"Thatch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... name was Thatch. He was called Blackbeard because he wore a long black beard that covered his face. This made him look frightful in that day, when other men shaved their faces smooth. He divided his beard into locks, and twisted each lock, ...
— Stories of American Life and Adventure • Edward Eggleston
... his roof of thatch, Smoked thoughtfully and slow; The Slaver's thumb was on the latch, He seemed in haste ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... turn-out," she said, "to the turn-out that's to be the morrow. It's more goes to the like, I'm thinking, than comes back again. He's taken the pike with him that lay in the thatch over our bed this year and more. But the will of the ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... and while the slow isicle hangs At the stifle thatch, and Winter's frosty pangs Benumme the year, blithe as of old let us Mid noise and war, of peace and mirth discusse. This portion thou wert born for. Why should we Vex at the time's ridiculous miserie? An age that thus hath fooled itself, and will, Spite of thy teeth and mine, persist so still. Let's ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... next to Henry, the greatest forest runner of the five, a marvel of skill, endurance and perception, with a mighty heart beating beneath his deerskins, and an intellect of wonderful native power, reasoning and drawing deductions under his thatch ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... 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 his lip?" ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... beauty. Sometimes the shrine consists only of a rude altar, situated amid a grove of trees; but, even in the case of large temples with a complete group of buildings, the architecture is extremely plain, the material employed being unornamented white wood with a thatch of chamaecyparis. The entrance to the temple grounds is always through gateways, called Torii; these are made sometimes of stone, but more properly of wood, and consist of two unpainted tree-trunks, with another on the top and a horizontal beam beneath. Near the entrance are commonly found stone ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... one side a meadow, on the other a green. My farm consisted of about twenty acres of excellent land. Nothing could exceed the neatness of my little enclosures, the elms and hedgerows appearing with inexpressible beauty. My house consisted of but one story, and was covered with [v]thatch, which gave it an air of great snugness; the walls on the inside were nicely whitewashed, and my daughters undertook to adorn them with pictures of their own designing. Though the same room served us for parlor and kitchen, that only made it the warmer. Besides, as it was ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... 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
... emotion had taken away her colour, and tears were thick on her cheek. She sat a little while by the table to recover herself, still thinking, and remembered that again last night she had dreamed the same dream about fire in the thatch. Somehow there seemed to be an alarm in the night, and they ran out of doors and found the corner of the roof on fire, over the window with the wire network instead of glass. It ran up from the corner towards the chimney, where the roof was mossy by the ridge. There ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... of the eighteenth century, a hardy family lived frugally and simply on a few, fertile Norman acres. Their home was but a hut of stone and clay and thatch. It was surrounded by a carefully attended vineyard and fruit trees which, in the springtime, made the spot most beautiful. On this May day the passerby would have stopped that he might carry away this scene of perfect pastoral charm. The blossoming vines almost ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... made them kiss it. We then entered the house, which covered a piece of ground 327 feet long, and forty-two feet broad. It consisted of a roof, thatched with palm leaves, and raised upon thirty-nine pillars on each side, and fourteen in the middle. The ridge of the thatch, on the inside, was thirty feet high, and the sides of the house, to the edge of the roof, were twelve feet high; all below the roof being open. As soon as we entered the house, she made us sit down, and then calling four young girls, she assisted ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... meeting-house in Dorchester, a very unpretentious structure of logs and thatch, was completed in 1631, and no free-holder was allowed to plant his domicile farther than the distance of half a mile from it, without special permission of the fathers of the town. It stood near the intersection of the present Pleasant and Cottage ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... 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 ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... being one compacted mass of stones, are often formed by two exterior surfaces of stone, filled up with earth in the middle, which makes them very warm. The roof is generally bad. They are thatched, sometimes with straw, sometimes with heath, sometimes with fern. The thatch is secured by ropes of straw, or of heath; and, to fix the ropes, there is a stone tied to the end of each. These stones hang round the bottom of the roof, and make it look like a lady's hair in papers; but I should think that, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... as you lift the latch, little ones are meeting you, Soon as you're 'neath the thatch, kindly looks are greeting you; Scarcely have you time to be holding out the fist to them— Down by the fireside you're sitting in the midst ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 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 filled with ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... "it's no sae bad now as it was in forty-six. The Hielands are what they call pacified. Small wonder, with never a gun or a sword left from Cantyre to Cape Wrath, but what tenty* folk have hidden in their thatch! But what I would like to ken, David, is just how long? Not long, ye would think, with men like Ardshiel in exile and men like the Red Fox sitting birling the wine and oppressing the poor at home. But it's a kittle thing to decide what folk'll bear, and what they will not. Or why would Red ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... constructed have never exhibited any tendency to depart from the primitive simplicity so strongly enjoined by their founder; and, down to the present time, the homes of the Buddhist priesthood are modest and humble structures generally reared of mud and thatch, with no pretension to external beauty and no attempt at ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... and Mahometans, both natives and foreigners who meet there—especially the Chinese, who have observed this condition—it is very annoying that they should see it served so inadequately and covered with wood and thatch—poor, dilapidated, and without provision. And because it is very just, and in accord with my will and desire, that the above-mentioned church be built and served with all possible propriety, you shall, as soon as you arrive at the said islands, especially further the building and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... mossy thatch, and the meadows so green, Are covered all over with white; The snowdrop and crocus no more can be seen, The thick snow has covered ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... Jack now felt sad, And thought of the home, so safe he once had, Where he'd plenty of food, and clean straw for his bed, And at night, a roof of good thatch o'er his head. He escaped from the field, though he scarcely knew how, And scampered as fast as his strength would allow: In the distance, a town, long and wide he could see; "Ah! ah!" said Jack Swine, ...
— Surprising Stories about the Mouse and Her Sons, and the Funny Pigs. - With Laughable Colored Engravings • Unknown
... 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 ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... relations with them. He found their deserted wigwams and the embers of their fires, but could not catch sight of a single native. A few days after this, two of the pilgrims, who were abroad gathering thatch, did not return, and great anxiety was felt for them. Four or five men the next day set out in search for them. After wandering about all day unsuccessfully through the pathless forest, they returned at ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... and undergrowth around had to be cleared; the huts, of which there were six, had to be cleaned out, fitted up with new parchment in the windows—for there was no glass in those days—and new thatch on the roofs, besides being generally repaired; additional huts had to be built for the people, pens for the sheep, and stabling for the cattle, all of which implied felling and squaring timber, while the smaller ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... back kitchen sloped down quite low. It was made of thatch and it had moss on it, and house-leeks and stonecrop and wallflowers, and even a clump of purple flag-flowers, at the ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... another hardy creeper. As soon as this tenement was vacated, and the Laird's intention of inhabiting it known, the ancient tenants of the family all manifested their affection by using their several crafts in repairing the cottage, and setting the house to rights,—one mended the thatch, another repaired the wood-work, a third white-washed the walls, another mended the paling, and old Shanty did any little job in his way which might ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... the Animallai Hills where thirty-five years ago there modestly nestled on the ridge beside the river only Forest Ranger Theobold's bungalow, built of mud and covered with grass thatch and bamboo rats, there is now a regular hill station lighted by electricity, a modern sanatorium high up on the bluff, a club, golf links, and other modern improvements. In my day there were exactly four guns on the Animallais. Now there are probably one hundred; ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... of the great storm in the spring of '97, the year that we had two great storms. This was the first one, and I remember it very well, because I found in the morning that it had lifted the thatch of my pigsty into the widow's garden as clean as a boy's kite. When I looked over the hedge, widow—Tom Lamport's widow that was—was prodding for her nasturtiums with a daisy-grubber. After I had watched ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... suppose, then, this centre surrounded with less than one hundred stragling huts, without order, which we will dignify with the name of houses; built of timber, the interfaces wattled with sticks, and plaistered with mud, covered with thatch, boards or sods; none of them higher than the ground story. The meaner sort only one room, which served for three uses, shop, kitchen, and lodging room; the door for two, it admitted the people and the light. The better sort two rooms, and some three, for work, for the kitchen, and for ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... of the lane it stands, Where the sumac grows in a crimson thatch, Down where the sweet wild berry patch, Holds out a lure for eager hands. Down at the end of the lane, who knows The ghosts that sit at the well-scarred seats, When the moon is dark, and the gray sky meets With the dawn time light, and ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... be done!—and then, faith, sure enough, As the pig was desaiced, 'twas high time to be off. So we gothered up all the poor duds we could catch, Lock the owld cabin-door, put the kay in the thatch, Then tuk laave of each other's sweet lips in the dark, And set off, like the Chrishtians turned out of the Ark; The six childher with you, my dear Judy, ochone! And poor I wid myself, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the blushing dewdrops falter; The peacock wakes and leaves the cottage thatch; A deer is rising near the hoof-marked altar, And stretching, stands, the ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... it was as bad. Time, which had dealt so kindly with Vandon itself, had taken the straggling village in hand too. Nothing could be more picturesque than the crazy black-and-white houses, with lichen on their broken-in thatch, and the plaster peeling off from between the irregular beams of black wood; nothing ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... ye bear to draw your latest breath Where all that's wretched paves the way for death? Such is that room which one rude beam divides, And naked rafters form the sloping sides; Where the vile bands that bind the thatch are seen, And lath and mud are all that lie between; Save one dull pane, that, coarsely patch'd, gives way To the rude tempest, yet excludes the day: Here, on a matted flock, with dust o'erspread, The drooping wretch reclines his ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... about here, boy or girl, who cannot swim; and every one of them has been used to tumbling about the little forest ponies—there's one of them now! They all of them know how to cook; the bigger lads can mow; many can thatch and do odd jobs at carpentering; or they know how to keep shop. I can tell you they know ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... round it on the inside. A number of respectable merchants and tradesmen reside in this town, where they are better protected than in any other town in Oude. It contains a population of between twenty and thirty thousand persons. They put thatch over the mud walls during the rains to preserve them. The fortifications and dwelling-houses together are said to have cost the family above ten lacs of rupees. There are some fourteen old guns in the fort. Though it would be difficult to shell a garrison out ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... milkmaids click the latch, And rarely smells the new-mown hay, And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch Twice or thrice his roundelay, Twice or thrice his roundelay; Alone and warming his five wits, The white owl in ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... 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 sight For gaping tourists, from his hackneyed height:[dz] Thou ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... is beyond the sea That I have never seen, But Johnny says he'll take me there, And I shall be a queen. He'll build for me a palace there, Its roof will be of thatch, And it will have a little ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... the fire came to our two houses, which were at that time very unfit for such danger, especially one to which the fire came within three yards, so that the jambs of the windows were so hot one could hardly lay their hand upon them, yet did not its old dry thatch take fire, to the great admiration of all who were there of many nations. All the villains of the place gathered round our house, so that we durst take no rest, lest they should set it on fire. Some of them even were so impudent in the evening ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... the saddle, it was almost impossible to think of him as a matured man. The receding chin, and coarse, loosely opened mouth, the pale, lifeless eyes set too closely together under a low forehead, with a ragged thatch of dead, mouse-colored hair, and a furtive, sneaking, lost-dog expression, proclaimed him the ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... twelve feet of the ground, and from the ground upwards a stone wall was raised, as perpendicular as was found practicable, towards these overhang-wattles, this wall being roughly "pointed" with sand and clay and lime. Now into and upon the roof was woven and intertwisted a covering of thatch, that defied all winds and weathers, and that made the cottage marvelously cozy,—being renewed year by year, and never allowed to remain in disrepair at any season. But the beauty of the construction was and is its durability, ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... longer one for his purpose, but when he returned, he found the 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 ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... forehead, when suddenly there arose a flame as if a house were on 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 I could hear distinctly the sound of cavalry coming ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... then alive, made as much difficulty as possible in getting the door open in order to give Davie time to conceal himself. But he did better than hide in the house. Springing out of bed, he actually broke a hole through the "divets" or turfs of the thatch, and creeping through it, climbed down outside, just as his adversaries, certain of capturing their prize, were mounting the ladder which led to his bed-chamber. When the exciseman saw the empty bed he ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... mellow fruitfulness! Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... pattern of neatness. The furniture, though simple, was pretty and well made, with snowy white curtains to the windows and beds, and green blinds to keep out the glare of that hot clime. The verandah ran completely round the house, and a thick thatch of leaves formed a roof which effectually prevented the sun's rays from penetrating below. In front was a pretty flower-garden, and in the rear a well-stocked kitchen garden, producing in perfection all the native vegetables, fruits, and roots, as well as many from Europe. The islanders ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... deal of information though by no means all he sought. He found out that he had been taken desperately ill, that he had been summarily removed from his lodging place because of the owner's superstitious dread of contagion into the miserable little thatch roofed hut in which he had nearly died thanks to the mal-practice of the rascally, drunken doctor and the ignorant half-breed nurse. He learned how Alan Massey had suddenly appeared and taken things in his own hands, discovered that in a nutshell the fact was ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... fairyland—the silver flood of the harbor motionless as glass, the wooded meadows dank with bloom, the air odorous of woodland smells, the blue hills rimming round the sky, and against the woods of the north shore the chapel spire and thatch roofs and slab walls of the little fort, the one oasis of life in a wilderness. {38} As the sails rattled down and the anchor dropped, not a soul appeared from the fort. The gates were bolted fast. The Jonas ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... treacherously 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
... 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 ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... started, stared, snatched off his straw hat, and gave his head a vicious rub, before having another good look back at the thatch-roofed summer-house of a place. ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... admittance. He was a tall, powerful man, tawny- bearded and deep-chested, clad in a loose-fitting suit of tweed, cut for comfort rather than elegance. As he stood in the shimmering sunlight, I took in every feature of his face. The large, fleshy nose; the steady blue eyes, with their thick thatch of overhanging brows; the broad forehead, all knitted and lined with furrows, which were strangely at variance with his youthful bearing. In spite of his weather-stained felt hat, and the coloured handkerchief slung round his muscular brown neck, I could see ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I missed a detail or two. I couldn't make out if it was the pink thatch of Yohness that gave him away, or whether Uncle could tell an American just by the feel of his neck. But the old boy ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... himself on the stream-side, and he stayed and looked from side to side, and lo! on the other side of the stream a little house that looked familiar to him as a yeoman's dwelling in the builded lands, and the thatch thereon shone under the moon and its windows were yellow with candle-light; and so homely it seemed to him, that he thrust his sword into the sheath and lightly crossed the brook, and came to the door and laid his hand upon the latch and lifted it and shoved the door, ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... depression of spirits at the dark and sombre aspect of the scene. In the first place, he finds himself in a canoe, so small that he is forced to lay quietly in the very centre of the stern portion, in order to prevent it upsetting. The palm leaf thatch (or toldo, as it is termed on the river) over his portion of the boat, shuts out much of the view, while his baggage, piled carefully amidships, and covered with oil cloths, encerrados as they are termed, is ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... vested in the hands of trustees, and settled absolutely to her own use. She could not anticipate her income nor make away with it, which Mr. Carnegie said was a very good thing. Beyond that remark, and a generous reminder that her old nest under the thatch was ready for her whenever she liked to return and take possession, nothing was said in the letters from Beechhurst about her grandfather's will or her new vicissitude. She had some difficulty in writing to announce her latest change to Harry Musgrave, but he wrote back promptly ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... still retains its rustic simplicity. Multitudes of visitors from all parts of the world yearly visit this relic of Old Shanklin. Pretty thatched cottages can be seen in many parts of the Island, but nowhere is there such a combination, there being three different styles of roof in thatch, the setting in a background of trees completing the illusion of the country. In the angle where the figures stand is the rustic fountain on which hangs the shield with the verse written by the poet Longfellow when staying at Hollier's ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... have a little cottage, a white house with green shutters, and though a thatched roof is the best all the year round, I would be grand enough to have, not those gloomy slates, but tiles, because they look brighter and more cheerful than thatch, and the houses in my own country are always roofed with them, and so they would recall to me something of the happy days of my youth. For my courtyard I would have a poultry-yard, and for my stables a cowshed for the sake of the milk which I love. My garden should be ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... meadow, so he'd just get her up on the 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 the ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... the way we came, and then knew that we could in no way take the boat to Poole. The gale was raging at its highest, and thatch was flying from the exposed roofs. It would be dead against us; and the sea was white with foam, even in the haven. So we must go by road, and that was a long way. But we must get back to Odda, for he should ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... have done well, if he liked. The present that you left in my father's hands, to buy him a boat when he was old enough to start as a fisherman on his own account, would have made a man of him, but it is hidden somewhere in the thatch of his father's cottage. When my father first went to the war, he handed it over to Larry, as he could not say what might happen before his return. Larry was at first delighted with the thought that some day he should have a boat of his own, and a boat, too, larger than any on the shore; but ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... half-sisters. I knew on which side of the hut it was her custom to lie, and where her head would be. So I lay down on my side and gently, very gently, began to bore a hole in the grass covering of the hut. It took a long while, for the thatch was thick, but at last I was nearly through it. Then I stopped, for it came into my mind that Baleka might have changed her place, and that I might wake the wrong girl. I almost gave it over, thinking that I would fly alone, when suddenly I heard a ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... when she arrived home; before she could enter she had to go down a little over the worn rocks, for the cottage was placed on an incline towards the beach, below the level of the Ploubazlanec roadside. It was almost hidden under its thick brown straw thatch, and looked like the back of some huge beast, shrunk down under its bristling fur. Its walls were sombre and rough like the rocks, but with tiny tufts of green moss and lichens over them. There were three uneven ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... they permitted to go to their huts during rain; and even had this privilege been granted, many of those miserable habitations were in so dilapidated a condition, that they would afford little or no protection. Negro huts are built of logs, covered with boards or thatch, having no flooring, and but one apartment, serving all the purposes of sleeping, cooking, &c. Some are furnished with a temporary loft. I have seen a whole family herded together in a loft ten ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and fences, and houses. How many of them 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 ran like ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... where the forces were gathered—who, as they were many, occupied all the houses, even the smallest ones—some soldiers were cleaning their weapons in one near the residence of the Recollect fathers. One fired his arquebus, which, unknown to him, was loaded. It caught in the thatch which formed the roof of that little house; and, as the sun was hot, and the wind the greater brisa, the house quickly caught fire. The father prior, Fray Pedro de San Nicolas, was very much annoyed; and he came out, and with reason rebuked ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... led the remainder of his force through an orchard divided from the south end of the house by a narrow lane, over which a barn abutted. Its high blank wall had been loopholed on both floors and was quite unassailable, but its roof was of thatch. And as he studied it, keeping his men in cover, a happy inspiration occurred to him. He sent back to the camp for an oil-can and a parcel of cotton wadding, and by three o'clock had opened a brisk fire of flaming bullets on the thatch. Within ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... his wife did not come when he called, und he knocked at her bedroom door und dot was shut tight-locked. Den he looked at me, und his face was white. I broke down der door mit my shoulder, und der thatch of der roof was torn into a great hole, und der sun came in upon der floor. Haf you ever seen paper in der waste- basket, or cards at whist on der table scattered? Dere was no wife dot could be seen. I tell you dere was noddings ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... been afraid of being ridiculous, I would have followed her. But I fancied that the apparition of a man in a red and yellow bath-robe, with an unkempt thatch of hair, walking up to her and assuring her that he would protect her would probably put her into hysterics. I had done that once before, when burglars had tried to break into the house, and had startled the parlor maid into bed for a week. So I tried to assure myself that I had imagined ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of charcoal near the well in the centre of the court. The bit of blazing tinder, which he nursed carefully between his hands, threw its light up into his face and showed it in relief against the darkness, sombre, strongly marked, with a thatch of black bushy hair. Hito, recognizing him, scowled ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... living with it was a real enchantment; but I pondered most the kind of house that would be provided for the General Commanding the District, how many the dining-room would seat, and whether it would have a roof of thatch or of corrugated iron—I prayed against corrugated iron. I confess these my preoccupations. I was forty, and at forty the practical considerations of life hold their own even against domes of marble, world-renowned, and set about with gardens where the bulbul sings to the rose. ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... stout leather hat, and ran down the street. Out came all the population, black, white, and brown, awfully excited, for it was blowing a furious north-wester, right up the town, and the fire was at the bottom; and as every house is thatched with a dry brown thatch, we might all have to turn out and see the place in ashes in less than an hour. Luckily, it was put out directly. It is supposed to have been set on fire by a Hottentot girl, who has done the same thing once before, on being scolded. There is no water but what runs down the ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... object, the reason, of that hidden road. A small hut crushed into the side of the sheer cliff. A dugout of logs, and thatch, and mud plaster. A hut with one fronting door, and a parchment window; a hut such as might have belonged to some old-time trapper, who had found it necessary to set his home somewhere secure from ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... school, one hot day, in the Illinois September. Our crowd had gone down to the pond back of the school-house, and two of us were paddling around on a raft made of sawmill slabs. One of the two—who always had more dare-deviltry than sense under his skull thatch—was silly enough to 'rock the boat,' and it went to pieces. You couldn't swim, Howard, but if you hadn't forgotten that trifling handicap and wallowed in to pull poor Billy Mimms ashore, I ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... forgotten now—for, across the ravine beneath him, he sees a cottage. The same, the very same it is, save that the thatch has been renewed! A humble shepherd's cottage, only a but and a ben, built long ago by thrifty hands—but he first learned to ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... mile or more from Claxton. He remembered having his attention attracted to the place by the curious nature of the building, which was constructed out of the remnants of a Norwegian barque stranded some years before. The thatch which covered it and the windows and door cut in the sides gave it a curiously hybrid appearance, and made it an object of interest to sightseers in those parts. Sampson was the owner of a fair-sized fishing-boat, which he worked with his eldest son, and which was said ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the village of Shalmovo. The sun is already kissing the earth on the horizon; it has turned crimson and will soon disappear. In Semyon's pothouse, which has lately changed its name and become a restaurant—a title quite out of keeping with the wretched little hut with its thatch torn off its roof, and its couple of dingy windows—two peasant sportsmen are sitting. One of them is called Filimon Slyunka; he is an old man of sixty, formerly a house-serf, belonging to the Counts Zavalin, by trade a carpenter. He has at one time been employed in a nail factory, has ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... sanitary. The English cottage has a rheumatic floor of beaten earth or tile; its rooms are few and small, and very dark; the water-supply is scanty and most inconvenient; its chimney smokes; mice and rats find secure refuge in the thatch; the masses of clinging vines make it damp and earwiggy; but what a lovely bit it is in the landscape!—the neutral tints, the patches of color, the picturesque outlines, the pitch and curved border of its roof, the yellow ricks in the background, the little garden gorgeous with marigolds, wallflowers, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... world. And by a strange old pathway they came to the land they sought, through a wind blowing up the pathway sheer from space with a kind of metallic taste from the roving stars. Even so they came to the windy house of thatch where dwells the Old Man Who Looks After Fairyland sitting by parlour windows that look away from the world. He made them welcome in his star-ward parlour, telling them tales of Space, and when they named to him their perilous quest he said it would be a charity to kill ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... hath fourescore houses which are great and well contriued. The most part haue their walls made of bords, and are couered with thatch; it hath some houses builded with lime and stone, and couered with tiles. (M603) It hath great Orchards and many trees in them, differing from those of Spaine: there be figgetrees which beare figges as big as ones fist, yellow within, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... white mountain village of K——, in Cardiganshire, were all retired to rest, it being ten o'clock. No—a single light twinkled from under eaves of thick and mossy thatch, in one cottage apart, and neater than the rest, that skirted the steep street, (as the salmon fishers, its chief inhabitants, were pleased to call it,) being, indeed, the rock, thinly covered with the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... not been cleaned for seven years. He tried to do it, and worked till noon, but the filth was as bad as ever. Then the Giant's youngest daughter came, and bid him sleep, and she cleaned out the stable, so that a golden apple would run from end to end of it. Next day the Giant set him to thatch the byre with birds' down, and he had to go out on the moors to catch the birds; but at midday, he had caught only two blackbirds, and then the Giant's youngest daughter came again, and bid him sleep, and then she caught ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... and Ned saw that his suspicions were correct, and that they were regarded by their captors as gods. Further proof was given of this when they were escorted to a large shed, composed of a roof of thatch supported on four upright posts, which stood in ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... gathered the sense of the words, ere, leaping from his horse, he bounded up the stairs, through the smoke, amid flakes of burning thatch falling from the roof, groped in the dense clouds of smoke for the senseless weight, and holding the shoulders while Malcolm held the feet, they sped down the stair, and rested not till they had laid him under a chestnut tree, out of reach of the crash of ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ten 'Tonio stood before them, not counting the thatch of his matted black hair, bound with white cotton turban. Five feet ten in height, but so gaunt and wiry that the ribs and bones seemed breaking through the tawny skin, that in flank and waist and the long sweep of his sinewy, fleshless legs, ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... near to the village with quick and joyful steps. He saw the smoke curling through the roof, and the thatch where green plants had thickly sprouted. He heard the children shouting and calling, and from a window that he passed came the twang of the koto, and everything seemed to cry a welcome for his return. Yet suddenly he felt a pang at ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... as the elder. The one was studying men, the other books. George was absorbing impressions of the things around him: of the quaint old Norfolk town, its "clean but narrow streets branching out from thy modest market-place, with thine old-fashioned houses, with here and there a roof of venerable thatch"; of that exquisite old gentlewoman Lady Fenn, {9b} as she passed to and from her mansion upon some errand of bounty or of mercy, "leaning on her gold-headed cane, whilst the sleek old footman walked at a respectful distance ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... the moment, had its own tale of hardihood to tell; there was a something that recalled the open sea, written in either countenance; courage and endurance; faith and self-reliance; the compass and the rudder; speaking plainly out under each little thatch of white hair. And indeed, as we found out afterwards, those young countenances told the truth; those fisher-boys were Red-Cap's only boat-crew. In all weathers, in all seasons, by night and by day, the three were together, the parent ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... male. And yet nature had played them this scurvy trick. The young heart in the old shell. Grown-up boys with a foot in the grave. Dependent upon mind and address alone to win a woman's regard, while the woman dreamed of the man with a thick thatch over his brains and the responsive magnetism of her own years. Poor old fighting-cocks! What a jade nature was . . . or was it merely the tyranny of an Idea, carefully inculcated at the nativity of the social group, with other arbitrary laws, in behalf of the race? The fetish of ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and fifty wide, and ten feet high, from ground to eaves; but from the eaves to the comb of the mighty roof was as much as forty feet, or maybe even more. This roof was of ancient mud-colored straw thatch a foot thick, and was covered all over, except in a few trifling spots, with a thriving and luxurious growth of green vegetation, mainly moss. The mossless spots were places where repairs had been made by the insertion of bright new masses of yellow straw. The ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... extemporaneous lanai such as is used to shelter that al fresco entertainment, the luau. But in the old times of strict tabu and rigorous etiquette, when the chief had but to lift his hand and the entire population of a district ransacked plain, valley, and mountain to collect the poles, beams, thatch, and cordstuff; when the workers were so numerous that the structure grew and took shape in a day, we may well believe that ambitious and punctilious patrons of the hula, such as La'a, Liloa, or Lono-i-ka-makahiki, did not allow the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... rafts, sometimes on flat boats, worked by ropes, were exciting and picturesque. For rustic interiors along the road side, there were the huts of the working people, rough trellises of tree-trunks interwoven with branches; green as arbors while fresh, a coarse thatch when dry. There was always a large open space in front, sheltered by the projecting thatch of the house, and furnished sometimes with a rough table and benches. Here would be the women at their work, or the children ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... the point of whirling away. But when darkness came, even the roof settled into quiet. For the drifts that had been piling up gradually to the north and west of the shack, sealing the windows and the door, had risen to the grassy eaves and overflowed them, and so weighted the thatch. ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... a recess in the wall of the traveling trench, and was open to the sky. There I saw the latest fashion in "oversea" hair cuts. The victims sat on a ration box while the barber mowed great swaths through tangled thatch with a pair of close-cutting clippers. But instead of making a complete job of it, a thick fringe of hair which resembled a misplaced scalping tuft was left for decorative purposes, just above the forehead. The effect was so grotesque that I had to invent an excuse for laughing. ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... "Bell Inn," where the road has crossed a stream, we see the cottage, and, horribile dictu! a row of modern brick-built cottages for background! Long, thatched and creeper-covered, built upon slabs of stone, with timber and plaster above, with tiny windows under the thatch, surrounded by a well-filled and carefully tended garden, the place makes a quick and enduring appeal to the imagination, even though the legends associated with it are, for the most part, legends and nothing more. It is easy to realise the supreme ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... Wife never left it until she was borne forth into the securer refuge of the narrow house that needed none of her care-taking. Upon the low green thatch lies heavily the shadow of a mighty monument that, to the satirist's eye, has a family likeness to the stone pile ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... one feature judge what an expensive Herr. Streets were hung with cloth, carpeted with cloth, no end of draperies and cloth; your oppressed imagination feels as if there was cloth enough, of scarlet and other bright colors, to thatch the Arctic Zone. With illuminations, cannon-salvos, fountains running wine. Friedrich had made two Bishops for the nonce. Two of his natural Church-Superintendents made into Quasi-Bishops, on the Anglican model,—which was always a favorite with him, and a pious wish of his;—but ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... and he knew, according to the rigorous selection he commanded, not having been clipped in the fall, that the shining mohair draping the sides of the least of them, as fine as any human new-born baby's hair and finer, as white as any human albino's thatch and whiter, was longer than the twelve-inch staple, and that the mohair of the best of them would dye any color into twenty-inch switches for women's heads and sell at prices ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... denote the former importance ascribed to the great Altar of Nature, and the power of religion on the social life of the past. Generations of later inhabitants, dwelling in flimsy huts of bamboo and thatch, regarded the mysterious ruins of the Tankahan Prahoe as the work of giants or demons, and the haunted hill as a mysterious resort of evil spirits. In lofty Sindanglaya, the swaying palms of the lowlands yield to glorious tree-ferns, shading road and ravine with ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... appreciative man, and he has made a rule that when any cottage in the village is found to be beyond repair, it shall be replaced by a new house exactly like the original. In consequence, the houses look equally old and equally attractive, with their roofs of grayish thatch, and the second stories leaning protectingly over the lower windows, overgrown ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... fear, were obliged to make into sheaves on 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... no answer; his mother looked at the boy's hands and face, all of much the same earthen cast, up to the eaves of his thatch of yellow hair, and said: "You go and wash yourself." At a certain light in his mother's eye, which he caught as he passed into the house with his dog, the boy turned and cut a defiant caper. The oldest son sat down on the bench beside his father, and they all looked ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Boga-panee on the Jheels. The path runs by Mamloo, and down the spur to the Jasper hill (see chapter xxviii): the vegetation all along is very tropical, and pepper, ginger, maize, and Betel palm, are cultivated around small cottages, which are only distinguishable in the forest by their yellow thatch of dry Calamus (Rattan) leaves. From Jasper hill a very steep ridge leads to another, called Lisouplang, which is hardly so high as Mamloo; the rocks are the same sandstone, with fragments of coal, and remains of the ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... in the evening, too tired to put away my packages, had retired to rest at once. My little maid, who was not so fatigued as I was, and slept more lightly, woke me in the night to listen to a noise in the thatch, at the further end of the store; but I was so accustomed to hear the half-starved mules of Cruces munching my thatch, that I listened lazily for a few minutes, and then went unsuspiciously into another heavy sleep. I do not know how long it was before I was again awoke by the child's ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... in flower o'er the thatch, And the swallow sings sweet from her nest in the wall; All trembling with transport he raises the latch, And the voices of loved ones reply ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... 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 purple flowers. In the lukewarm air a mingling of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... of natural beauty, and of the evident care bestowed upon the cultivation of the beds, and the training of the climbing plants, we yet felt, we hardly could tell why, but yet we instinctively felt, that the moss-grown thatch, the mouldering paling, the hoary apple trees, in a word, the evidences of decay visible around the place, were but types of the fading ...
— The Widow's Dog • Mary Russell Mitford
... hint. He would pay a visit to Braden Medworth—the coincidence was too striking to be neglected. But first Barthorpe itself—a quaint old-world little market-town, in which some of even the principal houses still wore roofs of thatch, and wherein the old custom of ringing the curfew bell was kept up. He found an old-fashioned hotel in the marketplace, under the shadow of the parish church, and in its oak-panelled dining-room, hung about with portraits of ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... weather was rainy that I could not lie dry. So wet would it be at certain seasons, that I was obliged to cover all within the pale with long poles, in the form of rafters, leaning against the rock, and loaded them with flags and large leaves of trees, resembling a thatch. ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... these Indians are in the depth of poverty, and have no possessions of value. Neither do they inherit anything save a little plot of land which they sow with rice—not to sell, but only for what is necessary for their families. Their houses are built on four posts; their walls are of bamboo and thatch, and are very small. Such was the spoliation committed on a people so poor and wretched that they would say: "Father, I will give the king twenty reals of eight annually, so that they will spare me from repartimientos;" ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... against 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 ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... eyes below, they beheld all the country sunk in a lake, only their own house left standing. While they gazed with wonder at the sight, and lamented the fate of their neighbors, that old house of theirs was changed into a temple. Columns took the place of the corner posts, the thatch grew yellow and appeared a gilded roof, the floors became marble, the doors were enriched with carving and ornaments of gold. Then spoke Jupiter in benignant accents: "Excellent old man, and woman worthy of such a husband, speak, tell us your ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... to the west. Nice little cottages 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 ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... went on board, the servant of the inn following with a great hamper of wine and provisions. He was glad to see that a bright fire burned on an earthen hearth in the middle of the boat; the smoke finding its way out, partly through a hole cut in the thatch above it, partly by the opening at the fore end of the boat. He brought with him his horse cloth as well as his other belongings. The men, who were clearly in a hurry to be away, pushed the boat off from the shore as soon as ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... very lawn 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 ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes, And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind Like aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes, Stripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak, Blackens afar the half-forgotten creek,— Then leans on me the ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... at this time erected, to the material of which every man, woman, and child contributed something, even if only a stick or a reed of thatch. Some were drafted off to put up the house, and the rest commenced to fight in real earnest, and settle any old grudges with each other. He who got the most wounds was set down for special favours from the god. With the completion of the temple the fighting ended, and that was to suffice ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... as an Indian, for she scorned shade-hats, and oftenest had nothing on her head at all but her own thick thatch of riotous brown hair. ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... long deserted; and their fallen roofs, blackened gables, and ruinous walls, showed Desolation's triumph over Poverty. On some huts the rafters, varnished with soot, were still standing, in whole or in part, like skeletons, and a few, wholly or partially covered with thatch, seemed still inhabited, though scarce habitable; for the smoke of the peat-fires, which prepared the humble meal of the indwellers, stole upwards, not only from the chimneys, its regular vent, but from various other crevices in the roofs. Nature, in the meanwhile, always changing, but ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... camels of the Tuareg who escorted us. Behind, followed the women of the tribe, my mother among them, two by two, the yoke upon their necks. There were not many men. Almost all lay with their throats cut under the ruins of the thatch of Gao beside my father, brave Sonni-Azkia. Once again Gao had been razed by a band of Awellimiden, who had come to massacre the French ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... hanging to his suspenders, He has button'd-up one-half of him in a pair of short knee-enders. Now, Punch, on your oath, did you ever hear the likes o' that? But oh, houly Paul, if you only seen his big cock'd hat, Stuck up on the top of his jazy;—a mighty illegant thatch, With hair like young Deaf Burke's, all rushing up to the scratch, You must have been divarted; and, Jewil, then he wore A thund'ring big Taglioni-cut purple velvet roquelore. And who but Misther Dan cut it fat in all his pride, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... 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 was ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... outside towards the roof; before commencing which, they partially cut the windows out of the walls, putting wood across to support the top. I should have explained that the turf used in building was the upper and coarser part of the peat, which was plentiful in the neighbourhood. The thatch-eaves of the cottage itself projected over the joining of the new roof, so as to protect it from the drip; and David soon put a thick thatch of new straw upon the little building. Second-hand windows were procured at the village, and the holes in the walls cut to their ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... 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, and 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 steer and gear and ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... stair of rock into the sea. The draught of air drew down under the foliage in the very bottom of the den, which was a perfect arbour for coolness. In front it stood open on the blue bay and the Casco lying there under her awning and her cheerful colours. Overhead was a thatch of puraos, and over these again palms brandished their bright fans, as I have seen a conjurer make himself a halo out of naked swords. For in this spot, over a neck of low land at the foot of the mountains, the trade-wind streams into Anaho Bay in a flood of almost constant volume and velocity, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... too, that crowned his head and 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 ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 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, and now he hesitated to enter. In the winter he would keep about it ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... rotten timber, the remains of a ruined barn. The yard was empty; no trace of farm implements or human labor to be seen. "Which is the inspector's house," inquired Anton, in dismay. The driver looked round, and at last made up his mind that it was a small one-storied building, with straw thatch and ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... tell, in days of yore, A widow somewhat old, and very poor: Deep in a cell her cottage lonely stood, Well thatch'd, and under covert of a wood. This dowager, on whom my tale I found, Since last she laid her husband in the ground, A simple sober life, in patience, led, And had but just enough to buy her bread: But huswifing the little Heaven ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... had been left behind in the nest spread himself out to his full size. He was now, you know, a householder; but his grandeur did not last long: in the night red fire broke through the windows, the flames seized on the roof, the dry thatch blazed up high, the whole house was burnt, and the young sparrow with it; but the young married couple escaped, fortunately, with life. When the sun rose again, and every thing looked so refreshed and invigorated, as after a peaceful sleep, there was nothing left of the cottage except some charred ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... York people put up when the rains commence are usually dome-shaped, four to six feet high, constructed of an arched framework of flexible sticks, one end of each of which is stuck firmly in the ground, and over this sheets of tea-tree (Melaleuca) bark—and sometimes an additional thatch of grass—are placed until ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... The leaves make the 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 ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... there were no shade, no peace, and no turning back, no one day's march made him stronger for the next; and at length, when he came to the low thatch of a negro-cabin, under the shadow of its bananas he sank down in its doorway, ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... them by the Blackwater. Some cedars he brought to Cork are to this day growing, according to the local historian, Mr. J. G. MacCarthy, at a place called Tivoli. The four venerable yew-trees, whose branches have grown and intermingled into a sort of summer-house thatch, are pointed out as having sheltered Raleigh when he first smoked tobacco in his Youghal garden. In that garden he also planted tobacco.... A few steps further on, where the town-wall of the thirteenth ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... in the green path, His flowers are lean and dry, His thatch hangs in wisps against The ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... the figure of Mr. Stone, which could be seen, bowed, and utterly still, beside his desk; so, by lifting the spy-hole thatch, one may see a convict in his cell stand gazing at his work, without ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... garden whose paling did not go all the way round, the potato pit being only kept out of the road, that here sets off southward, by a broken dyke of stones and earth. On each side of the slate-coloured door was a window of knotted glass. Ropes were flung over the thatch to keep ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... to see nothing strange in Sam's situation, nor was he in the least curious concerning the gossip of the country. This comforted Sam strangely. Ed was a little, trim, round-headed man, with a cropped thatch of white, and dancing brown eyes. Sixty years had in nowise impaired his vigour. He was an incorrigible ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... 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 ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... his life, and ran into a grass-thatched hut that stood close by; but the elephant, pulling out his picket pins like a couple of toothpicks, reached the hut in a stride, and, putting his trunk through the thatch as if it had been a sheet of paper, felt round for the man inside and, seizing him, dragged him forth. The people yelled, and some came running with fire-brands to scare him, but before any could reach him Maharaj had knocked one of his great fore-feet against the head of the unfortunate ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... with straw, and practically the cottage is now built, for there are no indoor fittings to speak of. The chimney is placed at the end of the room set apart for day use. There is no ceiling, nothing between the floor and the thatch and rafters, except perhaps at one end, where there is a kind of loft. The floor consists simply of the earth itself rammed down hard, or sometimes of rough pitching-stones, with large interstices between them. The furniture of this room is of the simplest description. ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... only wrecks of the walls, and a few beams and rafters standing up in the air, or lying across each other, without any thatch to cover them. Something must be left inside, however; for Roger was busy with his pitchfork. This something must be valuable, too; for Roger, after carefully feeling the depth, jumped out of the tub, and went on filling it, while he stood in the water. Oliver thought ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... allowed them to travel languidly upwards and along the 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 ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... he had id—but he hadn't an' more was the pity." His entire possessions consisted of the ground we have mentioned, most part of which was so rocky as to be entirely useless—a cow, a couple of pigs, and the "the uld cabin," which consisted of four mud walls, covered with thatch, in which was an opening, "to let in the day-light, an' to let out the smoke." In the interior there was no division, or separate apartment, as the one room contained the cooking materials, and all other necessaries, beside their ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... moss to frame the prints he had brought home uninjured, and which were to be part of the furnishing of their future home; others across the salt meadows for the little red samphire stems to pickle; sails in the float down river and in the creeks, where the tall thatch parted by the prow rustled almost overhead, and the gulls came flying and piping around them: here and there, they two alone, pouring out thought and soul to each other, and every now and then glancing shyly at those days, ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... through an open tract of the forest, full of brush and birches, and where the starlight guided her; and, beyond that again, must thread the columned blackness of a pine grove joining overhead the thatch of its long branches. At that hour the place was breathless; a horror of night like a presence occupied that dungeon of the wood; and she went groping, knocking against the boles - her ear, betweenwhiles, strained to aching and ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for a sheaf-binding reaper, and one of L. 50 for a similar machine. In 1885, at Preston, the competitions were concerned with two-horse, three-horse and four-horse whipple-trees, and packages for conveying fresh butter by rail. In 1886, at Norwich, a prize of L. 25 was awarded for a thatch-making machine. In 1887, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, a prize of L. 200 went to a compound portable agricultural engine, one of L. 100 to a simple portable agricultural engine, and lesser prizes to a weighing-machine for horses and cattle, a weighing-machine for sheep and pigs, potato-raisers ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... snow-white hair and beard attested, he was much older. The thickness of his wrist and the greatness of his fingers made authentic the mighty frame of him hidden under loose dungaree pants and cotton shirt, buttonless, open from midriff to Adam's apple, exposing a chest matted with a thatch of hair as white as that of his head and face. The depth and breadth of that chest, its resilience, and its relaxed and plastic muscles, tokened the knotty strength that still resided in him. Further, no bronze and beat of sun and wind availed to hide the testimony of his skin that he ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... in sight were one-room dwellings of adobe, with an open shed at the back built of four corner posts supporting a thatch roof, on which peppers were still sunning, late as was the season. Here and there between these forlorn huts grew an oleander or an umbrella chinaberry; and there were vines on some of the walls, masking ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... said Garavel, in a choking voice. "So that is where you were when I believed you to be dancing!" He burst forth violently, pounding the table with his clenched fist until the dishes danced, his brilliant black eyes flashing beneath their thatch of white. "But I will not have it, understand! You are betrothed. You have given ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... covered with oiled cotton. Generally they wore the queue tucked into the girdle to keep it out of the way, but occasionally it was put to use, as, for example, if a man's hat was not at hand to ward off the glare of the sun, he would deftly arrange a thatch of leaves over his eyes, binding it firm with his long braid of black hair. On their feet they wore the inevitable straw sandal of these parts. Comfortable for those who know how to wear them, cheap even though not durable ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall |
