"Sassafras" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hope soon to report that the goose remains suspended at a favorable altitude. People who have tried to run a funny paper and entertain a congregation of large piebald measles at the same time will understand something of the tact, finesse, and hot sassafras tea required to do so. We expect to get out the paper regularly from this time on, but are forced to be very careful, as improper treatment and deleterious after-effects of measles, combined with the high price of paper and presswork, ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... need. Abraham Peirsey was in charge as Cape-Merchant and it was his responsibility also to dispose of the cargo at a price that would bring a profit to the promoters. The exchange, of course, was in tobacco or sassafras, the only two commodities at the time, which could be disposed of in England at a profit. Evidently, Peirsey was successful in his bargaining, for upon his return to England in the Susan, he came back the ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... Pass commenced. We had now penetrated to the actual foot of the Pass without the smallest difficulty, it now remained to ascend by a steep slope to the level of its entrance. This slope is occupied by a very close wood, in which red cedar, sassafras, palms, and other ornamental inter-tropical trees are frequent. Through this shaded wood lye penetrated, climbing up a steep bank of a very rich loose earth, in which large fragments of a very compact rock are embedded. At length we gained the foot of a wall of ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... spacious; the names of many of them, as Sassafras, Chesnut, and Locust, record their sylvan origin: rows of Lombardy poplars are planted in them. The private houses are characterized by elegant neatness; the steps and window-sills of many of them are of grey marble, and they have large mats placed before the doors. The streets ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... know not by what particular conformation of the organ it happens, but I have always found that this composition is surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young chimney-sweeper—whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous concretions, which are sometimes found (in dissections) to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged practitioners; or whether Nature, sensible ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... wish it were. Oh, aren't they horrible! Run, girls, run back, or you'll be eaten up!" and she beat such a hasty retreat, meanwhile wildly flinging her arms up and around her head, that she collided with Margaret, and nearly toppled her into a sassafras bush. ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... to find himself in the grasp of his own father. Nonowit pointed hastily through the thick growth to the river, and the two watched the English vessel sail up the stream, but history reports that Martin Pring saw no Indians when he searched the Piscataqua shores for a sassafras tree, which, he believed, held ...
— Some Three Hundred Years Ago • Edith Gilman Brewster
... do you think of Sid and Howard making twenty thousand dollars apiece in Sassafras Copper? Isn't it too lovely! I'm having a little architect make me plans for a conservatory. You know I've always been dying for one—I don't see how I've lived ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... le' me see: Firs',—horhound drops an' catnip tea; Den rock candy soaked in rum, An' a good sized chunk o' camphor gum; Next Ah tried was castor oil, An' snakeroot tea brought to a boil; Sassafras tea fo' to clean mah blood; But none o' dem t'ings didn' do no good. Den when home remedies seem to shirk, Dem pantry bottles was put ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... "Sassafras, that makes tea for skin disease; Ginseng, that's good to sell; Bloodroot for the blood in springtime; Goldthread, that cures sore mouths; Pipsissewa for chills and fever; White-man's Foot, that springs up wherever ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... unlike paragoric in composition, with catachu, anise flavoring, and coloring added. Godfrey's Cordial also featured opium in widely varying amounts. The committee chose a formula which would provide a grain of opium per ounce, to which was added sassafras "as the carminative which has become one of the chief features ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... very thought of a man paddling down the river seemed to suggest some scheme of the fakir or dodge of the showman to separate him from the coins that jingled in his pocket. The old Vermonter, turning a quid of sassafras from one corner of his mouth to the other, drawled, with all impressiveness of a judge to whom some knotty law point had been presented: "Wall, I wunder what he gits out'n this? He mus' be a darned critter tew resk himself in thet ere fashion; an' I swan whar th' profit ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... the Willow Tree II Uncle Wiggily and the Wintergreen III Uncle Wiggily and the Slippery Elm IV Uncle Wiggily and the Sassafras V Uncle Wiggily and the Pulpit-Jack VI Uncle Wiggily and the Violets VII Uncle Wiggily and the High Tree VIII Uncle Wiggily and the Peppermint IX Uncle Wiggily and the Birch Tree X Uncle Wiggily ...
— Uncle Wiggily in the Woods • Howard R. Garis
... a composition, the ground-work of which I have understood to be the sweet wood 'yclept sassafras. This wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar, hath to some tastes a delicacy beyond the China luxury. I know not how thy palate may relish it; for myself, with every deference ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Surgeon started up the walk for his own perfectly formal and respectable brown stone mansion. Deep down in his lurching heart he felt a sudden most inordinate desire to reach that brown stone mansion just as quickly as possible. But abruptly even to himself he swerved off instead at the yellow sassafras tree and plunged quite wildly through a mass of broken sods towards the rickety, no-account cedar ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... molasses, sugar, and tobacco; but there were chests of rice, tea, coffee, and spices, barrels of pork in brine, as well as piles of cotton and woolen cloth on the shelves above the counters. His shop window, seldom dusted or set in order, held a few clay pipes, some glass jars of peppermint or sassafras lozenges, black licorice, stick-candy, and sugar gooseberries. These dainties were seldom renewed, for it was only a very bold child, or one with an ungovernable appetite for sweets, who would have spent his penny at Foxy ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... purpose to divide the trees into two great groups, hard woods and soft woods, using these terms not so loosely as lumbermen do, but drawing the line between sycamore, yellow birch, yellow pine, and slippery elm, on the one side, and red cedar, sassafras, pitch pine and white ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... insects. It may he kept free from the latter by a judicious mixture of aromatic shrubs and flowers, cut up and sewed in silken bags, which must be interspersed among the drawers and shelves. The ingredients used may consist of lavender, thyme, roses, cedar shavings, powdered sassafras, cassia, &c., into which a few drops of otto of roses, or other ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... three days' march, was the gathering of mushrooms. The old fields frequent along the route abounded with them, and many a royal meal they furnished. To farmers' sons accustomed to the sight of close cultivation, these old fields, half covered with stunted pines, sassafras, varieties of spice wood, and the never-failing persimmon tree, were objects of curiosity. It was hard to realize that we were marching through a country once considered the Garden of America, whose bountiful supplies and large ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... would answer for bait. Not falling in with any birds, I determined to seek for a rabbit or a frog. To save time, I lighted a fire, put my water to boil, spread my hide and blanket, arranged my saddle for a pillow, and then went in search of bait, and sassafras to make ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... that had led to the mill from the main highway was overgrown with weeds. Later it would be filled with thistles and burdocks. Wild sassafras grew along the roadside. ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... corn dodgers as hard as any rock, Until my teeth began to loosen and my knees began to knock; I got so thin on sassafras tea I could hide behind a straw, And indeed I was a different man ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... do; and for that reason am I paying my court to the more substantial part of the breakfast. Come, Blessington, my dear fellow, you have quite lost your appetite, and we may have sharp work before we get back. Follow my example: throw that nasty blood-thickening sassafras away, and lay a foundation from this venison. None sweeter is to be found in the forests of America. A few slices of that, and then a glass each of my best Jamaica, and we shall have strength to go through the expedition, if its ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... A nutritive starchy product named Salep, or Saloop, is prepared from the roots of the common Male Orchis, and its infusion or decoction was taken generally in this country as a beverage before the introduction of tea and coffee. Sassafras chips were sometimes added for giving the drink a flavour. Salep obtained from the tubers of foreign Orchids was specially esteemed; and even now that sold in Indian bazaars is so highly valued for its fine qualities that most extravagant prices are paid for it by wealthy ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Gullettsville road. Presently Sis and Woodward came in sight. They walked slowly along in the warm sunshine, wholly absorbed in each other. Woodward was leading his horse, and that intelligent animal improved the opportunity to nip the fragrant sassafras buds just appearing on the bushes. Teague looked at the two young people from under the brim of his hat and chuckled, but when Sis caught sight of him, a little while after, he was rubbing his rifle vigorously, and seemed to be oblivious to the fact that two young ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... out of sight. With him always, at his side as he watched them, was one to whom he gave his heart and soul in love—a twin brother. Together they strolled along the banks of the stream; together explored the fields lying farther away from it, and gathered pungent mints and sticks of fragrant sassafras in the hills overlooking all—beyond which lay the Realm of Conjecture, and from which, looking southward across the great river, they caught glimpses of the Enchanted Land. Hand in hand and heart in heart they two, the only children of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... something weird about this silent man's ability to turn the conversation as he chose to have it go. Sitting by the Granny's tea-table, nibbling corn-bread while he drank his glass of water, having declined even her sassafras, he ceased to stimulate her medical talk and opened the vein of gossip. Once started, Granny Sanders was sure to allude to the robbery. And once on the robbery the doctor's course ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... they fall amid the foliage of evergreen oaks; among clustering groves that show all the varied tints of verdure, disporting upon green glassy glades, and glinting into arbours overshadowed by the sassafras laurel, the Osage orange, and the wild China-tree, laced together by a trellis of grape vines. A lake in the centre of this luxurious vegetation, placid as sleep itself, only stirred by the webbed feet of waterfowl, or the wings of dipping swallows, with ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... have plenty for to eat, plenty co'nmeal, 'lasses and heavy, brown sugar. We gits flour bread once de week, but lots of butter and milk. For de coffee, we roasts meal bran and for de tea, de sassafras. Den we has veg'tables and fruit dat am raised on de place. De meat mostly am de wil' game, deer and de turkey, but sometimes ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... ever taste the bark of the sassafras-tree?" asked Paul. "If not, here is one; and I will break off a twig for you to chew. The color of the inner bark, near the root, is red, like cinnamon. A beer is made from it; and it is also used ...
— The Nursery, September 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 3 • Various
... upon the grass, Of spice-wood and of sassafras; On pillars of mottled tortoise-shell Hung the burnished canopy, And o'er it gorgeous curtains fell Of the tulip's crimson drapery. The monarch sat on his judgment-seat, On his brow the crown imperial shone, The prisoner Fay was at his ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... dry and keen as he walked briskly towards the mountains. The road ran through groves of stunted persimmon and sassafras bushes, across swift-bounding mountain streams, and under natural arbors of wild grapes and muscadine vines. In a few minutes Westerfelt reached the meeting-house on a little rise near ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... morn, Woods upon woods, with fields of corn Lying between them, not quite sere, And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom, When the wind can hardly find breathing-room, Under their tassels,—cattle near, Biting shorter the short green grass, And a hedge of sumach and sassafras, With bluebirds twittering all around,— (Ah, good painter, you can't paint sound!)— These, and the little house where I was born, Low and little, and black and old, With children, many as it can hold, All at the windows, open wide,— ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... into her bosom. Nothing could detain the absent from her but one reason—death! Larger and brighter grew the star until now it flashed like the eye of To-ke-ah from its home in the heavens. Still the absent came not. Tears began to flow, and she at length started in wild fear from her couch of sassafras to the towering rock to see if she could not behold the approaching shape of To-ke-ah. By this time the sky was sparkling with stars, and a feeble light was shed upon the forests. She saw the pointed rocks around her—she saw the two leaps of the torrent through their rugged ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Governor Carver—who died before it was received—upbraiding him for sending her home "empty." The terrible sickness and mortality of the whole company, afloat and ashore, had, of course, made it impossible to freight her as intended with "clapboards" [stave-stock], sassafras roots, peltry, etc. No vessels of her class of that day were without the high poop and its cabin possibilities,—admirably adapting them to passenger service,—and the larger had the high and roomy topgallant forecastles so necessary for their larger crews. The breadth of beam ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... present time, by little search, as far as they have come to our knowledge, consist principally of Venus' hair, hart's tongue, lingwort, polypody, white mullein, priest's shoe, garden and sea-beach orach, water germander, tower-mustard, sweet flag, sassafras, crowfoot, platain, shepherd's purse, mallows, wild marjoram, crane's bill, marsh-mallows, false eglantine, laurel, violet, blue flag, wild indigo, solomon's seal, dragon's blood, comfrey, milfoil, many sorts of fern, wild lilies of different kinds, agrimony, ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... an untenanted houseboat was left lying in the sunshine and the marshes, all aboard having taken to the shore-boats and gone in search of the more solid portions of Weyanoke. Weyanoke is an Indian name and means "land of sassafras." In 1617 the Indian chief, Opechancanough, gave this land of sassafras to Sir George Yeardley, afterward governor-general of the colony; and his ownership gave early prominence to the place, though he did not live upon the plantation that he ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... voyage; and it was necessary to disembark with all possible speed, and erect huts to shelter them from the daily increasing inclemency of the weather. For this purpose, the forests of oak, pine, juniper, and sassafras, that had grown undisturbed for centuries along the coast, furnished them with abundant materials; and the woods soon echoed to the unaccustomed sound of the hatchet and the saw, at which all the men, of every rank and condition, labored unremittingly, ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... antecedent Miocene period. Among the genera of flowering plants, M. Gaudin enumerates pine, oak, evergreen oak, plum, plane, alder, elm, fig, laurel, maple, walnut, birch, buckthorn, hickory, sumach, sarsaparilla, sassafras, cinnamon, Glyptostrobus, Taxodium, Sequoia, Persea, Oreodaphne (Figure 134), Cassia, and Psoralea, and some others. This assemblage of plants indicates a warm climate, but not so subtropical an one as that of the Upper Miocene period, which will presently ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... to find the aromatic spice-bush to cool the burning of fever, and where in the spring grew the tenderest willow twigs whose bark went into cures for rheumatism. Sassafras yielded its savory roots for tea and tonics, and the purplish red pokeberry supplied a valuable blood purifier. So he harvested the woods for others, at the same time finding ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... head and poked the pillow to a more comfortable shape. "Now you lay perfectly still," she commanded in the hectoring tone of the born nurse; "I'm goin' to run down and make you up a good hot cup of sassafras tea." ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... corruption of Saxafas, which is from Saxifrage. By origin, the word means "stone-breaking," from its medicinal qualities. The true Sassafras (S. officinale) is the only species of the genus. It is a North-American tree, about forty feet high, but the name has been given to various trees in many parts of the world, from the similarity, either of their appearance or of the real or supposed ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... may be made from any of the following woods—mulberry, sassafras, southern cedar, black locust, black walnut, apple, slippery elm or hickory. In making a bow, select wood with straight grain. The length of the bow should be about the height of the boy using it, or if the boy is between ten and fifteen years of age, his bow should ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... hated it! She liked feeding the hens and pigs better, and when she got promoted to driving the cows, a couple of years later, she was in her element. There were charming possibilities of nuts and checkerberries and sassafras and sweet flag all the way between the house and the pasture, and the chance to loiter, and ...
— The Adventures of Ann - Stories of Colonial Times • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... crackling, sending up their light columns of thin blue smoke among the trees; and now a goodly portion of venison is roasting on the forked sticks before the fires. Each lodge has its own cooking utensils. That jar embedded in the hot embers contains sassafras tea, an aromatic beverage, in which the squaws delight when they are so fortunate as to procure a supply. This has been brought from the Credit, far up in the west, by a family who have come down on a special ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... are torn on its walls that leant, And all from the young shrubs there By struggling hands have the leaves been rent, And there hangs on the sassafras, broken and bent, One tress of the ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... take you for a quiet spin in the country, to make the better acquaintance of Madame Spring-in-Carolina," he said. A few minutes later he swung the car into a lonesome and lovely road edged with pines, and sassafras, and sumach, and cassena bushes, and festooned with vines. Madame Spring-in-Carolina had coaxed the green things to come out and grow, and the people of the sky to try their jeweled wings in her fine new sunlight. The Judas-tree was red, the dogwood ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... saw a creature dancing down the moon-path, whirling and springing about while a pair of rabbits, that were startled in crossing the path, scurried off into a clump of sassafras bushes nearby. Then, as if reassured, they sat there calmly, even when the dancing figure came closer to them. And Nautauquas heard singing, though the words of the song did not come to his ears. He slipped behind an oak tree and watched the dancer advance. Now that it was nearer he discovered that ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... great store. In the very same Iland where wee were seated, being fifteene miles of length, and fiue or sixe miles in breadth, there are fewe trees els but of the same kind; the whole Iland being full. [Sassafras.] ...
— A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land Of Virginia • Thomas Hariot
... large party from Cockburn's fleet landed at Havre de Grace, and, having driven away the few militia, captured and burned the town. Having accomplished this exploit, the marauders continued their way up the bay, and turning up into the Sassafras River ravaged the country on both sides of the little stream. After spreading distress far and wide over the beautiful country that borders Chesapeake Bay, the vandals returned to their ships, boasting that they had despoiled the Americans of at least seventy thousand dollars, and injured them to ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... they probably thought would scare away the devil of sickness. Winslow gave him some conserve, washed his mouth, scraped his tongue, which was in a horrid state, got down some drink, made him some broth, dosed him with an infusion of strawberry leaves and sassafras root, and had the satisfaction of seeing him rapidly recover. Massasoit, full of gratitude, revealed the plot which had been formed to destroy the colonists, whereupon the Governor ordered Captain Miles Standish to see to them; who thereupon, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... badly treated, on the whole. My office was to be that of cook—by no means a very difficult task in that craft, the camboose consisting of two pots set in bricks, and the dishes being very simple. In the cabin, sassafras was used for tea, and boiled pork and beef composed the dinner. The first day, I was excused from entering on the duties of my office, on account of sea-sickness; but, the next morning, I set about the work in good earnest. We had a long passage, and my ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... of hounds that had been sleeping under the sassafras bushes across the road came fawning to his feet, and he ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... another village of Niagara Falls. The same shops, the same guides, the same hackmen—all are there, save poor Lo, with his beadwork and sassafras. In fact, a "cabby" just outside of New Place offered to take me to the Whirlpool and the Canada side for a dollar. At least, this is what I thought he said. Of course, it is barely possible that I was daydreaming, but I ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... Cassia Marilandica, Polygala Senega, Sanguinaria Canadensis, Lobelia inflata, Phytolacca decandra, Podophyllum peliatum, Sassafras officinale. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... thirteen men. After following the windings of "the brave river" for twelve miles or more, the two vessels turned back and put to sea again, having failed in the chief object of the expedition, which was to obtain a cargo of the medicinal sassafras-tree, from the bark of which, as well known to our ancestors, could be distilled the ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... rye, okra, corn, bran, chickory and sweet potato peelings. For tea, raspberry leaves, corn fodder and sassafras root. There was not enough bacon to be had to keep the soldiers alive. Sorghum ...
— Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War • Mrs. Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... and his companion had ascended the preceding evening; but to his astonishment a mountain stream was now foaming down it, leaping from rock to rock, and filling the glen with babbling murmurs. He, however, made shift to scramble up its sides, working his toilsome way through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witch-hazel, and sometimes tripped up or entangled by the wild grapevines that twisted their coils from tree to tree, and spread a kind of network in ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... running from north to south. In the centre is a square of ten acres, for the state-house, market-house, and school-house, as before hinted. The names of the streets here denote the several sorts of timber that are common in Pennsylvania, as Mulberry-street, Sassafras-street, Chesnut-street, Walnut-street, Beech-street, Ash-street, Vine-street, Cedar-street. There are also King-street, Broad-street, High-street. Their court-house is built of brick, and under it is a prison: several houses on the quay ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... sassafras. I know a big tree of it, and Dan told me how squirrels dig up the roots and eat them, and I love to dig," returned Rob, undaunted by ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... the zigzag-cornered fence Where sassafras, intrenched in brambles dense, Contests with stolid vehemence [41] The march of culture, setting limb and thorn As pikes against the ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... of the 11th of November, in the year of our Lord 1620, as described to us in the simple words of the pilgrims: "A pleasant bay, circled round, except the entrance, which is about four miles over from land to land, compassed about to the very sea with oaks, pines, junipers, sassafras, and other sweet weeds. It is a harbor wherein a thousand sail of ship may ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... had swept the country as clean as a floor. But the Uptons were the poorest even in that community. Others recuperated, pulled themselves together, and began after a time to get up. The Uptons got flatter than they were before. The fences (the few that were left) rotted; the fields grew up in sassafras and pines; the barns blew down; the houses decayed; the ...
— "Run To Seed" - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... expecting H. to be dragged off. Brookhaven was also the station for dinner. I choked mine down, feeling the sword hanging over me by a single hair. At sunset we reached our station. The landlady was pouring tea when we took our seats and I expected a treat, but when I tasted it it was sassafras tea, the very odor of which sickens me. There was a general surprise when I asked to exchange it for a glass of water; every one was drinking it as if it were nectar. This morning ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... named by Skipper Block, an Albany Dutchman. But they would English his name, even in his own town, for it lingers there in Vineyard Point. Bartholomew Gosnold was one of the first white visitors here, for he landed in 1602, and lived on the island for a time, collecting a cargo of sassafras and returning thence to England because he feared ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... came in, but they were small, belated craft. The most had left England before the sailing of the Santa Teresa; the rest, private ventures, trading for clapboard or sassafras, knew nothing of court affairs. Only the Sea Flower, sailing from London a fortnight after the Santa Teresa, and much delayed by adverse winds, brought a letter from the deputy treasurer to Yeardley and the Council. From Rolfe I learned ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... (south) was opened as a shop, in 1719, by one Lockyer, who called it "Mount Pleasant." It then became a "saloop-house," where the poor purchased a beverage made out of sassafras chips. The proprietor, who began life, as Mr. Noble says, with half-a-crown, died in March, 1739, worth L1,000. Thomas Read was a later tenant. Charles Lamb mentions "saloop" in one of his essays, and says, "Palates otherwise not uninstructed in dietetical elegancies sup it up with avidity." ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... old field-pine is eschewed, and the planter draws on his stock of oak and hickory-trees. Many use sassafras and sweet gum in preference to all other woods for this purpose, under the impression that they improve the flavor of the tobacco-leaf. When the leaves, fully cured, have taken the rich brown hue of the tobacco of commerce, so unlike the deep green ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... building purposes, and a considerable amount of timber is purchased from the mills of Puget Sound. Bamboo is largely employed for buildings. Camphor is the product of a tree (Camphora officinarum) allied to the cinnamon and the sassafras. It is cultivated in the island of Kiushiu. The best gum, however, is now obtained from Formosa, and this island now controls the world's supply. The camphor product is a government monopoly leased to ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... the cedar, the tamarind, the guaiacum, the sassafras, the hickory, the chestnut, the walnut of many different kinds, the wild cherry (sometimes a hundred feet high), and more than fifty different ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... either—spring-water and trout all the way to the river; and all the rest of the way river-water and trout; and at this season birds' eggs in the reeds and a turtlelike terrapin, and Brodeia roots and wild onion, and young sassafras—a child could do it. Eat that...." he tossed me with his fingers a ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... Tulip Tree Basswood Linden Holly Striped Maple Hard Maple Silver Maple Red Maple Box Elder Staghorn Sumach Kentucky Coffee Tree Honey Locust Red or Canada Plum Wild Plum Green Ash Sassafras American Elm Rock Elm Slippery Elm Wild Red Cherry Wild Black Cherry Wild Crab Apple Mountain Ash Cockspur Thorn Black Haw Scarlet Fruited Thorn Shad Bush Witch Hazel Sweet Gum Flowering Dogwood Pepperidge Persimmon Black Ash White ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... no papaw, no linden or basswood, no locust-trees, no cherry-tree large enough for a timber tree, no gum-trees, no sorrel-tree, nor kalmia; no persimmon-trees, not a holly, only one ash that may be called a timber tree, no catalpa or sassafras, not a single elm or hackberry, not a mulberry, not a hickory, or a beech, or a true chestnut. These facts would seem to indicate that the forest flora of North America entered it from the east, and that the Pacific States ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... age of reptiles is known as the Cretaceous or chalk period. Now, for the first time, the forests begin to take on more of the character of our forests of to-day. Plants like our willow and beech, poplar and sassafras appear in great abundance. Their broad leaves serve better than those of any earlier plants to catch the sunlight. But in addition they offered such effective evaporating surface that they cast off rapidly the moisture obtained from the ground by the ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... her annual epidemic of aching hearts and aching joints had advanced ten days and ten degrees. The season's first straw replacement of derby had been noted by press. The city itched in its last days of woolens and drank sassafras tea for nine successive mornings. A commuter wore the first sweet sprig of lilac. The slightly East Sixties took to boarding up house-fronts into bland, eyeless masks. The very ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... hickory, chestnut, mountain ash, and walnut trees, whose strong lateral branches afford ample protection from the sun, and at the same time furnish playgrounds to innumerable bright-eyed squirrels. Further down one comes upon gentle elms, succeeded by sassafras and locust—these, in their turn, succeeded by the softer linden, red bud, catalpa, and maple; and at the foot of the declivity, and in the bottom of the valley, wild shrubbery, interspersed with silver willows, and white poplars. Still following ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... the party of finding mines, and yet so reduced, that they still pushed on, though they once found that they had but a half-pint of corn for a man, besides two mastiffs, upon the pottage of which, with sassafras leaves, they might subsist for two days. They returned safe, however, without any of the precious metals which they had made such exertions to find. Lane also explored the Chowan, or, as he called it, the Chowanook. The king of this country gave him much information respecting ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... have a good understanding with one another's palates? as foolish people who have lived long together, know when each wants salt or sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already. Every natural function can be dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The compliments and ceremonies ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... extraordinary stones, forming a seat with a back and footstool. And this thicket, so full of a natural art, was in the immediate vicinity, within a few rods, of the dwelling of Madame Deluc, whose boys were in the habit of closely examining the shrubberies about them in search of the bark of the sassafras. Would it be a rash wager—a wager of one thousand to one—that a day never passed over the heads of these boys without finding at least one of them ensconced in the umbrageous hall, and enthroned upon its natural throne? Those who would hesitate at such a wager, have either never been ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... door, and turning up one ear, very much as if it were a dipper, in which she expected to catch the words which dropped from the lips of her mistress. "Betsey, have you attended to your sister—to my little child, I mean? Then go out and make some sassafras cakes, and some eel-pie, and some squirrel-soup; and set the table in five minutes: ...
— Little Prudy's Sister Susy • Sophie May
... childhood, when his father was both guide and physician to the king, on hunting trips through the mountains, the doctor taught the boys to recognize sarsaparilla, stramonium, hemlock, hellebore, sassafras and mandrake. Then Aristotle made a list of all the plants he knew and wrote down the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Rachel says he is needed here on the farm since uncle cannot work as he used, and that he shall neither go away to marry, nor bring a wife home here. They had a bitter quarrel one day. I was gathering sassafras and birch buds for her and they did not know I was there. And Rachel said if he married Clarissa, she would persuade uncle not to leave him any part of the farm. Ought not ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... stretched away from the Tigmore foot-hills in broad strips of harvest gold. The sky was brilliantly blue; even Choke Gulch's glooms were flecked with light. The scrub-oak, the dog-wood, the chinca-pin, the walnut, the hickory, sumach and sassafras trailed over the Tigmores like a giant green veil. On beyond the Tigmores the pale wide Di ran ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... hero, having hired a capital saddle-horse, a little the worse for age, was finding his way eastward along the sandy roads. The country was full of color; the sassafras and gum trees and oaks were all ablaze with red and yellow. Now and then he caught a glimpse of a sail on one of the wide reaches of the river which lay to the northward; now and then he passed a broken gateway ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... some old fields that were full of blackberries. Soon, thereafter, the green corn or roasting-ear came into season, and I heard no more of the scurvy. Our country abounds with plants which can be utilized for a prevention to the scurvy; besides the above are the persimmon, the sassafras root and bud, the wild-mustard, the "agave," turnip tops, the dandelion cooked as greens, and a decoction ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... woodpeckers make a cavity when a suitable trunk or branch is found, but the chickadee, with its small, sharp beak, rarely does so; it usually smooths and deepens one already formed. This a pair did a few yards from my cabin. The opening was into the heart of a little sassafras, about four feet from the ground. Day after day the birds took turns in deepening and enlarging the cavity: a soft, gentle hammering for a few moments in the heart of the little tree, and then the appearance of the worker at the opening, with the chips in his, or her, beak. They changed off ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... dat am sho' good, git snakeroot and sassafras and a li'l lodestone and brimstone and asafoetida and resin and bluestone and gum arabic and a pod or two red pepper. Put dis in de red flannel bag, at midnight on de dark of de moon, and it ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... woodland scenery around me! The sombre green of pines, and the equally dark though glossy foliage of oaks, were beautifully enlivened by lighter greens, and by the brilliant hues of the sassafras-tree. Here climbed in tantalizing beauty—tempting as insidious vice, which attracts but to destroy—the poison-oak vine. Cherokee roses starred the hedges, or, adventurously climbing the highest trees, flung downward graceful pendants. Upon the edge of the ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... himself caused it. In short, that it was made by either a pin or a cuff button in his wristband when he was attacked and fell. But enlighten me upon a puzzling point, Sir Henry: What do you use coriander and oil of sassafras for in a stable?" ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... rite of sacrifice was enacted with frightful symbols. Through the awful din the three war-cries pealed, the drums advanced, thundering; the iris-maids lighted the six little fires of black-birch, spice-wood, and sassafras, and crouched to inhale the aromatic smoke until, stupefied and quivering in every limb with the inspiration of delirium, they stood erect, writhing, twisting, tossing their hair, chanting ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... pine, the spruce, and the balsam trees, 'will give our gums and our balsam.' The slippery elm offered its bark; the sassafras its roots; the cherry tree its bark and its berries. One after another, the other trees and shrubs offered their berries, their bark, their leaves, or their roots as medicine to heal the diseases ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... were doing so much injury. The pine and the spruce and the balsam trees said, 'We will give of our gums and balsams.' The slippery elm said it would give of its bark to make the soothing healing drink. The sassafras said it would give of its roots to make the healthful tea that will bring back health again. The prickly ash and the sumach and others volunteered their help, and spoke of the wonderful healing power there was ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... watch into action. Transferred to his hand, some spent and rusty sentinel, long silent and useless, seemed to feel the warmth of the mender and resumed the round of duty. He would buy from the old estate halls on the Sassafras and the Chester rivers, tall, solemn clocks, dead to the purpose of their creation, their stately learned faces lost to former automatic expressions or waggery, and when exposed to the infectious influences of his shop, a gurgle of sound as of ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... of the unsuccessful attempts of Raleigh. But, at this time, the intercourse was renewed: a ship sailed to Virginia, the name then given to the greater part of the east coast of North America; and a traffic was carried on with the Indians for peltry, sassafras, cedar wood, &c. Captain Gosnol, who commanded this vessel, was a man of considerable skill in his profession, and he is said to have been the first Englishman who sailed directly to North America, and not, as before, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... in Camp of Instruction ended with the Summer. September had come, and Nature was hanging out crimson battle-flags every-where—on the swaying poppy and the heavy-odored geranium. The sumach and the sassafras wore crimson signals of defiance, and the maples blazed with the gaudy red, yellow and orange of ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... the smoke of the First-day morning, It hangs low over the rows of trees by the fences, It hangs thin by the sassafras and wild-cherry and ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the woods and their balmy light— One hour on the top of a breezy hill, There in the sassafras all out of sight The Blackbird is splitting his slender bill For the ease of his heart: Do you think if he said "I will sing like this bird with the mud colored back And the two little spots of gold over his eyes, Or like to this ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... he scratch'd the place where the Lameness chiefly lay, till the Blood came, bathing it, both before and after Incision, with warm Water, spurted out of his Mouth. This done, he ran into his Plantation, and got some Sassafras Root, (which grows here in great plenty) dry'd it in the Embers, scrap'd off the outward Rind, and having beat it betwixt two Stones, apply'd it to the Part afflicted, binding it up well. Thus, in a day or two, the Patient ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... with an infernall rowt of words and actions, will seeme to sucke their inwarde griefe from their navels or their grieved places." Judging by other accounts written during the century concerning Indian medicine, the powdered root may well have been sassafras, of which there was an abundance in the Jamestown area. The priest dried the root in the embers of a fire, scraped off the outer bark, powdered it, and bound the wound ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... instances, the woods extended on both sides down to the river, throwing an agreeable shade over the way-farers, and shedding abroad a cool, moist freshness, that brought with itself a woodland-scent, compounded of the fragrance of sassafras, and fern, and sweet-briar, and mosses, and unknown plants. Then, again the road would run for a considerable distance through an open space, unshaded by trees, to cross, a little further on, another belt ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... whatever, though we were better off in this particular than we knew. And the idea of pitching into that host, with six unsupported guns, was not calming to the mind. Coming out from cover of the pines, back of a slight ridge that ran through the field, with a few sassafras bushes on it, we were not seen, and the Federals were in blissful ignorance of what was about to follow. We pulled diagonally across the field to a point, just back of the low ridge, and quietly went into position and unlimbered the guns. We pushed them, by hand, up so that the muzzles just looked ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... the two returned ones could tell nothing of the two unreturned except that neither of them, dead or alive, was anywhere on the ground of the fight or flight as they knew it. For days, inside the enemy's advancing lines, they had prowled in ravines and lain in blackberry patches and sassafras fence-rows, fed and helped on of nights by the beggared yet still warm-hearted farm people and getting through at last, but with never a trace of Kincaid or Charlie, though after their own perilous search ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... away, he discovers the beautiful crocus struggling through the half-frozen ground; the snow-drops appear in all their chaste beauty; the buds of the swamp-maple shoot forth; the beautiful magnolia opens her splendid blossoms; the sassafras adds its evidence of life; the pearl-white blossoms of the dog-wood light up every forest: and while our stranger is rubbing his eyes in astonishment, the earth is covered with her emerald velvet ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... economic salvation, tobacco. In the first years of the settlement every effort had been made to find products in the New World that would assure financial success for the settlers and the Company. Pitch, tar, timber, sassafras, cedar, and other natural products were sent in the returning ships. Attempts to produce glass on a paying scale proved futile, as did early efforts to make silk, using the native mulberry trees growing in abundance. The glass furnaces ...
— The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624 • Charles E. Hatch
... unkind. Your feelings must be a good deal torn up. But you haven't told me what I'm drinking. Tastes something like the sassafras tea I used to get dosed with when I was a kid. ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock |
