"Peat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man sighed often and occasionally there were tears in Mary's eyes; and there were times when the past surged through my mind with such vividness that I could only look vacantly into the white flame of the peat fire. Once after a long silence my father spoke—his voice trembled, "Oh," he said, "if she cud just have weathered through ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... many bows, came forward to receive the aristocratic guests, and led them to the fire-place, where huge pieces of peat were glimmering. The heat they sent forth answered several purposes at the same time. It warmed the air, lighted a portion of the room, which was very dark in rainy weather, and served to cook three fowl ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that carry the heart to laughter and to sobs. The singer's song, all pathos and tenderness, played on the chords of our emotion like a harp. My eyes began to smart. Creagh muttered something about the peat-smoke affecting his, and I'm fain to admit that I rolled over with my face from the fire to hide the tell-tale tears. The haunting pathetic wistfulness of the third stanza shook ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... it seemed to have died out after growing for many years; and when we discovered this, we were more rejoiced than we had been at any time since starting the fire; for the moss, being dead, had become dry and hard, and burned almost like peat, as we found when we came to try it in our fireplace; and when we added to it a little of our blubber, it made such a heat that we could not have desired anything better. Indeed, it made our hut ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... saw her graceful, high-bowed canoe heading for the beach that is the favorite landing place of the "tillicums" from the Mission. Her canoe looked like a dream-craft, for the water was very still, and everywhere a blue film hung like a fragrant veil, for the peat on Lulu Island had been smoldering for days and its pungent odors and blue-grey haze made a dream-world of sea ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... in mounds and earthworks. Not long ago a man ploughing in the fen struck an old red vase up with the share, and searching the place found a number of the same urns within the space of a few yards, buried in the peat, as fresh as the day they were made. There was nothing else to be found, and the place was under water till fifty years ago; so that it must have been a boatload of pottery being taken in to market that was swamped ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... not that of Howard, his cure for national distress is to bury our paupers in peat bogs, driving wooden boards on the top of them. His entire works may be described as reiterating the doctrine that "whatever is is wrong." He has thrown off every form of religious belief and settled down into the conviction that the Christian profession of Englishmen is a sham.... ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... carbonic acid gas from the atmosphere, and replaced it with sixteen pounds of oxygen gas, occupying the same bulk. And when we consider the amount of carbon that is contained in the tissues of living, and of extinct vegetation also, in the form of peat and coal, we may have some idea of the vast body of oxygen which the vegetable kingdom has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... rather hazily knocking at a door and presently finding myself in a low kitchen with a peat fire burning on an open hearth and what seemed to be dozens of people sitting round it. I probably counted each of them three ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... nine, all women and all wise in the art of reading the days to come. It was supposed that she had come from Iceland, but nobody remembered to have brought her, nor knew of her origin. In these days she lived by herself in a hut of the Settlement at the Ness, and crouched over a peat fire all the winter, singing songs to herself which nobody could understand. In the summer she was often seen about among the pastures below the hills, but always by herself. When she was asked she might go out and show herself at men's houses ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... in our storage house a couple of chestnuts fell over into a pile of peat moss and they did ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... grafting trees is to regulate the moisture and the temperature factors. As a means of regulating the moisture I use German peat around the graft. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... Rome exposed their titles, one just beyond the margin of the other. He turned from the door and went into the dining-room, where the stove was ostentatiously roaring over its small logs and its lozenges of peat, But even here the fire had been so recently lighted that the warmth was potential rather than actual. By stooping down before the stove, and pressing his shoulder against its brass doors, Colville managed to ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... several years, during which he lived at Stirling, and travelled to and from his work. He was succeeded in 1738 by his son, who became Sir William Moncrieff Wellwood. In that year the old kirk was burned in rather curious circumstances. The kirk was being used as the parish school, and was heated by a peat fire. In the master's absence one day the boys amused themselves by throwing about the lighted peats. The kirk caught fire, and was burned to the ground. Sir Henry Moncrieff succeeded his father in 1771, the sixth minister of the family in a lineal descent. He had ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... poor with a handy and cheap fuel, I doubt that these little bogs are any detriment to the country. Some of them have been made to take on a soil (by draining, cutting, drying and burning the upper strata of peat, and spreading the ashes over the entire surface), and are now quite productive.—Drainage and ridging are almost universally resorted to, showing the extraordinary humidity of the atmosphere. The Potato is now generally ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... sluggish river, keeping flat pastures green, reflecting straight lines of pollard willows, and constantly flowing past gay villas and country cottages, but a pretty, brawling river with a stony bed, now yellow with iron, and now brown with peat, for long distances running its solitary race between the hills, but made useful here and there by ugly mills built upon the banks. Sometimes there was a hamlet as well as a mill. Tracts of the neighbouring moorland were enclosed and cultivated, the fields being ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... known in his house. The only indulgence which looked like luxury was that, on a Saturday afternoon, he would read a newspaper or a magazine. The clothes of the whole family were grown, spun, woven, and made by themselves. The fuel of the house, which was peat, was dug, dried, and carried by themselves. They made their own candles. Once a month a sheep was selected from their little flock and killed for the use of the family, and in the fall a cow would be salted ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... raised by his wild forefathers in the days when the Spaniard lay at Smerwick; and, mean and crumbling, still gave rise to emotions which the stern battlements of Stralsund or of Rostock had failed to evoke. Soil and sky, the lark which sang overhead, the dark peat-water which rose under foot, the scent of the moist air, the cry of the curlew, all spoke of home—the home which he had left in the gaiety of youth, to return to it a grave man, older than his years, and with grey ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... pedlar, "must be the out-scourers of Murray's party; let us lie down in the peat-hag, and keep ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... mood he was amused at this infamous meal, fell back upon a thin wine which rasped his throat, and resignedly drank coffee which left a sediment of peat at the bottom of ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... these temporary supports had been fixed and excavations begun that the magnitude of the task was fully revealed. The Cathedral was found to have been built on an old "water-bed" having a foundation of peat, the distance between the ground level and the firm gravel beneath the peat being 27 feet. The only hope of saving the east end was to remove the peat and fill in the spaces with concrete and cement. With the removal of the peat, however, there was so great an influx of water that ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... to justify any enthusiasm on the subject, and the use of albumen for soap-making in this country appears to be very slight, however popular it may be on the Continent. Numerous other substances have been proposed for addition to soaps, including yeast, tar from peat (sphagnol), Swedish wood tar, permanganate of potash, perborates and percarbonates of soda and ammonia, chlorine compounds, but none of these has at present come much into favour, and some had only ephemeral existence. Of the many drugs that it has been suggested to admix in soap for use in allaying ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... horizon, and black embers of villages wherever they marched. There was no coming up with them. The barons set forth in the morning, fierce, and wound up for a battle, pennons displayed, and armor burnished; but by and by the steeds floundered in the peat-bogs, the steep mountain-sides were hard to climb for men and horses cased in proof armor, and when shouts or cries broke out at a distance, and with sore labor the knights struggled to the spot in hopes of an engagement, it proved to have been merely the hallooing of some other part of the ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... then, that Nickerson's, once an all-night refuge, closes now at three—desecration has made it the yellow marble office of a teetotaler in the banking line—and the Glengyle, that blessed essence of the barley, heather, peat, and mist of Old Scotland, has been taken over by an exporting company, limited. Sometimes I think I detect a little of it in the poisons that the grocers of Glasgow and Edinburgh send over here, or perhaps I only ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... as he can. There is no restriction on this head, whether he rent a large or a small farm. If there be no moss in the scatthold contiguous to his farm, the tenant must pay for the privilege to cut peat in some other common, and this payment is called It seldom ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... the noticeable dark blue eyes that twinkled merrily, yet with something gloomy in their darkness, as of hyacinths in a woodland glade, drifting and smoky, like the kind of smoke that comes from weed-burning or a peat-fire ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... form. One of the finest we have seen belonged to the Rev. H. B. Hutchings, of Appleshaw, Hants,[100-*] and was found in a meadow at Bosington, near Stockbridge, in the same county, by a labourer who saw it among a heap of peat. We give a side and front view of this interesting relic; the whole is of gold, and is of considerable weight and thickness; the gold threads are all beautifully reeded, and the lettering and head executed with great care. The inscription reads—NOMEN EHLLA FID IN XPO, ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... letter, considered in language, crafty in purpose, really, an overture for the hand of Marget Forbes, and I sat far into the night, while my peat fire died out in Corgarff Castle, wondering how I was to answer it, and, even more, how I myself stood towards the acute personal situation which it created. For I saw that the Black Colonel meant to make love and do business at the same stroke, not for the first time, perhaps, in his life of ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... sea. But there are certain parts of the world in which the coral polypes which live and grow are of a kind which remain, adhere together, and form great masses. They differ from the ordinary polypes just in the same way as those plants which form a peat-bog or meadow-turf differ from ordinary plants. They have a habit of growing together in masses in the same place; they are what we call "gregarious" things; and the consequence of this is, that as they die and leave their skeletons, those skeletons form a considerable ...
— Coral and Coral Reefs • Thomas H. Huxley
... could not help springing up at the sight—pale, leaden, and misty as it was; and though Markham forthwith rebuked him for not listening, his heart was still beating as at the first sight of a dear old friend, when that peep was far behind. More black heaths, with stacks of peat and withered ferns. Guy was straining his eyes far off in the darkness to look for the smoke of the old keeper's cottage chimney, and could with difficulty refrain from interrupting Markham to ask after the ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dripped from the joists, and great spiders ran nimbly over them; there were no beds, but on a heap of rotting skins in one corner two rats were busy, and in another were some dry leaves and bracken. There was no chimney either, though there was a peat fire smouldering in what you must call the hearth. The place was dense with the fog of it; it was some time, therefore, before Prosper could leave blinking and fit his eyes to see the occupants of his lodging.... ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... uranium, rare earth oxides, peat, cobalt, copper, platinum (not yet exploited), vanadium, ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... It was the "peat-casting" for the priest; every one had worked with a will—young and old. Dinner had been sent up to the moss at noon by the various housewives of the district. It was a sumptuous repast, as usual on so great an occasion; chickens, oatcake, ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... discovered in a Danish peat-bog probably belong to the fifth century, thus being fifteen hundred years of age. Yet their counterparts can still be seen along the Norwegian coast. Such wonderful persistence, even of such an excellently serviceable type, is quite unparalleled; and it proves, if proof were needed, ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... changed! Those who are good-tempered because it is a fine day, will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in the one case, the fine weather has got into them, in the other the rainy. Rosamond, as she sat warming herself by the glow of the peat-fire, turning over in her mind all that had passed, and feeling how pleasant the change in her feelings was, began by degrees to think how very good she had grown, and how very good she was to have grown good, and how extremely good she must always have been that she was able to grow ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... grey light in the square of the window and a red light in the oblong of the grate. A small boy with a toasting-fork knelt by the hearth. You disentangled a smell of stewed tea and browning toast from thick, deep smells of peat smoke and the sweat drying on Ned's shirt. When Farmer Alderson got up you saw the round table, the coarse blue-grey teacups and the brown glazed teapot on ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... perish of hunger; it was kinder to kill them at once. The wounded bull I slew with my own hand, and I cannot say that I felt much compunction in so doing. He knew me again, and made a desperate effort to get at me, but I am glad to say that the peat held ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... soon showed me where I was-in the hollow valley, within a couple of hundred yards from nurse's cottage. I made my way towards it. There was no light in it, except the feeblest glow from the embers of her peat fire. "She is in bed," I said to myself, "and I will not disturb her." Yet something drew me towards the little window. I looked in. At first I could see nothing. At length, as I kept gazing, I saw something, indistinct in the darkness, like an ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... defined. Formations of the Recent Period. Modern littoral Deposits containing Works of Art near Naples. Danish Peat and Shell-mounds. Swiss Lake-dwellings. Periods of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. Post-pliocene Formations. Coexistence of Man with extinct Mammalia. Reindeer Period of South of France. Alluvial Deposits of Paleolithic Age. Higher and Lower-level Valley-gravels. ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... the Irish hearth with peat There lives a subtle spell— The faint blue smoke, the gentle heat, ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... annual allowance for his clothing, three yards of woollen cloth, white or russet, six yards of linen, and six of canvas. Four fires were allowed for the whole community. From Michaelmas to All Saints, they had two baskets of peat, on double mess days; and four baskets daily, from All Saints to Easter. On Christmas Day, they had four Yule logs each a cartload, with four trusses of straw; four trusses of straw on All Saints' Eve, and Easter Eve; and four bundles of rushes, on the Eves of Pentecost, S. John the Baptist, and ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... ones who did not hesitate to hint that he had only been over to Ireland working in a peat-bog, and that his knowledge of Brazil was gotten out of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... place where they had to climb, and then to a long peat level beside a rivulet. There a quantity of delicate little pink flowers caught Bert's eye. "Gaw!" he said, and stooped to pick one. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... difficult situation. Madame Lavigne did what most people would have done in the case. She unrolled the wrappings, and taking the little thing on her lap, sat down in front of the dull peat fire and considered. It seemed wonderfully contented, and Madame Lavigne thought the best thing to do would be to undress it and put it to bed, and then go on with her knitting. She would consult Father ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... Mull of Cantire were on the opposite side of the Channel, and the wind being ahead, we tacked from shore to shore, running so near the Irish coast, that we could see the little thatched huts, stacks of peat, and even rows of potatoes in the fields. It was a panorama: the view extended for miles inland, and the fields of different colored grain were spread out before us, a brilliant mosaic. Towards evening we passed ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... the single field which separated his house from the edge of the Grannoch water—where on the other side, above the glistening sickle-sweep of sand which looked so inviting, yet untouched under the pines by the morning sun, the hyacinths lay like a blue wreath of peat smoke in the ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... grew dark the air turned very chill, and snow began to fall thick and fast. Malcolm laid a few sticks on the smouldering peat-fire, but they were damp and did not catch. All at once the laird gave a shriek, and crying out, "Mither! mither!" fell into a fit so violent that the heavy bed shook with his convulsions. Malcolm held his wrists and called ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... a coot poy today," returned the tremulous voice of a grey headed old man, who was leaning over a small peat fire on the hearth, sifting oatmeal through the fingers of his left hand into a pot, while he stirred the boiling mess with a short stick held in ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... is a fossil wood carbonized to a certain degree, but retaining distinctly its woody texture. Dr. MacCulloch, On Rocks, p. 636., observes: "In its chemical properties, lignite holds a station intermediate between peat and coal; while among the varieties a gradation in this respect may be traced; the brown and more organised kinds approaching very near to peat, while the more compact kinds, such as jet, approximate ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... out of his Eton jacket when gillies and water-bailiffs got hold of him, and made him thrash salmon-pools with a seventeen-foot rod until his back was breaking; and then keepers and foresters had taken possession of him, and compelled him to crawl for miles up wet gullies and across peat-hags, and then put a rifle in his hand, expecting him to hit a bewildering object on the other side of a corrie when, as a matter of fact, his heart was like to burst with excitement and fear. But the young man had some strength ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... their small size the spermatozoids are difficult to see satisfactorily and other mosses (e.g. peat mosses, Figure 64, the hairy cap moss, Figure 65, I), are preferable where obtainable. The spermatozoids of a peat moss are shown in Figure 60, D. Like all of the bryophytes they have ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... in its way, very beautiful region. In the last century, Artois seems to have been a kind of Ireland. The climate was excessively damp, the lack of forests and the undeveloped coal-mines left the peasantry dependent upon turf and peat for fuel; the roads were few and bad. There were good crops of grain; but the Intendant Bignon, drawing up a report on the province at the close of the seventeenth century, for the Duke of Burgundy, tells us the wars had made ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of but one small apartment, in the centre of which blazed a, huge fire (summer though it was) of dried peat. The smoke sought egress where it might, but still left a sufficient canopy over the heads of the occupants, as completely to hide the dingy and charred rafters, and did not seem in the slightest degree to annoy the optical powers of any one, so accustomed where they to this kind ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... excursion would have been longer, but during the whole time it blew a gale of wind, with hail and snow. There is no firewood bigger than heath, and the whole country is, more or less an elastic peat-bog. Sleeping out at night was too miserable work to endure it for all ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... good loam with a little peat, and stones varying in size from a mustard seed to an almond. A little manure may be used, but ...
— Making A Rock Garden • Henry Sherman Adams
... lands, where Heaths (Ericae) are produced: it is composed of decayed vegetable matter and white sand. The best sort is light when dry, of a black colour, and easily reduced to powder. Care should be taken to distinguish it from Peat, which is hard when dry, destitute in a great measure of the sand, and mostly of a red colour. This contains in great quantities sulphureous particles and mineral oil, which are known to ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... hand was on the post that ended the passage, and beyond that I felt nothing. I had come to the inner doorway, and before me was the place where Sigurd lay. Yet no fiery eyes glared on me, and nothing stirred. The air was heavy with a scent as of peat, and the sound of the whetstone seemed loud as I stood peering into ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... thoughts and impressions as they came to me and as I dimly now remember them. I had expected to see old Tom Bassett crouching half asleep over a peat fire, a dim lamp on the table beside him, and instead this assembly of tall and splendid men and women stood there to greet me, and stood in silence. It was little wonder that at first the ready question died upon my lips, and I almost ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... produce; the house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands, with the scanty fields attached, as an island in a sea of morass. The landscape is unredeemed by grace or grandeur—mere undulating hills of grass and heather, with peat bogs in the hollows ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... use of paper instead of slates, the fashion of wrapping Christmas gifts in white tissue, and the invention of the low-priced cameras have increased enormously the amount of paper called for. In the attempt to supply the demand all sorts of materials have been used, such as hemp, old rope, peat, the stems of flax, straw, the Spanish and African esparto grass, and especially wood; but much more paper is made of wood than of all the rest together. Poplar, gum, and chestnut trees, and especially those trees which bear cones, such ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... are sensitive to water, and storage material must be fairly dry and cool. In two large boxes of scions received last year from Germany, some 20 varieties of Persian walnut, all had dead buds when received. They were packed in German peat. When buds are covered with wax the wax must not be too hot or it will kill the buds. In placing grafted walnuts in sphagnum or sand they should not stay wet or the buds will die. Either unions must be above damp sand ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... should re-peat, All sit still; but if she say "Twi-light," each must change his seat, Or a for-feit he ...
— The Infant's Delight: Poetry • Anonymous
... therefore, to discover and invent materials for supplying us with the means of domestic heat and comfort, has exercised the ingenuity of man. Those now known have been divided into five classes; the first comprehending the fluid inflammable bodies; the second, peat or turf; the third, charcoal of wood; the fourth, pit-coal charred; and the fifth, wood or pit-coal in a crude state, with the capacity of yielding a copious and bright flame. The first may be said ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... gloaming bad darkened, and the little small-paned window was a fretted sheet of dark and lucent blue. Grateful odours of food and drink and tobacco hung in the air, though tar and homespun and the far-carried fragrance of peat ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... she would sit and spin in the old tapestried room, her own life as faded, and sometimes she would dream in the hall, among the antlers and beast-skins, and watch the great burning logs, so much more poetic than this peat smoke which hurt one's eyes. Ah, but then there was O'Flanagan. Well, he would not be much in the way. He liked riding over his new estate in his buckskin breeches, cracking his great loaded whip. She had met him herself once or twice, and the great shy creature had ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... red sand formed a distinct layer, 2 inches beneath the surface, or 11/2 inch beneath the turf; so that on an average .21 inches of mould had been annually brought to the surface. Immediately beneath the layer of red sand the original sub-stratum of black, sandy peat extended. ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... of the cottagers, and this he could not stand. Not one beast in two years had fattened on its barrenness. Three old donkeys alone eked out the remnants of their days. A bundle of firewood or old bracken, a few peat sods from one especial corner, were all the selfish peasants gathered. But the cottagers were no great matter—he could soon have settled them; it was that fellow Peacock whom he could not settle, just because he happened to abut on the Common, and his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... went about the villages saying: "Ge's a peat t' burn the witches." They were thought to be out stealing milk and harming cattle. Torches used to counteract them were carried from west to east, against the sun. This ceremony grew into a game, when a fire was built by one party, ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... all day and meet with no living thing save the birds of the air, and a few shy, wild creatures of the moorlands; curve after curve, the rounded hills stretch away into the distance, grass-grown or heatherclad, with occasional peat-mosses; above is the "grey gleaming sky," and, all around, a stillness as of vast untrodden wastes, and a sense of solitude out of all proportion to the actual extent of this lonely region. The fascination of it, however, admits of no denial, even on the part of those newly making ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... a bright peat fire, which all the children gathered round, expecting every minute to hear their parents' voices at the door. But it began to get dark and late, and still they did not come. Agnes had often heard of the dangers of snow among the hills, and ...
— The Old Castle and Other Stories • Anonymous
... dwellings with their ancient inhabitants, and understand something of their manners of life and customs. Their rude abodes had probably cone-shaped roofs made of rafters lashed together at the centre, protected by an outside coat of peat, sods of turf, or rushes. The spindle-whorl is evidence that they could spin thread; the mealing stones show that they knew how to cultivate corn; and the bones of the animals found in their dwellings testify to the fact that they were not in the wild ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... themselves. The machine with a lurch entered something in the nature of a carriage drive, and I found myself on the threshold of Dorlin—a lodge of unusual size, which seemed to be almost wading in the water. When the door opened I was greeted by an odor of peat smoke. An old London butler conducted me up a flight of stairs, and I was presently in a drawing-room filled with familiar figures. Besides my host and hostess and their then unmarried daughters, were ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... meadowed distance peat seemed to be being burnt, and over the black forest there had gathered an opalescent cloud of smoke which also suffused ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... corn should grow abroad, I ween, And gold be made of gold, or paper sheet; How many pigs be born to each spalpeen; And, ah! how man shall thrive beyond his meat,— With twenty souls alive, to one square sod of peat! ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the Ingvorstrup horses were intended for. They were to blind the judge and to lead him aside from the narrow path of righteousness. The rich Morten Bruns covets poor Ole Anderson's peat moor and pasture land. It would have been a good bargain for Morten even at seventy thalers. But no indeed, my good fellow, you don't ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... through the heather, where the raindrops sparkled like diamonds. Farther down, they ran in between rough limestone walls with gleaming spar in them, smothered here and there in trailing brambles and clumps of fern, while the streams that poured out from black gaps in the peat and flowed beside the road flashed with coppery gold in the evening light. It was growing brighter ahead of them, though inky clouds still ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... separate routes. You shall have the easiest. Do you see that black point on the heath? It is a stone of remarkable size and shape. When you reach it, turn to the left; and then, upon coming to the peat-trenches, to the right—until you arrive at a little hill: from the summit of this, and about a mile distant, you will observe some inclosures: there dwells Evan Williams: mention my name, and he will gladly harbour you until the heat of the pursuit is over. I will contrive to communicate ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... M'Crawney, the agent, an eager-faced Scot with an insatiable desire for information on all sorts of subjects. Mrs. M'Crawney was an Irishwoman who was always sighing for the mild, moist climate and the peat reek of her childhood's home. But Peter knew when he was well off, and meant to stick to his post until he had saved enough money to live ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... application of stimulants. At every fair and market he had heard that a good time was at hand, that the tyrants who spoke Saxon and lived in slated houses were about to be swept away, and that the land would again belong to its own children. By the peat fires of a hundred thousand cabins had nightly been sung rude ballads which predicted the deliverance of the oppressed race. The priests, most of whom belonged to those old families which the Act of Settlement had ruined, but which were still revered by the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... last, and having laid my flask, tobacco-pouch, and twelve loose cartridges where I could reach them most handily on projecting shelves of peat inside the butt—I love neatness and method: Kitty says that when (if ever) I get to heaven I will decline to enter until I have wiped my boots,—settled down to enjoy a superb view and take note of the not altogether uninteresting ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... youths were grappling together like wild cats, striking, kicking, and biting with no thought except of who should have the best of the battle. They rolled on the floor, now tussling among the crackling faggots, anon pitching soft as one body on the peat dust in the corner, again knocking over a bench and bringing down the tools thereon to the floor with a jingle which might have been heard far out on the loch. They were still clawing and cuffing each other in blind rage, when a hand, heavy ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... weather such as this. Nay, with a storm for variety; clouds from the top of Scawfell falling thick about us; a fierce wind shrieking across the tarn; sheets and torrents and floods of rain beating upon our roof; and you and I by the peat-fire. With a good supply of books, old and new, I can picture it for three months, for half ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... country people repair to the summer pastures among the mountains, and take their cattle there to grass. On the west coast of Jutland, among the sand-hills, are huts built of pieces of wrecks, and covered with peat and layers of heather. The sleeping-places stretch round the principal room; and there sleep and live, during the early spring time, the people employed in the fishing. Every one has his AEsepige, as she is called, whose business it is to put bait on the hooks, to await the fishermen at their ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... ten years past; Mecklenburg the most anarchic of countries, owing to the kind of Ritters and kind of Duke it has. Poor souls, it is evident they have all lost their beaten road, and got among the IGNES FATUI and peat-pools: none knows the necessities and sorrows of this poor idle Duke himself! In his young years, before accession, he once tried soldiering; served one campaign with Charles XII., but was glad to "return to Hamburg" again, to the peaceable ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... through a peat bog, [Footnote: Peat-bog. Peat is a kind of turf that is used for fuel.] and the greater part of it is twenty feet deep. A broad fringe of water-lilies lines the banks, leaving, however, an available space for throwing a fly upon between them. This is the great resting-place ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... in their anhydride form ('pentosanes'). They yield readily to acid hydrolysis, and certainly constitute a considerable percentage of the dissolved products. A similar complex was obtained by the author in his investigation of peat (Berl. Ber. 30, 2571), and was found to be similarly incompletely attacked by yeast. The yields of alcohol corresponded with the proportion of the total carbohydrates disappearing. These were the hexose constituents of the hydrolysed complex, the ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... the city, but they were sufficiently annoying. Thorpe's old tin pail was pressed into service as a smudge-kettle. Every evening about dusk, when the insects first began to emerge from the dark swamps, Charley would build a tiny smoky fire in the bottom of the pail, feeding it with peat, damp moss, punk maple, and other inflammable smoky fuel. This censer swung twice or thrice about the tent, effectually cleared it. Besides, both men early established on their cheeks an invulnerable glaze of a decoction of pine tar, oil, and a pungent herb. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... the peat-shed when they drove up, and saw her as he peeped through a chink in the boards. The moment he did so, he involuntarily took the quid of tobacco out of his mouth and threw it from him. After waiting a long time, he had begun again to chew tobacco, and after a still longer time he had married. ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... be drained by making the railway across its quivering surface, but hopes of this sort were not to be realised, for it remains to-day a wild, but picturesque stretch of heather and silver birches, where the peat-digger plies his trade with, perhaps, as much profit as the farmer would in tilling it. But as to its power to bear the weight of passing trains the engineers had little doubt. The canal already crossed it, and though in making soundings ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... an immense peat bog of about twelve square miles in extent. Unlike the bogs or swamps of Cambridge and Lincolnshire, which consist principally of soft mud or silt, this bog is a vast mass of spongy vegetable pulp, the result of the growth and decay ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... vessels entering port were strictly examined, and there was a guard-house on the quay. Lying by one of the wharves was a large boat laden with peat, which was being rapidly unloaded, the peat being sold as soon as landed, as fuel was ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... Fred's absence hardly a word had been spoken concerning him in the cottage. Mrs. O'Hara had feared the subject, and Kate had thought of him much too often to allow his name to be on her tongue. But now as they sat after dinner over their peat fire the mother began the subject. "Mr. Neville is to dine ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... looked back doubtfully over the immense peat bog through which the train had been travelling, and thought of the swamps and the forests of pine and birch which lay between them and Lulea, many miles away on the coast. Then she looked forward toward more peat bogs, swamps and forests that lay ...
— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... promised danger as we approached the town. They sang songs, they ran races, they fenced with their walking-sticks and umbrellas; and, in spite of this violent exercise, the fun grew only the more extravagant with the miles they traversed. Their drunkenness was deep-seated and permanent, like fire in a peat; or rather—to be quite just to them—it was not so much to be called drunkenness at all, as the effect of youth and high spirits—a fine night, and the night young, a good road under foot, and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... low down, a faint haze told where the sea lay. The stream at his feet sang its queer, crooning moor-song as it rambled onward, chuckling to meet a bed of pebbles somewhere out of sight, whispering mysteriously to the rushes that fringed its banks of peat, deepening to a sudden contralto as it poured over granite boulders ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... given by the cunning man in a Glamorganshire tale. After poring over his big book, he told his distracted client to find a black hen without a single feather of any other colour. This she was to bake (not living, but dead, as appears by the sequel) before a fire of wood (not, as usual, of peat), with feathers and all intact. Every window and opening was to be closed, except one—presumably the chimney; and she was not to watch the crimbil, or changeling, until the hen had been done enough, which she ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... "Winter is at hand." Then the axe of the woodcutter echoes sharp and diligently in the forest; then the coal-merchants rejoice because each shriek of Nature in her agony adds something to the price of coal per ton; then the peat-smoke spreads its aromatic fragrance through the atmosphere. A few days more, and at eventide the children look out of the window and dimly perceive the flaunting of a snowy mantle in the air. It is stern Winter's vesture. They crowd around ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you will soon find yourself involved in chemical and meteorological questions; as, for instance, when you ask—How is it that I find one flora on the sea-shore, another on the sandstone, another on the chalk, and another on the peat-making gravelly strata? The usual answer would be, I presume—if we could work it out by twenty years' experiment, such as Mr. Lawes, of Rothampsted, has been making on the growth of grasses and leguminous plants in different soils and under different manures—the ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... her rivers gliding under ancient walls; beautiful is Italy, her seas, and her suns: but dearer to me the long grey wave that bites the rock below the minster in the north; dearer are the barren moor and black peat-water swirling in tauny foam, and the scent of bog myrtle and the bloom of heather, and, watching over the ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... weather. I am seated in the dining-room, having just concluded tidying our desk-boxes, writing this document. Papa is in the parlour—Aunt upstairs in her room.... Victoria and Adelaide are ensconced in the peat-house. Keeper is in the kitchen—Hero in ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... support its present occupants, that even beds of coal have been stored up for mans benefit Yet what is more accidental, and more simply the consequence of physical agencies than the accumulation of vegetable matter in a peat bog and its transformation into coal? No scientific person at this day doubts that our solar system is a progressive development, whether in his conception he begins with molten masses, or aeriform or nebulous masses, or with a fluid revolving mass of vast extent, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... publicly a method of producing coal-gas. Besides making experiments on production and utilization of coal-gas for lighting, he devoted his knowledge of chemistry to the analysis of the gas. He also made analytical studies of the relative value of wood, peat, oil, wax, and different kinds of coal for the distillation of gas. His chemical analyses showed to a considerable extent the properties of carbureted hydrogen upon which illuminating value depended. The results of his work were published in various English journals between ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... beef there nor venison, but good tough whale flesh, black as a peat, or else a few candle ends — for the Icelanders are fond of fat. Once when I was ship-broken on their coasts naught could my shipmates find to eat but reasty butter. Disliking that alone, we took our ship's cable, that was made of walrus hide, and smearing ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... Babbitt whose god was Modern Appliances was not pleased. The air of the bathroom was thick with the smell of a heathen toothpaste. "Verona been at it again! 'Stead of sticking to Lilidol, like I've re-peat-ed-ly asked her, she's gone and gotten some confounded stinkum ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... then the explanation came, and I knew I had found a frame of mind and body that belonged to Scotland, and particularly to the neighbourhood of Callander. Very odd these identities of sensation, and the world of connotations implied; highland huts, and peat smoke, and the brown, swirling rivers, and wet clothes, and whiskey, and the romance of the past, and that indescribable bite of the whole thing at a man's heart, which is - or rather lies at the bottom ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... county); from Amherst (western part of Hancock county) and Clifton (southeastern part of Penobscot county) northward just east of the Penobscot river the predominant tree, generally on dry ridges and eskers, but in Greenbush and Passadumkeag growing abundantly on peat bogs with black spruce; hillsides and lower mountains about Moosehead, scattered; New Hampshire,—ranges with the pitch pine as far north as the White mountains, but is less common, usually in groves of a few to several hundred acres in extent; Vermont,—less ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... The peat burns brimming from their cups of stone Glow brown and blood-red down the vast decline As if Christ stood on yonder clouded peak And turned its thousand ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... capricious things, besides the sea itself, with its store of marble fragments,—a world of amusement. Also you will see women making fuel with cow-dung, which they nail against the walls of their houses to dry in the sun, after which they pile it up as we do peat in Paris." ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... town is an elevated tableland formed by an extensive development of Bagshot sands and clays covered with peat or turf, and partly, on the upland levels, with ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath |
