"Sedge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... behind a bank of purple fog, and cloud after cloud had put off its vermilion glow and faded into a vague dimness of twilight: house and garden were quiet, except for the silver rippling of the river which went on and on, ceaselessly fleeting over shallows or washing along through faded sedge. These river murmurs haunted Wanhope all day and night, and so did the low river-mists: in autumn by six o'clock the grass was already ankle deep and white as a field ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... and his son pitched their camp beneath a gum tree upon the edge of the wood. It was October, and the gum was the colour of blood. Behind it rolled the autumn forest; before it stretched a level of broom-sedge, bright ochre in the light of the setting sun. The road ran across this golden plain, and disappeared in a league-deep wood of pine. From an invisible clearing came a cawing of crows. The sky was cloudless, and the ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... perhaps unconsciously, her eye wandered from the moon to this dreary abode; where it lingered longest is more than we dare tell. She drew nigh to the dark margin of the pond. The white swans were sleeping in the sedge. At her approach they fluttered clumsily to their element; there, the symbols of elegance and grace, like wreaths of sea-foam on its surface, they glided on, apparently without an impulse or an effort. She was gazing ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... of the mountain,—the bunch of chestnut-trees on the summit showed their swelling buds against the sky just over her head,—yet how slow was her advance! The sedge-grass caught her feet; the blackberry-vines tore at her skirt; a rolling pebble threw her ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... a soft mist upon the evening shore, At once a lovely isle before me lay, Smooth, and with tender verdure covered o'er, As if just risen from its calm inland bay; Sloped each way gently to the grassy edge, And the small waves that dallied with the sedge. ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... think they call it) with a whipping of silver round the top, and a darker grey silk tag to fasten it. It is marked 5-3/4 inside, and has a delicious scent about it, to keep off moths, I suppose; naphthaline is better. It reminds me of a 'silver-sedge' tied on a ten hook. I startled the good landlady of the little inn (there is no village fortunately) when I arrived with the only porter of the tiny station laden with traps. She hesitated about a private sitting-room, but eventually we compromised matters, ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... dazzle of sparks from a glowing brand, 'Mid the tender green of the feathery fern And nodding sedge, by the light gale fanned, The Indian pinks in the sunlight burn; And the wide, cool cups of the corn flower brim With the sapphire's splendor of heaven's own blue, In sylvan hollows and dingles dim, Still sweet with a ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... sea-creek, with snaky run Slipping through low green leagues of sedge, An ebbing tide, and a setting sun; A hut and a woman by ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Nest. "Slight, of leaves and strips of flags" (Gould); "of sedge and grass, rarely found," ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... hand on the dresser-ledge, And scanned far Egdon-side; And stood; and you heard the wind-swept sedge And the rippling Froom; ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... until the Cretaceous, and do not show much development until the mid-Tertiary; and their development seems to be chiefly connected with physical conditions. The meandering rivers and broad lakes of the mid-Tertiary would have their fringes of grass and sedge, and, as the lakes dried up in the vicissitudes of climate, large areas of grass would be left on their sites. To these primitive prairies the mammal (not reptile) herbivores would be attracted, ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... hates wild boars that eat like tame Gets his from Umbria, genuine mast-fed game: For the Laurentian beast, that makes its fat Off sedge and reeds, is flavourless and flat. The flesh of roes that feed upon the vine Is not to be relied on when you dine. With those who know what parts of hare are best You'll find the wings are mostly in request. Fishes and fowls, their nature and their age, Have ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... vaguely associated with God. The Protectors, when the Emperors degenerated, made a great show always of chastising or threatening the other vassals on account of their neglect to honour the Emperor. Thus in 656 the First Protector (Ts'i) made war upon Ts'u for not sending the usual tribute of sedge to the Emperor, for use in clarifying the sacrificial wine. Previously, in 663, after assisting the state of Yen against the Tartars, Ts'i had requested Yen "to go on paying tribute, as was done during the reigns of the two first Chou Emperors, and to continue the wise government of ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... the coming wind did roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge; And the rain poured down from one black cloud; The Moon was ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... and the Beehive Cells, in Eilan na Naoimh (Nun's Island.) These old Strathearn churches would seldom be larger than 12 feet wide by 20 long, built of undressed land stones (like a field dyke), and thatched with heather, bracken, or sedge. The great storehouse of reliable material with minimum of controversy relative to the early Christianity of Scotland is Warren's Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church. ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... do well enough, but we don't approve of such forward ways," sighed Mrs. Bob. "No," chimed in Mrs. Mate Hare, limping from her home in the broom sedge. "It's not safe, with that horrid little Nip so near; to be sure, they've got wings, but as for me, he just frightens the life out of me, with his nosing and sniffing; forever nosing and sniffing after some mischief." And she wiggled her nose and ears ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... mating season you will usually find a gobbler accompanied by two or more Turkey hens. When a female gets ready to make her nest she slips away from her sultan and the other members {56} of the seraglio and, going to some broom-sedge field or open place in the woods, constructs her nest on the ground beneath some slight, convenient shelter. Day after day she absents herself for a short time, and the speckled treasures grow in number until from ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... Calandria, is remarkable, from possessing a song far superior to that of any other bird in the country: indeed, it is nearly the only bird in South America which I have observed to take its stand for the purpose of singing. The song may be compared to that of the Sedge warbler, but is more powerful; some harsh notes and some very high ones, being mingled with a pleasant warbling. It is heard only during the spring. At other times its cry is harsh and far from harmonious. Near Maldonado ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... her. It gave her a strange sense of lightheartedness. Her heart warmed with love to the sight of the purple tint in the eastern sky, that bluish purple which precedes the yellow sunrise. On either side of her boat now the water was so shallow that sedge and ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... brook was now before them; and Alan said, "This river must be crossed, and I hope that none of us will be carried away by the current. What we shall do if an Indian springs from behind the bushes, or a crocodile comes out of the sedge, I don't know. Here is the narrowest part of the river. I will lay my stick across it; and, if we make believe very much, it will do ...
— The Nursery, July 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 1 • Various
... wind did roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge:[45-35] And the rain poured down from one black cloud: The Moon ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... can ail thee, wretched wight, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge is wither'd from the lake, And no ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... round, upon the river's slippery edge, Witching to deeper calm the drowsy tide, Whispers and leans the breeze-entangling sedge; Through emerald glooms the lingering waters slide, Or, sometimes wavering, throw back the sun, And the stiff banks in eddies melt and run Of dimpling light, and with the current seem ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... books were more field-trials won than by any other dog in Alabama. And now he dozed and dreamed of them again, with many twitchings of feet, and cocked, quivering ears, and rigid tail, as if once more frozen to the covey in the tall sedge-grass of the old field, with the smell of frost-bitten Lespedeza, wet with ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... sea—saw the same great mountain shadows on the same valleys as he has seen to-day—saw olive mounts, and pine forests, and the broad plains green with young corn or rain-freshened grass—saw the domes and spires of cities rising by the river-sides or mingled with the sedge-like masts on the many-curved sea-coast, in the same spots where they rise to-day. And as the faint light of his course pierced into the dwellings of men, it fell, as now, on the rosy warmth of nestling children; on the haggard waking of sorrow ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... pleased along thy willowed edge Erewhile I strayed, or when the morn began To tinge the distant turret's golden fan, Or evening glimmered o'er the sighing sedge! And now reposing on thy banks once more, I bid the lute farewell, and that sad lay Whose music on my melancholy way I wooed: beneath thy willows waving hoar, Seeking a while to rest—till the bright sun Of joy return; ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... tree-stems that you were looking through open air; you find that you are looking through a labyrinth of wire-rigging, and must use the cutlass right and left at every five steps. You push on into a bed of strong sedge-like Sclerias, with cutting edges to their leaves. It is well for you if they are only three, and not six feet high. In the midst of them you run against a horizontal stick, triangular, rounded, smooth, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... observed Sutchok, who spoke in a strange, far- away voice, as though he were in a dream, 'and there's sedge and mud at the bottom, and it's all overgrown with sedge. But there are ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... the pirates, he saw the three figures again in the distance, and, skirting around back of a hill of sand covered with coarse sedge grass, he came to where he overlooked a little open level space ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... are hurled, And Bacchus' vineyards overspread the world; Where woods and forests go in goodly green;— I'll be Adonis, thou shalt be Love's Queen;— The meads, the orchards, and the primrose-lanes, Instead of sedge and reed, bear sugar-canes: Thou in those groves, by Dis above, Shalt live with me and be ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... bolder bank where the pines bent heavy heads over the water, the holly crowded close to the shore, and pale tinted reeds made border at the water's edge. Now in rounding a curve, we passed close to the cypress wood fringed with bush and sedge. Delicate brown festoons of vines hung from the branches; and, high out of reach, mats of mistletoe clung. It seemed one with our mood and our fancy when two round yellow eyes stared out of the shadows, two wide lazy wings were spread, and the bird of daylight slumber took soft, noiseless ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... arose, and, turning itself on edge, Exposed a ponderous shelly wedge, All covered with slime, and sea-weed, and sedge,— A conchological wonder! This wedge flew open, as quick as a flash, Into two great jaws, with a mighty splash One scraunching, crunching, crackling crash,— And the smack was ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... heathy wastes, immix'd with reedy fens; Ye mossy streams, with sedge and rushes stor'd; Ye rugged cliffs, o'erhanging dreary glens, To you I fly, ye with my ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... was heard, nor passing gale Sigh'd thro' the long lank sedge, The air was hushed, no little wave Dimpled the ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... trembling edge There grew broad flag-flowers, purple pranked with white, And starry river-buds among the sedge, And floating water-lilies, broad and bright, Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge With moonlight beams of their own watery light; And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green As soothed the dazzled eye with ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... the sloping stubbles, broke the sound of the sportsman's gun; and ever and anon, by stream and sedge, they startled the shy wild fowl, just come from the far lands, nor yet settled in the new haunts too ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... stream broadened and mixed with the river, there existed a dense and extensive rush-bed—an island of rushes separated by a deep channel, some twelve or fourteen yards in width from the bank. This was a favourite nesting-place of the sedge-warblers; occasionally as many as a dozen birds could be heard singing at the same time, although in no sense together, and the effect was indeed curious. This is not a song that spurts and gushes up fountain-like in the manner of the robin's, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... utterance of our own thoughts to the sentiments of any song, however sweet. There was music enough around us; the hum of the wild bee as it bade farewell to the closing corolla; the whoop of the gruya in the distant sedge; and the soft cooing of the doves as they sat in pairs upon the adjacent branches, like us whispering their ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... trees with scarlet, 135 Stained the leaves with red and yellow; He it was who sent the snow-flakes, Sifting, hissing through the forest, Froze the ponds, the lakes, the rivers, Drove the loon and sea-gull southward, 140 Drove the cormorant and curlew To their nests of sedge and sea-tang In the realms of Shawondasee. Once the fierce Kabibonokka Issued from his lodge of snow-drifts, 145 From his home among the icebergs, And his hair, with snow besprinkled, Streamed behind him like ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... very strong, from six to eight miles an hour, and quite far enough to observe the nature of the stream at its embouchure. We could see that it widened and spread out in a myriad of channels, rushing by isolated clumps of sedge and matete grass; and that it had the appearance of a swamp. We had ascended the central, or main channel. The western channel was about eight yards broad. We observed, after we had returned to the bay, that the easternmost channel was about six yards broad, and about ten feet deep, but very ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... miles. Even when more than 6,000,000 acres have been reclaimed by drainage, the armies found some of these marshes extending continuously for over 200 miles. In the upper Pripet basin the woods were everywhere full of countless little channels which creep through a wilderness of sedge. Along the right bank of the Pripet River the land rises above the level of the water and is fairly thickly populated. Elsewhere extends a great intricate network of streams with endless fields of bulrushes and stunted woods. Over ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... famous trout-streams in the Midlands. There should be a capital rise to-night. If that man has the sense to put on a sedge-fly, he'll ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and "Joe," and, keeping behind banks lest they be seen by young uns, they shamefacedly paddled barefoot—two old men with bare feet and silvery shanks, chuckling and catching crabs, in a salt inlet among rolling hillocks covered with sedge-grass that lisped in the breeze. The grass hollows were filled with quiet and the sound of hovering flies. Beyond was a hill shiny ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... by F. and Y. with the Warblers. Gould strangely puts it with his rock-birds, 'saxicolinae,'—in which, however, he also includes the sedge warbler. ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... azure sky. The hilltops were bathed in a warm, soft glow; the placid waters of the canal sparkled, dimpled, and smiled beneath the caress of the passing breeze, until they broke into tiny ripples and wavelets against their sedge-grown banks. ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... quails huddled in the grass. The least shade of gray in the shadow of the creek bank he distinguished at once as a rabbit, a glinting flash from a tree top he knew instantly as being caused by the slight movement of a hidden squirrel, and the quiver of a single stem of sedge grass told him of a bevy of birds hiding in the depths. The pot-hunting negro has all the skill of the Indian, has more industry in his loafing, and kills without pity and without restraint. This grandson of ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... of the winding brooks, With your sedge crowns and ever-harmless looks, Leave your crisp[442-33] channels, and on this green land Answer our summons; Juno does command: Come, temperate nymphs, and help to celebrate A contract of true ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... melodious note of a trumpeter swan; or from the top of a tall cottonwood, or cypress, the sharp saw-filing shriek of the white-headed eagle, angered by some stray creature coming too close, and startling it from its slumbers. Below, out of the swamp sedge, rises the mournful cry of the quabird—the American bittern—and from the same, the deep sonorous bellow of that ugliest animal on ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... exquisite beauty. Long bands of pale green light widened up from the west. Along the hither slope of a ridge someone was burning off his sedge-grass. The slender red lines of fire, beautiful after passion's sort, but dimming the field's fine gold, were just reaching the crest to die by a road-side. The objects of his search were nowhere ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... where the clover had grown. The weather was hot and dry at that time; it was in December. The whole of the different fields were covered with either the stalks of weeds, corn-stalks, or what is called sedge—something like spear-grass upon the poor limestone in England; and the steward told me nothing would eat it, which is true. Indeed, he found fault with everything, just like a foreigner; and even told me many unpleasant tales of the General, so that I began to think he feared I was ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... and led along, with the brightly glassy sheet of water on one side, and the steep wooded slope on the other, loose-strife and meadow-sweet growing thickly on the bank, amid long weeds with feathery tops, rich brown fingers of sedge, and bur-reeds like German morgensterns, while above the long wreaths of dog-roses projected, the sweet honeysuckle twined about, and the white blossoms of traveller's joy hung in festoons from the ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... flowers, such as those of a grass, sedge, or rush among the monocotyledons, or an oak, hazel, or plantain, among dicotyledons, the flowers are extremely inconspicuous and often reduced to the simplest form. In such plants, the pollen is conveyed from the male flowers to the female by the wind, and to this end the ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... gentle murmur glides, Thou know'st, being stopped, impatiently doth rage; But, when his fair course is not hindered, He makes sweet music with the enamelled stones, Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge He overtaketh in his pilgrimage. Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act ii. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... the End is here! The swine rush on: the sea is near! My wild flowers bloom on the trenches' edge; My little birds sing by shore and sedge." ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... the town, my songs, draw Daphnis home. As when some heifer, seeking for her steer Through woodland and deep grove, sinks wearied out On the green sedge beside a stream, love-lorn, Nor marks the gathering night that calls her home- As pines that heifer, with such love as hers May Daphnis pine, and I ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... shore, Dropped down to west, and crossed our frontage here. Seen from above they specked the water-shine As will a flight of swallows toward dim eve, Descending on a smooth and loitering stream To seek some eyot's sedge. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... hour there came little brown trigonid visitors, sting-less bees, whose nests were veritable museums of flower extracts—tubs of honey, hampers of pollen, barrels of ambrosia, hoarded in castles of wax. Scirpus-sedge or orchid, all was the same ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... and one hundred and sixty bushels per acre are reported to have been raised in the county, in 1849. The yield increases from year to year. A general and rapid improvement of the State is in progress, and in nothing is this seen more clearly than in the corn crop. Mossy "old sedge" fields, which have been laid out for years, are broken up, and will yield, if it be a good season, from five to ten bushels per acre; fence them, lime them with twenty to thirty bushels, and seed the oat crop with clover, and in two years the ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... include the Soft Rush (effusus); the Hard Rush (glaucus); and the Common Rush (conglomeratus). The Bulrush (Pool Rush) is a Sedge; the Club Rush is a Typha; and the flowering Rush, a Butomus. "Rish" was the old method of ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... pinnated grouse, was as distinct to the eye as though, instead of making thirty-two miles an hour, he were posing for his photograph. For full two hundred yards he sustained the race, until, finding that his competitor had the better wind, he gave it up and shot suddenly into the sedge. How much longer the match had lasted I could not say. He must have got up near the engine—of course losing some time in the act of rising—and fallen back gradually to my place, which was in a rear car. But when a schedule for birds comes to be framed, it is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... wattled pale Fenced the downland from the vale, Now the sedge was set with reeds Fitter for Arcadian meads, And where I was wont to find Only things of timid kind, Now the Genius of the pool Mocked me from his corner cool. Eyes he had with malice quick, Tufted hair and ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... classed the Blue-throated Warblers, included in Professor Ansted's list and marked as Jersey (these Mr. Gallienne himself told me he believed to be Continental and not genuine Channel Island specimens), the Great Sedge Warbler, the Meadow Bunting, the Green Woodpecker, and ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... looked from his donjon bars, Where the Danube clamours through sedge and sand, And he cursed with a curse his revolting land, - With a king's deep curse of treason ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... The sedge-birds kept just in front of me, now busy on a willow-stole, and concealed in the grasses and moss which grew out of the decaying wood; now among the sedges covering the mudbanks where the brook had silted up; now in the hedge which divided the willows from ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... beyond the ironworks and through a delectable land. The river wound among low hills, so that sometimes the sun was at our backs, and sometimes it stood right ahead, and the river before us was one sheet of intolerable glory. On either hand, meadows and orchards bordered, with a margin of sedge and water flowers, upon the river. The hedges were of great height, woven about the trunks of hedgerow elms; and the fields, as they were often very small, looked like a series of bowers along the stream. There was never any prospect; sometimes a hill-top with ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which stretched, hedgeless and ditchless, past a directing-post where another road joined it, and on to the less regular ground beyond, lying like a riband unrolled across the scene, till it vanished over the furthermost undulation. Beside the pools were occasional tall sheaves of flags and sedge, and about the plain a few bushes, these forming the only obstructions to ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Tossed on the brimming river chaplets wov'n On mead or hill, or branches lopped in woods With fruit-bloom red, or white with clustering cone, Changing clear stream to garden. Mile on mile Now song was heard, now bugle horn that died Gradual 'mid sedge and reed. Alone the swan High on the western waters kept aloof; Remote she eyed the scene with neck thrown back, Her ancient calm preferring, and her haunt Crystalline still. Alone the Julian Tower ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... is an ideal nesting place for a colony of these little marsh wrens. The home is made of sedge grasses, softly lined with the softer meadow grass or plant-down, and placed in a tussock of tall grass, or even upon the ground. The entrance is on the side. But while fond of moist places, both for a home and feeding ground, it will be noticed that these wrens have no ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... the country broadened out into a great marsh, vast and spreading widely over the land, dotted with eyots, where birds flew low among the sedge. Away to west and east were low grim hills, with a sense of unending space and loneliness upon them. And at the foot of the street was the ford, crowded here with men,—soldiers and serfs and freedmen,—with horses ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... loosened rein, o'er grassy mead, through ferny hollows, o'erleaping chattering rill that babbled to the moon, 'mid swaying reeds and whispering sedge, past crouching bush and stately tree, and so at last they reached the woods. By shadowy brake and thicket, through pools of radiant moonlight, through leafy, whispering glooms they held their way, across broad glade and clearing, on and on until all noise of pursuit was lost ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... pleasure 'tis to hedge My temples here with heavy sedge, Abandoning my lazy side, Stretched as a bank unto the tide, Or to suspend my sliding foot On the osier's undermined root, And in its branches tough to hang, While at my lines the fishes twang? But ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... country round the gulf was well-grassed, particularly before we crossed the Nicholson; and on the plains and approaches to the rivers and creeks. The large water-holes were frequently surrounded with a dense turf of Fimbristylis (a small sedge), which our horses liked to feed upon. Some stiff grasses made their appearance when we approached the sea-coast, as well on the plains as in the forest. The well-known kangaroo grass (Anthisteria) forms still one ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... my heart with boyish passion burned, When far away across the sedge and mere I saw that Holy City rising clear, Crowned with her crown of towers!—On and on I galloped, racing with the setting sun, And ere the crimson after-glow was passed, I stood within ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... in the field! The jackal laughs to see you. Paddy bird, do not fish in the pond! You pecked a piece of sedge thinking it was a frog's leg! Do not drink rice beer, O fowl! The jackal ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... plumes of smoke, tossed their tails in the air, and galloped away in a fright,—at which Adele clapped her hands, and broke into a laugh that was as cheery as the new dawn. Next came low, flat meadows of sedge, over which the tide oozed slowly, and where flocks of wild ducks, scared from their feeding-ground, rose by scores, and went flapping off seaward in long, black lines. And from between the hills on either side ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... the Spaniards, but the heavy guns opened fire upon them and swept them off in files as they rushed on, and in the intervals of reloading the cavalry charged into their midst. By this time the Tlascalans had come up, having by order of Cortes bound wreaths of sedge about their heads that they might be the more easily distinguished from the Cholulans, and they fell upon the rear of the wretched townsmen, who, thus harassed on all sides, could no longer maintain their ground. They fled, ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... Lined with the fluff from the cattail's crest, 'Mid the juniper boughs is hung; And further on, by the elder hedge, Where the turtles come out to sleep, The marsh-hen builds, by the brooklet's edge, Her warm, wet home in the swampy sedge, 'Mid the shadows so dark ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... a sort of "lean-to" against the cliff, you may observe a rude hut built with blocks of stone, and plastered with mud from the bed of the rivulet. Enter it. You will find it empty, cold, untenanted by living thing. No furniture. Stone couches covered with sedge and grass, upon which men may have slept or lain; and two or three blocks of granite upon which they may have sat. That is all. Some pieces of skin hanging around the walls, and the bones of animals strewed over the ground outside, give a ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... boat to the shore the day was close at hand. The stars were gone, and a pale, cold light, more desolate than the dark, streamed from the east across which ran, like a faded blood stain, a smear of faint red. Upon the forest the mist lay heavy. When I drove the boat in amongst the sedge and reeds below the bank, I could see only the trunks of the nearest trees, hear only the sullen cry of some river bird that ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... she fought them, wind and water, with mouth set and a smile in her eyes. One sharp struggle still, where the creek leaped into freedom; the mouth grew a little firmer, the eyes laughed more, the keel grated on pebbles, and the boat ran its nose into the withered sedge on the ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.
... who lay entranced Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades High over-arched embower; or scattered sedge Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armed Hath vexed the Red-Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew Busiris and his Memphian chivalry, While with perfidious hatred they pursued The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... of the sedge by the creek a flight of clamorous killdees Rose from their timorous sleep with piercing and iterant challenge, Wheeled in the starlight, and fled away into distance and silence. White in the vale lay ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... nights later LeGrand Blossom left his boarding place and met a veiled woman at a lonely spot on the beach, Colonel Ashley, who had been waiting as he so well knew how to do, hid himself on the sand behind some sedge grass and began to think that the game was coming his ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... I dreamt I was a-working in my garden, hard by the celery trenches in the sedge; and I was moaning at my lot, as well I may: and a sort of angel came to me, only he looked dark and sorrowful, and kindly said, 'What would you have, Roger?' I, nothing fearful in my dream, for all the strangeness of his winged presence, answered ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... footsteps wild and free, The crackling leaves beneath yon linden-tree, Panting from play or dripping from the stream, How bright the visions of my boyish dream Or, modest Charles, along thy broken edge, Black with soft ooze and fringed with arrowy sedge, As once I wandered in the morning sun, With reeking sandal and superfluous gun, How oft, as Fancy whispered in the gale, Thou wast the Avon of her flattering tale! Ye hills, whose foliage, fretted on the skies, Prints shadowy arches on their evening dyes, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sings its tender song In osage thicket, or in locust hedge, But pipes its notes the negro boys among, On cotton plant, or Alabama sedge. ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... through a perfect tangle of channels and islands and marshes, and the fog is sure for at least a good half of the time. The sides of the castle towards the channel show no light at all; and even when you're once through the outlying islets, the only approach is masked by a movable bed of sedge which I contrived, and which turns you skilfully back into the marsh by another way. No; you might float around there for days but you'd never find ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... of the stairs and creep beneath it. This particular step of a short flight running from the landing into a garret is, upon closer inspection, indeed movable, and beneath gapes a dark cavity about five feet square, on the floor of which still remains the piece of sedge matting whereon a certain Father Wall rested his aching limbs a few days prior to his capture and execution in August, 1679. The unfortunate man was taken at Rushock Court, a few miles away where he was traced after leaving Harvington. There is a communication between the hiding-place and "the ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... golden-green—and now and then encountering and making their wings rustle as they touched in rapid flight. Then as he stood with his hand resting against a tree trunk, peering forward, a curious little head with bright crimson eyes divided the sedge or reeds growing in the water, its owner looking out to see if there was any danger; and as it looked, Robin could see that the bird's beak seemed to be continued right up into a fiat red plate between ...
— Young Robin Hood • G. Manville Fenn
... became a broad surface of gold, beautiful to look down upon, with islands of tenderest birch green interspersed, and willows in which the sedge-reedling chattered. They used to say in the country that cuckoos were getting scarce, but here the notes of the cuckoo echoed all day long, and the birds often flew over the house. Doves cooed, blackbirds whistled, thrushes sang, jays called, wood-pigeons uttered the old familiar notes in ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... sunlit arch overhead, the waving trees that sent dancing shadows like troops of elfin sprites over the water, the fret in one place where a rock broke the murmurous lapping, the swish somewhere else, where grasses and weeds and water blooms rooted in the sedge rocked back and forth with the slow ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... of convolvulus torn from the hedge, And trailing the highway over, The dreamy-eyed mistresses circled the sedge, And called for a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... arrangement, and gives us a very poor idea of the cleanliness of even the best houses, though it probably was not the custom all through the year, as Newton says, speaking of Sedges, but evidently confusing the Sedge with the Sweet-scented Rush, "with the which many in this countrie do use in sommer time to straw their parlours and churches, as well for cooleness as for pleasant smell."[266:1] This Rush (Acorus calamus) is a British plant, with broad leaves, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... Middle Moor, containing about 2,500 acres, spoken of by Arthur Young as 'a watery desert,' growing sedge and rushes, and inhabited by frogs and bitterns;—it is now fertile, well ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... there in the loneliness of this big nature which worked around me. The dog dignified the situation—he was a part of nature's belongings—while I somehow did not seem to grace the solitude. The grays slowly grew into browns on the sedge-grass, and the water to silver. A bright flash of fire shot out of the dusk far up in the gloom, and the dull report of a shot-gun came over the tank. Black objects fled across the sky—the ducks were flying. I missed one or two, and grew weary—none came near enough to my ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... his bidding accomplished, turned to meet Hilarius and the Friar who were now coming slowly across the windswept common. March mists gathered and draped the sluggish river; the dry reeds rattled dismally in the ooze and sedge. Hilarius shivered, and the Friar started nervously when ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... Blakeney Sea pansies, sedge, and rosemary; Frail fronds thrust forth in dim dank air, A message from those lying there: Wan leaves ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... song of the 'Nachtegael' was heard. There are no nightingales in Australia, but the bird to which the writer of the Journaal alludes may have been the Long-billed Reed Warbler, the Australian representative of the Sedge Warbler and a denizen of the reed-beds of the Swan River. Two species of geese are also mentioned by the same writer under the names of European geese. It is somewhat difficult to determine to which ...
— Essays on early ornithology and kindred subjects • James R. McClymont
... on the edge And purple buds and red, Leant down,—and 'mid the pale green sedge The ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... birds on hice, in quetan, among sedge out on the bay, but I never see such sight. I never think so many birds in the world before," said Peter, as he loaded ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... golden-crested wren, * goldfinch, * chaffinch, * *greenfinch, pied wagtail, sparrow, * dunnock (hedge, accentor), missel thrush, starling, rook, jackdaw, *blackcap, * garden warbler, * willow warbler, * chiffchaff, * wood warbler, tree-creeper, * reed bunting, * sedge warbler, coot, water hen, little grebe (dabchick), tufted duck, wood pigeon, stock dove, * turtle dove, peewit, tit (? coal-tit), * cuckoo, * nightjar, * ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the seaward hedge The wild hops, hanging bright, Gleam as a foam-spray flung on sedge From a sea ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... saw it in the morning sunlight; it was her white hands that were lifted from the crested breakers; it was the rustling of her skirt when the sea wind swept through the beach grasses; it was the loving whisper of her low voice when the long waves sank and died among the sedge and rushes. She was as omnipresent as sea and sky and level sand. Hence when the fog wiped them away, she seemed to draw closer to him in the darkness. On one or two more gracious nights in midsummer, when the influence of the fervid noonday ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... plains, marked with ripples as though the retiring sea had but just left it. Then a green swamp; through the tall reeds the native companion, king of cranes, waded majestic; the brilliant porphyry water hen, with scarlet bill and legs, flashed like a sapphire among the emerald green water-sedge. A shallow lake, dotted with wild ducks; here and there a group of wild swan, black with red bills, floating calmly on its bosom. A long stretch of grass as smooth as a bowling-green. A sudden rocky rise, clothed with native cypress ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... who had been slumbering between two painted boards, respectively inscribed "MIDDLESEX COUNTY BANK" and "SURREY BANK," and surrounded by flower-pots filled with bulrushes and sedge, roused by the intended imprecation upon their host, here interrupted Egomet, and entered into a long dialogue with him, in which he detailed all his grievances so far as gas and steam were concerned. At length he feels the influence of Hook as "the ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... a summer evening Enda lay stretched on the platform, watching the sunset fading from the mountain-tops, and the twilight creeping over the waters of the lake, and it chanced that once when he was so engaged he heard a rustle in a clump of sedge that grew close to one side of the hut. He turned to where the sound came from, and what should he see but an otter swimming towards him, with a little trout in his mouth. When the otter came up to where Enda was lying, ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... crowned with whispering sedge, And black bog-pools below; While dry stone wall or ragged hedge Leads ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... felt since the day when he first gazed with seeing eyes across its dreamy, silent solitudes. The secrets of the marshland wastes have been whispered in his ears by the wind in the willows, and have been sung to him by the sighing sedge. He knows the bird voices of reed rond and hover, and has read the lesson of the day's venture in the brightening sunrise and sunset glow. Amidst scenes that have little changed since the Iceni hid ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... fire, and always the guns repelled them. It was growing late. The sun could not be seen. Plain and woods were darkening, darkening and filled with groaning. It was about him like a melancholy wind, the groaning. He raised himself on his hands and saw how many indeed were scattered in the sedge, or in the bottom of the yellow gully, or slanted along its sides. He had not before so loudly heard the complaining that they made, and for a moment the brain wondered why. Then he was aware that the air was less filled with missiles, that ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... motacilla; and motacilla salicaria of his fauna suecica seems to come the nearest to it. It is no uncommon bird, haunting the sides of ponds and rivers where there is covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country people in some places call it the sedge-bird. It sings incessantly night and day during the breeding-time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a skylark, and has a strange hurrying manner in its song. My specimens correspond most minutely to the description of your fen salicaria shot near Revesby. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... this place the land by the sea is in some places low, and in others high, everywhere covered with wood. This town of Don John[249] is but small, having only about twenty huts of the negroes, and is mostly surrounded by a fence about the height of a man, made of reeds or sedge, or some such material. After being at anchor two or three hours, without any person coming off to us, we manned our boats and put some merchandize into them, and then went with our boats very near the shore, where we anchored. They then sent off a man to us, who told us by signs that this ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... coming wind did roar more loud; And the sails did sigh like sedge: And the rain pour'd down from one black cloud The moon ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... undergrowth, the lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping in the stream, the plaint of the whippoorwill, the call of the bluebird, the golden flash of the oriole, the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the mallard from the sedge. And, more than all, a human voice declaring by its joy in song that not only God looks upon the world ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... screeched an order. Straightway the mob divided. One part went racing clumsily up the shore to the left, the other followed the Chief along through the rank sedge-growth to the right—the Chief, by reason of his superior stature and length of leg, ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... welcomed this billeting, we are not told. Their method of cooking the game which they hunted was one well known to all primitive peoples. Holes were dug in the ground; in them red-hot stones were placed, and on the stones was laid venison wrapped in sedge. All was then covered over, and in due time the meat was done to a turn. Meanwhile the heroes engaged in an elaborate toilette before sitting down to eat. Their beds were composed of alternate layers of brushwood, moss, and rushes. The Fians were ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... no more regret nor old deep memories to mar the bliss; where the low sedge is thick, the gold day-lily outspreads and rests beneath soft fluttering of red swan wings and the warm quivering of the ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... statement and Joe plucked up spirit, as was his habit when another arduous task confronted him. Cautiously they made their way from one quaking patch of sedge to another or scrambled to their middles. There came a ridge of higher ground thick with brambles and knotted vines and they traversed this with less misery. A gleam of water among the trees and they took it to be the creek which they sought to find. Wary of ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... immix'd with reedy fens; Ye mossy streams, with sedge and rushes stor'd: Ye rugged cliffs, o'erhanging dreary glens, To you I ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... with perilous step shall climb, Thence stretch their view the wide horizon round, [14] By scattered hamlets trace its antient bound, And, choked no more with fleets, fair Thames survey Through reeds and sedge pursue ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... who looked not for it. There was a green fresh hedge, And willows by the river side, And whistling sedge. ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... his bare breast the cedar boughs are laid, On his bare breast, dry sedge and odorous gums, Laid ready to receive the sacred spark, And blaze, to herald the ascending sun, Upon his living altar. Round the wretch The inhuman ministers of rites accurst Stand, and expect the signal when to strike The seed of fire. Their Chief, apart from all, ... eastward turns ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... where he had slept, a small brook wound its way through the sedge grass. Tom welcomed it with a grin, for he had not had a bath ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... ball their sight Sears with excess of light; Or through dun sand-clouds the blue scimitar's edge Slopes down like fire from heaven, Mowing them as the thatcher mows the sedge. ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... when a fire takes place in a low bottom of long grass, sedge and tangled dry plants, more than six feet high; and when a rushing wind urges on the fiery ruin, flashing like the lightning and roaring like the thunder; the appearance is not beautiful, but terrible. I have heard the shrill war-whoop, and the clash of contending tomahawks in the fight, when no ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... farms! The business of the day is done, The last-left haymaker is gone. And from the thyme upon the height, And from the elder-blossom white And pale dog-roses in the hedge, And from the mint-plant in the sedge, In puffs of balm the night-air blows The perfume which the day forgoes. And on the pure horizon far, See, pulsing with the first-born star, The liquid sky above the hill! The evening comes, the fields ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Nothing comes amiss to us; Hare, rabbit, snare, nab it; Cock, or hen, or kite; Tom cat, with strong fat, A dainty supper is to us; Hedge-hog and sedge-frog To stew is our delight; Bow, wow, with angry bark My lady's dog assails us; We sack him up, and clap A stopper on his din. Now pop him in the pot; His store of meat avails us; Wife cook him nice and hot, And ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... more it burnes: The Current that with gentle murmure glides (Thou know'st) being stop'd, impatiently doth rage: But when his faire course is not hindered, He makes sweet musicke with th' enameld stones, Giuing a gentle kisse to euery sedge He ouer-taketh in his pilgrimage. And so by many winding nookes he straies With willing sport to the wilde Ocean. Then let me goe, and hinder not my course: Ile be as patient as a gentle streame, And make ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... A soft sedge or rush (Juncus laevis), of which coarse kinds of rope and matting are made. A Gaelic term for the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... my canoe, flying swiftly forward at its own sweet will, brought me into a bight, a bare, desolate-looking country with no vegetation save grass and sedge on the near marshes and stony hills rising up beyond, with others beyond them mounting step by step to a long line of ridges and peaks still covered ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... recovered his strength sufficiently to crawl into the swamp further, till daylight found him lying in the swamp grass, between two paths, and in speaking distance of the enemy's fort. While lying there but partially screened by the low sedge, he saw rebel officers and men walk by, and heard their conversation, which was entirely devoted to the affair of the morning. From their remarks he learned that the torpedo had done its work effectively and thoroughly, and that his great object was accomplished. He did not learn any of ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... Spoon Island he went into raptures over it, for it was a rarity, even among the many beautiful ones he had visited. As its name implied, it was shaped like a spoon, about five hundreds rods long and formed of white sand, with a growth of green sedge grass all over it. On the broadest part was a cluster of spruce forming a little thicket and beside this, and entered by a narrow inlet the tiniest bit of a harbor, just large enough to shelter a small sloop. The seagulls had also discovered its beauty, ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... like the rustle of leaves; but the preoccupation in her face silenced him. It was after four when, brushing past a fringe of willows, the skiff bumped softly against a float half hidden in the yellowing sedge and grass at Willis's landing. Blair got out, and drawing the boat alongside, held up his hand to his wife, but she ignored his assistance. As she sprang lightly out, the float rocked a little and the water splashed over the planks. There was ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... breath for argument, and we lay in the muddy sedge till our hearts had settled to a more reasonable beat, and we ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... Land Nymphs every eve To wait upon her: bringing for her brows Rich garlands of sweet flowers and beechy boughs. For pleasant was that pool, and near it then Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen, It was nor overgrown with boisterous sedge, Nor grew there rudely then along the edge A bending willow, nor a prickly bush, Nor broad-leaved flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush. But here well-ordered was a grove with bowers, There grassy plots set round about with flowers. Here you might through the water see the ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... seemed to come from sodden leaves and mosses that began to ooze under their feet. They had picked their way in silence for some minutes; the stunted willows and cypress standing farther and farther apart, and the openings with clumps of sedge were frequent. Courtland was beginning to fear this exposure of his follower, and had moved up beside him, when suddenly the negro caught his arm, and trembled violently. His lips were parted over his teeth, the whites of his eyes ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... furrow and sheepfold, and the yield of his lands grew under his wardenship. He brought heavy French cattle to improve the little native breed, and made a garden of fruit trees where once had been only bent and sedge. The thralls wrought cheerfully for him, for he was a kindly master, and the freemen of the manor had no complaint against one who did impartial justice and respected their slow and ancient ways. As for skill in ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge is withered from the lake And no ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... Some had waited for an hour, some for two; yet still there was no sound but the piping of the birds in white-thorn hedges, the hollow lowing of kine knee-deep in grassy meadows, and the long rush of the river through the sedge beside the pebbly shore; and naught to see but quiet valleys, primrose lanes, and Warwick orchards white with bloom, stretching away to ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... grown to their full height and turned from green to yellow. The stalks, stripped of their tops and blades, were bent by the weight of their ears. There was a whispering of breezes in the sedge-fields, in the long rows of brown-bolled cotton plants, among the fodder-stacks, and in the forest that stretched from the main road up the mountain-side. It was the season in which the rugged landscape appeared most brilliant; when the kalmia bloomed, the gentian, the primrose, the yellow ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... the slanting forest eaves, Shingled tight with greenest leaves, Sweep the scented meadow-sedge, Let us snoop along the edge; Let us pry in hidden nooks, Laden with our nature books, Scaring birds with happy cries, Chloroforming butterflies, Rooting up each woodland plant, Pinning beetle, fly, and ant, So we may identify What we've ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... spring to birth, And trees in rivalry assume Their vernal garb of bud and bloom. How fair they look, how bright and gay With tasselled flowers on every spray! While each to each proud challenge flings Borne in the song the wild bee sings. That mallard by the river edge Has bathed amid the reeds and sedge: Now with his mate he fondly plays And fires my bosom ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... two musical instruments which we observed were of an exceedingly rude kind. One of them does not produce a melody exceeding that of a child's rattle. It consists of what may be called a conic cap inverted, but scarcely hollowed at the base above a foot high, made of a coarse sedge-like plant, the upper part of which, and the edges, are ornamented with beautiful red feathers, and to the point, or lower part, is fixed a gourd-shell larger than the fist. Into this is put something to rattle, which is done by holding the instrument by the small part, and shaking ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... waters. Our lucky star was in the ascendant; we reached Wad N'fiss at eleven o'clock to find its waters low and clear. On the far side of the banks we stayed to lunch by the border of a thick belt of sedge and bulrushes, a marshy place stretching over two or three acres, and glowing with the rich colour that comes to southern lands in April and in May. It recalled to me the passage in one of the stately choruses of Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... of the peaty marshes on the opposite side of the district, belonging to an alluvial soil, washed down from the chalk hills. The great reed-mace adorns the Itchen, and going along the disused towing path of the canal there is to be found abundance of the black and golden spikes of the sedge, and the curious balls of the bur-reed, very like the horrid German weapon called a morning star. Also meadow-sweet, meadow-rue, and comfrey of every shade of purple, the water avens and forget-me-not, also that loveliest ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... and the stock, left by the Baron de Lery long ago, had multiplied and now overran the island. Wild fowl, too, teemed on the inland lake; and foxes, which must have drifted ashore on the ice float of spring, ran wild through the sedge. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... is thoroughly commonplace; you can ferry-steam anywhere. Row, brothers, row, perhaps you will never have the chance again. Lightly, lightly row through the green waters of the great St. Lawrence, through the sedge and rank grass that wave still in his middle depths, over the mile and a half of great rushing billows that rock our little boat somewhat roughly: but I am not ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... quivering through pine tops, the startled cry of birds dozing in cedar thickets, the shrill droning of crickets, the monotonous recrimination of katydids, the peculiar, querulous call of a family of flying squirrels housed in the cleft of an old magnolia, the Gregorian chant of frogs cradled in the sedge and ferns, where the river lapped ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Atlantic, islands drifted like those tissues of root and sedge that break from the edges of northern lakes and are sent to and fro by the gales: floating islands. The little rafts bearing that name are thick enough to nourish trees, and a man or a deer may walk on them without breaking through. Far different were those wandering Edens of the ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Prater Canyon were trapped in the grasses and sedges of the meadow comprising the floor of the canyon. The ground and vegetation were dry at the time of capture, September 2, 3, and 4, 1956. Microtus montanus was the only other species taken in the mouse traps in the sedge and grass. Five of the six specimens from Prater Canyon are young, having slightly worn teeth; the sixth is an old adult male the teeth of which are so much worn that only a few traces of the reddish-brown pigment remain. His ...
— Mammals of Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado • Sydney Anderson
... shells of the fresh-water clams to be found so often upon the premises of this builder. Does he sup on them, or are they only the cups and saucers of his vegeto-aquarian menage? Blue and yellow all,—the sky and the sedge-rows, the calm lake and the canoe, the plashing basswood-leaves and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes, I explore amid the bare alders and the huckleberry-bushes and the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau
... or eastern shore, where the Arabs were constructing the raft, spread solid ground-fields through which lay the road to Doomiat; on the other shore, near which the boat was lying, the bog extended for a long way. An interminable jungle of papyrus, sedge, and reeds, burnt yellow by the heat of the sun and the extraordinary drought, covered almost the whole of this parched and baked wilderness; and, when a stiff morning breeze rose from the northeast, the captain was inspired ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... rains, all the cresses, and tresses, and stars, and tangles, and laced sprays of the miniature growth of the springs and running brooks were as bright as malachite, though embedded in a double line of dead white shivering sedge. And thus the shortest day went by, and still the fields lay dry, and the river shrank, and the fish were off the feed; and though murky vapours hung over the river and the flats and shut out the sun, the long-expected rains fell not ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... side of the Hoffman spur, immediately above the great Tuolumne canon, there are ten lovely lakelets lying near together in one general hollow, like eggs in a nest. Seen from above, in a general view, feathered with Hemlock Spruce, and fringed with sedge, they seem to me the most singularly beautiful and interestingly located lake-cluster I ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... rugged fellow, with a kind of shame-faced culture, and my good friend. His father kept a general store in a little town called Hosea. Pettit had been raised in the pine-woods and broom-sedge fields adjacent thereto. He had in his gripsack two manuscript novels of the adventures in Picardy of one Gaston Laboulaye, Vicompte de Montrepos, in the year 1329. That's nothing. We all do that. And some day when we make a hit with the little sketch about a newsy and his lame ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... country is the better for the grey, soft, cloudy darkness of the sedge, and our full landscape is the better for the distinction of its points, its needles, and its ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... harmony of hue displayed in their composition is marvellous. It would be curious to trace in detail the remnants of classical treatment which may be discerned—Jordan, for instance, pours his water from an urn like a river-god crowned with sedge—or to show what points of ecclesiastical tradition are established these ancient monuments. We find Mariolatry already imminent, the names of the three kings, Kaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, the four evangelists as we now ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... sisters played. It was that fatal and perfidious bark Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark, That sunk so low that sacred head of thine. Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow, His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge, Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge, Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe. "Ah! who hath reft," quoth he, "my dearest pledge?" Last came, and last did go, The pilot of the Galilean lake, Two massy keys he bore, of metals ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... Rance, where bare-footed children, sent out to look after pigs and geese, were building castles with the many-coloured stones, while others on the rocky banks above were singing in chorus, like a somewhat louder twittering of sedge warblers from the fringe of willows. I wandered on until all was quiet save the water, and returned to the inn when the fire on the hearth was sending forth a cheerful red glow through the dusk. The soup was bubbling in the chain pot, and a well-browned ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... short-grass country," said a salesman to a packer, as Wells Brothers' beeves were crossing the weighing scale. "You and I needn't worry about the question of range—the buffalo knew. Catch the weights of these cattle and compare it with range beef from the sedge-grass and mountain country. Tallow tells its own story—the buffalo knew ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... just before the splash of alighting, from a thick cover of sedge across the pool came two sharp spurts of flame, one after the other, followed by two thunderous reports, so close together as to seem almost like one. Turning straight over, the leader fell upon the water with a heavy splash; and immediately after him dropped his second in ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts |
