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More "Birch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a good deal of a disciplinarian, and upheld the standard of the family with a birch switch when it showed a tendency to deteriorate. Once, when I was being punished for some unfortunate doings which had taken place in the village school, I felt called upon to explain after the whipping had begun that I ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... on, "our pleasant times in Scotland? Ah, it is a restful place, your Highland home, with the beautiful purple hills rolling away in the distance, and the glorious moors covered with fragrant heather, and the gurgling of the river that runs between birch and fir and willow, making music all day long for those who have the ears to listen, and the hearts to understand the pretty love tune it sings! You know Frenchmen always have more or less sympathy with the Scotch—some old association, perhaps, with the romantic times ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... frame, to protect it from injury by the weather, until their return. Among other things which lay strewed about here, were a spear-shaft, eight feet in length, recently made and ochred; parts of old canoes, fragments of their skin-dresses, &c. For some distance around, the trunks of many of the birch, and of that species of spruce pine called here the Var (Pinus balsamifera), had been rinded; these people using the inner part of the bark of that kind of tree for food. Some of the cuts in the trees with the axe were evidently made the preceding year. ...
— Report of Mr. W. E. Cormack's journey in search of the Red Indians - in Newfoundland • W. E. Cormack
... eyes an autograph letter of her sister, Miss Pinkerton, was an object of as deep veneration as would have been a letter from a sovereign. Only when her pupils quitted the establishment, or when they were about to be married, and once, when poor Miss Birch died of the scarlet fever, was Miss Pinkerton known to write personally to the parents of her pupils; and it was Jemima's opinion that if anything could have consoled Mrs. Birch for her daughter's loss, it would have been that pious and eloquent ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... an hour later, we had got down to the table-land, I found myself suddenly in front of a long, quaint, double log cottage, set between two immense bowlders, and roofed with layers of birch bark, covered with turf, which was blue with wild pansies. It was as if it were built under a bed of heart's-ease. It was very old, and had evidently been a house of some pretension, for there was much curious carving about the doors, and indeed about the ...
— Elsket - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... immemorial, till the fatal deluge of the fire-water burst upon the red men, and swept their whole race away from the cold fountains. Endicott, and his followers, came next, and often knelt down to drink, dipping their long beards in the spring. The richest goblet, then, was of birch-bark. Governor Winthrop, after a journey afoot from Boston, drank here, out of the hollow of his hand. The elder Higginson here wet his palm, and laid it on the brow of the first town-born child. For ...
— A Rill From the Town Pump (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... assumed an aspect of grandeur and magnificence in harmony with his chivalric mania. The leaky craft in which he sat became a majestic barge; the skipper, some wrinkled Charon who doubtless had ferried many a brave knight to his death beneath yonder castle's walls. That seeming birch-stump on the farther shore was the castle champion, armed cap-a-pie in silver harness and ready with drawn sword to do battle against all comers. Trim the sail, ferryman, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... amused himself by making a toy theatre for his little Hans, and showed him how to work the puppets, and make them act little plays. This was a winter amusement. In the long summer days he would often take the child to the woods—and here, in the great birch forests, the two would spend the hours, hardly saying a word to each other, but each dreaming his own dreams as they sauntered along ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... Henry James, for instance, wrote a review of "Drum Taps" in the Nation, November 16, 1865. In the lusty heyday and assurance of twenty-two years, he laid the birch on smartly. It is just a little saddening to find that even so clear-sighted an observer as Henry James could not see through the chaotic form of Whitman to the great vision and throbbing music that seem ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... banks were low. Then Boone forced his way noiselessly into a patch of bushes that grew at the very water's edge, and Simon Kenton followed him. The two reappeared in a minute, carrying a spacious canoe of birch bark. ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... full of burgoo, or hasty pudding, with which she occasionally fed him out of the cook's iron ladle. Two or three stout men were habited as sea nymphs, to attend on the goddess: they carried a looking-glass, some curry-combs, a birch-broom, and a pot of red paint, by ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... appearances, to wear cotton and woollen and silk; and beads and trinkets are in no extraordinary demand. Beavers and furs are seen upon our streets; and the sound of the piano heard in the land, is not a very unusual disturbance. Our boys, as of old, smoke cigars in secret, fearful of ancient birch, and gum drops still adhere to the pockets of our girls in school. We don't see a very remarkable difference between the children about us and those we knew at a somewhat early age. Brick and stone rise with us into comfortable and even aspiring buildings, and the price of board ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... his wife and Miss Beggs recurred, intensified—one an absolute wreck and the other as solidly slender as a birch tree. Fate had played a disgusting trick on him. In the prime of his life he was tied to a hopeless invalid. It put an unfair tension on him. Women were charming, gracious—or else they were nothing. If Emmy's money had been an assistance at first he had ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... to the window, and looking in, he saw the young girl seated on an armchair made of rough birch boughs, with a little prayer-book on her knee; her fair arm supporting her head, while a mass of golden ringlets half veiled her face, which was as pale as an alabaster statue; the extreme sadness of its expression rendering her ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... There were birch twigs caught in the straps of the digger's "swag," and he had a bit of rata flower stuck in the band of his hat. "That's where he's come from!" Tresco pointed in the direction of the great range of mountains which could be seen distinctly through ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... lay in the valley and on the hills. Summer lingered in the garden but on the ridge the nights were cool and in the swamplands, Hughie said, already the maples were coloring with a hint of colder weather. Here and there on birch and poplar fluttered ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... copies. But it is only a slight specimen of the sad state of art and literature in England, neglected equally by Conservatives, Liberals and Radicals. What has been done for the endowment of research? What is our equivalent for the Prix de Rome? Since the death of Dr. Birch, who can fairly deal with a Demotic papyrus? Contrast the Societe Anthropologique and its palace and professors in Paris with our "Institute" au second in a corner of Hanover Square and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... air of deep dejection; yet he bore his woes in silence, doubtless avoiding any concession that should suggest the need of another clarification of his system. Once, when nobody was looking, he cautiously withdrew a handful of scraped birch bark from his pocket and gave it to me, remarking that he thought it was "a little more bracin' than them ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... alkanet-root. Methylated spirits and a small quantity of dragon's blood will also produce a mild red. Any yellow wood can be improved by an alcoholic solution of Persian berries, fustic, turmeric, or gamboge. An aqueous decoction of barberry-root will serve the same purpose. Birch when preferred a warm tint may be sponged with oil, very slightly tinted with rose-madder or Venetian red; the greatest care should be used, or it will be rendered unnatural in appearance by becoming too red. Maple which ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... "Mr. Birch," said Mrs. Van Kirk, "this is my daughter Miss Edith," and as Halfdan sprang to his feet and bowed with ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... mastiff-birch, was expected to assist in guarding our castle, — an honourable duty which her courage and fidelity amply warranted us in confiding to her. Of the former quality, I shall mention an instance that occurred during the voyage. We had one day ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... of birch bark under the trees. But it hasn't any stove-pipe!" said Flaxie, who had never forgotten that unfortunate ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... of the night, they beheld a number of dark objects on the lake before them. It was a fleet of Iroquois canoes, heavier and slower craft than those of the Algonquins, for they were made of oak-or elm-bark, instead of the light paper-birch ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... remember the river was swollen to a point higher than it had ever reached within the memory of any body in the settlement. Marie is venturesome, and since a child has shown a keen delight in going upon boats, or paddling a canoe; so one day, during the visit which I have mentioned, she got into a birch that swung in a little pond formed behind her uncle's premises by the over-flowing of the stream's channel. Untying the canoe, she seized the blade and began to paddle about in the lazy water. Presently ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... successful novel was The Spy, 1821, a tale of the Revolutionary War, the scene of which was laid in Westchester County, N. Y., where the author was then residing. The hero of this story, Harvey Birch, was one of the most skillfully drawn figures on his canvas. In 1823 he published the Pioneers, a work somewhat overladen with description, in which he drew for material upon his boyish recollections of frontier ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... miles beyond Havenfiord I saw the first birch-trees, which, however, did not exceed two or three feet in height, also some bilberry-plants. A number of little butterflies, all of one colour, and, as it seemed to me, of the same species, fluttered among the ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... bushes she hastened, nor noticed that the evening shadows fell; on past the birch groves she ran, nor noticed ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... right there are only a few single trees, between which the fiord is visible. In front is seen the corner of a boat-shed with a boat drawn up. Under the old trees on the left stands a table with a bench and one or two chairs, all made of thin birch-staves. It is a heavy, damp day, ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... I have a most distinct recollection of Mr. Harlan Thornton. When I was ten years old you brought me some lumps of spruce-gum in a birch-bark box and I declined it, saying that young ladies did not chew gum. But I took it when you looked so sad, and I carried it away to boarding-school, and I found out that young ladies do chew gum—when no one is watching them. That gift made me very popular, sir, and now I thank ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... in moonlight and the birch trees wavered their stark shadows across it like supplicating arms. Suddenly I heard the soft padded sound of snow falling upon snow, to slowly perceive a figure, the slender figure of a young child attempting to arouse itself ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... him uneasily. It was only the moonlight on the bark of a silver birch. Conscious of having betrayed weakness, he ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... birch twigs are so sharp. I'd sooner go 20 miles than go to school on Mondays. My master asks where I've been. 'Milking ducks,' I tell him, and he gives me pepper for it. I only wish he was a hare, and my book a wild cat, and all his books dogs. Wouldn't I blow my horn! ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... light tent, made with poles stuck into the ground, in a circle, fastened together at the top, and covered on the outside with skins of wild animals, or with birch bark. The Indians light a fire of sticks and logs on the ground, in the middle of the wigwam, and lie or sit all round it; the smoke goes up to the top and escapes. In the winter, they bank it up with snow, and it ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... giving them some money and a drink of Jamaica spirits, with which they seemed vastly pleased. I looked into one of their huts; it was made of poles like unto a tent, only it was covered with the silver-colored bark of the birch, instead of hempen stuff. A bark mat, braided of many exceeding brilliant colors, covered a goodly part of the space inside; and from the poles we saw fishes hanging, and strips of dried meat. On a pile of skins in the corner sat a young woman with a child a-nursing; they ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... genuine besom, made of birch stems, cut out in the country, and brought into town tied up in bundles like fagots; suitable enough for those stalwart men who drag them along so leisurely, but burdensome for the hands of the wretched little waifs, who, tattered and unkempt, make a pretence of keeping the crossings clean; ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... List the Saxon's silvery laughter, and his humming hives of gain. Swiftly sped the tawny runner o'er the pathless prairies then, Now the iron-reindeer sooner carries weal or woe to men. On thy bosom, Royal River, silent sped the birch canoe, Bearing brave with bow and quiver, on his way to war or woo; Now with flaunting flags and streamers—mighty monsters of the deep— Lo the puffing, panting steamers, through thy foaming waters ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... southward from Clarksburg with three brigades, having left the Upper Potomac line in command of General Kelley, and the Cheat Mountain region in command of General J. J. Reynolds. His route (already indicated) was a rough one, and the portion of it between Sutton and Summersville, over Birch Mountain, was very wild and difficult. He crossed the mountain on the 9th, and left his bivouac on the morning of the 10th of September, before daybreak. Marching through Summersville, he reached ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... she disappeared from view behind a clump of birch trees. Then leaving the highway he walked slowly along the trail leading ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... with them, as well as with the little flowers that grew at their feet; and he tried to teach her how to know each separate kind by the bark and leaf and manner of growth. The pine and hemlock and fir were easily learnt; the white birch, too; beyond those, at first, she was perpetually confounding one with another. Mr. Van Brunt had to go over and over his instructions never weary, always vastly amused. Pleasant lessons these were! Ellen thought so, and Mr. Van Brunt thought ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... I declare I was beat, and I hav'n't never got over bein' beat about that. So we growed up together, always out in the woods between schools, huntin' checker-berries, and young winter-greens, and prince's piney, and huckleberries, and saxifrax, and birch, and all them woodsy things that children hanker arter; and by-'n'-by we got to goin' to the 'Cademy; and when Hetty was seventeen she went in to Hartford to her Aunt Smith's for a spell, to do chores, and get a little ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... extended up to a wood of firs, and out of this wood the small river which bore the name of the family came rushing down the field in a gully, went under the road, swept around to the right and along the edge of a birch copse just below the house. The little stream grew quieter there and widened into a mill pond. At the lower end was a broken dam and beside it a dismantled mill. Here was peace for Roger's soul. The next day at dawn he awakened, and through the window close by his bed he ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... tiny stream. Upon the bosom of the blue lakelet, the fountain of thy life, I have launched my birchen boat; and yielding to thy current, have floated softly southward. I have passed the meadows where the wild rice ripens on thy banks, where the white birch mirrors its silvery stem, and tall coniferae fling their pyramid shapes, on thy surface. I have seen the red Chippewa cleave thy crystal waters in his bark canoe—the giant moose lave his flanks in thy cooling ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... have been domesticated for thousands of years in several quarters of the world; the earliest known record of pigeons is in the fifth Aegyptian dynasty, about 3000 B.C., as was pointed out to me by Professor Lepsius; but Mr. Birch informs me that pigeons are given in a bill of fare in the previous dynasty. In the time of the Romans, as we hear from Pliny, immense prices were given for pigeons; "nay, they are come to this pass, that they ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... bicornis, Cooke, the appendiculate sporidia are similar, and the conidia would also appear to partake of the character of Stilbospora. We may remark here that we have seen a brown mould, probably an undescribed species of Dematiei, growing in definite patches around the openings in birch bark caused by the crumpent ostiola of the perithecia of Melanconis stilbostoma, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... tree. The landscape, in Europe and America, begins to wear a modern aspect. Long before the end of the Cretaceous most of the modern genera of Angiosperm trees have developed. To the fig and sassafras are now added the birch, beech, oak, poplar, walnut, willow, ivy, mulberry, holly, laurel, myrtle, maple, oleander, magnolia, plane, bread-fruit, and sweet-gum. Most of the American trees of to-day are known. The sequoias (the giant Californian trees) still represent the conifers ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... steps under Sittaford Tor, near the river's twin birthplaces. He also knew where the great peel rested, on their annual migration from sea to moor; where the kingfisher's nest of fish-bones lay hidden; where the otter had her home beneath the bank, and its inland vent-hole behind a silver birch. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... ran wild and roamed the woods of Lincolnshire in search of all the curious things that the woods hold in store for boys. The father occasionally made stern efforts to "correct" his sons. In the use of the birch he was ambidextrous. But I have noticed that in households where a strap hangs behind the kitchen-door, for ready use, it is not utilized so much for pure discipline as to ease the feelings of the parent. They say that expression is a need of the human heart; and I am ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the trouble that was causing his sickness; but he was very weak and faint, and he slept long after the birds were up and singing. He was a little afraid at first to eat anything when he finally crawled from his hole in the decayed tree branch; but, recognizing some sweet birch trees, he ate moderately of the leaves ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... one time was Assistant Secretary of State in charge of American Republic Affairs. In recent years, Mr. Braden has given leadership to many patriotic organizations and efforts, such as For America and The John Birch Society; and, in testimony before various committees of Congress, he has given much valuable information about communist influences in the ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... all their jewels' worth. Then O ye shepherds of the Church Down, down with Mahomet's creed! Leave not the fighters in the lurch! For if to scourge yourselves you speed 480 Then Rome may spare the birch. You should sell your chalices, Yes and pawn your breviaries, Turn your gourds into flasks, and e'er Of bread and parsnips make your fare, 485 To vanquish ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... with mine? True, I have but four kinds—Scotch fir, holly, furze, and the heath; and by way of relief to them, only brows of brown fern, sheets of yellow bog-grass, and here and there a leafless birch, whose purple tresses are even more lovely to my eye than those fragrant green ones which she puts on in spring. Well: in painting as in music, what effects are more grand than those produced by the scientific combination, ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... live to clear up all these mysteries. His work was taken up and extended by his pupil Rossellini, and in particular by Dr. Richard Lepsius in Germany, followed by M. Bernouf, and by Samuel Birch of the British Museum, and more recently by such well-known Egyptologists as MM. Maspero and Mariette and Chabas, in France, Dr. Brugsch, in Germany, and Dr. E. Wallis Budge, the present head of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum. But the task of later investigators ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... wigwam, a description of the manner and stages of its construction may be interesting. Poles, twelve or fourteen feet long, are placed in the ground, these meeting at the top, and leaving an opening through which the smoke may escape. Over the poles are placed nets, made of flags, or birch bark, and, sometimes, the skins ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... that the inhabitants of the place were greatly excited, and were running to and fro. The globe was lowered to within three hundred feet of the earth. As they neared the spot, two of the anchors were dropped, and soon caught in the birch tree tops. The ship strained tremendously at the cables for a moment or two, and then rode easily at anchorage, three hundred ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... issue eastwards through a narrow gorge into Loch Affric. It was a place remarkably well adapted for the purpose of a resisting party. A rocky boss, called Torr-a-Bheathaich, then densely covered with birch, closes up the glen as with a gate. The black mountain stream, "spear-deep," sweeps round it. A narrow path wound up the rock, admitting of passengers in single file. Here lay Murchison with the best of his people, while inferior adherents were ready to make demonstrations ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... she featly footed, With the herd-boy hasting after, Sprang she on a trunk uprooted, Clung she by a roping vine; Leaped behind a birch, and told, Still eluding, through its fine, Mocking, slender, leafy laughter, Why her finger tips ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... the spoil in that hall, along with Fairfax Fearneley, Esq., the owner. The fourteen names are given, doubtless "mighty men of yore;" but, among them all, Sir Fletcher Norton, Attorney-General, and Major-General Birch were the only ones with which I had any association in 1855. Passing on from Oakwell there lie houses right and left, which were well known to Miss Bronte when she lived at Roe Head, as the hospitable homes of some of her school-fellows. Lanes branch off for three or four miles ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... here," he said, "a little birch forest. It helps, your Majesty, it helps." Faithfully did it play its part in my day, though I cannot bear witness that it helped. But its day passed, too, and is gone. The world moves and all the while forward. ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... The Birch is the queen of trees, with her feathery foliage, scarcely visible in spring but turning to leaves of gold in autumn; the pendulous twigs tinged with purple, and silver stems so brilliantly marked ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... still by the birch-tree's root In the heather. The hare was running with nimble foot O'er the heather. Was ever brighter a sunshine-day, Before, behind me, and every ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... bounds, And winged zephyrs waft the floating joy 190 Through all the regions near: afflictive birch No more the school-boy dreads, his prison broke, Scampering he flies, nor heeds his master's call; The weary traveller forgets his road, And climbs the adjacent hill; the ploughman leaves The unfinished furrow; ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... common in leaves, as seen among herbs, in cultivated varieties of Coleus and in the brown leaved form of the ordinary white clover, among trees and shrubs in the hazelnut (Corylus), the beech (Fagus), the birch (Betula), the barberry (Berberis) and many others. But though most of these forms are very ornamental and abundant [134] in parks and gardens, little is as yet known concerning the origin of their varietal attributes and their constancy, when propagated by ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... some travellers came to the house. They stopped at the door and asked for milk; the mother brought them brimming bowlsful, and the shy little girl crept up behind her mother with her birch-bark baskets of berries. The gentlemen took them and thanked her, and one told of his own little Mary at home, far away over the great sea. Jeannette often thinks of her, and wonders whether her papa has gone home ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... glancing up, "what are you two amateurs about? As usual, I'm ready to begin before Rex is awake!" and stepping to the edge he landed his flies with a flourish in a young birch tree. Rex came and disengaged them, and he received the assistance with ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... "That's birch for him," he muttered, as he passed through the baize door, which shut out the noise of the school from the rest of the house; and the boy drew a deep breath as he crossed the hall toward the study, connected in his mind with scoldings ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... chateau cliff to where the water, conveyed to the summit, dribbled and dropped, or squirted and splashed, nourishing countless fronds of fern and beds of moss, and many a bog plant. The cedars and umbrella pines in the spring sun exhaled their aromatic breath, and the flowering birch rained down its yellow dust over one from its ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn? Where may the grave of that good man be?— By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, Under the twigs of a young birch-tree! The oak that in summer was sweet to hear, And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year, And whistled and roared in the winter alone, Is gone,—and the birch in its stead is grown.— The knight's bones are dust, And his good ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... with none but the Snow under her, and the Heaven over her, in a misty and rainy season. She sent then unto a French Priest, that he would speak unto her Squaw Mistress, who then, without condescending to look upon her, allow'd her a little Birch-Rind, to cover her Head from the Injuries of the Weather, and a little bit of dried Moose, which being boiled, she drunk the Broth, and gave it unto ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... From a scraping on birch bark by Tomak Josephs, Indian Governor at Peter Dona's Point, Maine. The Mik um wees always wears a red cap like the ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Dr. Thomas Birch, in a letter dated June 15, 1764, says that this letter was by Mr. Philip Yorke, afterwards Earl of Hardwicke, who was author also of another piece in the Spectator, but his son could not ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... his boys, four in all, fairly carved a farm out of the big forest that covered the cold rocky hills. Giant work it was for them in such heavy timber—pine, hemlock, maple, beech and birch—the clearing of a single acre being a man's work for a year. The place where the maples were thickest was reserved for a sugar grove, and from it was made all of the sweet material they needed, and some besides. Economy of the very strictest kind had ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... said Mr. Barly, closing one eye, and nodding his head a number of times. "There is indeed. But those days are over, Mr. Frye. When I was a child I had the fear of God put into me. It was put into me with a birch rod. But nowadays, Mr. Frye, the children neglect their sums, and grow up wild as nettles. I don't know what ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... She walked across the Park, and I followed, praising God, whose image she is. On the further side the Pole met her in his furs, and she walked with him for an hour in the sun. She had no wrappage to hide her blissful shape. Close-fitted, erect, free- moving, gracious as a young birch-tree. Master, she is ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... with a strictness unknown to American boys and girls of to-day. Even small acts of disrespect or disobedience were promptly punished, and to aid in the work of correction the Bryant home as well as that of almost every neighbor was provided with a good-sized bundle of birch sticks hanging warningly on the kitchen wall. As the poet himself tells us in a sketch of his early life, the children looked upon the older people of the family with so much awe that they could not go to them freely nor act naturally in ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... oak and the birch and whatever the other trees are called stick out one polite branch on this side and ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... forrard, and raised her to my arms: spiling thereby a new weskit and a pair of crimson smalcloes. I rushed forrard. I say, very nearly knocking down the old sweeper who was hobbling away as fast as posibil. We took her to Birch's; we provided her with a hackney-coach and every lucksury, and carried her home ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in the afternoon when Lionel found himself driving along a loftily-winding road overlooking the wide and fertile valley of the Aivron. Right down below him, and visible through the birch-trees, was the river itself, of a brilliant, clear-shining blue, save where in some more distant sweeps it shone a silver-white; on the other side of the broad strath rose a range of hill fringed ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... asunder. In this respect the unsuspecting creek was an asset of incalculable value. The boxes of his wagons could boast of nothing up to date, that was not possessed by the wheels; and in many cases the tongues and whiffletrees and neck-yokes had been substituted by raw maples or birch secured on the ranch. His unwritten law was to buy nothing that would cost money, and to import nothing that could be produced on the farm even if it was only a poor makeshift substitute. No part was ever replaced until it had gone hopelessly on strike, and necessity was his only motive power ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... on her birth. Theodore Fitzhedingham could never think of paying attention to the daughter of a Hindoo woman and old Sneezum, the bullock contractor of Bunderjumm. One day I had been at work in one of the plantations, and just as I was marking with my hand-axe a birch tree to be felled, a thought came into my head. I left the cross half executed, and threw the axe on the bank, hurried home, and locked myself in the study. Pen and paper were lying before me, and in a moment I had got deep ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... furs have been dispatched for Montreal, MacKenzie launches out on May 9 of 1793 with a thirty-foot birch canoe, six voyageurs, and Alexander Mackay as lieutenant, for the hinterland beyond the Rockies. This time the going was against stream,—hard paddling, but safer than with a {328} swift current in a river with dangerous rapids. Ten days later the river ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... ground; and in the Hunting Moon the leaves of this undergrowth have turned to purest yellow, without touch or trace of red, so that the sombre forest is carpeted with gold. Here and there shows a birch or aspen, also bright, pure light yellow, as though a brilliant sun were striking down through painted windows. Groups of yellow-leafed larches add to the splendour. And close to the ground grow little ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... name is forever associated with Westminster, and he ruled the school with his terrible birch rod for upward of fifty-seven years. "My rod is my sieve," he said, "and who can not pass through it is no boy for me." So many able boys, however, passed through it, that he could point to the Bench of Bishops, ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... native trees and immediately replant saplings of certain introduced varieties about the farmyard or along the streets. In this way a forest growth of oak, elm, beech, butternut, hemlock, basswood, and birch is cleared off to give room for saplings of soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is felt that the inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing would derogate from the dignity that should invest an article ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... to look upon them. The height of land or plateau which constitutes the interior of the Labrador peninsula is from 2,000 to 2,500 feet above the sea level, fairly heavily wooded with spruce, fir, hackmatack, and birch, and not at all the desolate waste it has been pictured by many writers. The barrenness of Labrador is confined to the coast, and one cannot enter the interior in any direction without being struck by the latent possibilities of the peninsula were it not for the abundance of flies and mosquitoes. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... American Indians composed of a number of long sticks stuck in the ground in a circle, and bending inwards till their other ends met, and were secured together with a band. Instead of being covered with birch bark, these were thatched very neatly with dry grass or reeds, and formed very warm abodes. In the centre a pile of ashes showed where their fires were placed. Their canoes were very like those of North America, being built of bark, with ribs neatly formed, and kept in shape by several beams ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... the heavens, gave pearly tints to the clouds that floated near it; the pines on the shore flung dark masses against the oaks and maples, or stood as a Rembrandt background for the boughs of the trees on which the moonlight fell, or for some ghostly procession of the white birch trunks. The water, in the shadows as dark and smooth as a Claude Lorraine glass, showed far off in the moonlight faint quivers of its surface here and there, as if the breeze so longed for were coming to ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... I had occasion to visit the Falls of St. Anthony, a village of a few houses on the east side of the Mississippi River, ten miles Northwest of St. Paul. I crossed the river to the west side in a birch bark canoe, navigated by Tapper, the ferryman for many years after, until the suspension bridge was built. Examining the Falls, I went down to an old saw mill built by and for the soldiers at Fort Snelling and measured the retrocession of the fall by the ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... seen all along the coast, that is to say they had been hollowed from cottonwood or pine trees and afterward steamed and spread by means of hot water to meet the maker's idea of the proper line of grace and speed. They were really beautiful and sat the water almost as gracefully as the birch-bark canoe of the Chippewas. At each end they rose into a sort of neck, which terminated often in a head carved to resemble a deer or some fabled animal. Some of them had white bands encircling the throat of this figurehead. Their paddles were short ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... singing and hardly breathed, they stood so still. They looked at St. Nicholas with big, big eyes. In one hand St. Nicholas carried two large packages; in the other, a birch rod. ...
— The Dutch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... favourite retreat, a cluster of slender birch trees deep in the forest, she seated herself on a fallen trunk and unrolled her crocheting. Through the thin foliage the sun filtered over her hair and spangled the ground at her feet. A breeze as gentle as herself whispered above her head in friendly ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... over which we could see a large volume of water rushing with headlong force and speed, bubbling, foaming, and roaring into the channel which leads to the loch. Above us was a bridge thrown across the chasm, while the mountain sides were clothed with graceful birch and other trees. We had brought a copy of Burns, whose lines on ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... puzzle of the school was how to account for her close relationship to old Rippenger. Such an apple on such a crab-tree seemed monstrous. Heriot said that he hoped Boddy would marry old Rippenger's real daughter, and, said he, that's birch-twigs. I related his sparkling speech to Julia, who laughed, accusing him, however, of impudence. She let me see a portrait of her dead mother, an Irish lady raising dark eyelashes, whom she resembled. I talked of the portrait to Heriot, and as I had privileges ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "Douggie" went up to a young sapling that grew at the base of the fallen tree. Bending it down to the ground, as an archer bends his bow, he gave a sudden spring, and let the tough birch catapult him to the ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... Aspine good for Staves, the Cypress Funeral. The Laurel, Meed of mighty Conquerors, And Poets sage; the Fir that weepeth still, The Willow worn of forlorn Paramours, The Yew obedient to the Bender's Will. The Birch for Shafts, the Sallow for the Mill; The Myrrhe sweet bleeding in the bitter Wound, The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill, The fruitful Olive, and the Plantane round, The Carver Helm, the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... doubt, give thee as much wealth as thou desirest.' Thus addressed, O king, Gautama cheerfully set out from that place, eating on the way, to his fill, fruits sweet as ambrosia. Beholding the sandal and aloe and birch trees that stood along the road, and enjoying their refreshing shade, the Brahmana proceeded quickly. He then reached the city known by the name of Meruvraja. It had large porches made of stone, and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... wet snow, snapped in his face and blinded him with its damp burden; and he knew long before nightfall that another night in the woods was inevitable. He could feed the horse on young twigs of beech and birch; fresh moss, and new-peeled bark (fodder the animal would have resented with scorn under any other conditions); but hunger has no law concerning food. Scott himself was famished; but his pipe and tobacco were a refuge whose value he knew before, and his charge was tired ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... tried to have a school, and to this end had hired an elderly Irishman, who gave hard lessons and a taste of the birch to children who had exhausted themselves in the mills and had no zest for learning. Mr. Dale had taken on more than two hundred pauper children from the workhouses and these were a sore trial ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... well on its way by now—though Gwendolyn could not recall the moment of starting. The Piper had not waited to be invited, but strolled along with the others, his birch-stemmed tobacco-pipe in a corner of his mouth, his hands in his pockets, and the pig-poke a-swing at ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... from the tall brass andirons or claw-footed chair and table. Sometimes he glanced shyly at the mother, but getting no answering smile kept silence. Once or twice the girl whispered a word to him, as the logs fell and a sheet of flame from the hickory and the quick-burning birch set free the stored-up sunshine of many a summer day. A moment later, the ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... as long as this room—six ash-trees, one butternut, and a birch sapling thrown in for a witch spectre. Say no more, Paul. Sit you down and keep Olive company. I will go, if only for the sake of showing these silly little hussies that there is no call for a gospel woman with prayer in her heart to be ...
— Giles Corey, Yeoman - A Play • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... decided not to birch boys in the future, but to fine their parents. Several soft-hearted boys have already indicated that it will hurt ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... on an errand—not a particularly romantic one, as it happened, only to pay a bill for Miss Todd at a farm-house a few miles away. If the errand was prosaic the farm and its surroundings looked attractive; it stood on a hill with a beautiful group of birch-trees behind it, and a small stream came rippling down at the bottom of the garden. The path from the high road was blocked by a cart left standing with a load of straw, so it would be impossible to ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... Giant's Stairway and sat down in the little rock chapel. There was a picnic at the Lovers' Leap, and I had that side of the island to myself. I was leaning back, half asleep, in the deep shadow, when the sound of voices roused me; a birch-bark canoe was passing close in shore, and two were in it,—Jeannette and our surgeon. I could not hear their words, but I noticed Rodney's expression as he leaned forward. Jeannette was paddling slowly; her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes brilliant. Another moment and ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... to a little scrubby thing, that looked very like a birch rod. I proceeded to examine it most minutely, while Collins waited with all the intense anxiety of a man whose character ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... settlement, where the trail that came up from the railroad thirty miles away forked off into two wavy ribands that melted into a waste of snow. Lander's consisted then of five or six frame houses and stores, a hotel of the same material, several sod stables, and a few birch-log barns; and its inhabitants considered it one of the most promising places in Western Canada. That, however, is the land of promise, a promise that is in due time usually fulfilled, and the men of Lander's were, for the most part, shrewdly practical ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... verge of the line with a dense fence of stunted trees just before him and the wilderness of snow beyond, sloping up to the crest, outlined in white against the solid gray sky. The Spartans of the forest were around him—fir, pine, spruce, birch, and trembling little aspens up there among the stoutest. All were of one height, clean-shaven by the volleys of the wind-driven sand and pebbles that clipped off any treetop that aspired above the mass. In solid numbers was their salvation, and they grew ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... didn't know which, but he was quite sure that he liked her better than any woman he had seen for a long time. He had not known her a week, and she already absorbed his thoughts. And, during the drive home, he hardly saw the forest. Once a birch, whose faint leaves and branches dissolved in a glittering light, drew his thoughts away from Mildred. She lay upon his shoulder, his arm was affectionately around her, and, looking at him out of eyes whose brown seemed to soften in ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... The cedar will burn all right, but it is a good thing to have the birch. We shall have a supper worth while in a few minutes. Stacy, get busy ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... snow—careered out of the north and followed me along my way. I was soon out of the cultivated basin of the Allier, and away from the ploughing oxen and such-like sights of the country. Moor, heathery marsh, tracts of rock and pines, woods of birch all jewelled with the autumn yellow, here and there a few naked cottages and bleak fields,—these were the characters of the country. Hill and valley followed valley and hill; the little green and stony cattle-tracks wandered in and out of one another, split into three or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... little way down the road from the old house, they projected a roadway which swept round, horseshoe fashion, till it met itself again within a space of some twenty yards or so; and this sweep made a frontage—upon its inclosed bit of natural, moss-turfed green, sprinkled with birch and pine and oak trees, and with gray out-croppings of rock here and there—for the twenty houses, behind which opened the rest of the unspoiled, irregular, open slope and swell and dingle of the hill-foot tract that dipped down at one reach, we ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... a deep breath. The safe disappearances he had read about flashed through his mind. But he didn't believe it. It couldn't be! Yet, there was the empty corner with the birch panels forming the back of the show-windows, and no safe. In a daze, he walked over to the corner, intending to feel about with his hands and make sure the safe was really gone. Before he got there, there flashed into sight in place of the safe, ...
— The Einstein See-Saw • Miles John Breuer
... had fallen the day before, and now wherever the ground was not paved the grass shone green. The birch trees in the gardens looked as if they were strewn with green fluff, the wild cherry and the poplars unrolled their long, balmy buds, and in shops and dwelling-houses the double window-frames were being removed and ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... which he 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 or tendrils from tree to tree, and spread a kind of network in ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... at the topmost source—fons et origo—of our chosen river. This single spring, crystal-clear and ice-cold, gushing out of the hillside in a forest of spruce and yellow birch and sugar maple, gave us the clue that we must follow for a week through ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... day of his visit he had been wont of an evening to take a walk along the shore of the lake. The road led along close under the garden. At the end of the latter, on a projecting mound, there was a bench under some tall birch trees. Elisabeth's mother had christened it the Evening Bench, because the spot faced westward, and was mostly used at that time of the day in order to enjoy a view ...
— Immensee • Theodore W. Storm
... Col. Birch's recipe for rheumatic gout or acute rheumatism, commonly called in England the "Chelsea Pensioner." Half an ounce of nitre (saltpetre), half an ounce of sulphur, half an ounce of flour of mustard, half an ounce of Turkey rhubarb, quarter of an ounce of powdered guaicum. Mix, and ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... sent from Fort Ridgely to the Lower Agency, to feel the enemy, bury the dead, and perform any other service that might arise. They went as far as Little Crow's village, but not finding any signs of Indians, they returned; and on the 1st of September they reached Birch Coulie, and encamped at the head of it. Birch Coulie is a ravine extending from the upper plateau to the river bottom, nearly opposite the ferry where Captain Marsh's company ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... drinks include phosphates, ginger ale, coca cola, birch beer, root beer, and various other drinks called mashes, sours, and freezes. While these are pleasing to the taste and have the advantage of being ready to drink when prepared, it is advisable not to indulge in them too frequently, because excessive use of them is liable to affect the ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... increasing. He had made efforts to improve his knowledge of the language; and he had spent many days in sketching and studying the terra-cottas and vases and coins at the British Museum. He had also taken up some study of Egyptology, through Champollion, Bunsen and Birch, in the hope of tracing the origin of Greek decorative art. Comparative mythology, at that time, was a department of philology, introduced to the English public chiefly by Max Mueller. Under his influence Ruskin entered step by step upon an inquiry which afterwards became of singular importance ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... joined hands with their leaves, like young men and maidens standing ready for a dance around a married pair. In the midst of the company stood the pair, distinguished from all the rest of the forest throng by gracefulness of form and charm of colour; the white birch, the beloved, with her husband the hornbeam. But farther off, like grave elders sitting in silence and gazing on their children and grandchildren, stood on this side hoary beeches, and on that matronly poplars; and an oak, bearded with moss, ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... Boston, was then a dense and silent wilderness, threaded with a few Indian trails. Along the shore several rude wigwams were scattered, the smoke curling from their fires from among the trees, with naked children playing around the birch canoes upon the beach. ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... stage simultaneously opens, and the noble steamer sinks out of sight, leaving only the top of one of the smoke-pipes in view, from which emerges BILLY BIRCH, who sings to slow and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 13, June 25, 1870 • Various
... have been made about "cart whips," etc., when I say flogging is not the most degrading punishment in the world. It may be so to a white man in most countries, but how is it to the white boy? That necessary coadjutor of the schoolmaster, the "birch," is never thought to have rendered infamous the unfortunate victim of pedagogue ire; nor did Solomon in his wisdom dream that he was counseling parents to debase their offspring, when he exhorted them ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the previous question whether they should go into Committee. On this previous question 136 had voted No, with Sir Charles Wolseley and Mr. Strickland (two of the Council of State) for their tellers, but 141 had voted Yea, with Bradshaw and Colonel Birch for their tellers. In other words, it had been carried by a majority of five that it fell within the province of the House to determine whether the Single-Person element in the Government of the Commonwealth, already ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Appendix to the life of Prince Henry, Doctor Birch has given us an account of the prices of butcher's meat as commonly paid by that prince. It is there said, that the four quarters of an ox, weighing six hundred pounds, usually cost him nine pounds ten shillings, or thereabouts; that is thirty-one shillings and eight-pence per hundred ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... small enclosure round the house, and gathered juniper and birch-twigs, and kindled a fire upon the open stove built in the corner of the room. Fortunately, we had some dried reindeer and bread in our bag, and on that and the ryper and the contents of our flasks we supped. Afterwards, to while ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... had lost L500 over the deal. But it was no use crying over spilt milk. The immediate effect was that he would have to be very economical over his honeymoon expenses. However, he wouldn't say anything about the matter to Dolly that day. He would carry out his promise—give her a nice luncheon at Birch's. ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... and in sheltered valleys even up to 5500 ft., when it of course comes into contact with the purely alpine flora. Tree vegetation, which reaches up as high as 6500 and 8150 ft., the latter limit on the north and west, consists of magnificent forests of birch, poplar, aspen, and Coniferae, such as Pinus cerebra, Abies sibirica, Larix sibirica, Picea obovata, and so on, though the fir is not found above 2500 ft., while the meadows are abundantly clothed with brightly coloured, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... quite right. Blinkhampton was a predestined seaside resort on the South Coast, and Iver, with certain associates, meant to develop it. They had bought it up, and laid it out for building, and arranged for a big hotel with Birch & Company, the famous furnishers. But all along in front of it—between where the street now was and the esplanade was soon to be—ran a long narrow strip, forming the estate of an elderly gentleman named Masters. Of course Masters had to be bought out, ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... gambrel-roofed cottage, on the side of Harpswell Bay, just at the head of the long cove which we have already described. The windows on two sides commanded the beautiful bay and the opposite shores, and on the other they looked out into the dense forest, through whose deep shadows of white birch and pine the silver rise and fall of ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Assyria is furnished by the magnificent bronze gates of Balawat, now in The British Museum. See Birch and Pinches, The Bronze Ornaments of the Palace Gates of ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... neither pen nor pencil can bring before you the reality. William [Footnote: William, one of Miss Edgeworth's half-brothers, had joined his sisters at Edinburgh.] says he does not, however, fear for Killarney, even after our having seen this. Here are no arbutus, but plenty of soft birch, and twinkling aspen, and dark oak. On one side of the lake the wood has been within these few years cut down. Walter Scott sent to offer the proprietor L500 for the trees on one spot, if he would spare them; but the offer came two days too late; ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... The luckless tree again is reared— (Small sign of honour or of grace!) To mark the parish market-place! Long as St. Idloes' town shall be A patroness of poesy— Long as its hospitality The bard shall freely entertain, My birch! ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... Little Furry Ones," he continued, after pressing down the tobacco in his pipe, "were born in a dry, warm, roomy den in the bank, under the roots of an old birch that slanted out over the water. The front door was deep under water. But as the old otters had few enemies to dread, being both brave and powerful, they had also a back entrance on dry land, hidden by a thicket of fir bushes. The two furry 'pups' were at first as sprawling and helpless ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... overhung it—each bank a mute monotonous screen of foliage, unbroken by glade or clearing; pine and spruce and hemlock, maple and alder; piled plumes of green, motionless, brooding, through which no sunrays broke, though here and there a silver birch drew a shaft of light upon their sombre background. Here were no English woodlands, no stretches of pale green turf, no vistas opening beneath flattened boughs, with blue distant hills and perhaps a group of antlers topping the bracken. The wild ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... To make Birch Wine:—In March bore a hole in a tree, and put in a faucet, and it will run two or three days together without hurting the tree; then put in a pin to stop it, and the next year you may draw as much from the same hole; put to every ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... quite abolished." "He did not much revive the curiosity of the public," says Johnson, in his life of Hughes; "for near thirty years elapsed before his edition was reprinted." Editions of the "Faerie Queene" came thick and fast about the middle of the century. One (by Birch) was issued in 1751, and three in 1758; including the important edition by Upton, who, of all Spenser's commentators, has entered most elaborately into the interpretation ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... what he did remember, and very well, was the moment when the bird fluttered towards the window; he could see it resting on the sill, hesitating a moment, doubting its power of flight. But it had ventured out in the air and had reached a birch, on which it alighted. There had been a rush downstairs and out of the house, but the hawk was no longer in the birch, and was never seen by him again, yet ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... wandering I struck a heavy game trail, and could see deer and bear tracks not over a day old. I filled the magazine of my rifle and plunged along at a fast pace. Here and there were thick clumps of quaking asp, mountain birch, and on the creek banks were choke cherries and plum trees. Great springs of water bubbled out of the earth, and by one of these springs I found some of the Sheep Eaters' lodges. They were decayed and fallen to the earth, but the rounded stones with which they warmed the water were there, ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... of affairs, Dominie Curtius's mood this day was not a pleasant one, and the school exercises had more to do with the whipping horse and the birch twigs than with the horn book and the ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... tolerably exact idea of his charge, returned to Quebec. He was well pleased with what he saw, but not with the ways and means of Canadian travel; for he thought it strangely unbecoming that a lieutenant-general of the king should be forced to crouch on a sheet of bark, at the bottom of a birch canoe, scarcely daring to move his head to the right or left lest he should disturb the ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... Company's agent had called his place "The Shack" because it was built entirely of logs, and a woman could not have made it more comfortable. Keith stood in the big living-room. At one end was a strong fireplace in which kindlings and birch were already laid, waiting the touch of a match. Brady's reading table and his easy chair were drawn up close; his lounging moccasins were on a footstool; pipes, tobacco, books and magazines littered the table; and out of this cheering disorder rose triumphantly the amber shoulder of ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... shop, quite crammed and choked with the abundance of its stock; a perfectly voracious little shop, with a maw as accommodating and full as any shark's. Cheese, butter, firewood, soap, pickles, matches, bacon, table-beer, peg-tops, sweetmeats, boys' kites, bird-seed, cold ham, birch brooms, hearth- stones, salt, vinegar, blacking, red-herrings, stationery, lard, mushroom-ketchup, staylaces, loaves of bread, shuttlecocks, eggs, and slate pencil; everything was fish that came to the net of this greedy little shop, and all articles were in its net. How many other kinds of petty ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... bugs and specimens which he had collected. And, for those who feel an interest in Professor Shaw, it may be agreeable to know, that in his wanderings, having discovered in a green lane, on the margin of a duck-pond, a district school in want of a pedagogue, he forthwith assumed the birch, and may be now seen at almost any hour of the day, in the midst of his noisy populace, commanding silence, or dusting them on their least honorable parts. 'Tough, are you? I'll see if I can find a tender spot. Come, no bawling, or I'll flog you till you stop. Thomas Jones, take your book, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... and whose remains we find buried in the same deposits as theirs, were of species that still hold their place as aboriginal trees of the country, or of at least the more northerly provinces of the continent. The common Scotch fir, the common birch, and a continental species of conifer of the far north, the Norwegian spruce (Abies excelsa), have been found underlying the Pleistocene drift, and rooted in the mammiferous crag; and for many ages must the old extinct elephant have ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... pause for an instant, and to reflect upon the character and circumstance of our luxurious voyage as contrasted with that of these few adventurers in their fragile birch canoes—a little over 220 years ago—is ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... That evening the birch which Sister Gabrielle kept in the dormitory was put away in a cupboard, and in the refectory the salad was turned with two long wooden spoons. These were the only changes. We went into class from ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... As pine, beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness; a sort ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... horses were, and urged me to take the one belonging to the chief, since it was clever and gentle. At first I had compunctions of conscience, but no choice was left me, and I had to do it. I made a rude bridle of birch bark, and jumping on the horse, came here just ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... and I'll give you a stick," he called to her; "it's a help when you're climbing." He pulled down a slender birch, and, setting his foot on it, broke it off at the root. She stopped, with an impatient gesture, and waited while he tore off handfuls of leaves and ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... and the larks sang loud in the blue clear air; the birch-wood clothed itself in tender green; the stream, with its melting snow-drifts, wound down the mountains singing on its way; but no plough furrowed the loosened earth, and from the heights was heard no wood-horn calling the cattle at feeding time. All was still ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... with the saints, we trust.' [Footnote: [The author has somewhat altered part of a beautiful unpublished fragment of Coleridge:— "Where is the grave of Sir Arthur Orellan,— Where may the grave of that good knight be? By the marge of a brook, on the slope of Helvellyn, Under the boughs of a young birch tree. The Oak that in summer was pleasant to hear, That rustled in Autumn all withered and sear, That whistled and groan'd thro' the Winter alone, He hath gone, and a birch in his place is grown. The knight's bones ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... extended wings," sing the wild swans. "Let us bear thee up to the great lakes, the perpetually roaring elvs (rivers), that rush on with arrowy swiftness; where the oak forest has long ceased, and the birch-tree becomes stunted. Rest thee between our extended wings: we fly up to Sulitelma, the island's eye, as the mountain is called; we fly from the vernal green valley, up over the snow-drifts, to the mountain's top, whence thou canst see the North Sea, on yonder ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... beauty and variety to the landscape. Above these scattered woods rose the hill, in barren, but purple majesty; the dark rich hue, particularly in autumn, contrasting beautifully with the thickets of oak and birch, the mountain ashes and thorns, the alders and quivering aspens, which checquered and varied the descent, and not less with the dark-green and velvet turf, which composed the level part ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... BIRCH, SAMUEL, archaeologist and Egyptologist, born in London; keeper of Oriental antiquities in the British Museum; had an extensive knowledge of Egyptology, wrote largely, and contributed articles on that and kindred ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... sound of his wife's voice. Sometimes the women had to bring in fire-wood themselves, but to-night he filled the great wood-box just outside the kitchen door, piling it high with green beech and maple, with plenty of dry birch and pine, taking pains to select the best and straightest sticks, even if he burrowed deep into the wood-pile. He brought the bushel basketful of kindlings last, and set it down with a cheerful grunt, having worked himself into good humor ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... and slanting rain Have swept the woods and dimmed the plain. Wet winds have swayed the birch and oak, And caught and swirled away the smoke, But, all day long, the wooden ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... Here eglantine embalmed the air, Hawthorn and hazel mingled there. The primrose pale and violet flower, Found in each cliff's narrow bower; Foxglove and nightshade side by side, Emblems of punishment and pride; Gray birch and aspen wept beneath; Aloft the ash and warrior oak, Cast anchor in the rifted rock; And higher yet the pine-tree hung, His shattered trunk, and frequent flung Where seemed the cliff to meet on high, His boughs athwart the narrow ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... Jackson, Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight. It is all set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given in the book; only he ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was declared, therefore, they began to build strong fortifications in the interior of North America. It was strange to behold these warlike castles on the banks of solitary lakes and far in the midst of woods. The Indian, paddling his birch canoe on Lake Champlain, looked up at the high ramparts of Ticonderoga, stone piled on stone, bristling with cannon, and the white flag of France floating above. There were similar fortifications on Lake Ontario, and near the great Falls of Niagara, and at ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and village assemble themselves together, both men, women, and children, olde and young, all indifferently, and goe into the woodes and groves, hilles and mountaines, where they spend the night in pastyme, and in the morning they returne, bringing with them birch bowes and braunches of trees to deck their assembly withal. . . . They have twentie or fourtie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweete nosegay of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these draw home this Maypole (this stincking idol rather) which is covered all over ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... an education, was not fortunate in his teachers. Saint- Laurent, to whom he was first confided, was, it is true, the man in all Europe best fitted to act as the instructor of kings, but he died before his pupil was beyond the birch, and the young Prince, as I have related, fell entirely into the hands of the Abbe Dubois. This person has played such an important part in the state since the death of the King, that it is fit that he should be made known. The Abbe Dubois ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... notes by way of remark; the blackbird was heard, flute-throated, down in the hollow recesses of the wood; and the thrush, in a holly tree by the wayside, sang out his sweet, clear song that seemed to rise in strength as the wind awoke a sudden rustling through the long woods of birch and oak.—WILLIAM BLACK, in Adventures ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... Mr. Barly, closing one eye, and nodding his head a number of times. "There is indeed. But those days are over, Mr. Frye. When I was a child I had the fear of God put into me. It was put into me with a birch rod. But nowadays, Mr. Frye, the children neglect their sums, and grow up wild as nettles. I don't ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... amazing story about Jane Smif, in addition to running away, mother whipped me for the first time in my life with a birch switch. ...
— Aunt Madge's Story • Sophie May
... had bought you shall be given to Nannie Cameron, and you shall wear your old one to the kirk. How will that suit your vanity? And you may be off to bed now directly, without any supper. There are twigs enough for a birch rod, my lady, if bed does not bring you to a better frame of mind. Run in now, and don't let me see your face before ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... at a neighbouring farm-house, where there lived one of Mr. Walsingham's tenants; a man of the name of Birch, a respectable farmer, who was originally from Ireland, and whose son was at sea with Captain Walsingham. The captain had taken young Birch under his particular care, at Mr. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... he suddenly appeared from behind a hayrick. I was so startled that I turned to fly, and in my precipitancy tripped on a tussock and fell. Mr. Diggles came to my assistance, and, when he had helped me to my feet and brushed me down with a birch broom he was carrying, I could do nothing less than buy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... his permit, built his boats,—whether light, roomy bateaux made of boards, or birch-bark canoes, or pirogues, which were simply hollowed out logs. He loaded them with paint, powder, bullets, blankets, beads, and rum, manned them with hardy voyageurs, trained all their lives in the use of pole and paddle, and started off up or down the Mississippi,[25] the Ohio, or the Wabash, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... face of the hill fell, an abrupt promontory, to the woods of the plain. Its face was scored by the weather, and the dry drainage channels were headlong cascades of grey pebbles. Clumps of heather, sparse oak scrub with young leaves of bronze, contorted birch, and this year's croziers of the bracken (heaven knows their secret for getting lush aromatic sap out of such stony poverty), all made a tough life which held up the hill, steep as it was; though the hill ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... winds so sweet with birch and fern, A sweeter memory blow; And there in spring the veeries sing The song ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... him?' asked Raja Haji, 'He had cheated me and it was not fitting that he should live; besides, he was a Chinaman, and we counted not their lives as being of any worth. In Kinta, before Mr. Birch went to Perak, they had a game called Main China, each man betting on the number of the coins which a passing Chinaman carried in his pouch, and whether they were odd or even. Thereafter, when the bets had been made, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... as the best on earth. Horapollo, or rather his commentator Bolzani, says, that when the master of the house is going a journey, he hangs out a broom of fig boughs for good luck. Our forefathers preferred a broom of birch; as if, in the master's absence, it was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XIII, No. 370, Saturday, May 16, 1829. • Various
... company—plenty of company! he got Taliesin—Owen Glyndwr—Iolo Morganwg and all the rest of them! and he's quite happy in their company. But once he comes down to live with us he's as rough and prickly as a birch-broom. Indeed he wass nevver used to be like this whatever; 'tis ever since his brother John die, and leave all his money ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... spied me from the village, and 'twas her brought me ashore in her birch-bark and tended me in her wick-i-up till reason came and the blood ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... delicious that he fell sound asleep the moment it began to carry him upwards; and he could not keep awake long enough even to thank the sender of it. When he awoke, he was lying on the grass under a silver birch tree, and in front of him was a red brick fort with battlements and a drawbridge. It was so like the fort in which he kept all his tin soldiers in the nursery at home that he was not at all surprised when a sentinel without a head came out in answer to his knock. He remembered ...
— All the Way to Fairyland - Fairy Stories • Evelyn Sharp
... church, garlands of birch leaves hung here and there on the white walls and festooned the carved pulpit. Green wreaths crowned the golden angels that supported, each with one lifted hand, the sculptured altar-piece; while in the other, outstretched, they loosely held wild flowers, ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... islands casting their soft shades Across the lake; sequester'd leafy glades, That through the dimness of their twilight show Large dock leaves, spiral foxgloves, or the glow Of the wild cat's eyes, or the silvery stems Of delicate birch trees, or long grass which hems A little brook. The youth had long been viewing These pleasant things, and heaven was bedewing The mountain flowers, when his glad senses caught A trumpet's silver voice. Ah! it was fraught With many joys for him: the ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... curious hut contrived by Cluny in one of the inmost recesses of the hills. It was called 'The Cage,' and was placed in a little thicket on the rocky slope of a hill. The walls were formed by actual growing trees with stakes planted between them, the whole woven together by ropes of heather and birch. Till you were close to the hut it looked merely like a thick clump of trees and bushes. The smoke escaped along the rocks, and the stone being of a bluish colour it could easily pass unnoticed. This hut could only ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... flooded in moonlight and the birch trees wavered their stark shadows across it like supplicating arms. Suddenly I heard the soft padded sound of snow falling upon snow, to slowly perceive a figure, the slender figure of a young child attempting to arouse ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... slenderness, once more she caught from the air an inspiration. She would incase Kedzie in a sheath of soft, white kid marked with delicate lines and set off with black gloves and a hat of green leaves. And this she would call "The White Birch." ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... stopped for a half hour at sunset, when the sky, for a few moments, showed streaks of red, then closed in for a night's drizzle. I had built what shelter I could for the woman out of boughs covered with sheets of paper birch and elm. I had made a similar shelter for myself that I might not seem to discriminate too much in favor of the Englishman, and had told the men to do the same. But they were indolent, and stopped at chopping a few hemlock boughs, which they laid across crotched aspens. In truth, our shelters ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... passage have gone; a happy journey and welcome back again! Titmouse and blackcap and a hedge-sparrow or so live now alone in the bush and undergrowth: tuitui! All is so curiously changed—the dwarf birch bleeds redly against the grey stones, a harebell here and there shows among the heather, swaying and whispering a little song: sh! But high above all hovers an eagle with outstretched neck, on his way ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... of this book is found sculptured on a certain number of the tombs of the Theban kings. It was first translated into English by Birch, then into French by Deveria, and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... September I came vnto Vologhda, which is a great citie, and the riuer passeth through the midst of the same. The houses are builded with wood of Firre trees, ioyned one with another, and round without: the houses are foure square without any iron or stone worke, couered with birch barkes, and wood ouer the same: Their Churches are all of wood, two for euery parish, one to be heated for Winter, and the other ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... without evidence, also, of a much more severe climate. In a lignite bed (a species of coal) found in nearly the same latitude as the forest growth just mentioned, we detect the presence of trees that grow only in cold northern climates, such as birch, mountain pine, larch, and spruce. And in some peat-bogs of Southern Europe belonging to this age are found willows now growing only in Spitzbergen, and some species of mosses that only thrive far to the north. It is quite evident that this deposit testifies to an altogether different ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... such style, is to be found in all these books when they are good books. Compare a paragraph or two of the early Burroughs on his birch-clad lake country, or Thoreau upon Concord pines, with the "natural history paragraph" that English magazines used to publish, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... many proposed derivations of the word Pyramid. Perhaps the origin of the name suggested by the distinguished Egyptologist, Mr. Birch, from two Coptic words, "pouro," "ing," and "emahau," or "maha," "tomb,"—the two in combination signifying "the king's tomb,"—is the most correct. "Men," in Coptic, signifies "monument," "memorial;" and "pouro-men," or ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... have decided not to birch boys in the future, but to fine their parents. Several soft-hearted boys have already indicated that it will hurt them more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... Fuller's appreciation of our native trees. In few instances should we have to go far from home to find nearly all that we wanted in beautiful variety—maples, dogwoods, scarlet and chestnut oaks, the liquid- amber, the whitewood or tulip-tree, white birch, and horn-beam, or the hop-tree; not to speak of the evergreens and shrubs indigenous to our forests. Perhaps it is not generally known that the persimmon, so well remembered by old campaigners in Virginia, will grow readily in this latitude. There are forests of this tree ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... ancient extensive forests of fir and pine are found in the numerous peat bogs which supply a large proportion of the fuel locally used. In Bornholm, it should be mentioned, the flora is more like that of Sweden; not the beech, but the pine, birch and ash are the most ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... boy dearly, and she often gently chided him, but he would not listen to her, and when she urged him to be more diligent, he ran out of the room. The monks did not spare the birch rod, and soon it was a case of a whipping ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... beside my fire, slipping on a great roll of birch bark which blazed up brightly, filling the woods with light. There, under a spruce, where a dark shadow had been a moment agone, stood the mother, her eyes all ablaze with the wonder of the light; now staring steadfastly into the fire; now starting nervously, with low questioning snorts, ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... bring shame to the beholder from more easy-going conditions. Everything is kept up with a strenuous virtue that imparts an air of self-respect to the landscape, which the bleaching and blackening stone walls, wandering over the hill-slopes, divide into wood lots of white birch and pine, stony pastures, and little patches of potatoes and corn. The mowing-lands alone are rich; and if the New England year is in the glory of the latest June, the breath of the clover blows honey—sweet into the car windows, and the fragrance of the new-cut hay ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... fifteenth century, we offer the following synopsis, which classifies and indicates the development of the different hands used by writers and illuminators of MSS. It is constructed on the information given in Wailly's large work on Palography, and in Dr. de Grey Birch's book on the Utrecht Psalter. The former work affords excellent facsimiles, which, together with those given in the plates published by the Palographical Society, will give the student the clearest possible ideas respecting ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... recounted: and the more he related, the more he remembered himself; and it appeared as if those times had really been happy times. "But they may still come—they may still come! Humpy-Dumpy fell downstairs, and yet he got a princess!" and he thought at the moment of a nice little Birch Tree growing out in the woods: to the Fir, that would be a ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... a long, old-fashioned rough-cast house facing the east, with great wide windows on each side of the door and a veranda all the way across the front. The big lawn was quite uneven, and broken here and there by birch trees, spruces, and crazy clumps of rose-bushes, all in bloom. Altogether it was a sweet, home-like old place. The view to the south showed, over the village roofs on the hill-side, the blue of Lake Erie outlined against the sky, while to the north stretched the open, ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... narrow way which we had followed for some miles, upon one much wider, and more commodious, which my guide told me was the coach road from Wrexham to Ruthyn, and going on a little farther we came to an avenue of trees which shaded the road. It was chiefly composed of ash, sycamore and birch, and looked delightfully cool and shady. I asked my guide if it belonged to any gentleman's house. He told me that it did not, but to a public-house, called Tafarn Tywarch, which stood near the end, a little way off the road. "Why is it called Tafarn Tywarch?" said I, ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... superior intelligence. Insatiable in their thirst for adventure, they were willing to assume all manner of risks or privations. Spring might find them at Lake Champlain, autumn at the head-waters of the Mississippi, a trusty birch-bark having carried them the thousand miles between. Their work did not figure very heavily in the colony's annual balance-sheet of progress with its statistics of acreage newly cleared, homes built and harvests stowed safely away. But according to their own ideals of service they valiantly served ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... on me fait tort!" preserves the custom of Normandy, and of Rollo the Dane, in Jersey, so that the sound of it "makes the workman drop his tools, the woman her knitting, the militiaman his musket, the fisherman his net, the schoolmaster his birch, and the ecrivain his babble, to await the judgment of ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... existence is the map of the Ethiopian Goldmines, dating from the time of Sethos I., the father of Rameses II., long enough before the time of the bronze tablet of Aristagoras, on which was inscribed the circuit of the whole earth, and all the sea and all rivers. (Tylor, p. 90, quoted from Birch's Archaeologia, vol. xxxiv. p. 382.) Sesostris was the first ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... glory in my evergreens. What winter-garden can compare for them with mine? True, I have but four kinds—Scotch fir, holly, furze, and the heath; and by way of relief to them, only brows of brown fern, sheets of yellow bog-grass, and here and there a leafless birch, whose purple tresses are even more lovely to my eye than those fragrant green ones which she puts on in spring. Well: in painting as in music, what effects are more grand than those produced by the scientific combination, in endless new variety, of a few simple elements? ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... the third strake under the wale were found to be stove in, and the timbers within started. The farther they proceeded in removing the sheathing, the more they discovered the decayed state of the ship's hull. The chief damage was repaired with a birch tree, which had been cut down when they were there before, and was the only one in the neighbourhood large enough for the purpose; but Captain King gave orders that no more sheathing should be ripped off, being apprehensive that further decayed planks might be met with which ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... horse whinnying for his corn; And sharply clashing horn on horn, Impatient down the stanchion rows, 15 The cattle shake their walnut bows; While peering from his early perch Upon the scaffold's pole of birch, The cock his crested helmet bent And down ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... not understand the life we lead; If we asked Dr. Birch to play, no doubt he'd rather read; He hates all scrambling restlessness, and chattering, scuffling noise; If he could catch us we should fare no ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... and, after first gathering a few dry sticks, he struck a light, and soon made a little fire. They found a birch tree growing near, and they stripped off some pieces of the bark. These they laid upon the fire, holding the ends of two long sticks upon them, in such a manner, that, as the pieces of birch bark curled up under the influence ...
— Forests of Maine - Marco Paul's Adventures in Pursuit of Knowledge • Jacob S. Abbott
... of art and literature in England, neglected equally by Conservatives, Liberals and Radicals. What has been done for the endowment of research? What is our equivalent for the Prix de Rome? Since the death of Dr. Birch, who can fairly deal with a Demotic papyrus? Contrast the Societe Anthropologique and its palace and professors in Paris with our "Institute" au second in a corner of Hanover Square and its skulls ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Signore Tommaso de' Medici, the Chamberlain of the Court, and gave him instructions to set the boy at liberty, after administering the useful punishment of twenty strokes with a birch rod, and giving him a severe reprimand ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... rose, and, after, women wailed their warriors slain, List the Saxon's silvery laughter, and his humming hives of gain. Swiftly sped the tawny runner o'er the pathless prairies then, Now the iron-reindeer sooner carries weal or woe to men. On thy bosom, Royal River, silent sped the birch canoe, Bearing brave with bow and quiver, on his way to war or woo; Now with flaunting flags and streamers—mighty monsters of the deep— Lo the puffing, panting steamers, through thy foaming waters sweep; And behold ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... sections, overgrown with artemisia, wormwood, and wild tansy; he gazed ... and that fresh, fertile nakedness and wildness of the steppe, that verdure, those long hillocks, the ravines with stubby oak bushes, the grey hamlets, the flexible birch-trees,—this whole Russian picture, which he had not seen for a long time, wafted into his soul sweet and, at the same time, painful sensations, weighed on his breast with a certain agreeable oppression. His thoughts slowly roved about; their outlines were as indistinct ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... many who didn't. Henry James, for instance, wrote a review of "Drum Taps" in the Nation, November 16, 1865. In the lusty heyday and assurance of twenty-two years, he laid the birch on smartly. It is just a little saddening to find that even so clear-sighted an observer as Henry James could not see through the chaotic form of Whitman to the great vision and throbbing music ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... should be of a different kind. The task of governing well was becoming more and more difficult, and reigning monarchs were criticized in an open fashion, such as had not hitherto been possible. After much thought the post was given to Mr Henry Birch (formerly a master at Eton College, and at that time rector of Prestwich, near Manchester), who had made a very favourable impression upon ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... concerning the lake and vicinity. When Fern Rock was reached, all went ashore, and our hero pointed out the ferns he had seen, and dug up such as the others wished to take along. An hour was spent over the ferns, and in getting some birch bark, and then they started on the return ...
— Joe The Hotel Boy • Horatio Alger Jr.
... on either side, the high pines, breathing their fragrance out into the darkness, and, like ghosts amongst them, the silver stems of birch-trees. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... THOMAS BIRCH, the well-known painter, died in Philadelphia on the 14th of January, at the ripe age of seventy-two, after a life of quiet and laborious devotion to his profession. He was distinguished in a particular department of landscape and marine painting, delighting in the treatment of coast and river ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... usefulness as implements of persuasion, being now employed exclusively as foot-gear. The lissom birch thrives ungarnered in the thicket, where grace and gentleness supply the whilom vigor of its sway. The unyielding barrel-stave, that formerly occupied a place of honor and convenience in the household, is now relegated, a harmless thing, to a forgotten corner of the cellar, and no ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... gooseberry (Ribes Grossularia) and the red oranges. The red hue is far more common in leaves, as seen among herbs, in cultivated varieties of Coleus and in the brown leaved form of the ordinary white clover, among trees and shrubs in the hazelnut (Corylus), the beech (Fagus), the birch (Betula), the barberry (Berberis) and many others. But though most of these forms are very ornamental and abundant [134] in parks and gardens, little is as yet known concerning the origin of their varietal attributes and their constancy, ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... Philip knew anything about were quite small, and were called canoes. They were made either of birch bark fastened over a light wooden frame, or of logs that had been hollowed by ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... that likes birds; if you'll come with me, I'll show 'ee what no man ever seed afore"; and Caleb, fired with curiosity, followed him away to a distance from home, out from the downs, into the woods and to a place where he had never been, where there were bracken and heath with birch and thorn-trees scattered about. On cautiously approaching a clump of birches they saw a big, thrush-like bird fly out of a large nest about ten feet from the ground, and settle on a tree close by, where it was joined by its mate. The old man pointed out that ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... weight aloof, To hide it where one ghastly birch Held up the rafters of the roof, And grim old pine-trees ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... my beautiful, it is not the sunset nor the pale green sky shimmering through the curtain of the silver birch, nor the quietness; it is not the hopping of birds upon the lawn, nor the darkness stealing over ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... not touch them without her permission. In many cases such property was very extensive. Among the Menomini Indians, for instance, a woman of good circumstances would own as many as 1200 to 1500 birch-bark vessels.[178] In the New Mexico Pueblos what comes from the outside of the house as soon as it is inside is put under the immediate control of the women. Bandelier, in his report of his tour in Mexico, tells us that "his host at Cochiti, New Mexico, could ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... The birch-bark canoe, made by the Indians of the northern rivers and lakes, is really a work of art. It is a model of lightness, and when we consider its frailty, and then the way in which it can be managed in the most turbulent currents, our admiration is divided between the craft ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... he was quite sure that he liked her better than any woman he had seen for a long time. He had not known her a week, and she already absorbed his thoughts. And, during the drive home, he hardly saw the forest. Once a birch, whose faint leaves and branches dissolved in a glittering light, drew his thoughts away from Mildred. She lay upon his shoulder, his arm was affectionately around her, and, looking at him out of eyes whose brown seemed to soften in affection, ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... keen observation reduced to a saying or a story. It is true that the oak-tree is a black witch so far as lightning is concerned and that the beech and alder are white witches. The proportion of trees struck by lightning has often been counted and for every fifty-four oaks struck, only one beech, or birch, or maple or alder is struck. Elms are fairly dangerous, being forty to the beech's one, and pines are less so, their ratio being fifteen. Not only this, boys, but a good deal depends on the way in which a tree is struck. An oak-tree may be riven into splinters, showing the terrible resistance that ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... the water and is a good swimmer. In summer he delights to feed on the pads, stems and roots of water lilies, and his long legs enable him to wade out to get them. For the most part his food consists of leaves and tender twigs of young trees, such as striped maple, aspen, birch, hemlock, alder and willow. His great height enables him to reach the upper branches of young trees. When they are too tall for this, he straddles them and bends or breaks them down to get at the upper branches. His front teeth are big, broad and sharp-edged. With these he strips the bark from ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... the cedar and birch was used by the Indians in weaving baskets and mats. From the inner bark of the birch tree they made canoes that were so light that they could be carried from one stream to another. Where there were no birch trees, great cedars were cut or burned down and made into canoes, for ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... The hand that you have bound! Omphale! Omphale!—But I feel your shawl against my mouth; it is as warm and soft as your arm, and it smells of vanilla, like your hair when you were young! Laura, when you were young, and we walked in the birch woods, with the primroses and the thrushes—glorious, glorious! Think how beautiful life was, and what it is now. You didn't want to have it like this, nor did I, and yet it happened. ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... mistaken, you lazy, ill-behaved wench. The new frock I had bought you shall be given to Nannie Cameron, and you shall wear your old one to the kirk. How will that suit your vanity? And you may be off to bed now directly, without any supper. There are twigs enough for a birch rod, my lady, if bed does not bring you to a better frame of mind. Run in now, and don't let me see your face ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... throte, and my bar riz up so I lost my cap,—leastways I've allus 'spected that was the reason I lost it. I didn't know what ter do. I kep' on runnin', but my wind was givin' out, and I knew I couldn't stan' it much longer; so I made a break for a good sized white birch I see, and the way I shinned up thet tree, would a bin a credit to ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... day of Wakoa, the dog sale—seven fat caribou were roasting on great spits at Post Lac Bain, and under them were seven fires burning red and hot of seasoned birch, and around the seven fires were seven groups of men who slowly turned ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... of Indian hunting parties, and at last they came to a deserted village. Either it had been abandoned because of warfare or to escape an unhealthy location, but the five examined it with great curiosity. Many of the lodges built of either poles or birch bark were still standing, with fragments of useless and abandoned household goods here and there. Paul found in one of the lodges a dried scalp with long straight hair, but, obeying a sensitive impulse he hid it from the others, thrusting it between ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of these was their favourite stamping ground. Here they were assembled on this particular evening. There was a grove of young spruces in this hollow, with a tiny, grassy glade in its heart, opening on the bank of the brook. By the brook grew a silver birch-tree, a young, incredibly straight thing which Walter had named the "White Lady." In this glade, too, were the "Tree Lovers," as Walter called a spruce and maple which grew so closely together that their boughs were inextricably intertwined. Jem had hung an old string ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the production of great men and women than by calling your attention to the difference between vegetation in valleys and upon mountains. In the valley you find the oak and elm tossing their branches defiantly to the storm, and as you advance up the mountain side the hemlock, the pine, the birch, the spruce, the fir, and finally you come to little dwarfed trees, that look like other trees seen through a telescope reversed—every limb twisted as though in pain—getting a scanty subsistence from the miserly crevices of the rocks. You go on and on, until at last the ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... hills. The track was rough and boggy and often blocked by interminable trains of bullock carts laden with logs or dressed lumber, Urga's important exports. Toward the end of the day the way became steeper and wilder, ascending between slopes well wooded with spruce and pine and larch and birch. It was a joy to be in a real forest again. The flowers that grew in great profusion were more beautiful than any I had seen before in North Mongolia, especially the wonderful masses of wild larkspur of a blue so intense that ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... about "cart whips," etc., when I say flogging is not the most degrading punishment in the world. It may be so to a white man in most countries, but how is it to the white boy? That necessary coadjutor of the schoolmaster, the "birch," is never thought to have rendered infamous the unfortunate victim of pedagogue ire; nor did Solomon in his wisdom dream that he was counseling parents to debase their offspring, when he exhorted them not to spoil the child by sparing the rod. Pardon me for recurring to the now ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... river on the West Side of the river nearly South 18 Miles and halted on the upper Side of a large Creek, haveing Crossed 8 Streams 4 of which were Small. this vally is from 10 to 15 Ms. in width tolerably leavel and partially timberd with long leaf & pitch pine, Some cotton wood, Birch, and Sweet willow on the borders of the Streams. I observed 2 Species of Clover in this vally one the white Clover Common in the Western parts of the U. States, the other Species which is much Smaller than either the red or white both it's leaf & blossom the horses are excessively ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... weeks, during which the labour was continued without intermission, and the house was raised of logs, squared and well fitted; the windows and doors were also put in, and the roof well covered in with large squares of birch-bark, firmly fixed on the rafters. The house consisted of one large room, as a dining-room, and the kitchen, with a floor of well-beaten clay, a smaller room, as a sitting-room, and three bed-rooms, all of which were floored; one of the largest ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... scant half mile away. At some distant time there had been an enormous fall of rock. This, disintegrating, had formed a gently-curving breast which sloped down to merge with the valley's floor. Willow and witch alder, stunted birch and poplar had found roothold, clothed it, until only their crowding outposts, thrusting forward in a wavering semicircle, held back seemingly by the blue hordes, showed where it ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... families by four or five. Some of them who had finished their houses earlier than the rest, had already commenced gathering their provisions for the winter. These consisted of the leaves and soft twigs of several species of trees—such as willow, birch, and mulberry—and we saw collections of these floating in the water in front of several ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... Latin or Welsh. Many volumes of chronicles, charters, and historical poems have been published by the Government, by the Corporation of Cardiff, by J. Gwenogvryn Evans, by H. de Grey Birch, and others. But, so far, we have not had the interesting chronicles and poems translated into English as they ought to be, and published in well ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... seized their supplies by theft or open violence. They appealed to Pontiac, and about the only creditable act recorded of that perfidious chief was his agreement to make restitution to the robbed settlers. Pontiac gave them in payment for their purloined property promissory notes drawn on birch-bark and signed with the figure of an otter—the totem to which he belonged—all of which promises to pay, it is said, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... of about thirty, clad in a worn, over-ample jacket which formerly had graced his master's shoulders, and possessed of a nose and a pair of lips whose coarseness communicated to his face rather a sullen expression. Behind the portmanteau came a small dispatch-box of redwood, lined with birch bark, a boot-case, and (wrapped in blue paper) a roast fowl; all of which having been deposited, the coachman departed to look after his horses, and the valet to establish himself in the little dark ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... dig. Yet it is very pretty like all the rest, and tells its own tale. There is nothing bold or vicious or vulpine in it, and his timid, harmless character is published at every leap. He abounds in dense woods, preferring localities filled with a small undergrowth of beech and birch, upon the bark of which he feeds. Nature is rather partial to him, and matches his extreme local habits and character with a suit that corresponds with his surroundings,—reddish gray in summer ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... islands, the birch, the hazel, the alder, and the ash, cast their shadows over the water, and are there reflected in their minutest lineaments; nor are their trunks and branches more sharply defined in the air above, than they are ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the silver Trent, The whispering birch by every zephyr bent, The woody island, and the naked mead, The lowly hut half hid in groves of reed, The rural wicket, and the rural stile, And frequent interspersed, the woodman's pile. Above, below, where'er I turn my eyes, Rocks, waters, ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... the lodge gates that they usually set forth; more convenient for their purpose was a postern in the wall which enclosed the greater part of Rivenoak; the approach to it was from the back of the house, across a paddock, and through a birch copse, where stood an old summer-house, now rarely entered. Constance, with her own key, had just unlocked the door in the wall; she ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... brigade had reached the post assigned to it, high up on the hill; or that Tytler had worked round to the village in the enemy's rear. Some attacks which were made upon the Afghans were repulsed, with loss. Major Birch and Lieutenant Fitzgerald were killed, and Captain Maclean wounded; and between thirty and forty of the rank and file were killed, or wounded. As the fort and its defenses could not have been carried by direct attack, without ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... newspapers were deposited in the bow. Holliday waved his hand. The Druro churned the water and swung out into midstream again. Bennie looked curiously after her. To the north lay a sandy shore dotted by a scraggy forest of dwarf spruce and birch. A few fishing huts and a mass of wooden shanties fringed the forest. To the east, seaward, many miles down that great stretch of treacherous, sullen river waited a gray bank of fog. But overhead the air ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... train at 11 o'clock yesterday, and arrived at Moscow about nine this morning. The road, with but little exception, is flat and uninteresting. The forests are immense, mostly of firs and birch, which being thickly set grow small. Many of the stations are superb. The line of railway did not conduct us near any towns or villages that I could observe, but by some of the poorest scattered huts I ever saw ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... pebbled shore, O'erhung with wild woods, thickening green; The fragrant birch, and hawthorn hoar, Twined amorous round the raptured scene; The flowers sprang wanton to be prest, The birds sang love on every spray,— Till soon, too soon, the glowing west Proclaimed the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... easier to punish a child for a misdeed, than to explain and argue. But the gentler method is better. Yet we all admit that the birch must be used sometimes. However, if it is used only for serious trangressions, the child will have a sense of proportion regarding what offenses are grave. But for ordinary small misdemeanors I think we need a new motto: Spoil the rod ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... hot, slanted much as the two rose into oak woodlands to the right of the pike and beyond it. Here the air was cool and light. As they ascended higher, and oaks gave place to chestnut and mountain-birch, wide views opened around and far beneath. In the south spread the green fields and red fallows of Clearwater, bathed in the sheen of the lingering sun. Miles away two white points were the spires ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... found that home, and had caught only one or two glimpses of Tommy Tit. Now, with household cares ended and his good-sized family properly started in life, Tommy Tit was no longer interested in the snug little home he had built in a hollow birch-stub, and he and Mrs. Chickadee spent their time flitting about hither, thither, and yon, spreading good cheer. Every time Peter visited the Old Orchard he found him there, and as Tommy was always ready ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... Will!" Like wretch o'ertaken in his track, With stolen chattels on his back, Will hung his head in fear and shame, And to the awful presence came,— A great, green, bashful simpleton, The butt of all good-natured fun. With smile suppressed, and birch upraised, The thunderer faltered,—"I'm amazed That you, my biggest pupil, should Be guilty of an act so rude! Before the whole set school to boot— What evil genius put you to't?" "'Twas she herself, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... passed was exceedingly rich and fertile. Hochelaga stood in the midst of great fields of Indian corn; it was of a circular form, containing about fifty large huts, each fifty paces long and from fourteen to fifteen wide, all built in the shape of tunnels, formed of wood, and covered with birch bark; the dwellings were divided into several rooms, surrounding an open court in the center, where the fires burned. Three rows of palisades encircled the town, with only one entrance; above the gate, and over the whole length of ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... disappearance. I sat on my hemlock floor until the gray of twilight and studied Latin, keeping my mind on the text; save when a squirrel ventured out and glided bushy trained and sinuous before me, or the marble birches with ebony limbs, drew me to gloat on them. The white birch is a woman and a goddess. I have associated her forever with that afternoon. Her poor cousin the poplar, often so like her as to deceive you until ashen bough and rounded leaf instruct the eye, always grows near her like a protecting servant. The poor ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... treating their children with a strictness unknown to American boys and girls of to-day. Even small acts of disrespect or disobedience were promptly punished, and to aid in the work of correction the Bryant home as well as that of almost every neighbor was provided with a good-sized bundle of birch sticks hanging warningly on the kitchen wall. As the poet himself tells us in a sketch of his early life, the children looked upon the older people of the family with so much awe that they could not go to them freely nor act ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... eddies in the canyons, coming from most unexpected and unwelcome directions and often from all points of the compass in turn. Usually ready-made camps, overhanging cliffs, were available. When they were not, my ingenuity rose to the occasion and I thatched together twigs of willow or birch, or even spruce or pine, though the latter were stiffer and more difficult to fit tightly together. Beginning at the bottom, I worked upward, lapping each successive layer over the one beneath, as in laying shingles, and pointing the tips of ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... take notice, I was apparently capable of holding extended conversations in an unknown dialect with birds and red squirrels. Once I fell asleep in my cradle, suspended five or six feet from the ground, while Uncheedah was some distance away, gathering birch bark for a canoe. A squirrel had found it convenient to come upon the bow of my cradle and nibble his hickory nut, until he awoke me by dropping the crumbs of his meal. It was a common thing for birds to alight on my ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... saying, he went to the side of the little maiden Musk-rat, and whispered certain words in her ear. When he had done this, he went to the forest near them, cut down a young pine-tree, dug up a root of the hemlock, took a spruce cone, an oak acorn, a hickery nut, and a birch-leaf, and laid them all in the fire which the Nanticoke had kindled. While they were burning, he walked round the fire muttering many words in an unknown tongue, and striking the earth repeatedly with the stone staff which he held in his hand. ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... always Till my songs grew poor and poorer, Till the dells alone would hear me, Only the deaf fir-trees listen? Not in life is she, my mother, She no longer is aboveground; She, the golden, cannot hear me, 'T is the fir-trees now that hear me, 'T is the pine-tops understand me, And the birch-crowns full of goodness, And the ash-trees now that love me! Small and weak my mother left me, Like a lark upon the cliff-top, Like a young thrush 'mid the flintstones In the guardianship of strangers, In the keeping of the stepdame. She would ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... passed from the goldenrod's plume, The purple-hued asters still linger in bloom; The birch is bright yellow, the sumachs are red, The maples like ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... walked Andy. There were parts of those hills where he walked that probably nobody, not even the Indian, ever traversed. Anything could happen there—where the woods are dark with pine or sunny with birch, and where echoes are the only memory (and they never last long). It was so far away, up in through there; as I've said, anything could happen there and we would never hear of it. All day long the cold brooks ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and shows shapely beards and comely faces and toilettes ranged about the wall. The bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent round in scalding thimblefuls. So a good hour or two may pass with song and jest. And then we go home in the moonlit morning, straggling a good deal among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever called together again, as one of our leaders winds his horn. Perhaps some one of the party will not heed the summons, but chooses out some by-way of his own. As he follows the winding sandy road, he hears the flourishes grow fainter ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have but little motion, the dam is almost straight; but when the current is more rapid, it is always made with a considerable curve, convex towards the stream. The materials made use of are drift-wood, green willows, birch, and poplars if they can be got; also mud and stones, intermixed in such a manner as must evidently contribute to the strength of the dam; but there is no other order or method observed in the dams, except that of the work being carried on with a regular sweep, and ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... they came to a small, clear, swift brook, crossed by a big white-birch log. Elizabeth Ann was horribly afraid to set foot on it, but with little Molly's hand holding tightly to hers she was ashamed to say she was afraid. Ralph skipped across, swinging the pail to show how easy it was for him. Ellen followed more slowly, and ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... coast of Labrador, and there had encountered their first "natives", members of some Algonkin tribe from Canada, who had come north for seal fishing (Cartier is clever enough to notice and describe their birch-bark canoes). After examining the west coast of Newfoundland, Cartier's ships sailed on past the Magdalen Islands (stopping every now and then off some islet to collect supplies of sea birds, for the rocky ground was covered with them ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... runs for a great part of the way up the valley of a stream, a favourite with anglers and with midges, full of falls and pools, and shaded by willows and natural woods of birch. Here and there, but at great distances, a byway branches off, and a gaunt farmhouse may be descried above in a fold of the hill; but the more part of the time, the road would be quite empty of passage and the hills of habitation. Hermiston parish is one of the least populous in Scotland; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cursing, two more men came from obscurity with fish dangling from birch twigs. The pudgy man made an obviously herculean struggle and a meal was prepared. As he was drinking his cup of coffee, he suddenly spilled it and swore. The ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... face and tore deep through the skin before he could lift his wide-flung arms to protect it. And then, almost before he realized what had happened, she stood back, groping blindly away from him until her hands found a birch sapling. She clung to it with a desperately tight clasp as if to hold herself erect. A little spot of red flecked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at her throat as ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... Bernouilli. Berthelot. Berwick (Duke of). Berwickshire. Berwick-upon-Tweed. Beryllium. Besancon. Bessemer, Sir Henry. Bet and Betting. Betrothal. Beyle. Bezique. Bhagalpur. Bible Christians. Bichromates and Chromates. Bidder. Bigamy. Bijapur. Bikanir. Bilaspur. Bilbao. Billiards. Binomial. Birch. Birkenhead. Birmingham. Birney, James G. Biron, Armand ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... to its pebbled shore, O'erhung with wild woods, shorn of green; The leafless birch and hawthorn hoar Were planted round the wintry scene; No flowers sprang wanton to be pressed— No birds sang love on every spray— But brightest yet o'er all the rest Will ever shine ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... curbs to headstrong steeds,— Which for this fourteen years we have let sleep, Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave, That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers, Having bound up the threat'ning twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sight For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead; And liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... we had to wade, or by the side of which we encamped at night; infinite perspectives of heather; infinite quantities of moorfowl; here and there, by a stream-side, small and pretty clumps of willows or the silver birch; here and there, the ruins of ancient and inconsiderable fortresses—made the unchanging characters of the scene. Occasionally, but only in the distance, we could perceive the smoke of a small town or of an isolated ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Latin and Greek,—so far is clear enough, even to eyes peering myopic through horn-lensed editorial spectacles,—but naught farther? O purblind, well-meaning, altogether fuscous Melesigenes-Wilbur, there are things in him incommunicable by stroke of birch! Did it ever enter that old bewildered head of thine that there was the Possibility of the Infinite in him? To thee, quite wingless (and even featherless) biped, has not so much even as a dream of wings ever come? "Talented young parishioner"? Among the Arts whereof thou art Magister, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... Night, with none but the Snow under her, and the Heaven over her, in a misty and rainy season. She sent then unto a French Priest, that he would speak unto her Squaw Mistress, who then, without condescending to look upon her, allow'd her a little Birch-Rind, to cover her Head from the Injuries of the Weather, and a little bit of dried Moose, which being boiled, she drunk the Broth, and gave it unto ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... of fields of clover, or of birch-woods, or of apple-trees and berry bushes, but that summer took its character from the climbing-roses. The bright, delicate buds, that could resist neither wind nor rain, the light, waving, pale-green ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... the frozen river. The houses on the other shore, each surrounded with its patch of cleared land, were sadly distant from one another. Behind the clearings, and on either side of them to the river's bank, it was always forest: a dark green background of cypress against which a lonely birch tree stood out here and there, its bole naked and white as the ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... began to look about. There was a moon, the evening was calm, and the dew sparkled on the grass by the hedgerows. A thick wood bordered one side of the road, which went up a long hill, and pale birch trunks that caught the light stood out against dusky firs. Now and then a rabbit ran across the road and plunged into the grass, and presently there was a sharp rattle of wings. A flock of wood-pigeons circled round in the moonlight and ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... stir the cocoons with those whisks of peeled birch?" inquired Pierre curiously. "What are they ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... that of discovering some short cut to the high road of mental acquirement. The toilsome learner's "Progress" through the barren outset of the alphabet; the slough of despond of seven syllables, endangered as they both are by the frequent appearance of the compulsive birch of the Mr. Worldly-wisemen who teach the young idea how to shoot, must ever be looked upon as a probation, the power of avoiding which is "a consummation devoutly to be wished." Imbued with this feeling, the more speculative of past ages have frequently attempted to arrive, by external ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... 'lays his blanket near the deerskin she had laid for herself. "Good," he muttered, "this is my wife."' She refuses to eat the beavers he has shot, but at night he hears a noise, 'krch, krch, as if beavers were gnawing wood.' He sees, by the glimmer of the fire, his wife nibbling birch twigs. In fact, the good little wife is a beaver, as the pretty Indian girl was a frog. The pair lived happily till spring came and the snow melted and the streams ran full. Then his wife implored the hunter to build her a bridge ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... than Elizabeth did when we left Godmersham. I had only a glimpse at the child, who was asleep; but Miss Debary told me that his eyes were large, dark, and handsome. She looks much as she used to do, is netting herself a gown in worsteds, and wears what Mrs. Birch would call a pot hat. A short and ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... to a point higher than it had ever reached within the memory of any body in the settlement. Marie is venturesome, and since a child has shown a keen delight in going upon boats, or paddling a canoe; so one day, during the visit which I have mentioned, she got into a birch that swung in a little pond formed behind her uncle's premises by the over-flowing of the stream's channel. Untying the canoe, she seized the blade and began to paddle about in the lazy water. Presently ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... beauty in the scene as they wearily led two packhorses through the thin, scattered trees, with Benson lagging a short distance behind. They had spent some time crossing a wide stretch of rolling country dotted with clumps of poplar and birch, which was still sparsely inhabited; and now they were compelled to pick their way among fallen branches and patches of muskeg, for the ground was marshy and their feet sank ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... afterwards Earl of Halifax, who was then at the head of the treasury. He had been introduced to Mr. Montague by Congreve, who with others was desirous of honouring the descendant of so great a poet. Dr. Birch describes him as a man somewhat advanced in years, but unable to give any account of the works of his ancestor which are wanting. The family has been since very ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... cowslips, oxslips, arums, orchises, wild hyacinths, ground ivy, pansies, strawberries, heart's-ease, formed a small part of the Flora of that wild hedgerow. How profusely they covered the sunny open slope under the weeping birch, 'the lady of the woods'—and how often have I started to see the early innocent brown snake, who loved the spot as well as I did, winding along the young blossoms, or rustling amongst the fallen ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... sheet of water, almost entirely surrounded by trees, with now and then an opening bordered by a plot of grass, or a bend of the grand walk which ran round it. Here and there was an island with a few birch-trees or willows growing on it, and over the trees could be seen, rising in the distance, a downy hill, now sprinkled with some snow which had fallen the night before the frost regularly set in, and which had thus not affected the surface ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... Mr. Birch has contributed a number of spirited illustrations that bring clearly before the eye the forms of Roland and his friend Oliver, of Ogier, the Dane, and other famous knights and paladins, as well as the scenes of ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... that side of the lake which had hitherto been little else than a moorish ridge. After turning a rocky point we came to a bay closed in by rocks and steep woods, chiefly of full-grown birch. The lake was elsewhere ruffled, but at the entrance of this bay the breezes sunk, and it was calm: a small island was near, and the opposite shore, covered with wood, looked soft through the misty rain. William, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... existence precisely the same whether we live in a fine mansion with lap-dogs to tend, or sort rags in a workhouse? Does it make much difference whether we shall hide our gray heads beneath lace or a handkerchief striped with blue and red; whether we sweep a crossing with a birch broom, or the steps of the Tuileries with satins; whether we sit beside a gilded hearth, or cower over the ashes in a red earthen pot; whether we go to the Opera or look on in the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... its groves of birch Still looks the tower of Kallundborg church, Where, first at its altar, a wedded pair, Stood Helva of Nesvek and ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... to the Androscoggin and often stopped at this lake, midway, to fish in the spring, and again in winter to hunt for moose, then snowbound in their "yards." On snowshoes, or paddling their birch canoes along the pine-shadowed streams, these tawny, pre-Columbian warriors came and camped on the Pennesseewassee; we still pick up their flint arrow-heads along the shore; and it may even be that the short, brown Skraellings ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... suffused with a long stream of light, narrowing as it approached the low horizon. But the line of the trees on the hither side of this London lake was heavier than the spiritual trees in the picture entitled "By the Water-side," and there was not anywhere the beauty of the broken birch that leans over the lake in "Le Lac de Garde." Then I thought of "The Ravine," for the darkening island reminded me of the hillside in the picture. But the St. James's Park sky lacked the refined concentration of light in "The Ravine," so beautifully placed, low down ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... the shadow of the birch-trees, in the summer stillness of that hour, she told him the story of her love, of her flight, and of the misery of these long, toilsome five ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring,—compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations?—From this, that the natural landscape is effected, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... securely to it and it was planted on one of the little snow turrets of the summit—the sign of our redemption, high above North America. Only some peaks in the Andes and some peaks in the Himalayas rise above it in all the world. It was of light, dry birch and, though six feet in length, so slender that we think it may weather many a gale. And Walter thrust it into the snow so firmly at a blow that it could not be withdrawn again. Then we gathered about it and said the ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... for the cows; Heard the horse whinnying for his corn; And sharply clashing horn on horn, Impatient down the stanchion rows, 15 The cattle shake their walnut bows; While peering from his early perch Upon the scaffold's pole of birch, The cock his crested helmet bent And down his querulous ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... distant therefrom, to its source; thence in a straight line to a point on the western shore of Lake Winnipegoosis due west from the most northern extremity of Waterhen Lake, thence east to the centre of Lake Winnipegoosis, thence northwardly through the middle of the said lake (including Birch Island) to the mouth of Red Deer River, thence westwardly and south-westwardly along and including the said Red Deer River and its lakes, Red Deer and Etoimami, to the source of its western branch, thence in a straight line to the source ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... get to the wood-box first?" That was certainly a question, and it was also a question whose neck would be broken first, to judge from the way in which they rushed out of the room. But they came back safely, strange to say, Nibble in advance, with a huge stick of yellow birch nearly as large as himself, while Brighteyes ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... way from the mouth, full a mile wide. Into this main river run innumerable smaller rivers, there called CREEKS. On the sides of these creeks the land is, in places, clear of rocks; it is, in these places, generally good and productive; the trees that grow here are the birch, the maple, and others of the deciduous class; natural meadows here and there present themselves; and some of these spots far surpass in rural beauty any other that my eyes ever beheld; the creeks, abounding towards their sources ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... a long inlet of the sea, extending up country over a score of miles. The district is hilly, and is covered by a forest of rather small trees, spruce and birch, but further inland the hills are generally bare. There are comparatively few European ...
— Report by the Governor on a Visit to the Micmac Indians at Bay d'Espoir - Colonial Reports, Miscellaneous. No. 54. Newfoundland • William MacGregor
... other's throats. But luckily at this instant a curtain was pushed aside as if by some waiting listener, and a thin man entered, dressed in cap and gown,—which would have been simply academic but for his carrying in one hand behind him a bundle of birch twigs. It was Dr. Haustus Pilgrim, a noted London practitioner and specialist, dressed as "Ye Olde-fashioned Pedagogue." He was presumably spending his holiday on the Nile in a large dahabiyeh with a number of friends, among whom ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... arranged, Piskaret drew a long breath, grasped his war-club, and stealthily pushing aside the loose birch-bark door-flap of the nearest lodge, peeped inside. By the ember light he saw that every Iroquois, man and woman, was fast asleep, under furs, on spruce boughs ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... returned Jane, "they didn't know where you were, really. And those country officers have threatened us before, you know. I suppose they are a little bit jealous that we girls and not their boys, are scattered over the landscape with yells and other appropriate noises. Sit down" (they had reached a birch bench), "I must tell ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... "thimell-pie" of the dame's school—a smart tapping on the head with a heavy thimble—to belaboring with a heavy walnut stick or oaken ruler. Master Lovell, that tigerish Boston teacher, whipped the culprit with birch rods and forced another scholar to hold the sufferer on his back. Other schoolmasters whipped on the soles of the feet, and one teacher roared out, "Oh the Caitiffs! it is good for them." Not only were children whipped, but ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... hillock of mishapen stones Is not a ruin of the ancient time, Nor, as perchance thou rashly deem'st, the Cairn Of some old British Chief: 'tis nothing more Than the rude embryo of a little dome Or pleasure-house, which was to have been built Among the birch-trees of this rocky isle. But, as it chanc'd, Sir William having learn'd That from the shore a full-grown man might wade, And make himself a freeman of this spot At any hour he chose, the Knight forthwith Desisted, and the quarry and the mound Are monuments of his unfinish'd task.— The block ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... the swells grew larger. Birch and tamarack swamps alternated with dry ridges on which an inferior pine still grew. The swamps were dense tangles of broken and uprooted trees. Slender pike-like stumps of fire-devastated firs rose here and there, black ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... and long dark hair; but developed by her white-man training so that the shy Indian girl had given place to the alert, resourceful world-woman, at home equally in the salons of the rich and learned or in the stern of the birch canoe, where, with paddle poised, she was in absolute and fearless control, watching, warring and winning against the grim rocks that grinned out of the white rapids to tear the frail craft and ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... the sheathing, three feet of the third strake under the wale were found to be stove in, and the timbers within started. The farther they proceeded in removing the sheathing, the more they discovered the decayed state of the ship's hull. The chief damage was repaired with a birch tree, which had been cut down when they were there before, and was the only one in the neighbourhood large enough for the purpose; but Captain King gave orders that no more sheathing should be ripped off, being apprehensive that further decayed planks ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... in at the first door, when Maslova, stooping and pushing a large heap of rubbish and dust towards the stove with a handleless birch broom, came out of the other. She had a white jacket on, her skirt was tucked up, and a kerchief, drawn down to her eyebrows, protected her hair from the dust. When she saw Nekhludoff, she drew herself up, flushing and animated, put down ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... as I write comes back to me the bright vision of an Alpine valley—blue sky above, glittering snow, bare grey or rich red rock, dark pines here and there, mixed with bright green larches, then patches of smooth alp, with clumps of birch and beech, and dotted with brown chalets; then below them rock again, and wood, but this time with more deciduous trees; and then the valley itself, with emerald meadows, interspersed with alder copses, threaded together by a silver stream; and I almost fancy I can hear the ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... They did all the work on the early pioneer farm. They were the gods whose rude strength first broke the soil. They could live where the moose and the deer could. If there was no clover or timothy to be had, then the twigs of the basswood and birch would do. Before there were yet fields given up to grass, they found ample pasturage in the woods. Their wide-spreading horns gleamed in the duskiness, and their paths and the paths of the cows became the future roads and highways, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... the red gooseberry (Ribes Grossularia) and the red oranges. The red hue is far more common in leaves, as seen among herbs, in cultivated varieties of Coleus and in the brown leaved form of the ordinary white clover, among trees and shrubs in the hazelnut (Corylus), the beech (Fagus), the birch (Betula), the barberry (Berberis) and many others. But though most of these forms are very ornamental and abundant [134] in parks and gardens, little is as yet known concerning the origin of their ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... spring rain had fallen the day before, and now wherever the ground was not paved the grass shone green. The birch trees in the gardens looked as if they were strewn with green fluff, the wild cherry and the poplars unrolled their long, balmy buds, and in shops and dwelling-houses the double window-frames were being removed ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... fern, while the deer stole by. The bracken grove of irretrievable delights, of golden minutes in the long marriage of heaven and earth! The bracken grove, sacred to stags, to strange tree-stump fauns leaping around the silver whiteness of a birch-tree nymph at ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... daughter were meantime proceeding along a dark path through oak and birch woods, constantly ascending, until the oak grew stunted and disappeared, and the opening glades showed steep, stony, torrent-furrowed ramparts of hillside above them, looking to Christina's eyes as if she were set to climb ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cannot stay what they are under such influences. Mollusca live two hundred fathoms down in the Norwegian seas. The Siberian stag grows fat on the stunted growth of Altaian peaks. The Hedysarium thrives amid the desolation of Sahara. Tufts of osier and birch grow on the hot lips of volcanic Schneehalten. But good character and a useful ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... manner and stages of its construction may be interesting. Poles, twelve or fourteen feet long, are placed in the ground, these meeting at the top, and leaving an opening through which the smoke may escape. Over the poles are placed nets, made of flags, or birch bark, and, sometimes, the ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... thir'ty birch ci'der bit'ter thirst'y chirp mi'ser dif'fer third'ly flirt spi'der din'ner birch'en girl vi'per frit'ter chirp'er shirt cli'ent lit'ter girl'ish squirm gi'ant riv'er gird'er squirt i'tem shiv'er stir'less third ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... caught on fire last Tuesday night. He reckons it was caused by a defective flue, for the fire caught in the north wing. This is one of Plum's bon mots, however. He tries to make light of it, but the wood he has been using all winter was white birch, and when he got a big dose of hickory at the same place last week it was so dark that he didn't notice the difference, and before he knew it he had a bigger fire than he had allowed. In the midst of a pleasant flow of conversation gas collected in the wood and caused ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... thought I, why should not others be amused also? In a few days Dr. Birch's young friends will be expected to reassemble at Rodwell Regis, where they will learn everything that is useful, and under the eyes of careful ushers continue the business of their ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bears the date of the third month of the second season of the thirty-fifth year of Darius I.: Khabbisha's rebellion therefore broke out between June and September, 486. Stern makes this prince to have been of Libyan origin. From the form of his name, Revillout has supposed that he was an Arab, and Birch was inclined to think that he was a Persian satrap who made a similar attempt to that of Aryandes. But nothing is really known of him or of his family previous ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... there, gave the word, and the marine leg, gravely, deliberately descended. There is a magnificent audacity about that sort of performance. The leg was ninety feet long, steel-booted, framed of great timbers, heavy enough to have wrecked the barge like a birch bark canoe if it had got away. It went down bodily into the hold and the steel boot was buried in wheat. Then Pete threw another lever, and in a moment another endless series of cups was carrying the wheat aloft. It went over the cross-head and down a spout, then ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... suddenly, she bursts up a few yards from you, and goes humming through the trees,—the complete triumph of endurance and vigor. Hardy native bird, may your tracks never be fewer, or your visits to the birch-tree less frequent! ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... imperious authority is often attended by very dangerous consequences, and particularly our way of chastising. How much more decent would it be to see their classes strewed with green leaves and fine flowers, than with the bloody stumps of birch and willows? Were it left to my ordering. I should paint the school with the pictures of joy and gladness; Flora and the Graces, as the philosopher Speusippus did his. Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too. Such viands as are proper and wholesome for children, should ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... a long story of operations on the estates—planting birch in the top fields, and eucalyptus in the low meadow, fencing, ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... without fail, That so the soldiers should prevail, 475 Gave all their jewels' worth. Then O ye shepherds of the Church Down, down with Mahomet's creed! Leave not the fighters in the lurch! For if to scourge yourselves you speed 480 Then Rome may spare the birch. You should sell your chalices, Yes and pawn your breviaries, Turn your gourds into flasks, and e'er Of bread and parsnips make your fare, 485 To ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... of furniture arrived on Saturday and is now on exhibition on our third floor. The showing is unsurpassed. Here you will find something to suit you, whether you wish oak, mahogany, walnut or birch. We invite you to pay ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... we speak of, she went to wait for Becky, who would join her as soon as the after-supper chores were done. In the little cave which held a few books, a dipper, and a birch-bark basket for berries, Emily kept a sketching block and a box of pencils, and often amused herself by trying to catch some of the lovely scenes before her. These efforts usually ended in a humbler attempt, and a good study of an oak-tree, ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... Ojibways and Swampy Crees of Canada. A small cavity is scooped out, the body deposited therein, covered with a little dirt, the mound thus formed being covered either with split planks, poles, or birch bark. ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... precipice, with a sheer descent of several hundred feet to the river. It looked down upon the course of the Esk, winding between rocks of lofty height, whose sides were fringed with a tangled mass of shrubs, ferns, and thistles, and whose summits were crowned with thickets of hazel, pine, and birch. On still higher ground, behind the house, and sheltering it from the northern blast, stood a thick wood of cedar, beech, and fir trees. Many winding footpaths led through this wood, and down the rocks and along the edge of the river. A wilder, more picturesque ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... good company—plenty of company! he got Taliesin—Owen Glyndwr—Iolo Morganwg and all the rest of them! and he's quite happy in their company. But once he comes down to live with us he's as rough and prickly as a birch-broom. Indeed he wass nevver used to be like this whatever; 'tis ever since his brother John die, and leave all his ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... to his very girdle? What boy would dare to play, or whisper, or even glance aside from his book, while Master Cheever is on the look-out, behind his spectacles! For such offenders, if any such there be, a rod of birch is hanging over the fire-place, and a heavy ferule lies on ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hard glebe, constricted by its bare and gnarled roots, they draw sustenance from afar; and not another knoll on which the sun so delights to pour his beams. Weeks before any other Sycamore, and almost as early as the alder or the birch—the GLORY OF MOUNT PLEASANT, for so we schoolboys called it, unfolded itself like a banner. You could then see only the low windows of the dwelling—for eaves, roof, and chimneys all disappeared—and then, when you ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the Garry, which here descend in a succession of roaring cataracts and pools. The old road, which ran almost parallel to the river and close upon its edge, was extremely narrow, and wound its way beneath a wall of enormous crags, surmounted by a natural forest of birch, oak, and pine. An army cooped up in that gloomy ravine would have as little chance of escape from the onset of an enterprising partisan corps, as had the Bavarian troops when attacked by the Tyrolese ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... the mother in a low, firm voice, and the little bits of things, scarcely bigger than acorns and but a day old, scattered far (a few inches) apart to hide. One dived under a leaf, another between two roots, a third crawled into a curl of birch-bark, a fourth into a hole, and so on, till all were hidden but one who could find no cover, so squatted on a broad yellow chip and lay very flat, and closed his eyes very tight, sure that now he was safe from being ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... excellent food, while their furs are an important article of trade with the Hudson Bay Company; bringing to the poor Indian his much prized luxury of tea or tobacco, a warm blanket or ammunition. As the Spring comes on the women of the camps will be busy making "sirop" from the birch trees, and dressing the skins of moose or deer which their husbands have killed in the chase. There are also the canoes to be made or repaired for use whenever the eight months' fetters ...
— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas
... the copsewood, and the grand old clumps of timber, exploring the undulations, and the wild nooks and hollows which have each their circumscribed and sylvan charm; a wonderful interest those little park-like broken dells have always had for me; dotted with straggling birch and oak, and here and there a hoary ash tree, with a grand and melancholy grace, dreaming among the songs of wild birds, in their native solitudes, and the brown leaves tipped with golden light, all breathing ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... remarked that trees full of white blossom should not be painted, because they make no picture, just as birches with their foliage are unfit for the foreground of a picture, because the delicate foliage does not adequately balance the white trunk. Said Goethe, "Ruysdael never placed a foliaged birch in the foreground, but only broken birch stems, without leaves. Such a trunk suits the foreground admirably, for its bright ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... most bellicose Highlanders, but that young man dodged cleverly behind Pat Murphy's broad shoulders. "Ye'll think Ah'll not find ye out?" the master shouted triumphantly. "But Ah'll soon do that! Aye, it was at the Birch Crick ye were fightin' like a pack o' wild beasts; ye thought ye were far enough away to be safe. But Ah'll find out who started it!" His eye ranged quickly round the room and fell upon Scotty, sitting open-mouthed ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... men; most of the squaws wore a large blanket over their heads, forming a cloak in which they were shrouded. The wigwams were constructed of long thin poles, fastened at the top, and spread out in a conical form, the whole being covered thickly with slabs of birch-bark. ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... our acacia grove, on the hill, with a few pines near enough for me to hear their oceanic murmur. It is only necessary for me to shut my eyes, to hear every variety of water sounds. The pine gives me the long, majestic swell and retreat of the sea waves; the birch, the silvery tinkle of a pebbly brook; the acacia, the soft fall of a cascade; and all mingled together, a sound of many waters most refreshing to the sense. I thank heaven that we possess a hilltop. No amount of plains could compete with the value of this. To look down on the world ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... promotion to a swifter craft, have they rowed with patient stroke down the lovely lake, still attended by their guide, philosopher, and coxswain,—along banks where herds of young birch-trees overspread the sloping valley and ran down in a blaze of sunshine to the rippling water,—or through the Narrows, where some breeze rocked the boat till trailing shawls and ribbons were water-soaked, and the bold little foam would even send a daring drop over the gunwale, to play at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... minutes of the Royal Society is the following entry: "June 11, 1662. Dr. Pett's brother shewed a draught of the pleasure boat which he intended to make for the king" (Birch's "History of the Royal Society," vol. i., p. 85). Peter Pett had already built a yacht for ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... means unusual for a village or a farmer in the wooded country to clear the land of its native trees and immediately replant saplings of certain introduced varieties about the farmyard or along the streets. In this way a forest growth of oak, elm, beech, butternut, hemlock, basswood, and birch is cleared off to give room for saplings of soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is felt that the inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing would derogate from the dignity that should invest an article which is intended to serve ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... cried the mother in a low, firm voice, and the little bits of things, scarcely bigger than acorns and but a day old, scattered far (a few inches) apart to hide. One dived under a leaf, another between two roots, a third crawled into a curl of birch-bark, a fourth into a hole, and so on, till all were hidden but one who could find no cover, so squatted on a broad yellow chip and lay very flat, and closed his eyes very tight, sure that now he was safe from being seen. They ceased their frightened peeping ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... pioneered in the name of Him who made earth and heaven: but they found nothing which they thought would suit the blessed St. Boniface, save that they stayed a little at the place which is called Ruohen-bah, 'the rough brook,' to see if it would suit; but it would not. So they went back to their birch huts to fast ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... utterly dry up in the summer heats, when you want it most; or, at best, it is a fussy little tormenting river, that won't and can't sail a sloop. What are you going to do about it? You are going to wind up your lead and line, shoulder your birch canoe, as the old sea-kings used, and thrid the deep forests, and scale the purple hills, till you come to water again, when you will unroll your lead and line for another essay. Is that fickleness? What else can you do? Must you launch your bark on the unquiet ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... the steep sides of the encircling hills as far as can be seen, and to the water's edge. The trees, tall and grand, are of three kinds, almost peculiar to Tierra del Fuego. One is a true beech; another, as much birch as beech; the third, an aromatic evergreen of world-wide celebrity—the "Winter's-bark." [Note 2.] But there is also a growth of buried underwood, consisting of arbutus, barberry, fuchsias, flowering currants, and a singular ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... had three sons, one of whom was a noodle. When the old man died, his property was shared between the brothers, but all that the simpleton received was one ox, which he took to the market to sell. On his way he chanced to pass an old birch-tree, which creaked and groaned in the wind. He thinks the tree is offering to buy his ox, and so he says, "Well, you shall have it for twenty roubles." But the tree only creaked and creaked, and he fancied it was asking the ox on credit. "Very good," says he. ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... said Miss Hazel, pensively. 'But what is to become of my poor woods, at that rate? There is an elm with a branch too many on one side; and a birch keeping house lovingly with a hemlock. If "woodcraft" means only ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... strong current, and maintaining a medium breadth of about 200 yards. Its banks, which are clothed with verdure to the water's edge, recede by a gradual slope until they terminate in a high ridge, running parallel to the river on both sides. This ridge yields poplar, birch, and maple, with a few pines, proving the excellence of the soil. The interior, however, is said to ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... to Heaven had been used to build the loggia wing, and he considered the name of "Stormfield" as a substitute. When, presently, the summer storms gathered on that rock-bound, open hill, with its wide reaches of vine and shrub-wild, fierce storms that bent the birch and cedar, and strained at the bay and huckleberry, with lightning and turbulent wind and thunder, followed by the charging rain—the name seemed to become peculiarly appropriate. Standing with his head bared to the tumult, his white hair tossing in the blast, and looking out ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... warm you well If they're old and dry; Larch logs of pine woods smell, But the sparks will fly. Beech logs for Christmas-time, Yew logs heat well; "Scotch" logs it is a crime For anyone to sell. Birch logs will burn too fast, Chestnut scarce at all; Hawthorn logs are good to last If cut in the Fall. Holly logs will burn like wax, You should burn them green; Elm logs like smouldering flax, No flame to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... the hazel bushes she hastened, nor noticed that the evening shadows fell; on past the birch groves she ran, nor noticed that ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... of convenience. To every law there are counsels attached. A law may be said to be a nucleus of precept, having an envelope of counsel. Every law has also a pendent called punishment for those who break it: this is called the sanction of the law. A law is also for promulgation, as a birch rod for application. The promulgation, or application, brings the law home to the subject, but is not part of the law itself. So much for ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... and take their places at a long pine table, painted turkey red, on ordinary wooden kitchen chairs, also red! The floral decoration is of laurel leaves in vases made of preserve jars covered with birch bark. Glass and china is of the cheapest. But there are a long centerpiece of hemstitched crash and crash doilies, and there are "real" napkins, and at each plate a birch bark napkin ring with a number on it. Mrs. Worldly looks at her napkin ring as though it were an insect. One or two of the others ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... shoulders, and legs bare below the knee, and to him the charge of the flock was committed, with signs which he evidently understood and replied to with a gruff 'Ay, ay!' The three went on the way, over the slope of a hill, partly clothed with heather, holly and birch trees, as it rose above the moss. Hob led the pony, and there was something in his grim air and manner that hindered any conversation between the two young people. Only Hal from time to time gathered ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... but many ranges of hills. Norway monopolizes almost entirely the mountain system of the great northern peninsula, but the large forests of pine, fir, and birch, which cover so much of the country, are common to both. Though iron is found in large deposits in Norway, it is still more abundant in Sweden, where it is chiefly of the magnetic kind, yielding when properly smelted the ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... formally, "that I have not had the honor of meeting Miss Westfall." But he saw vividly again a girl straight and slender as a silver birch, with firm, wind-bright skin and dark, mocking eyes. There were hemlocks and a dog—and Dick Sherrill had been talkative over billiards the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... bridge, and then past the trunk of the birch tree, and then past the old hag who sat in the cleft of the rock spinning, and they went by so fast that Cinderlad could not hear what the old hag screeched after him, but just heard enough to understand that she was ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... under the wale were found to be stove in, and the timbers within started. The farther they proceeded in removing the sheathing, the more they discovered the decayed state of the ship's hull. The chief damage was repaired with a birch tree, which had been cut down when they were there before, and was the only one in the neighbourhood large enough for the purpose; but Captain King gave orders that no more sheathing should be ripped off, being apprehensive that further decayed planks might be met ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... wound along the feet of the mountains through a pastoral valley, bright with verdure, and varied with groves of dwarf oak, beech and sycamore, under whose branches herds of cattle reposed. The mountain-ash too, and the weeping birch, often threw their pendant foliage over the steeps above, where the scanty soil scarcely concealed their roots, and where their light branches waved to every breeze that fluttered from ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... days, always ascending, and they were coming now to a wooded country. They crossed several creeks, flowing down from the higher mountains, and along the beds of these they found cottonwood, ash, box elder, elm, and birch. On the steeper slops were numerous cedar brakes and also groves of yellow pine. There was very little undergrowth, but the grass grew in abundance. Although it was now somewhat dry, the horses and mules ate it eagerly. The buffaloes did not appear here, but they saw many ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... torches unnecessary. Around it were seated six or seven hardy and athletic young men, some drawing coarse tools carefully through the curvatures of ox-bows, others scraping down the helves of axes, or perhaps fashioning sticks of birch into homely but convenient brooms. A demure, side-looking young woman kept her great wheel in motion; while one or two others were passing from room to room, with the notable and stirring industry of handmaidens, busied ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... the life of Prince Henry, Doctor Birch has given us an account of the prices of butcher's meat as commonly paid by that prince. It is there said, that the four quarters of an ox, weighing six hundred pounds, usually cost him nine pounds ten shillings, or thereabouts; that is thirty-one shillings and eight-pence ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... to outflank Kesselsdorf;—neglecting Grune (refusing Grune, as the soldiers say):—"our horse of the right wing reached from the Wood called Lerchenbusoh (LARCH-BUSH) rightward as far as Freyberg road; foot all between that Lerchenbusch and the big Birch-tree on the road to Wilsdruf; horse of the left wing, from there to Roitsch." [Stille (p. 181), who was present. See Plan.] It was about two P.M. before the old man got all his deployments completed; what corps of his, deploying this way or that, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... hearing from some wandering Indians of a great river which they termed the "Father of Waters," determined to visit it. He floated in a birch-bark canoe down the Wisconsin to the Mississippi (1673), and thence to the mouth of ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... of her meal, wrapped them in a bit of silver birch-bark, unrolled her bundle, and placed them there. Then she drained the tin cup of its chilly water, and, still sitting there cross-legged on the rock, tied the little cup to her girdle. It seemed to me, there in the dusk, that she smiled very faintly; and if it was so it was the first smile I ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Soon after he found seven grains of this cereal on the sea-shore and consulted the birds how best to plant them. They advised him to fell the forests, burn the branches, and plant the barley in the land thus cleared. While obeying these directions in the main, Wainamoinen allowed the birch to stand, declaring there must be some place where the cuckoo and the eagle could build their nests. These two birds, greatly pleased by this attention, watched Wainamoinen as he sowed his seed, and heard him chant a prayer to Ukko, Father of Heaven, to send down rain to help it germinate. This ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... said I. 'And if anybody knows what gray wackey is, I ought; but I don't find it so easy to repose after it as you may. Gray means the gray birch rod, dear, and wackey means layin' it on. We always called it gray whackey in school, when a ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... fifty-one, another ten years and sixty-one. All to be lived here? Yes, I have sworn it. Not Arcady, not Utopia, only Muskoka, but very dear to me. There is the forest primeval! I know everything in it from the Indian pipe—clammy white thing, but how pretty!—to that great birch there with the bark peeling off in pieces a yard wide. There is the lovely Shadow river. Masses of cardinal flowers grow there in the summer, and when I take my boat up its dark waters I feel that no human being ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... across the Harlem. To boat it means to be beaten in detail. I tell you, gentlemen, that the only chance I might have in an attempt upon any part of Washington's army must be if he advances. In formal council, Generals Kniphausen, Birch, and Robertson sustain me; and, believing I am right, I am prepared to suffer injustice and calumny in silence from my detractors here in New York ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... 5th of November, myself of course among the number; many of them were large boys, and we were left together while Griffith was busily employed making up a number of rods out of half a dozen new birch brooms, a great many dozens of which he bought every year at Weyhill fair, expressly for that purpose. While he was thus amiably occupied, although I was one of the smallest and youngest among them, I volunteered to recommend forcible resistance; and proposed, if they would all stick together, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... were being rubbed against the birch broom that, rooted at Kentish back doors, stands to receive on its purple twigs the scrapings of ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... Started in a birch canoe for Sault St Marie, a small town built under the rapids of that name, which pour out a portion of the waters of Lake Superior. Two American gentlemen, one a member of Congress, and the other belonging to the American Fur Company, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... inhabitants. Higher up, on the uneven surface of the plateau, are scattered villages built on limestone foundations—tiny fortresses, like Rumigny and Champlat, the scene of hard-fought battles. Almost the entire surface is covered with forests of pine and oak and birch. These are the woods of Le Roi, Courton, Pourcy, and Reims, where hand-to-hand fighting went on for more than a fortnight, British, Italians, and French succeeding at first in checking the enemy ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... Queen Elizabeth, vol. i. p. 61. Monson (p. 267) says that there were only fourteen thousand soldiers and four thousand seamen in the whole on this expedition: but the account contained in Dr. Birch is given by one of the most considerable of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of Theben on a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... will ever forget it as long as they live. The hit does that; for a kick is a very striking thing, that's a fact. There has been no good scholars since birch rods went out o' school, and sentiment ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the topmost source—fons et origo—of our chosen river. This single spring, crystal-clear and ice-cold, gushing out of the hillside in a forest of spruce and yellow birch and sugar maple, gave us the clue that we must follow for a week ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... O Hiawatha, Take your arrows, jasper-headed, Take your war-club, Puggawaugun, And your mittens, Minjekahwan, And your birch canoe for sailing, And the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... an illustration in Arundale- Bonomi-Birch's Gallery of Antiquities from the British Museum, pl. 31. The king thus represented is Thutmosis II. of the XVIIIth dynasty; the spear, surmounted by a man's head, which the double holds in his hand, probably recalls ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... a confused and intricate way as if it were a collection of puzzles." The poor boys, he declared, were almost frightened to death. They needed skins of tin; they were beaten with fists, with canes and with birch-rods till the blood streamed forth; they were covered with scars, stripes, spots and weals; and thus they had learned to hate the schools and ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... the principle that dictates the rotation of ordinary crops, just as the leguminous plants alternate satisfactorily with the graminaceous, or, as I have read that in Norway, where a fir forest has been cut, birch will spring up ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... sound. I was charmed by the forest scenery through which we passed. The pine, spruce, and fir trees, of the greatest variety of form, were completely coated with frozen snow, and stood as immovable as forests of bronze incrusted with silver. The delicate twigs of the weeping birch resembled sprays of crystal, of a thousand airy and exquisite patterns. There was no wind, except in the open glades between the woods, where the frozen lakes spread out like meadow intervals. As we approached the first station there were signs of cultivation—fields ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... The boat was already some distance out on the sea, and the wind, which blew from land, was driving it still further out. Lasse was frightened and began to cry. But there was no one on the shore to hear him. Only a big crow perched alone in the birch tree; and the gardener's black cat sat under the birch tree, waiting to catch the crow. Neither of them troubled themselves in the least about Little Lasse, who ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... be, every pupil dreads him, For he sees, hears, knows, everything that's doing. On the urchin's forehead he can see it written. He divines who laughs, idles, yawns, or chatters, Who plays tricks on others, or in prayer-time's lazy. With its shoots, the birch-rod lying there beside him Knows how all misdeeds in a trice are settled. Surely by ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... crossed the Mississippi river, we know not how, perhaps in the birch canoe of some friendly Indian, perhaps on a raft, swimming the horses. They then continued their journey two hundred miles farther west, till they reached a spot far enough from neighbors and from civilization to suit the taste even ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... for Assyria is furnished by the magnificent bronze gates of Balawat, now in The British Museum. See Birch and Pinches, The Bronze Ornaments of the Palace ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... entering, in our downward course, the Pleistocene period, we at length find ourselves among familiar species. On old terrestrial surfaces, that date before the times of the glacial period, and underlie the boulder clay, the remains of forests of oak, birch, hazel, and fir have been detected,—all of the familiar species indigenous to the country, and which still flourish in our native woods. And it was held by the late Professor Edward Forbes, that the most ancient of his five existing British floras,—that ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... from the mows Raked down the herd's grass for the cows; Heard the horse whinnying for his corn; And sharply clashing horn on horn, Impatient down the stanchion rows, 15 The cattle shake their walnut bows; While peering from his early perch Upon the scaffold's pole of birch, The cock his crested helmet bent And down his querulous challenge ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... printing, one could read upon them the owner of every piece of timber, every farm, the acreage in each piece of timber, with a careful estimate of the amount of timber to the acre—also its proportions of spruce, beech, birch, maple, ash. ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... beautiful when it looks like art, and art beautiful when it looks like nature, Schiller gives a large number of concrete illustrations of his theory. Thus a vase is beautiful when, without prejudice to the vase-idea, it looks like a free play of nature. A birch is beautiful when it is tall and slender, an oak when it is crooked; the shape in either case expressing the nature of the tree when it follows nature's law. 'Therefore', he concludes his illustrations, 'the empire of taste is the empire of freedom; the beautiful world of sense being the happiest ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... had just been at a neighbouring farm-house, where there lived one of Mr. Walsingham's tenants; a man of the name of Birch, a respectable farmer, who was originally from Ireland, and whose son was at sea with Captain Walsingham. The captain had taken young Birch under his particular ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... away forked off into two wavy ribands that melted into a waste of snow. Lander's consisted then of five or six frame houses and stores, a hotel of the same material, several sod stables, and a few birch-log barns; and its inhabitants considered it one of the most promising places in Western Canada. That, however, is the land of promise, a promise that is in due time usually fulfilled, and the men ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... flat promontory jutting out into the Heath. A brown brick wall with buttresses, strong like fortifications on a breastwork, enclosed it on three sides. From the flagged terrace at the bottom of the garden you looked down, through the tops of the birch-trees that rose against the rampart, over the wild places of the Heath. There was another flagged terrace at the other end of the garden. The house rose sheer from its pavement, brown brick like the wall, and flat-fronted, with the white wings of its storm shutters spread open, row on row. It barred ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... been making these astonishing revelations, the Egyptologists have not been behindhand. Such scholars as Lepsius, Brugsch, de Rouge, Lenormant, Birch, Mariette, Maspero and Erman have perfected the studies of Young and Champollion; while at the same time these and a considerable company of other explorers, most notable of whom are Gardner Wilkinson and Professor ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... blood! Blood flows upon the board—blood streams along the floor, and ye—ye twain!—lie dead thereon, and about your shapes are shrouds, and on her feet are Hell-shoon! Eric comes and Whitefire is aloft, and no more shall ye stand before him whom ye have slandered than stands the birch before the lightning stroke! Eric comes! I see his angry eyes—I see his helm flash in the door-place! Red was that marriage-feast at which sat Unna, my kinswoman, and Asmund, thy father—redder shall be the feast where sit Gudruda, ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... very stealthy below—the rustling of a fox, or a hare in the fern mayhap, though she could not see to the bottom of the quarry, but she clung to the bar, craned forward, and beheld far down a shaking of the ivy and white-flowered rowan; then a hand, grasping the root of a little sturdy birch, then a yellow head gradually drawn up, till a thin, bony, alert figure was for a moment astride on the birch. Reaching higher, the sunburnt, freckled face was lifted up, and Eleanor's heart gave a great ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him was a bleak, dreary, desolate landscape. A few blades of grass sprouted at the edge of the cape. Further back, in places sheltered from the winds, the ground was clothed in rich verdure, and adorned with flowers. Still further inland were little patches of dwarf birch, scarcely a foot high, crouching close to the ground to escape being torn away by the furious winds that sweep over the land. There was none of the abundant life that we see around us in our fields and woods. A spider, a ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... chance' on this trip. He wanted to try his own mouth at 'calling.' He had never really done it before. But he had been practicing all winter in imitation of a tame cow moose that Johnny Moreau had, and he thought he could make the sound 'b'en bon.' So he got the birch-bark horn and gave us a sample of his skill. McDonald told me privately that it was 'nae sa bad; a deal better than Pete's feckless bellow.' We agreed to leave the Indian to keep the camp (after locking up the whisky flask in my bag), and take Billy with us ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... sorry for him?' asked Raja Haji, 'He had cheated me and it was not fitting that he should live; besides, he was a Chinaman, and we counted not their lives as being of any worth. In Kinta, before Mr. Birch went to Perak, they had a game called Main China, each man betting on the number of the coins which a passing Chinaman carried in his pouch, and whether they were odd or even. Thereafter, when the bets had been made, they would kill the Chinaman ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... Then, for the special benefit of these "friends" of mine (with what ominous emphasis that name is sometimes used! "I must have a private interview with you, my young friend," says the bland Dr. Birch, "in my library, at 9 a.m. tomorrow. And you will please to be punctual!"), for their special benefit, I say, I will produce another charge against this ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... right of the lady-birch to grow, To grow as the Lord shall please, By never a sturdy oak rebuked, Denied nor sun nor breeze, For all its pliant slenderness, kin ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... they want nothing of the mass but the liftings." (Speech of King James VI, to the Central Assembly of the Church of Scotland, at Edinburgh, August 1590. Calderwood's Hist. of the Ch. of Scot. p. 206.) What is called the birch or "birk in Yule even'" was probably the Yule clog. On Christmas eve at no very remote period, the Yule clog, which was a large shapeless piece of wood, selected for the purpose, was dragged by a number of persons bearing ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... descended, we were in Birch Creek water, and had we followed the watercourse would have reached the Yukon; but we would have travelled hundreds of miles and would have come out below Fort Yukon, while we were bound for Circle City. So there was another ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... Meyla (Little Girl), who professed to be the grandson of a former king. But all this last of the pretenders was able to do was to roam about in the wilderness, keeping himself and his followers from starving by robbing the people. They were in so desperate a state that they had to use birch-bark for shoes, and the peasants in derision called them Birkebeiner, or Birchlegs. Though little better than highwaymen, they were sturdy and daring and had some success, but finally were badly beaten by the king and their leader slain. They might have never been ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... is seated with pews of curly birch, upholstered in old rose plush. The floor is in white Italian mosaic, with frieze of the old rose, and the wainscoting repeats the same tints. The base and cap are of pink Tennessee marble. On the walls are bracketed oxidized silver lamps of Roman design, and there ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... whole anatomy and physiology, as well as variety and history of trees of that species, and show its characteristic distinctions; for the mind receives a different impression on looking at a maple, a birch, a poplar, a tamarisk, a sycamore, or hemlock. In this way complex ideas are formed, distinct in their parts, but blended in a common whole; and, in conformity with the law regulating language, words, sounds or signs, are employed to express the complex whole, ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... rasped, scratched, wrenched, bridled, fangled, birchen, hardened, strengthened, quickened, &c. almost frighten us when written as they are actually pronounced, as rapt, scratcht, wrencht, bridl'd, fangl'd, birch'n, strength'n'd, quick'n'd, &c.; they become still more formidable when used contractedly in the solemn style, which never ought to be the case; for here instead of thou strength'n'st or strength'n'd'st, thou quick'n'st or quick'n'd'st, we ought to pronounce ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the gate, and all the family went out to inspect the articles of their own manufacture, which the Indians humbly offered for sale. These consisted of baskets ornamented with porcupine quills, moccasins of deer-skin, and boxes of birch bark. Mrs. Lee's and Aunt Abby's heart bled for the way-worn looking mothers and their patient babes; they relieved their feelings, however, by making them eat as much as they would. Uncle John and Tom were glad to buy some of the pretty toys for wedding presents, ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... mean the short birch for me, Steele," said the factor gloomily. "Lac Bain is just now the emptiest, most fallen-to-pieces, unbusiness-like post between the Athabasca and the Bay. We've had two bad seasons running, and everything has ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... experimented and arranged, Piskaret drew a long breath, grasped his war-club, and stealthily pushing aside the loose birch-bark door-flap of the nearest lodge, peeped inside. By the ember light he saw that every Iroquois, man and woman, was fast asleep, under furs, on spruce ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... was not fortunate in his teachers. Saint- Laurent, to whom he was first confided, was, it is true, the man in all Europe best fitted to act as the instructor of kings, but he died before his pupil was beyond the birch, and the young Prince, as I have related, fell entirely into the hands of the Abbe Dubois. This person has played such an important part in the state since the death of the King, that it is fit that he should be made known. The Abbe Dubois was a little, pitiful, wizened, herring-gutted ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... whistled, though on a moderate key. But boldness breeds boldness, and shortly I plunged into a Vineyard, in the full light of the moon, and captured a gallon of superb grapes, not even minding the presence of a peasant who rode by on a mule. Denny and Birch followed my example. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Mr. Van Brunt was at home. Ellen wanted to become acquainted with them, as well as with the little flowers that grew at their feet; and he tried to teach her how to know each separate kind by the bark and leaf and manner of growth. The pine and hemlock and fir were easily learnt; the white birch, too; beyond those, at first, she was perpetually confounding one with another. Mr. Van Brunt had to go over and over his instructions never weary, always vastly amused. Pleasant lessons these were! Ellen thought so, and Mr. Van Brunt ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... seems a trifle, but the making of all the spools requires the cutting of hundreds of acres of New England's best birch woods. Butter dishes, fruit crates, baskets, wooden boxes of all kinds, tools and handles, kitchen utensils, toys and sporting goods, picture molding and frames, grille and fretwork, excelsior, clothes-pins, matches, tooth-picks,—all ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... it is very pretty like all the rest, and tells its own tale. There is nothing bold or vicious or vulpine in it, and his timid, harmless character is published at every leap. He abounds in dense woods, preferring localities filled with a small undergrowth of beech and birch, upon the bark of which he feeds. Nature is rather partial to him, and matches his extreme local habits and character with a suit that corresponds with his surroundings,—reddish gray in summer ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... autograph letter of her sister, Miss Pinkerton, was an object of as deep veneration as would have been a letter from a sovereign. Only when her pupils quitted the establishment, or when they were about to be married, and once, when poor Miss Birch died of the scarlet fever, was Miss Pinkerton known to write personally to the parents of her pupils; and it was Jemima's opinion that if anything could have consoled Mrs. Birch for her daughter's loss, it would have been that pious and eloquent ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Mr. Arthur Birch. He had been with Cayley at Eton, as captain of the school. While we were together, he received and accepted the offer of an Eton mastership. We were going by diligence to Toledo, and Birch agreed to go with us. I mention the fact because the place reminds me of ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... of it is this: I have brought the mail from St. Ignace with my traino—you know the train-au-galise—the birch sledge with dogs. It is flat, and turn up at the front like a toboggan. And I have take the traino because it is not safe for a horse; the wind is in the west, and the strait bends and looks too sleek. Ice a couple of inches thick will bear up a man and dogs. But this old ice a foot thick, ...
— The Skeleton On Round Island - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... a short lecture on the different kinds of water-wheels, he decided on an undershot, and with Sandy's help proceeded to construct it—with its nave of mahogany, its spokes of birch, its floats of deal, and its axle of stout iron-wire, which, as the friction would not be great, was to run in gudgeon-blocks of some hard wood, well oiled. These blocks were fixed in a frame so devised that, with the help ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... the dignity of "honorary monikins," for the entire period of our stay in the country. He also caused it to be proclaimed that, if the boys annoyed us in the streets, they should have their tails curled with birch curling-irons. As for the Doctor himself, it was proclaimed that, in addition to his former title of F. U. D. G. E., he was now perferred* to be even M. O. R. E., and that he was also raised to the dignity of an H. O. A. X., ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and Ida, who was tired of fishing, sat carefully in the middle of a fragile birch canoe. Her rod lay unjointed beside her, and two or three big trout gleamed in the bottom of the craft, while Weston, who knelt astern, leisurely dipped the single-bladed paddle. Dusky pines hung over the river, wrapping it in grateful shadow, through which the water swirled crystal ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... Some commend them to thicken copp'ces, especially in parks, as least apt to the spoil of deer, and that it is good fire-wood. This tree being wounded, bleeds a great part of the year; and the liquor emulating that of the birch, which for hapning to few of the rest (that is, to bleed Winter and Summer) I therefore mention: The sap is sweet and wholsome, and in a short time yields sufficient quantity to brew with; so as with one bushel of malt, is made as good ale as four bushels with ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... about five miles on the left of the town the course of the river was interrupted by a small and thickly wooded island, along whose sandy beach occasionally rose the low cabin or wigwam which the birch canoe, carefully upturned and left to dry upon the sands, attested to be the temporary habitation of the wandering Indian. That branch of the river which swept by the shores of Canada was (as at this day) the only navigable one for vessels of burden, while ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... it in the street is no formidable thing, but when made by a multitude is a most hideous shriek, almost as terrible as an Indian yell; the people crying, "Kill them, kill them. Knock them over," heaving snowballs, oyster shells, clubs, white-birch sticks three inches and a half in diameter; consider yourselves in this situation, and then judge whether a reasonable man in the soldiers' situation would not have concluded they were going to kill him. I believe if ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... army; but, its days of glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves, and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled. Nor must it be forgotten that, in all this part, you come continually forth upon a hill-top, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snail-shells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore. She seized a live horseshoe by the tail, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from Miss Wordsworth's Journal of a birch-tree, 'the lady of the woods,' which her brother has not versified:—'As we were going along we were stopped at once, at the distance, perhaps, of fifty yards from our favourite birch-tree: it was yielding to the gust of the ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... sacks of magnificent candies, and all sorts of good things; and before all these splendid things the right shoe, that her nephew had given to the little waif, stood by the side of the left shoe, that she herself had put there that very night, and where she meant to put a birch-rod. ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... field, as compared with Greece, Egypt, and the Orient, will be apparent when we remember that the dawn of art in these countries lies hidden in the shadow of unnumbered ages, while ours stands out in the light of the very present. This is well illustrated by a remark of Birch, who, in dwelling upon the antiquity of the fictile art, says that "the existence of earthen vessels in Egypt was at least coeval with the formation of a written language."[1] Beyond this there is acknowledged chaos. In strong contrast with this, is the fact that all precolumbian ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... her to my arms: spiling thereby a new weskit and a pair of crimson smalcloes. I rushed forrard. I say, very nearly knocking down the old sweeper who was hobbling away as fast as posibil. We took her to Birch's; we provided her with a hackney-coach and every lucksury, and ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... browse your way through the forest, nipping here and there a rosy leaf of young winter-green, a fragrant emerald tip of balsam-fir, a twig of spicy birch, if by chance you pluck the leaves of Wood-Magic and eat them, you will not know what you have done, but the enchantment of the tree-land will enter your heart and the charm of the wildwood will flow through ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... round him uneasily. It was only the moonlight on the bark of a silver birch. Conscious of having betrayed weakness, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... wandering, wandering; No one but the pine trees and the white birch knew. Over rocks I scrambled, looked up and saw that Strange Thing, Peaked ears and sharp horns, ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... featly footed, With the herd-boy hasting after, Sprang she on a trunk uprooted, Clung she by a roping vine; Leaped behind a birch, and told, Still eluding, through its fine, Mocking, slender, leafy laughter, Why her finger ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... Thomas Birch, in a letter dated June 15, 1764, says that this letter was by Mr. Philip Yorke, afterwards Earl of Hardwicke, who was author also of another piece in the Spectator, but his son could not ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... pick by myself apart from all the rest, or else my efforts will make no show," he said, and he left the edge of the forest where they were walking on low silky grass between old birch trees standing far apart, and went more into the heart of the wood, where between the white birch trunks there were gray trunks of aspen and dark bushes of hazel. Walking some forty paces away, Sergey Ivanovitch, knowing he was out of sight, stood still behind ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... had been progressing for some time before the captain's arrival. In front of the bluff of rock blazed a fire made of birch and maple, and on a spit before this a huge piece of venison was roasting. A hideous old woman, with eyes like a rattlesnake, and draggled hair coloured like the moss upon an aged fir, stood by the spit, ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... behind the piano and stood in front of him, as erect as a silver birch, and as slim and young. There was a great ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... and blue glass, carved silver cups, and gilded drinking vessels of various makes—Venetian, Turkish, Tscherkessian, which had reached Bulba's cabin by various roads, at third and fourth hand, a thing common enough in those bold days. There were birch-wood benches all around the room, a huge table under the holy pictures in one corner, and a huge stove covered with particoloured patterns in relief, with spaces between it and the wall. All this was quite familiar to the two young men, who were wont to come home every year ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... that the rod with which popular fancy invests criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel-switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch-twig for the castigation of offenders. It has therefore been my aim in the following pages to direct attention to the best, not to forage for the worst—the small faults which acquire prominence only by isolation—of the poet with whose writings I am concerned. I wish also ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... ill or in mourning, or going to a festival.[87] In California the Yokaia widows make an unguent with which they smear a white band two inches wide all around the edge of the hair[88]. Of the Yukon Indians of Alaska "some wore hoops of birch wood around the neck and waists, with various patterns of figures cut on them. These were said to be emblems of mourning for the dead."[89] Among the Snanaimuq "the face of the deceased is painted with red and black paint... After the death of husband or wife the survivor must ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the place of many pines, God's country, that no white man yet had named— They beached their birch canoe 'neath swinging vines, For here, the Indian read by many signs, Lay the wild land the ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... enchanter, Thus outspeaks in measured accents: "O thou keen and cruel hatchet, O thou axe of sharpened metal, Thou shouldst cut the trees to fragments, Cut the pine-tree and the willow, Cut the alder and the birch-tree, Cut the juniper and aspen, Shouldst not cut my knee to pieces, Shouldst not tear my veins asunder." Then the ancient Wainamoinen Thus begins his incantations, Thus begins his magic singing, Of the origin of evil; ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... savor of unholiness, friends," said he, solemnly. "Yet, in that it also smacks of manliness, I will even consent to be judge. You, sir, since you are doubtless well acquainted with the part, can speak for distance. Now, I do appoint the trunk of yon birch-tree as first mark ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... imagination, which had aided in the deception, and led him to suppose that his time would be chiefly spent in the fascinating amusements and adventures arising from hunting the forest in search of deer and other game, pigeon and duck-shooting, spearing fish by torchlight, and voyaging on the lakes in a birch-bark canoe in summer, skating in winter, or gliding over the frozen snow like a Laplander in his sledge, wrapped up to the eyes in furs, and travelling at the rate of twelve miles an hour to the sound of an harmonious peal of bells. What a felicitous ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... yard, where chickens, turkeys, and guinea- fowls, were kept; and in the front, looking towards the west, was laid out a fine garden, well provided with evergreens, such as holly, yew, and pine-trees, and amongst these, also, many birch and ash- ...
— Fanny, the Flower-Girl • Selina Bunbury
... nobody could deny that in clothes the Squire was all consequence; and when he loomed into 'Court,' all over the steel chain, believe it, there were bows and servilities without stint. Taking his seat on a high birch block, the plank table being set before him, on which to spread his inseparable law-book, the plaintiffs and defendants assembled, and took seats on a wooded bench in front. 'All persons whatsoever havin' any business ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... those leaves grow greener while you wait," Kitty Clark said, reining her horse beside a chuckling brook and pointing to a near-by birch grove. "I feel just like this water. I want to run as fast as I can, calling, 'Spring is here! Spring is here!' Don't you perfectly love this odor of growing things? Listen to that phoebe! Doesn't it sound as if he were saying, 'Spring's come! ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... course of the afternoon, arrived at the fishing-ground. His cousin attended to the nets, for he was grown up to manhood, but Wassamo had not yet reached that age. They put their nets in the water, and encamped near them, using only a few pieces of birch-bark for a lodge to shelter them at night. They lit a fire, and, while they were conversing together, the moon arose. Not a breath of wind disturbed the smooth and bright surface of the lake. Not a cloud was seen. Wassamo looked out on the water towards their ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... grandiflora, the Caesalpina bonducella; among caprifoliaceous plants, the Cornus florida and the Cuspa of Cumana; among rosaceous plants, the Cerasus virginiana and the Geum urbanum; among amentaceous plants, the willows, oaks, and birch-trees, of which the alcoholic tincture is used in Russia by the common people; the Populus tremuloides, etc.; among anonaceous plants, the Uvaria febrifuga, the fruit of which we saw administered with success in the Missions of Spanish ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... made my way to a little island above in quest of driftwood. Before I had found the wood I chanced upon another patch of delicious wild strawberries, and took an appetizer of them out of hand. Presently I picked up a yellow birch stick the size of my arm. The wood was decayed, but the bark was perfect. I broke it in two, punched out the rotten wood, and had the bark intact. The fatty or resinous substance in this bark preserves it, and makes it excellent kindling. With some ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... little figure, blindly trying to guess the riddle of duty under these unfamiliar conditions, is pathetic, and Mrs. Burnett touches it in with delicate strokes. The stories are prettily illustrated by Birch." ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a little birch-bark dish full of water in his hand, March observed that the lines of his forehead indicated a mingled feeling of anger and sadness, and that his heavy brows frowned somewhat. He also noted more clearly now ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... noon we were at some distance from the creek, but then went towards it. The gum-trees were no longer visible, but melaleucas, from fifteen to twenty feet high, lined its banks like a copse of young birch. We now observed a long but somewhat narrow sheet of water, to which we rode; our suspicions as to its quality being roused by its colour, and the appearance of the melaleuca. It proved, as we feared, to be slightly ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... the young man's thought, and he glanced up. The college professor, whom the current had washed much nearer now, fancying, it appeared, that he had got a bite, had suddenly thrown himself far over the edge of his canoe, stretching his rod to the farthest reach. The slender birch-bark tipped so violently that even he noticed it; and the next instant, he sprang back again, rocking ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... both the thirtieth and thirty-first, and many diplomats were still optimistic. On the thirty-first I was lunching at the Hotel Bristol with Mrs. Gerard and Thomas H. Birch, our minister to Portugal, and his wife. I left the table and went over and talked to Mouktar Pascha, the Turkish Ambassador, who assured me that there was no danger whatever of war. But in spite of his assurances and judging by the situation and ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... mansion-house. Here the avenue made a wider circuit, and in order to avoid delay, I directed my way across the smooth sward round which the pathway wound, intending, at the opposite side of the flat, at a point which I distinguished by a group of old birch-trees, to enter again upon the beaten track, which was from thence tolerably direct to ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... to her father, and went with them into the forest. They walked about and gathered blackberries. All at once they saw a spade lying upon the ground. The wicked sisters killed Little Simpleton with it, and buried her under a birch tree. ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... was the red flag! "Wasn't that a signal for war? The flag was a red handkerchief, and it swayed from a stick cut from a variegated birch. ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... leaning back with his arms folded, his head in the shadow, and his face was grim. "She will sleep now," he said to himself, "sleep until I wake her. She is young and strong, and there is no harm done; but she has had some fearful shock, and it has shaken her like a slender birch struck by a storm. I will send my old Marta, and she will look ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... the extreme simplicity of the hardy mountaineers. Still higher up on the hills, and on the vast pasture grounds that reach up to their summits, along the gently descending plateaux, occurs the birch, luxuriating in the cold exposure of its habitation as though it were in Siberia instead of France: and ever and anon, whether high up or low down the sides of the hills, you will find the box and the juniper bushes flourishing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... till Learning fly the shore, Till Birch shall blush with noble blood no more, Till Thames see Eton's sons for ever play, Till Westminster's whole year be holiday, Till Isis' elders reel, their pupils sport, And Alma ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... the night, for of course we could not assist him. He made a full suit of rabbit skins sewed with fibers, and a cap and shoes of coonskin to match. The shoes were cut from a bedroom-slipper pattern that Tish traced in the sand on the beach, and the cap had an eagle feather in it. He made a birch-bark knapsack to hold the fish he smoked and a bow and arrow that looked well but would not shoot. When he had the outfit completed, he put it on, with the stone hatchet stuck into a grapevine belt and the bow and arrow over his shoulder, and he ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... heathenism, and were constantly at war with each other. They were clothed chiefly in skins made into leather, ornamented with feathers and stained grass and beads. The tents of the prairie Indians were of skins, and those of the Indians who inhabit the woods of birch bark. Many had rifles, but others were armed only with bows and spears, and the dreadful scalping-knife. Of these people the Sioux bore the worst character, and were the great enemies of the half-bred population of the settlements. These halfbreds, ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... spot), is a small tarn, or more properly the expanded bed of a stream, art having aided nature in its formation: it is edged by rocks and cliffs fringed with the usual trees of the neighbourhood; it is a wild and pretty spot, not unlike some birch-bordered pool in the mountains of Wales or Scotland, sequestered and picturesque. It was dark before I got back, with heavy clouds and vivid lightning approaching from the south-west. The day had been very hot (3 p.m., 90 degrees), and the evening the ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... calculate on cutting 100,000 pine logs. Though the mill has been ten years in operation, the lumber shows no signs of exhaustion; while the other and far more abundant products of the Newfoundland forests, such as fir, spruce, birch, tamarack, etc., have ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... which, though moved in June, throve and have made a fine new growth. There will be, also, a shadbush or two and certainly some hobble bushes, with here and there a young pine and small, slender canoe birch. Here and there will be a clump of flowering raspberry. I shall not scorn spireas, and I must have at least one big white syringa to scent the twilight; but the great mass of my screen will be exactly ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... hiding-place on a rocky islet in the middle of the Sept Chutes. He concealed himself from his foes, but could not escape, and in the end died of starvation and sleeplessness. The dying man peeled off the white bark of the birch, and with the juice of berries wrote upon it his death song, which was found long after by the side of his remains. His grave is now a marked spot on the Ottawa. La Complainte de Cadieux had seized the imagination ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the tent. In the open ground, on the way to a solitary birch-tree, we could see a group of soldiers.... Sara pointed ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... to Hermiston runs for a great part of the way up the valley of a stream, a favourite with anglers and with midges, full of falls and pools, and shaded by willows and natural woods of birch. Here and there, but at great distances, a byway branches off, and a gaunt farmhouse may be descried above in a fold of the hill; but the more part of the time, the road would be quite empty of passage and the hills of habitation. Hermiston parish ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is making the pastor do church penance the very same day his children are being confirmed. It's almost as bad as when he made the dean drink with the headsman, or when he sent those two prelates riding through the city with crowns of birch ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... keeping them until they were translated, and then delivered them again to the messenger, who still retains them. Mother Smith tells a graphic story of attempts to get the plates away from her son, and says that when he first received them he hid them until the next day in a rotten birch log, bringing them home wrapped in his linen frock under his arm.* Later, she says, he hid them in a hole dug in the hearth of their house, and again in a pile of flax in a cooper shop; Willard Chase's daughter almost found them once by means of ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... used to feed during famine times on the inner bark of cedar and white birch, as well as on the inner bark of the slippery elm and basswood, but these cannot be got without injury to ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... several engagements, all of which she broke off, whereby her reputation in some degree suffered. At last she gave her hand to Carlen, a very middling sort of poet, some years younger than she is; and she now styles herself—following the example of Madame Birch-Pfeiffer, and other celebrated singers—Flygare-Carlen. She lives very happily at Stockholm with her husband, and is at least as good a housewife as an authoress, not even thinking it beneath her dignity to superintend the kitchen. Her great ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... the decay of the stage, under a deluge of silly farce, opera, and sensation dramas; how bad architects are to deface the works of Wren and Inigo Jones; whilst the universities and public schools are to be given up to games and idleness, and the birch is to be abolished. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... the birch. Head was all; heart and hand nothing. This was schoolteaching. As a punishment for failure to memorize lessons, there were various plans to disgrace and discourage the luckless ones. Standing in the corner with face to the wall, and the dunce-cap, had given place ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... must be, X-Ray," the other told him; "they've nailed birch bark all over the sides of the log hut, you see, just ...
— Phil Bradley's Mountain Boys - The Birch Bark Lodge • Silas K. Boone
... more oats than barley, more heather than oats, more boulders than trees, and more snow than anything. It was a solitary, thinly peopled region, mostly of bare hills, and partially cultivated glens, each with its small stream, on the banks of which grew here and there a silver birch, a mountain ash, or an alder tree, but with nothing capable of giving much shade or shelter, save cliffy banks and big stones. From many a spot you might look in all directions and not see a sign of human or any other habitation. Even ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... the manner I have previously described, the animals make ready to establish their dyke. They intermix their materials—driftwood, green willows, birch, poplars, etc.—in the bed of the river, with mud and stones, so making a solid bank, capable of resisting a great force of water; sometimes the trees will shoot up forming a hedge. The dam has a thickness ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... oz., cream tartar 1/2 oz., tartaric acid 1/4 oz., loaf sugar 1 lb., oil of birch 20 drops; put 1 quart boiling water on all these articles, and add 3 quarts of cold water to 2 tablespoonsful of yeast; let it work 2 hours ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... mint by the wayward brook, A nibble of birch in the wood, A summer day, and love, and a book, And I wouldn't be a king if ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... books, both printed and manuscript, are as necessary as they are impossible to be attained in my present way of life. However, to acquire a general insight into my subject and resources, I read the life of Sir Walter Raleigh by Dr. Birch, his copious article in the General Dictionary by the same hand, and the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James the First in Hume's History of England." Beriton, January 1762. (In a month's absence from the Devizes.)—"During this interval of repose, I again turned my thoughts to ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... buried bushes, across the trickly, thawing streams, through a thick swamp, close with alder and birch, on up the slope into woods more largely spaced, where great oaks towered among the fir and the spruce, and tall white birches glimmered in the dusk—all still and as yet dead. And on far up the mountain slope until beneath ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... a certain shady spot about half a mile from the monastery, beneath a group of birch-trees, and overhung ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... has a copy of Bishop Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" that he prizes highly. It is the first edition of this noble work, and was originally presented by Percy to Dr. Birch of the British Museum. The Judge found these three volumes exposed for sale in a London book stall, and he comprehended them without delay—a great bargain, you will admit, when I tell you that they cost the Judge but three ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... either green or dry, the latter lying along the shore on both sides the straits, which are almost covered with the trees, that, having grown on the banks, have been blown down by the high winds. These trees are somewhat like our birch, but are of so considerable a size, that the trunks of some of them are two feet (surely an error, yards must be intended) and a half in diameter, and sixty feet in length. Many of these we cut down for our carpenters use, and found that, when properly dried, they ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... Let the birch-bark torches roar in the gloom, And the trees crowd up in a quiet startled ring So lone is the land that in this lonely room Never before ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... orange. Upon the other hand, the plant itself is ornamental, and it grows very fast. The Duke of Devonshire has some at Chatsworth which never fail to make a gorgeous show in their season; but they stand twenty feet high, twisted round birch-trees, and they have occupied their present quarters for half a century or near it. There is but one more species in the genus, so far as the unlearned know, but this, generally recognized as Vanda Lowii, as has been already mentioned, ranks among the grand curiosities ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... celebrated gardens which would always come back to her memory as a riot of roses. The frocks of the people on the lawn looked as though they were made of the petals of flowers, and a mad little haunting waltz was being played by the band, and there under a great copper birch on the green velvet turf near her stood Jem, looking at her with dark, liquid, slanting eyes! They were only a few feet from each other,—and he looked, and she looked, and the haunting, mad little waltz ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... dear, friendly hollows and the largest of these was their favourite stamping ground. Here they were assembled on this particular evening. There was a grove of young spruces in this hollow, with a tiny, grassy glade in its heart, opening on the bank of the brook. By the brook grew a silver birch-tree, a young, incredibly straight thing which Walter had named the "White Lady." In this glade, too, were the "Tree Lovers," as Walter called a spruce and maple which grew so closely together that their boughs were inextricably intertwined. ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the long ditches, overgrown with mugwort, wormwood, and mountain ash; and as he watched the fresh fertile wilderness and solitude of this steppe country, the greenness, the long slopes, and valleys with stunted oak bushes, the grey villages, and scant birch trees,—the whole Russian landscape, so long unseen by him, stirred emotion at once pleasant, sweet and almost painful in his heart, and he felt weighed down by a kind of pleasant oppression. Slowly his thoughts wandered; their outlines ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown thrasher—or red mavis, as some love to call him—all the morning, glad of your society, that would find out another farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are planting the seed, he cries—"Drop ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn? Where may the grave of that good man be?— By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, Under the twigs of a young birch tree! The Oak that in summer was sweet to hear, And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year; And whistled and roar'd in the winter alone, Is gone,—and the birch in its stead is grown.— The Knight's bones are dust, And his good sword rust;— His soul is ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... We know almost nothing of those movements of peoples, in the course of which a given art was brought from one part of the world to another. Hence, when we find the art duly installed in a particular place, and utilizing the local product, the bamboo in the south, let us say, or the birch in the north, as it naturally does, we easily slip into the error of supposing that the local products of themselves called the art into existence. Similar needs, we say, have generated similar expedients. ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... lithe as a young white-stemmed birch-tree; her hair was like a soft dusky cloud, and her eyes were as blue as Avonlea Harbor in a fair twilight, when all the sky ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... set, the raven went to sleep. Then the wood-worm made his way softly up the pine-tree to the raven's nest, and bound his feet together with grass and pieces of birch-bark. ...
— The Book of Nature Myths • Florence Holbrook
... the green and sunny meadow, Where the grass hangs thick with glistening dew,— In the birch-wood's flickering light and shadow, Where, between green leaves, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... and drooping Birch, And fragrant Linden Trees; No living sound E'er hovers round, Unless the vagrant breeze, The music of the merry bird, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... tall shovel and tongs, like sentries, mounted in brass. The tongs, like the two-handed sword of Bruce, cannot be wielded by puny people. We burn in it hickory wood, cut long. We like the smell of this aromatic forest timber, and its clear flame. The birch is also a sweet wood for the hearth, with a sort of spiritual flame and an even temper,—no snappishness. Some prefer the elm, which holds fire so well; and I have a neighbor who uses nothing but apple-tree ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... style, is to be found in all these books when they are good books. Compare a paragraph or two of the early Burroughs on his birch-clad lake country, or Thoreau upon Concord pines, with the "natural history paragraph" that English magazines used to publish, and ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... it is well worth all you may have to pay. If you are alone you will not want to carry much hardware. I made a twenty-day trip once with nothing but a tin cup and a frying-pan. Dishes, pails, wash-basins, and other receptacles can always be made of birch bark and cedar withes—by one who knows how. The ideal outfit for two or three is a cup, fork, and spoon apiece, one tea-pail, two kettle-pails, and a frying-pan. The latter can be ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... region was Canada, then possessed by the French, who carried on an extensive trade with the Indians, who brought their furs down to Montreal in their birch canoes. The French finally settled in the country of the savages, and married among the natives, thenceforward entirely devoting themselves to the life of the trapper and hunter. These marriages ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... all that was so far away and so near his heart; for the sake of which he bad gone to seek work, for the sake of which he had suffered such agonies that night. A flood of memories came back to him of his village, running down the steep slope to the river and losing itself in a whole forest of birch trees, willows, and mountain-ashes. These memories breathed something warm into him and cheered him up. "Ah, it would ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... poorer, Till the dells alone would hear me, Only the deaf fir-trees listen? Not in life is she, my mother, She no longer is aboveground; She, the golden, cannot hear me, 'T is the fir-trees now that hear me, 'T is the pine-tops understand me, And the birch-crowns full of goodness, And the ash-trees now that love me! Small and weak my mother left me, Like a lark upon the cliff-top, Like a young thrush 'mid the flintstones In the guardianship of strangers, In the keeping of the stepdame. She would drive the little ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... and it flies off, a little cloud of powdery particles. The scaly bark takes a ruddy tinge, when the sunshine falls upon it, and would then, I think, be worthy the attention of an artist as much as the birch bark, whose peculiar mingling of silvery white, orange, and brown, painters so often endeavour to represent on canvas. There is something in the Scotch fir, crowned at the top like a palm with its dark foliage, which, in a way I cannot express or indeed analyse, ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... ravine overgrown with dwarfish trees. The ravine was deep and had washed-out clay slopes. High above it stretched a muddy, uneven strip of grey sky, which poured an unceasing rain upon the soaked red clay, upon the small wet birch trees, and the group of soldiers, who had lost their way and driven by inertia were hurrying ...
— The Shield • Various
... here, they were agreeably surprised with the sight of a large birch-canoe, upon the lake, navigated by two or three Indians, in the dresses of their nation. These made for the shore, and soon landed; and, shortly afterwards, another party arrived, that had ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... human use. Since Naboth drew his fence about the field and restricted it to a few wild-eyed steers, halting between the hills and the shambles, many old habitues of the field have come back to their haunts. The willow and brown birch, long ago cut off by the Indians for wattles, have come back to the streamside, slender and virginal in their spring greenness, and leaving long stretches of the brown water open to the sky. In stony places where no grass grows, wild olives sprawl; close-twigged, blue-gray patches ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... grace of Mary Robertson,—for though married to Captain Cameron of Erracht, Mary Robertson she continued to be to the Glen folk,—the lady of her ancestral manor, now for five years lain under the birch trees yonder by the church tower that looked out from its clustering firs and birches on the slope beyond the loch. Five years ago the gentle lady had passed from them, but like the liquid, golden sunlight, and like the perfume of the heather and the firs, the aroma of her saintly life ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... of water written in short hand. In the Egyptian Pantheon there was but one aquatic deity, the god of the Nile; his type is, therefore, the only figurative representation of water in Egyptian art. (Birch, "Gallery of British Museum Antiquities," Pl. 13.) In Assyrian sculpture we have very curious conventionally imitative representations of water. On several of the friezes from Nimroud and Khorsabad, men are seen crossing a river in boats, or in skins, accompanied by horses swimming (see ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... of the outer and inner wood and of the bark of the grey birch, at different seasons of the year, gave the following yields of furfural p.ct. on ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... that was not the only horror. There were other wild deeds in history, and in the story of the "Raiders," memories of hunts for Covenanters, and great killings. But now all is peace, and I should have thought Loch Trool forgotten by the world if, in a dell of birch, rowan, hazel trees, and great pines like green umbrellas, I had not spied ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... strong solution of saltpetre and cutting it in small pieces. It is also called German tinder. Thome says that Boletus laricis and Polyporus fomentarius yield the "amadou" of commerce. Then, again, the birch Polyporus, P. betulinus, is used for razor strops. We need not say anything on the uses of fungi as articles of food. This subject has been exhausted by many able mycologists, and, excepting the mere mention of some mushrooms that are edible, ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... master could hardly be shaken, even by the most savage treatment, and a well- treated serf viewed his master's family with enthusiastic love and veneration. Vasili accompanied his master's flight through the birch forests towards the Livonian frontier, the country where but lately Kourbsky had been leading the Tzar's armies. On the way the prince's horse became exhausted by his weight, and Vasili insisted on giving up his own in its stead, though capture in the course of such desertion would have been ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of 32 East Street, Holborn, who died on Wednesday last. Alice Mathieson stated that she was landlady of the house where deceased lived. Witness last saw her alive on the previous Monday. She lived quite alone. Mr. Francis Birch, relieving officer for the Holborn district, stated that deceased had occupied the room in question for thirty-five years. When witness was called, on the 1st, he found the old woman in a terrible state, and ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... can still see the fireweed—it seems a universal plant all the way from the Saskatchewan to the Peace River and west even to this prairie here. That and the Indian paint—that red flower which you all remember—is common over all the north country. Then there is a sort of black birch which grows far up to the north, and we have had our friends the willows and the poplars quite a while. Now we'll go downhill into the land ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... for gutta percha is obtained by boiling the bark of the birch tree, especially the outer part, in water over an open fire. This produces a black fluid mass, which quickly becomes solid and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... told a long story of operations on the estates—planting birch in the top fields, and eucalyptus in the low ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... ever forget it as long as they live. The hit does that; for a kick is a very striking thing, that's a fact. There has been no good scholars since birch rods went out o' school, and ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... was also in attendance, and remained in the public room with the Yeomen, while the Co- Secretary was indulged with a private interview with the Magistrate, Mr. Alderman Birch, in the parlour. Mr. Newman, the City Solicitor, was also called into council, and remained iu consultation with Secretary Murray some time; there was much marching and countermarching in and out of the office on the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... below Fort MacMurray is a noble stream, one-third of a mile wide, deep, steady, unmarred; the banks are covered with unbroken virginal forests of tall white poplar, balsam poplar, spruce, and birch. The fire has done no damage here as yet, the axe has left no trace, there are no houses, no sign of man except occasional teepee poles. I could fancy myself floating down the Ohio two ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... ancestry. I love a spray of white cedar, especially the spicy, sweet inside bark, or a pine needle, or the tender, sweet, juicy end of a spike of timothy grass drawn slowly from its close-fitting sheath, or a twig of the birch that tastes like wintergreen. ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... a birch bark call to an the fellows in our troop. I sent them each a little piece of birch bark by courier. Connie Bennett, he's our courier. And that meant come to Special Meeting—W. S. W. S. means without scoutmaster. So pretty soon they began coming up to Camp Solitaire. That's the name ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... wife and his daughter gave the stranger a hearty welcome. They at once prepared a meal of poplar, birch and willow bark, and roots ...
— Story Hour Readers Book Three • Ida Coe and Alice J. Christie
... ever anything like it?" said Master Byles Gridley to himself. "I shall have all the young folks in Oxbow Village to take care of at this rate. Susan Posey in trouble, too! Well, well, well, it's easier to get a birch-bark canoe off the shallows than a big ship off the rocks. Susan Posey's trouble will be come at easily enough; but Myrtle Hazard floats in deeper water. We must make Susan Posey tell her own story, or let her tell it, for it will all come out ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of Paris, subject to short spells of severe cold in winter and sudden changes, I doubt much in the experiment. But the health-giving, fever-destroying Eucalyptus is not needed in this well-wooded healthy country, and the splendid foliage of acacia, walnut, oaks, and birch leaves nothing to desire either in the matter of shade or ornament. A lover of trees, birds, and whispering breezes will say that here at least is a corner of the Happy Fields of Homer, or the Islands of the Blest ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... are pleased, thought I, why should not others be amused also? In a few days Dr. Birch's young friends will be expected to reassemble at Rodwell Regis, where they will learn everything that is useful, and under the eyes of careful ushers continue the business of ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... shoulder, he chuckled: "Why, my town is just across the lake from Fort Consolation. A mere five-mile paddle, old chap, and remember, I extend to you the freedom of Spearhead in the name of its future mayor. And, man alive, I'm leaving for there to-morrow morning in a big four-fathom birch bark, with four Indian canoe-men. Be my guest. It won't cost you a farthing, and we'll make the ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... bodily away. But let us suppose that, for the sake of argument, something of the kind had happened, and that our boat was damaged beyond repair, or lost; could we not, think you, fabricate a couple of birch-bark canoes in a country where such splendid birch-trees grow, and with ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... swamp and sea must have existed there a thousand years ago. Yes, in these respects the same was to be seen there as is to be seen now. The rushes had the same height, the same sort of long leaves, and blue-brown, feather-like flowers that they bear now; the birch tree stood with its white bark, and delicate drooping leaves, as now; and, in regard to the living creatures, the flies had the same sort of crape clothing as they wear now; and the storks' bodies were ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... the Lancelot in its original form was held by so competent an authority as the late M. Gaston Paris to have been one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of French prose texts. (Cf. M. Paris's review of Suchier and Birch-Hirschfield's Geschichte der Franz. Litt.) The adventure in question is a 'Gawain' adventure; we do not know whence it was derived, and it may well have been included in an early version of the romance. Apart from the purely literary question, from the strictly critical point ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... something overflowing and heady in her enjoyment. It exhilarated the schoolmaster, and he lavished stick after stick on the ravening flames. The maple hardened into coals brighter than its own panoply of autumn; the delicate bark of the birch flared up and perished. ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... liable to be in some degree frost-bitten in this sort; all are partly encumbered and crusted over with idle matter; only, if they have real life in them, they are always breaking this bark away in noble rents, until it becomes, like the black strips upon the birch tree, only a witness of their ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... lucky enough to hit him, but one golden feather only fell down, and the bird flew away. The man took the feather and carried it to his brother, who looked at it and said, "It is pure gold!" and gave him a great deal of money for it. Next day the man climbed into a birch-tree, and was about to cut off a couple of branches when the same bird flew out, and when the man searched he found a nest, and an egg lay inside it, which was of gold. He took the egg home with him, and carried it to his brother, who again said, "It is pure gold," and gave him what ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... think of another way to accomplish his purpose. None presented itself; so with glowing words he appealed to their nobler selves, telling them all the great need of the travelers who were obliged to pass that way. First he appealed to a fine birch ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... ordinary sort of chap when it comes to intuition, but somehow I've never plucked up the cheek to do any talking about my own miserable self; not since she let me down as gently as she could, while I paddled her back from Birch Point to the canoe house, with Elephant Mountain ragged-backed in the moon-haze. For the life of me I couldn't tell you what it was she said. There was the drip of water from the paddle as I lifted it, stroke ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... Cragg's Ridge lay the paradise, a meadow-like sweep of plain that reached down to the edge of Clearwater Lake, with clumps of poplars and white birch and darker tapestries of spruce and balsams dotting it like islets in a sea of verdant green. The flowers were two weeks ahead of their time and the sweet perfumes of late June, instead of May, rose up out of the plain, and already ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... the abundance of its stock; a perfectly voracious little shop, with a maw as accommodating and full as any shark's. Cheese, butter, firewood, soap, pickles, matches, bacon, table-beer, peg-tops, sweetmeats, boys' kites, bird-seed, cold ham, birch brooms, hearth- stones, salt, vinegar, blacking, red-herrings, stationery, lard, mushroom-ketchup, staylaces, loaves of bread, shuttlecocks, eggs, and slate pencil; everything was fish that came to the net of this greedy little shop, and all articles were ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... continent from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Among the kinds of forest trees whose remains are found in the continental deposits of the Cretaceous are the magnolia, the myrtle, the laurel, the fig, the tulip tree, the chestnut, the oak, beech, elm, poplar, willow, birch, and maple. Forests of Eucalyptus grew along the coast of New England, and palms on the Pacific shores of British Columbia. Sequoias of many varieties ranged far into northern Canada. In northern Greenland there were luxuriant forests of magnolias, figs, and cycads; ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... have been a stirring spectacle. The shores of the Penobscot River were then a trackless wilderness; the placid bosom of the river itself had seldom been traversed by a heavier craft than the slender birch-bark canoe of the red man; yet here was this river crowded with shipping, the dark forests along its banks lighted up by the glare of twoscore angry fires. Through the thickets and underbrush parties of excited men broke their way, seeking for a common point of meeting, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Brayton. It was the second time Isom had seen him lurking about, and the boy's impulse was to hurry back to the mill. But it was still peace, and without his gun Crump was not dangerous; so Isom rose and ran on, and, splashing into the angry little stream, shot away like a roll of birch bark through the tawny crest of a big wave. He had done the feat a hundred times; he knew every rock and eddy in flood-time, and he floated through them and slipped like an eel into the mill-pond. Old ...
— The Last Stetson • John Fox Jr.
... weeks. At any rate, similes or not, there were we two together again at last. What a week of weeks we spent, pacing back and forth on the veranda of our log cabin, where we overlooked the pleasant sinuosities of the Sebois and gazed out together over golden beech and ghostly birch and blood-red maple banners to the far violet mountains of the Aroostook! And how we did take stock of the immediate past, chuckling to find that it had not been a quarter so bad as I had stupidly supposed. What gilded ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... high thy gold is heaped! The yellow birch-leaves shine like bright coins strung On wands; the chestnut's yellow pennons tongue To every wind its harvest challenge. Steeped In yellow, still lie fields where wheat was reaped; And yellow ...
— A Calendar of Sonnets • Helen Hunt Jackson
... low hills appeared on the left, near the river. Dazzling white villages were planted at their foot, and all the slopes were covered with olive orchards, while the banks of the stream were bordered with silvery birch trees. This gave the landscape, in spite of the African warmth and brightness of the day, a gray and almost wintry aspect. Soon the graceful Giralda, or famous Tower of Seville, arose in the distance; but, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... Brahmanas! That chief, induced by my request, will, without doubt, give thee as much wealth as thou desirest.' Thus addressed, O king, Gautama cheerfully set out from that place, eating on the way, to his fill, fruits sweet as ambrosia. Beholding the sandal and aloe and birch trees that stood along the road, and enjoying their refreshing shade, the Brahmana proceeded quickly. He then reached the city known by the name of Meruvraja. It had large porches made of stone, and high walls of the same material. It was also surrounded on every side ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... plenty of timber is to be found, consisting of pine, spruce, cottonwood, and birch. Thus far not the first sign of game had been seen. The whole country, ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... interesting. Poles, twelve or fourteen feet long, are placed in the ground, these meeting at the top, and leaving an opening through which the smoke may escape. Over the poles are placed nets, made of flags, or birch bark, and, sometimes, the skins ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... says Abu'l Fazl, "have a language of their own, but their books are written in the Shanskrit tongue, although the character is sometimes Cashmeerian. They write chiefly upon Tooz [birch-bark], which is the bark of a tree; it easily divides into leaves, and remains perfect for many years." (Ayeen Akbery, II. 147.) A sketch of Kashmiri Grammar by Mr. Edgeworth will be found in vol. x. of the J. A. S. B., and a fuller one by ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... towne, and village assemble themselves together, both men, women, and children, olde and young, all indifferently, and goe into the woodes and groves, hilles and mountaines, where they spend the night in pastyme, and in the morning they returne, bringing with them birch bowes and braunches of trees to deck their assembly withal. . . . They have twentie or fourtie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweete nosegay of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these draw home this Maypole (this ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... In their birch canoes they have run cloud-high, On the crest of a nor'land storm; They have soaked the sea, and have braved the sky, And laughed at the Conqueror Worm. They reck not beast and they fear no man, They have trailed where the panther glides; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the old school-house, hard by the old church; That tree at its side had the flavor of birch; Oh, sweet were the days of his juvenile tricks, Though the prairie of youth had so ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... no way beneficial; but I could not deny the stewards, who came in a body to my house to desire that kindness, one of them being Mr. Bridgeman, whose parents are your mother's friends." This account seems to imply, that the Ode was a work of some time; which is countenanced by Dr. Birch's expression, that Dryden himself "observes, in an original letter of his, that he was employed for almost a fortnight in composing and correcting it."[25] On the other hand, the following anecdote is told upon very respectable authority. "Mr. St. John, afterwards ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... and found the desired implement, but he could not find paper. The lining of his cap occurred to him; it was soft and unfit for his purpose. Looking sadly round, he observed that the tree against which he leaned was a silver-stemmed birch, the inner bark of which, he knew, would serve his purpose. With great difficulty he tore off a small sheet of it and began to write, while a little smile of contentment played ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... "dining camp" and take their places at a long pine table, painted turkey red, on ordinary wooden kitchen chairs, also red! The floral decoration is of laurel leaves in vases made of preserve jars covered with birch bark. Glass and china is of the cheapest. But there are a long centerpiece of hemstitched crash and crash doilies, and there are "real" napkins, and at each plate a birch bark napkin ring with a number on it. Mrs. Worldly looks at her napkin ring as though it were an insect. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... by the lodge gates that they usually set forth; more convenient for their purpose was a postern in the wall which enclosed the greater part of Rivenoak; the approach to it was from the back of the house, across a paddock, and through a birch copse, where stood an old summer-house, now rarely entered. Constance, with her own key, had just unlocked the door in the wall; she ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... and this time with success. For after a little they came into the shadow of the island, the keel grunted upon sand, and they got out. There was a little crescent of white beach, with an occasional exclamatory green reed sticking from it, and above was a fine arch of birch and pine. They hauled up the boat as far as they could, and sat down to wait for the tide to turn. Firm earth, in spite of her awful spiritual forebodings, put Margaret in a more cheerful mood. Furthermore, the woods and the general mystery of ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... exhibit of forest products consisted of sections of the great fir trees, pines, cedars, oaks, hemlocks, birch, ash, walnut, cherry, etc., and specimens of rough and polished lumber from every variety of wood grown in the Dominion, together with a large pyramid of pulp wood, of which Canada possesses millions of acres, ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... common sense! was the like ever heard?—to put yourself to school among pedants and Jacobites, when you might be pushing your fortune in the world! Why not go to Westminster or Eton at once, man, and take to Lilly's Grammar and Accidence, and to the birch, ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... slain, List the Saxon's silvery laughter, and his humming hives of gain. Swiftly sped the tawny runner o'er the pathless prairies then, Now the iron-reindeer sooner carries weal or woe to men. On thy bosom, Royal River, silent sped the birch canoe, Bearing brave with bow and quiver, on his way to war or woo; Now with flaunting flags and streamers—mighty monsters of the deep— Lo the puffing, panting steamers, through thy foaming waters sweep; And behold the grain-fields golden, where the bison ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... some instances where there were families by four or five. Some of them who had finished their houses earlier than the rest, had already commenced gathering their provisions for the winter. These consisted of the leaves and soft twigs of several species of trees—such as willow, birch, and mulberry—and we saw collections of these floating in the water in front ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... snow turrets of the summit—the sign of our redemption, high above North America. Only some peaks in the Andes and some peaks in the Himalayas rise above it in all the world. It was of light, dry birch and, though six feet in length, so slender that we think it may weather many a gale. And Walter thrust it into the snow so firmly at a blow that it could not be withdrawn again. Then we gathered about it and ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... here in anything approaching comfort? A second glance showed her how compactly and conveniently everything was arranged. The narrow cots, with their scarlet blankets and blue check pillows, stood on either side; between them was a table, with blotter of birch bark, and an inkstand made by hollowing out a quaintly shaped piece of wood and sinking in the hollow a small glass tumbler. Above the head of each bed hung a long shoe-bag with many pockets, while opposite the foot were rows of hooks for ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... from behind the piano and stood in front of him, as erect as a silver birch, and as slim and young. There was a great indignation all ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... woman to be proud of; for today after three vargs of marriage the memory of her trim trunk with four pairs of eyes laughing mischievously, filled his five brains with flame. Slim as a birch she stood in his memory, and eight eyes whispered lovers' thoughts across space ...
— Solar Stiff • Chas. A. Stopher
... often fatal. But the disorder was remedied by the advance of the Irish reserve, whose heavy and sustained fire compelled the Knight of Ardenvohr to forego his advantage, and content himself with repulsing the enemy. The Marquis of Montrose, in the meanwhile, availing himself of some scattered birch trees, as well as of the smoke produced by the close fire of the Irish musketry, which concealed the operation, called upon Dalgetty to follow him with the horse, and wheeling round so as to gain the right flank and even the rear of the enemy, he commanded ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... post-cards entitled Theatreuses, Le Bain de la Parisienne, Les Seins des Marbre, and so on. Then Langton drew Graham's attention to one or two other books, one of which had a gaudy cover representing a mistress with a birch-rod in her hands and a number of canes hung up beside her, while a girl of fifteen or so, with very red cheeks, was apparently about to be whipped. "Good Lord," said Langton, "the French are beyond me. This window is a study for you, Graham, ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... wood now on either side, the high pines, breathing their fragrance out into the darkness, and, like ghosts amongst them, the silver stems of birch-trees. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... season, which lasted from May to October, were low and muddy; the country through which it flowed, known as the barren lands, was for the most part flat and densely wooded with a stunted growth of black spruce, jackpine, tamarack, poplar, willow, and birch. The river was the only highway: much of the forest which lay back from its banks was entirely unexplored on account of its swamps and the closeness of its underbrush. There were places within three miles of Murder Point ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... breath. The safe disappearances he had read about flashed through his mind. But he didn't believe it. It couldn't be! Yet, there was the empty corner with the birch panels forming the back of the show-windows, and no safe. In a daze, he walked over to the corner, intending to feel about with his hands and make sure the safe was really gone. Before he got there, there flashed into sight in place of the ...
— The Einstein See-Saw • Miles John Breuer
... glimpse through birch and pine Of gable, roof, and porch, The tavern with its swinging sign, The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Benn, who was bailiff, in 1697. He resided in Pool-lane, now South Castle-street; his garden occupied this locality. Atherton-street was named after Mr. Peter Atherton, who was bailiff, in 1673. Bird-street was named after Mr. Joseph Bird, who was bailiff, in 1738; mayor in 1746. In Birch-field resided Mr. Birch. Roscoe lived here at one time, and it was here he wrote the greater part of the lives of "The Medici." I recollect a great many fine trees being in and about this vicinity. Bolton-street was named after John Bolton, ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... a crown of white birch bark and her braid of hair, twined with running ever-green, fell to her waist. Patty was wreathed with columbines and decked with some turkey feathers that she had put in her basket as too pretty to throw away. Waitstill looked rather conscious ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... her. The children gathered around the long table in the middle of the room, where lay the school-books and straw previously prepared for braiding, while the old fireplace, heaped with blazing logs of hickory, oak, and fragrant birch, made the room warm and cheerful. Here, with their books before them and fastened open to the next day's lessons, the children with nimble fingers plaited the straw and studied at the same time. For children taught to be industrious, usually carry into the schoolroom the principles thus ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... Orient, will be apparent when we remember that the dawn of art in these countries lies hidden in the shadow of unnumbered ages, while ours stands out in the light of the very present. This is well illustrated by a remark of Birch, who, in dwelling upon the antiquity of the fictile art, says that "the existence of earthen vessels in Egypt was at least coeval with the formation of a written language."[1] Beyond this there is ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... farmhouses nestled in New England valleys, Ample and long and low, with elm-trees feather- ing over them: Borders of box in the yard, and lilacs, and old- fashioned flowers, A fan-light above the door, and little square panes in the windows, The wood-shed piled with maple and birch and hickory ready for winter, The gambrel-roof with its garret crowded with household relics,— All the tokens of prudent thrift and the ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... at that time was equal in goodness to the best that can now be purchased. In like manner, a yard of velvet, about the middle of Elizabeth's reign, was valued at two and twenty shillings. It appears from Dr. Birch's life of Prince Henry,[*] that that prince, by contract with his butcher, paid near a groat a pound throughout the year for all the beef and mutton used in his family. Besides, we must consider, that the general turn of that age, which ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... cut its way through the landscape in long curves. From the south bow window in the hotel, the mother and daughter followed its course through tangled underwood and birch forest; sometimes it disappeared, and then shone out again, and at last became fully visible. There was a great deal of traffic going on, the hum of it ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... recesses of the bank, gave at once beauty and variety to the landscape. Above these scattered woods rose the hill, in barren, but purple majesty; the dark rich hue, particularly in autumn, contrasting beautifully with the thickets of oak and birch, the mountain ashes and thorns, the alders and quivering aspens, which checquered and varied the descent, and not less with the dark-green and velvet turf, which composed the level part of the ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... can remember her, she has suffered from 'a birch-tree growing inside me from my belly up; it presses against my chest, ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... of the relentless sun that growing things yield up their innermost vitality and emanate their fragrant essence. I have seen fields of tobacco under a hot sun that smelt as blithe as a room thick with blue Havana smoke. I remember a pile of birch logs, heaped up behind a barn in Pike County, where that mellow richness of summer flowed and quivered like a visible exhalation in the air. It is the goodly soul of earth, rendering her health and sweetness ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... found his face and tore deep through the skin before he could lift his wide-flung arms to protect it. And then, almost before he realized what had happened, she stood back, groping blindly away from him until her hands found a birch sapling. She clung to it with a desperately tight clasp as if to hold herself erect. A little spot of red flecked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at her throat as ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... swirls and eddies in the canyons, coming from most unexpected and unwelcome directions and often from all points of the compass in turn. Usually ready-made camps, overhanging cliffs, were available. When they were not, my ingenuity rose to the occasion and I thatched together twigs of willow or birch, or even spruce or pine, though the latter were stiffer and more difficult to fit tightly together. Beginning at the bottom, I worked upward, lapping each successive layer over the one beneath, as in laying shingles, and pointing the tips of the leaves ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... By and by he came to a wet place called a swamp. The ground was soft, and there were little pools of water. Great ferns grew here just as they did along the bank of the Laughing Brook, only more of them. There were pretty birch-trees and wild cherry-trees. It was still and dark and oh, so peaceful! Peter liked that place and sat down under a big fern to rest. He didn't hear a sound excepting the beautiful silvery voice of Veery the Thrush. Listening ...
— Mrs. Peter Rabbit • Thornton W. Burgess
... John Birch (1616-1691) was of Lancashire. Swift calls him "of Herefordshire," because he had been appointed governor of the city of Hereford, after he had captured it by a stratagem, in 1654. Devotedly attached to Presbyterian principles, Birch was a man of shrewd ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... delicate tints and shadings of an arts and crafts exhibition, stained leather, hammered copper and brass, art canvas, and ancient illuminated initials in monks' missals. The tempered winter sunlight is further softened by the trees; as it illuminates the soft red rags of the happy old birch it seems sublimated, almost sanctified and spiritual, like that which filters through rich windows in cathedrals, and makes a real halo around the heads ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... saw, on the knee-shaped crag above, the slouched figure of a buccaneer silhouetted against the sky. It was not the bearded giant called Herriot, but another, Jeremy was sure. He had no time for conjectures, for they plunged into the thicket and birch limbs whipped ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... twenty vessels. It has water enough, and is under shelter of the river Saguenay and a little rocky island; which is almost cut by the river; elsewhere there are very high mountains with little soil and only rocks and sand, thickly covered with such wood as fir and birch. There is a small pond near the harbor, shut in by mountains covered with wood. There are two points at the mouth: one on the south-west side, extending out nearly a league into the sea, called Point St. Matthew, or otherwise Point aux Allouettes; and another on the north-west side, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... man was cursing, two more men came from obscurity with fish dangling from birch twigs. The pudgy man made an obviously herculean struggle and a meal was prepared. As he was drinking his cup of coffee, he suddenly spilled it and swore. The little man was ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... thickness." We have carefully examined many trees this last week, and find it is not the case; in almost all, the bulging at the bottom, nearest the root, is manifest. There is an early association in our minds, that the birch for instance is remarkably tapering in its twigs. We would rather refer our "sworn measurer" to the factor than the painter, and we very much question whether his "top and top" will meet the market. We are satisfied the fact is not as he states it, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... "I saw a man from Lot Ten last week, and he said that the French were eating their seed-grain, and feeding their cattle, or such as were left alive, on birch ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... lest she should escape through some unknown fissure of the rock. His neighbors strongly remonstrated against the perilous enterprise; but he, knowing that wild animals were intimidated by fire, and having provided several strips of birch-bark, the only combustible material he could obtain that would afford light in this deep and darksome cave, prepared for his descent. Having accordingly divested himself of his coat and waistcoat, and having a long rope fastened about his legs, by which he ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... previously we had been taking short trial runs, to test our pace and powers of endurance; and Birch (my fellow-"hare") and I had more than once surveyed the course we proposed to take on the occasion of the "great hunt," making ourselves, as far as possible, acquainted with the bearings of several streams, ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... regions as yet untrodden by the feet of white men. Alexander Mackay, one of the most resolute and capable traders in the service of the North-West Company, was to be his companion on the journey; and with them were to go six picked French-Canadian voyageurs and two Indians as guides. They had built a birch-bark canoe of exceptional strength and lightness. It was twenty-five feet long, some four feet in beam, twenty-six inches deep, and had a carrying capacity of three thousand pounds. Explorers and {74} men stepped into their light craft on the evening ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... and any thing tending to prevent waste, is of some consequence in a system of domestic economy. To preserve cheeses from decay, lay them in an airy situation, and cover them with dried leaves of the yellow star of Bethlehem. The tender branches of the common birch, will prevent the ravages of mites. If cheese get hard, and lose its flavour, pour some sweet wine over four ounces of pearlash, till the liquor ceases to ferment. Filter the solution, dip into it some ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... number of stocks of red birch, white birch and scrub oak grafted with European hazels and chinkapins, but the grafts all died. The grafting was done as an experiment in the hope that we might possibly utilize our waste lands which are covered with birch and scrub oak by grafting ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... at this moment emerging from the wood, they found themselves in the valley of the Darl. The river here was narrow and winding, but full of life; rushing, and clear but for the dark sky it reflected; with high banks of turf and tall trees; the silver birch, above all others, in clustering groups; infinitely picturesque. At the turn of the river, about two hundred yards distant, Coningsby observed the low, dark roof of the fishing-cottage on its banks. They descended from the ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... deep and smiling bays; and Halifax Bay in particular, when its fresh and verdant surroundings are lighted up by brilliant sunshine, leaves nothing to be desired in the way of charm. I saw it thus when I arrived, in all the excitement of a regatta, with the peculiar feature of a race for birch-bark canoes, paddled with incredible vigour by Mic Mac squaws, or Indian women, in blue blouses and floating black hair. What a splendid colony Nova Scotia ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... port, and leaned something like a cloth rolled round a stick against the desk. No one in authority was yet present, so the school applauded, crying: "What's that, Foxy? What are you stealin' the gentleman's brolly for?—We don't birch here. We cane! Take away that bauble!—Number off from the right"—and so forth, till the entry of the Head and the masters ended ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... "but I learned to paddle a canoe pretty well. I'd rather have a good row-boat, though, than any birch I ever saw. If you run one of them on a sharp stone, it may be cut open, unless it's ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... were full of birch, exclaimed against this weak, and, as he said he would venture to call it, wicked lenity. To remit the punishment of such crimes was, he said, to encourage them. He enlarged much on the correction of children, and quoted many texts ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... Assistant Surveyor. Alexander B. Usborne, Master. Benjamin Bynoe, Surgeon. Thomas Tait, Assistant Surgeon. John E. Dring, Clerk in charge. Benjamin F. Helpman, Mate. Auchmuty T. Freeze, Mate. Thomas T. Birch, Mate. L.R. Fitzmaurice, Mate.* William Tarrant, Master's Assistant. Charles Keys,** Clerk. Thomas Sorrell, Boatswain. John Weeks, Carpenter. A corporal of marines and seven privates, with ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... March of the Pilgrims" came to an abrupt end. John Lansing Birch laid down his viola and bow, whirled about, and flung out his arms in despair. "Oh, this crowd is hopeless!" he groaned. "Never mind any other instrument, providing yours is heard. This march is supposed to die away in ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... "whizz" of his reel, the rush of a brown mountain stream with its fringe of silver birch and stunted alder, the white side of a leaping salmon, and the gasp of that noble fish towed deftly into the shallows at last, afforded him a natural and unmixed pleasure. He loved the heather dearly, the wild hillside, the keen pure air, the steady setters, the flap and cackle of ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... touch them without her permission. In many cases such property was very extensive. Among the Menomini Indians, for instance, a woman of good circumstances would own as many as from 1200 to 1500 birch-bark vessels.[140] In the New Mexican pueblo what comes from outside the house, as soon as it is inside is put under the immediate control of the women. Bandelier, in his report of his tour in Mexico, tells us that "his host at ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... fragrant birch above him hung Her tassels in the sky, And many a vernal blossom sprung, And nodded careless by. But there was weeping far away; And gentle eyes for him, With watching many an anxious day, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... trounce, sandbag, baste, belabor; lace, lace one's jacket; dress, dress down, give a dressing, trim, warm, wipe, tund[obs3], cob, bang, strap, comb, lash, lick, larrup, wallop, whop, flog, scourge, whip, birch, cane, give the stick, switch, flagellate, horsewhip, bastinado, towel, rub down with an oaken towel, rib roast, dust one's jacket, fustigate[obs3], pitch into, lay about one, beat black and blue; beat to a mummy, beat to a jelly; give a black eye. tar and feather; pelt, stone, lapidate[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... had some slight experience with small target rifles, made a good shot at a fine stag, and we were all very cheerful. The fire burned brightly before the tent she shared with Susie, and the dry dead pine with logs of long-burning birch crackled merrily. Over the little lake, behind the dark conifers and the distant hills, the sun had gone down in a glory of incandescent gold ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... "isn't it just like a palace all round—the castle of Tapio, and I'm the lord of the castle, and you're the forest fairy, come to visit me. And your clothes smell of the pine woods, and there's a scent of birch in your hair, and you come playing on a shepherd's pipe, music sweet ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... (Quercus alba) as food, if it can be readily obtained, but failing that, pin oak (Quercus palustris) will do; and I have no doubt that they will feed on any kind of oak. They will, indeed, feed on birch, and on sweet gum (Liquidambar), but oak is the proper food. It is worthy of remark that Pernyi bears a strong resemblance to our Polyphemus, but it is more easily reared in confinement, and ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... and straight by the slender bole of a silver birch. A golden sun flooded richly through the greenery. Overhead was a tunefully unflecked sky and into the shadows crept a richness of furtively underlying color and echoes of color. It was all vivid and beautiful and ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... corners was all kinds of junk that might be more or less useful to have: a couple of lawn-mowers, an old sleigh hoisted up on the rafters of the carriage house, a weird old buggy, a plow, a grindstone, a collection of old chairs and sofas that had seen better days, a birch-bark canoe—things ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... porphyry is heavy, gold is heavier; Ossa and Olympus are rough and unequal; the steppes of Tartary, though high, are of uniform elevation: there is not a rock, nor a birch, nor a cytisus, nor an arbutus upon them great enough to shelter a new-dropped lamb. Level the Alps one with another, and where is their sublimity? Raise up the vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where are those sylvan creeks and harbours in which the imagination watches while ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... and dying by bullets and disease went steadily on. Both sides fought with energy and industry. Captain Birch puts this striking incident in evidence. He is speaking of the third month ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to me. The benumbing frost made me quicken my pace. I heard a distant sound of waters; and, at one step more, I stood on the icy shore of some ocean. Innumerable droves of sea-dogs rushed past me and plunged into the waves. I continued my way along this coast, and again met with rocks, plains, birch and fir forests, and yet only a few minutes had elapsed. It was now intensely hot. I looked around, and suddenly found myself between some fertile rice-fields and mulberry-trees; I sat down under their shade, and found by my watch that it was just one quarter of ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... established by Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt may be resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils ate apples and put straws down one another's backs, until Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt collected her energies, and made an indiscriminate totter at them with a birch-rod. After receiving the charge with every mark of derision, the pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a ragged book from hand to hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some figures and tables, and a little spelling,—that is to say, it had had once. As soon as this volume began ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... approach at the present day to the Post-Pliocene climate of Western Europe is to be found in the climate of the great Siberian plains which stretch from the Altai Mountains to the Frozen Sea. "Covered by impenetrable forests, for the most part of Birch, Poplar, Larch, and Pines, and low creeping dwarf Cedars, they present every gradation in climate from the temperate to that in which the cold is too severe to admit of the growth of trees, which decrease in size as the traveller advances ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... pleased, thought I, why should not others be amused also? In a few days Dr. Birch's young friends will be expected to reassemble at Rodwell Regis, where they will learn everything that is useful, and under the eyes of careful ushers continue the business ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... The silver birch is a dainty lady, She wears a satin gown; The elm tree makes the old churchyard shady, She ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... poised, the scaly brood In myriads cleave thy crystal flood; The springing trout, in speckled pride, The salmon, monarch of the tide, The ruthless pike, intent on war, The silver eel, and mottled par. Devolving from thy parent lake, A charming maze thy waters make, By bowers of birch, and groves of pine, And edges ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... might greater than his, where he had not yet surrendered his sovereignty to man. Here the moose—mightiest of the antlered herd—reached full maturity and old age without ever mistaking the call of a birch-bark horn for that of his rutting cow. Young bulls with only a fifty-inch spread of horns and ten points on each did not lead the herds, as in the more accessible provinces of the North. All things were in their proper ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... things I ever heard of in the history of Mike, according to the best of my recollection, was the way he served Billy Birch's dog. You must know something about this Billy Birch. Burt was his real name. But it was changed into Birch by his neighbors, for a reason which I will ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... Then as birch and beech and oak and chestnut put forth a garb of tender pallid green, March advanced and Easter came ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... which they thought would suit the blessed St. Boniface, save that they stayed a little at the place which is called Ruohen-bah, 'the rough brook,' to see if it would suit; but it would not. So they went back to their birch huts to fast and pray ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... increasingly necessary. His sonorous Doric brought her back to the land of wet west winds, of blue inrushing seas, of far-stretching heather and sudden-dipping valleys where the birch-leaves and pine-needles play tremulous games at hide-and-seek with speckled trout in ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... blue glass, carved silver cups, and gilded drinking vessels of various makes—Venetian, Turkish, Tscherkessian, which had reached Bulba's cabin by various roads, at third and fourth hand, a thing common enough in those bold days. There were birch-wood benches all around the room, a huge table under the holy pictures in one corner, and a huge stove covered with particoloured patterns in relief, with spaces between it and the wall. All this was quite familiar to the two young men, who were ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... mouth of the Saguenay, under the shadow of savage and inaccessible rocks, feathered with pines, firs, and birch-trees, they built a cluster of wooden huts and store-houses. Here they left sixteen men to gather the expected harvest of furs. Before the winter was over, several of them were dead, and the rest scattered through the woods, living on the charity of ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... guilt, "and humbly implored mercy from God and forgiveness from her earthly sovereign, who did not only refuse to give it, but having shook her as she lay in bed, sent her, accompanied with most fearful curses, to a higher tribunal." Such is the awful account of the scene by Francis Osborne. Dr. Birch says the words used by Elizabeth were, "God may forgive you, but I never can." It was the death-blow to the proud old queen, whose regret for the death of Essex could not be quenched by her pride and belief in his ingratitude. A confirmed melancholy settled ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... that truffles are found under trees of special kinds, for Mr. Broome remarks that some trees appear more favourable to the production of truffles than others. Oak and hornbeam are specially mentioned; but, besides these, chestnut, birch, box, and hazel are alluded to. He generally found Tuber oestivum under beech-trees, but also under hazel, Tuber macrosporum under oaks, and Tuber brumale under oaks and abele. The men who collect truffles for Covent Garden Market obtain them chiefly under beech, and ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... PADDYWHACK AND DR. BIRCH.—Everyone knows what "the Assisted Education (Ireland) Bill" is. Why should not an Assisted Education (England) Bill be brought in to enable public school-boys to secure, without payment of any additional fee beyond that included for "swishing" in the Bill sent home to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... paddle at every stroke comes within eighteen inches of them. I know nothing which can be eaten that they will not take, and I had one steal all my candles, pulling them out endwise, one by one, from a piece of birch bark in which they were rolled, and another pecked a large hole in a keg of castile soap. A duck which I had picked and laid down for a few minutes had the entire breast eaten out by one or more of these birds. I have ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... spoke as a child"—Paul, doubtless acted as a child; "but when I became a man, I put away childish things." The experience and observation of years often make salutary corrections, which you would in vain attempt to effect in early childhood, by all the laws of a ponderous octavo, or by all the birch saplings to be ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... across it on fine days, and the beauty of the soft woodland clothing its base. The garden was his children's joy as it became mine. Its little beck with its mimic bridges, its encircling river, its rocky knolls, its wild strawberries and wild raspberries, its queen of birch-trees rearing a stately head against the distant mountain, its rhododendrons growing like weeds on its mossy banks, its velvet turf, and long silky grass in the parts left wild—all these things have made ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... track, With stolen chattels on his back, Will hung his head in fear and shame, And to the awful presence came,— A great, green, bashful simpleton, The butt of all good-natured fun. With smile suppressed, and birch upraised, The thunderer faltered,—"I'm amazed That you, my biggest pupil, should Be guilty of an act so rude! Before the whole set school to boot— What evil genius put you to't?" "'Twas she herself, sir," sobbed the lad, "I did not mean to be so bad; But when Susannah ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... declare I was beat, and I hav'n't never got over bein' beat about that. So we growed up together, always out in the woods between schools, huntin' checker-berries, and young winter-greens, and prince's piney, and huckleberries, and saxifrax, and birch, and all them woodsy things that children hanker arter; and by-'n'-by we got to goin' to the 'Cademy; and when Hetty was seventeen she went in to Hartford to her Aunt Smith's for a spell, to do chores, and get a little Seminary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... for in one of its branches there was seldom any water. At the fork was a low rocky mound, with an ancient ruin of no great size-three or four fragments of thick walls, within whose plan grew a slender birch-tree. Thither went the little party, wandering up the stream: the valley was sheltered; no wind but the south could reach it; and the sun, though it could not make it very warm, as it looked only aslant on its slopes, yet lighted both sides of it. Great ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... be just the thing," agreed Jack. "But a regular canoe, made of birch bark or paper, would cost too much. I'll tell you what it is, Rob. Jim and I have next to nothing in the treasury at present. We haven't had a chance to ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... rustling wheat, it retains even in July, on an afternoon of glare and brazen locusts, the freshness of a spring morning. A thousand slews, a hundred lakes bordered with rippling barley or tinkling bells of the flax, Claire passed. She had left the occasional groves of oak and poplar and silver birch, and come out on the treeless ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... a mixture of all the varieties above mentioned, to the number of 122; with a box of birch bark, containing twenty-nine little infants' scalps of various sizes; small white hoops, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... to punish a child for a misdeed, than to explain and argue. But the gentler method is better. Yet we all admit that the birch must be used sometimes. However, if it is used only for serious trangressions, the child will have a sense of proportion regarding what offenses are grave. But for ordinary small misdemeanors I think we need a new motto: Spoil the ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... and I have passed while sitting at our work by the fire, or wandering on the heath-clad hills, or idling under the weeping birch (the only considerable tree in the garden), talking of future happiness to ourselves and our parents, of what we would do, and see, and possess; with no firmer foundation for our goodly superstructure than the riches that were expected to ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... their thick plumage, they give animation to the frozen solitude long after all other birds have retired from the desolate scenery. Their food consists of the tender shoots of pines, the seeds of plants, the berries of the arbutus and bilberry, the buds of the birch and alder, the buds of the heather, leaves, and grain. The nest is very simply constructed, consisting of dried grasses placed upon the ground and ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... boldness breeds boldness, and shortly I plunged into a Vineyard, in the full light of the moon, and captured a gallon of superb grapes, not even minding the presence of a peasant who rode by on a mule. Denny and Birch followed my example. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... nature {136} have ever the indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the Celt's touch in the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakspeare's touch in his daffodil, Wordsworth's in his cuckoo, Keats's in his Autumn, Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy among the Swiss farms. To decide where the gift for natural magic originally lies, whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... keeper of wampum—a sort of secretary of the treasury without the task of keeping nine different kinds of money on a parity. This old Indian financier had simple and correct principles. No one could persuade him to issue birch-bark promises to pay and delude himself with the belief that he could thus create money. He certainly would have called them a debt, and would have paid them off as fast as he could. Nor can we imagine him trying to sustain the value ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... them and blocked their way, while all the time the foliage was fluttering down about them, clipped by the gigantic scythe that was mowing down the wood. Another man was struck dead beside them by a bullet in the forehead, and he retained his erect position, caught in some vines between two small birch trees. Twenty times, while they were prisoners in that thicket, did they ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the devil, The peasants make ready To sleep by the roadside. They light a large fire, And collecting some farthings 110 Send two of their number To buy them some vodka, The rest cutting cups From the bark of a birch-tree. The vodka's provided, Black bread, too, besides, And they all begin feasting: Each munches some bread And drinks three cups of vodka— But then comes the question 120 Of who can, in Russia, Be happy ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... that nobody was 'round t' see 'n' know 'n' tell just what I got 'n' how I got it. She 's been a secret these five year; stuck t' her tighter 'n' Erne Moore holds th' gals down t' Pickanock dances, 'n' that 's closer 'n' a burl on a birch. Fact is, I never told nobody 'fore now; 'n' I wouldn't be tellin' it t' youse now, only just 'fore we come up here I got a letter from one o' th' two brothers we blindfolded, sayin' his brother was dead an' ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... side, that two hunters had crossed the creek that morning, and had not yet returned. These were the two men who had been so inhumanly murdered. Immediate search was made for the canoe, and it was found a little above the spot where the men were hiding. It was a very large buoyant birch canoe, constructed for the transportation of a numerous household, with all their goods, and such game ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... the stage, and shuffled into the side-scenes, the drear and dusky background of the world's proscenium. Of the thousands and tens of thousands thus rudely dealt with, he is surely not the worst who, wanting a better weapon, shoulders a birch-broom, and goes forth to make his own way in the world, by removing the moist impediments of filth and refuse from the way of his more fortunate fellows. Indeed, look upon him in what light you may, he is in some sort a practical moralist. Though far remote from the ivy ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... tell them these words for they had never heard of birch, or of yew. "'I wonder if ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... serious, father and little daughter walked hand in hand, as if bent upon a very solemn mission. They went past the shaded birch grove, their favourite haunt, past the wild strawberry hill and the winding brook, without stopping; then, disappearing in an easterly direction, they went into the densest part of the forest; nor did they stop there. Wherever ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... by a handful of Europeans is the absolute fairness of their control, of course. Were justice non-existent, it would be inviting disaster for the white official to apprehend a wrong-doer, place him on trial, and personally administer with lash or birch the corporal punishment to be witnessed any morning in ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... represent, not a real object, but the idea of an "enemy." A "fight" could then be shown simply by drawing two arrows directed against each other. Many uncivilized tribes still employ picture writing of this sort. The American Indians developed it in most elaborate fashion. On rolls of birch bark or the skins of animals they wrote messages, hunting stories, and songs, and even preserved tribal annals extending ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... tallow in saucers, oil of birch, flowers of sulphur, hellebore, pepper, tobacco, are said to be "bogies," the last especially, to the Dermestes beetles and their cousin, Anthrenus museorum. Try them, but don't rely too much upon them, is my advice; nor, indeed, upon anything—not excepting ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... waited till the deer came, Till he saw two antlers lifted, Saw two eyes look from the thicket, Saw two nostrils point to windward, And a deer came down the pathway, Flecked with leafy light and shadow. And his heart within him fluttered Trembled like the leaves above him, Like the birch-leaf palpitated, As the deer came ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... (Happily a worthier and more philosophical system is proving to men that schools can be better govern'd than by lashes and tears and sighs. We are waxing toward that consummation when one of the old-fashion'd school-masters, with his cowhide, his heavy birch-rod, and his many ingenious methods of child-torture, will be gazed upon as a scorn'd memento of an ignorant, cruel, and exploded doctrine. May propitious gales speed ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... is because of these qualities that it is the oak. If you would have a smooth trunk, straight branches, satiny leaves, apply to the pale birch, the hollow elder, the weeping willow; but leave the mighty oak in peace. Do not stone ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... astonished, after all the flourishes that have been made about "cart whips," etc., when I say flogging is not the most degrading punishment in the world. It may be so to a white man in most countries, but how is it to the white boy? That necessary coadjutor of the schoolmaster, the "birch," is never thought to have rendered infamous the unfortunate victim of pedagogue ire; nor did Solomon in his wisdom dream that he was counseling parents to debase their offspring, when he exhorted them not to spoil the child by sparing ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... trees, between which the fiord is visible. In front is seen the corner of a boat-shed with a boat drawn up. Under the old trees on the left stands a table with a bench and one or two chairs, all made of thin birch-staves. It is a heavy, damp ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... passed was very beautiful, commencing with dark-green ilex, glistening holly, and sombre brown oak, interspersed with groups of the dainty, graceful, white-stemmed birch, and wreathed with festoons of the scarlet Himalayan vine. As we mounted higher, trees became fewer and the foliage less luxuriant, till at length only oaks were to be seen, their branches twisted into all sorts of weird, fantastic shapes ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... adapted to become the honour and the master-piece of an education, was not fortunate in his teachers. Saint- Laurent, to whom he was first confided, was, it is true, the man in all Europe best fitted to act as the instructor of kings, but he died before his pupil was beyond the birch, and the young Prince, as I have related, fell entirely into the hands of the Abbe Dubois. This person has played such an important part in the state since the death of the King, that it is fit that he should be made known. The Abbe Dubois ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... your Cask is a Butt, then with cold Water first rince out the Lees clean, and have ready, boiling or very hot Water, which put in, and with a long Stale and a little Birch fastened to its End, scrub the Bottom as well as you can. At the same time let there be provided another shorter Broom of about a Foot and a half long, that with one Hand may be so imployed in the upper and other Parts as to clean the ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... his friend; "things will be worse than ever! These people can't rule themselves. They're like disorderly schoolboys, and need a firm master who knows how to use the birch. I am all ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... land betters yet, and is well grassed, and in divers nooks and crannies groweth small wood of birch and whiles of quicken tree; but ever the best of the grass waxeth nigh unto the lips of the Sundering Flood, where it rises a little from the Dale to the water; and what little acre-land there is, and it is but little, is up on knolls that lie ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... out from behind the piano and stood in front of him, as erect as a silver birch, and as slim and young. There was a great ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... that suggest good sites for Asiatic chestnuts are: (a) Tree species—yellowpoplar, northern red oak, white ash, sugar maple, and yellow birch; (b) shrub species—spicebush; (c) herbaceous species—maiden hair fern, bloodroot, jack-in-the-pulpit, squirrelcorn and/or Dutchman's breeches. Plants that indicate sites too dry for forest-tree growth of Asiatic chestnuts are: (a) Tree species—the "hard" pines, black oak and scrub oak; (b) shrub ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... wild strawberries abound; I know certain lonely, quite untrodden glades, carpeted with strange mosses, some yellow as if gilded, some a sober gray, some gem-green. I know groups of trees that ravish the eye with their perfect, picture-like effects: rude oak, delicate birch, glossy beech, clustered in contrast; and ash-trees, stately as Saul, standing isolated; and superannuated wood-giants clad in bright shrouds ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... alone, for Frank left her at the gate, and was fumbling for the latch when she felt something hanging there. Opening the door carefully, she found it gay with offerings from her mates; and among them was one long quiver-shaped basket of birch bark, with something heavy under the green leaves that lay at the top. Lifting these, a slender bas-relief of a calla lily in plaster appeared, with this couplet slipped into the blue cord by which it was ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... will, without doubt, give thee as much wealth as thou desirest.' Thus addressed, O king, Gautama cheerfully set out from that place, eating on the way, to his fill, fruits sweet as ambrosia. Beholding the sandal and aloe and birch trees that stood along the road, and enjoying their refreshing shade, the Brahmana proceeded quickly. He then reached the city known by the name of Meruvraja. It had large porches made of stone, and high walls of the same material. It was also surrounded on every ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Indian corn; and instead of the pepper and eucalyptus, the lemon and the palm, I see (or I seem to see) the maple once more, and the elm and the chestnut trees, the shagbark walnut, the hickory, and the birch. In those days, these rugged mountains of this south land were unknown to me; and the Pelham hills were full of marvel and delight, with their tangled pathways and hidden stores of wintergreen and wild strawberries. Furtive ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... until he has an arboretum hardly equaled anywhere. There are pines in endless variety—from the Sierra and from the seashore, from New England, France, Norway, and Japan. There flourish the cedar, spruce, hemlock, oak, beech, birch, and maple. There in peace and plenty are the sequoia, the bamboo, and the deodar. Eucalypts pierce the sky and Japanese ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... when full-grown, they assemble in large flocks, fly about sundown to selected roosting-places on tall trees, and to feeding-places in the morning,—unhusked corn-fields, if any are to be found in the neighborhood, or thickets of dwarf birch and willows, the buds of which furnish a considerable part of their food when snow covers ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... Dr. Crane had removed the trouble that was causing his sickness; but he was very weak and faint, and he slept long after the birds were up and singing. He was a little afraid at first to eat anything when he finally crawled from his hole in the decayed tree branch; but, recognizing some sweet birch trees, he ate moderately of the leaves ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... Egypt, and the Orient, will be apparent when we remember that the dawn of art in these countries lies hidden in the shadow of unnumbered ages, while ours stands out in the light of the very present. This is well illustrated by a remark of Birch, who, in dwelling upon the antiquity of the fictile art, says that "the existence of earthen vessels in Egypt was at least coeval with the formation of a written language."[1] Beyond this there is acknowledged chaos. In strong contrast with ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... and wore the dunce's cap; nor did 'Thaniel Langmaid's knuckles escape the ruler when he dropped a blot upon his copy, 'Comparisons are Odious'—a proposition of which he understood the meaning not at all. The cane and the birch-rod on Mrs. Butson's desk served her now but as insignia. She had not wielded them as weapons of justice since the day (four years ago) when a struggle with Ivy Nancarrow's elder brother had taught her that her ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... coal, but all is burnt-out to a dead grammatical cinder? The Hinterschlag Professors knew syntax enough; and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, and could be acted-on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch-rods. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... and three young trees, "now six or seven years old, show a decided tendency to be pendulous, but as yet are not so much so as the mother-plant." According to Mr. MacNab,[45] seedlings from a magnificent weeping birch (Betula alba), in the Botanic Garden at Edinburgh, grew for the first ten or fifteen years upright, but then all became weepers like their parent. A peach with pendulous branches, like those of the weeping willow, has been found capable of ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... visited the United States His laughter tinkled among the teacups. I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch-trees, And of Priapus in the shrubbery Gaping at the lady in the swing. In the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, at Professor Channing-Cheetah's He laughed like an irresponsible foetus. His laughter was submarine and profound Like the old man of the seats Hidden under coral islands Where ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... the larks sang loud in the blue clear air; the birch-wood clothed itself in tender green; the stream, with its melting snow-drifts, wound down the mountains singing on its way; but no plough furrowed the loosened earth, and from the heights was heard no wood-horn calling the cattle at feeding time. ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... [Footnote 2: Dr. Thomas Birch, in a letter dated June 15, 1764, says that this letter was by Mr. Philip Yorke, afterwards Earl of Hardwicke, who was author also of another piece in the Spectator, but his son could not remember ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... emporium of Catholic books, pictures and images, one of those peculiarly Lower Canadian stores in the vicinity of the Rue Notre Dame, existing side by side with Indian curio shops, and rendering it possible for the emigrant and tourist to purchase maple sugar, moccasins, and birch bark canoes at the same time that he invested in purple ribbon bookmarks, gaily painted cards of the Virgin, and tiny religious valentines with rosy bleeding hearts, silver arrows and chubby kneeling infants. ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... than ordinarily he turned round. The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot, which extended over the walls upstairs and down in the dilapidated "Old-Grove Place," and the massive chimney-piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd contrast to the new and shining brass bedstead, and the new suite of birch furniture that he had bought for her, the two styles seeming to nod to each other across three ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... river where they had one day seen an otter, a marked event in their uneventful days; the farm with its red gables and its crowd of gobbling turkeys; the sweet-smelling fir groves with their sandy paths; and their own particular wood where beeches, oaks, and silvery birch trees were intermingled, with here and there a tall pine sometimes stately and erect, sometimes blown aslant ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... season of the thirty-fifth year of Darius I.: Khabbisha's rebellion therefore broke out between June and September, 486. Stern makes this prince to have been of Libyan origin. From the form of his name, Revillout has supposed that he was an Arab, and Birch was inclined to think that he was a Persian satrap who made a similar attempt to that of Aryandes. But nothing is really known of him or of his family previous to his insurrection ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... loomed up before Eddie's dazzled eyes when he least expected it. It was at the close of a particularly hot day when it seemed to Eddie that every one in town had had everything from birch beer to peach ice cream. On his way home to supper he stopped at the postoffice with a handful of letters that old man Kunz had given him to mail. His mother had told him that they would have corn out of their own garden for supper that night, and Eddie ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... learned to paddle a canoe pretty well. I'd rather have a good row-boat, though, than any birch I ever saw. If you run one of them on a sharp stone, it may be cut open, ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... her hands and knees on the bed, presenting her delicious white buttocks with her lovely slit, shaded with brown hair between them. Behind her was a tall, fine looking man, about forty years of age, also naked. In his hand was a birch—with which he was gently tickling the ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... Tommaso de' Medici, the Chamberlain of the Court, and gave him instructions to set the boy at liberty, after administering the useful punishment of twenty strokes with a birch rod, and giving him a ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... of angling for catfish and tapping the birch trees for sap, had been suffered to fall into disuse. Rather, it seemed interesting to wander vaguely together, or in the long grass to read together from the books which Reuben would borrow from the cobwebby library ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... appealingly to him for assistance, when circumstances had made a temporary ending of her total indifference to getting the lessons at all. For this and other reasons she sometimes sought the study, and drew a small chair beside the doctor's large one before the blazing fire of the black birch logs; and then Marilla in her turn would venture upon the neutral ground between study and kitchen, and smile with satisfaction at the cheerful companionship of the tired man and the idle little girl who had already found ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... aside her hat. She sat leaning against the crisp trunk of a silver birch. Her hands were in her lap. Her dress was crumpled up, displaying her crossed feet and the tantalizing line of her slim ankles. Against the copper green of the tree trunk the mass of her hair was pressed, gold upon the shadow of gold. Her moist lips were half ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... one who might dare to look upon them. The height of land or plateau which constitutes the interior of the Labrador peninsula is from 2,000 to 2,500 feet above the sea level, fairly heavily wooded with spruce, fir, hackmatack, and birch, and not at all the desolate waste it has been pictured by many writers. The barrenness of Labrador is confined to the coast, and one cannot enter the interior in any direction without being struck by the latent ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... of about 200 yards. Its banks, which are clothed with verdure to the water's edge, recede by a gradual slope until they terminate in a high ridge, running parallel to the river on both sides. This ridge yields poplar, birch, and maple, with a few pines, proving the excellence of the soil. The interior, however, is said to be low ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... never had looked so delightful to Mrs. Curtis as now that the fields were dressed in their gay, autumn attire. Their road lay through rich woods of maple, birch and oak, brilliant in their ...
— Bertie and the Gardeners - or, The Way to be Happy • Madeline Leslie
... Of course to Isoult it was different. She had been a forester all her life. To her there were names (and names of dread) not to be known of any map. Deerleap, One Ash, the Wolves' Valley, the Place of the Withered Elm, the Charcoal-Burners', the Mossy Christ, the Birch- grove, the Brook under the Brow—and a hundred more. She steered by these, with all foresters. What she did not remember, or did not know, was that Maulfry had also lived in Morgraunt and knew the ways by heart. Still, she had a better mount than the Lady of Tortsentier, ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... a spider's thread for a thong, was enough to start her into a gallop,—I could not repress a slight shudder or refrain from peering into the darkness rather anxiously, while at times the harmless trunks of ash or birch trees would appear to me as spectral-looking as one of ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... the place, Deerslayer," March at length observed; "here is a beech by the side of a hemlock, with three pines at hand, and yonder is a white birch with a broken top; and yet I see no rock, nor any of the branches bent down, as I told you ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... entering the forest. I know that first you climb a rough, rather narrow road up from the river, that the trees close about you very gradually, that there is a little church with a green turret and a fine view of the Nestor, and that there a broad solemn avenue of silver birch leads you forward, gently and without any sinister omens. Then again the forest clears and there are fields of corn and, built amongst the thin scattering of trees, the village of N——. It was here, on passing the first houses of the village, ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... bits and curbs to headstrong steeds,— Which for this fourteen years we have let sleep, Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave, That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers, Having bound up the threat'ning twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sight For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead; And liberty plucks justice ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... "have a language of their own, but their books are written in the Shanskrit tongue, although the character is sometimes Cashmeerian. They write chiefly upon Tooz [birch-bark], which is the bark of a tree; it easily divides into leaves, and remains perfect for many years." (Ayeen Akbery, II. 147.) A sketch of Kashmiri Grammar by Mr. Edgeworth will be found in vol. x. of the J. A. S. B., and a fuller one by Major Leech in vol. xiii. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... path to the ice-mountains, where he knew that he should find the Shcherbatskys there, Kitty among them. He had seen their carriage at the gate. It was a lovely day, and the gaily-clad fashionable people, the Russian izbas with their carved woodwork, the paths gleaming with snow, and the old birch-trees, brilliant with icicles, combined to render the whole scene ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... excepting the gigantic strength of Arran, are they much exposed to the Atlantic storms, lying landlocked and protected to the westward by the shores of Ayrshire. Accordingly, the weeping-willow, the weeping-birch, and other trees of early and pendulous shoots, flourish in these favoured recesses in a degree unknown in our eastern districts; and the air is also said to possess that mildness which is favourable ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the New Forest over a slightly undulating stretch of velvety grass, bracken, heather and stunted oak-trees, which gave the place a park-like aspect, running right up to where the oaks were clustered thickly, with an occasional silvery or ruddy barked birch, and made dense ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... September 4th.—At last we have got a beautiful day, quite warm and bright. Nothing can be more lovely than this Strath of the Dee, with its birch woods and pine-covered mountains. We went up a hill yesterday—the Coyle—and looked across the glen to the broad snow fields which still encircle the black cliffs of Lochnagar. To-day we are going up to Alt na Ghuissac, and shall lunch at the Queen's hut. H. M. called ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... attestor, certainly," replied his uncle. "Johnny, if you demonstrate your power of strength so forcibly and practically, some one will apply oil of birch to you." ...
— Eric - or, Under the Sea • Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels
... more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one's breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges—this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. Nothing else would do, nothing else would satisfy, except this coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling into one's blood. How fortunate he was, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... been daintily spread for them under a birch-tree near the keeper's lodge. The keeper's wife served them with smiles and curtsies, and then discreetly disappeared. Falloden waited on Constance as a squire on his princess; and all round them lay the green encircling rampart of the wood. In the man's every action, there ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bonnet, high-crowned and crescent shaped in front, with a white muslin cap below, a buff handkerchief crossed over her shoulders, a dark short-sleeved gown, long mittens covering her arms, and a checkered apron; a regular orthodox birch-rod by her side, and a black cat at her feet. But her head was shaking with palsy, and she hardly seemed to understand what Lizzie screamed into her ear that, "Here was ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to the Dryad's Bubble and was curled up among the ferns at the root of the big white birch where she and Gilbert had so often sat in summers gone by. He had gone into the newspaper office again when college closed, and Avonlea seemed very dull without him. He never wrote to her, and ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... month in the year. It should tie their astronomy, botany, physiology, meteorology, picturesque, and poetry together. No bird, no bug, no bud, should be forgotten on his day and hour. To-day the chickadees, the robins, bluebirds and song-sparrows sang to me. I dissected the buds of the birch and the oak; in every one of the last is a star. The crow sat above as idle as I below. The river flowed brimful, and I philosophised upon this composite, collective beauty which refuses to be analysed. Nothing is beautiful alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole. Learn the ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... that, "Douggie" went up to a young sapling that grew at the base of the fallen tree. Bending it down to the ground, as an archer bends his bow, he gave a sudden spring, and let the tough birch catapult him to the ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... evidence for this extraordinary story fully stated in Birch's Negotiations. On the whole, it appears sufficient to warrant our belief; yet it should be remarked that the accounts which have come down to us differ from each other in some important points, and are traceable to no original witness of the interview between ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves, and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled. Nor ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... narrow winding brook wide enough for a canoe to float in that he did not know. He had spent all his days and many of his nights in these solitary wanderings. Visitors to the region grew wonted to the sight of the comely figure in the slight birch canoe, shooting suddenly athwart their track, or found lying idly in some dark and shaded stream-bed. On the approach of strangers he would instantly away, lifting his hat courteously if there were ladies in the boats he passed, ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... sense! was the like ever heard?—to put yourself to school among pedants and Jacobites, when you might be pushing your fortune in the world! Why not go to Westminster or Eton at once, man, and take to Lilly's Grammar and Accidence, and to the birch, too, if ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... built their bark wigwams here and there on the bank, paddling their birch canoes over the river's smooth surface, or threading the foamy ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... might not understand the life we lead; If we asked Dr. Birch to play, no doubt he'd rather read; He hates all scrambling restlessness, and chattering, scuffling noise; If he could catch us we should fare no ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... herd's grass for the cows; Heard the horse whinnying for his corn; And sharply clashing horn on horn, Impatient down the stanchion rows, 15 The cattle shake their walnut bows; While peering from his early perch Upon the scaffold's pole of birch, The cock his crested helmet bent And down his querulous ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... the place was full of soft, dark nooks, and golden hollows shaded by birch, through whose pensile twigs the sunshine seemed to fall in showers of golden rain—cascades of light that plunged into the transparent waters, and flashed from the scales ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... and "whizz" of his reel, the rush of a brown mountain stream with its fringe of silver birch and stunted alder, the white side of a leaping salmon, and the gasp of that noble fish towed deftly into the shallows at last, afforded him a natural and unmixed pleasure. He loved the heather dearly, the ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... in other kinds of trees. Curly grained white poplar has been propagated from hybrid trees by growing cuttings of shoots from the roots of the curly trees (Ref. 9). In Sweden it has been possible to grow figured birch, much of which has the curly type grain. In birch, seedling strains producing curly grain have been developed and are being grown. It is of interest to note that with these birches, the trees with curly grain grow only about half as fast as the normal ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... characteristic of their nature, she was known as the Antelope, because she more resembled that graceful animal than any other of the young maidens in her tribe. She would flit from rock to rock, when out gathering berries, or float down the stream in her birch-bark canoe, catching fish for her aged father's meals. Crouching Panther had for a long time had his eyes riveted upon the Antelope, and would often lie for hours on some high point of rock watching ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... hear no more, but ran to the clump of spruce to which the courier had directed him. Among them he found a number of birch trees, and stripping off an armful of bark he had a fire blazing upon the snow by the time the dog mail drew up with its unconscious burden. While the driver was loosening Wabi's clothes and bundling him in heavy bearskins Rod added dry ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... retreat, a cluster of slender birch trees deep in the forest, she seated herself on a fallen trunk and unrolled her crocheting. Through the thin foliage the sun filtered over her hair and spangled the ground at her feet. A breeze as gentle as herself whispered above her head in friendly commune ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... above all, I glory in my evergreens. What winter-garden can compare for them with mine? True, I have but four kinds—Scotch fir, holly, furze, and the heath; and by way of relief to them, only brows of brown fern, sheets of yellow bog-grass, and here and there a leafless birch, whose purple tresses are even more lovely to my eye than those fragrant green ones which she puts on in spring. Well: in painting as in music, what effects are more grand than those produced by the scientific combination, in endless new variety, of a few simple elements? Enough for me is ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... for Firefly Lake and Birch Tree Inn!" cried Shep, when they were preparing breakfast. "My! the Inn will seem like home, after such ...
— Guns And Snowshoes • Captain Ralph Bonehill
... the Saxon's silvery laughter, and his humming hives of gain. Swiftly sped the tawny runner o'er the pathless prairies then, Now the iron-reindeer sooner carries weal or woe to men. On thy bosom, Royal River, silent sped the birch canoe, Bearing brave with bow and quiver, on his way to war or woo; Now with flaunting flags and streamers—mighty monsters of the deep— Lo the puffing, panting steamers, through thy foaming waters sweep; ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... not like the "birch" or corporal punishment at all. I do not advocate it, but I am certain that the demoralising effect of a few' days' imprisonment is far in excess of the demoralisation that follows a reasonable application ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... occasion his only daughter Francoise, probably the richest heiress in the kingdom, was contracted in marriage to Cesar, Duc de Vendome, the illegitimate son of Henry IV. by Gabrielle d'Estrees, the Duchess de Beaufort. The Duc de Mercoeur died at Nuremburg, February 19, 1602.—Vide Birch's Memoirs of Queen Elizabeth, Vol. I., p. 82; Davila's His. Civil Warres of ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... andirons or claw-footed chair and table. Sometimes he glanced shyly at the mother, but getting no answering smile kept silence. Once or twice the girl whispered a word to him, as the logs fell and a sheet of flame from the hickory and the quick-burning birch set free the stored-up sunshine of many a summer day. A moment later, the girl ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... study or Moscovie glass, shining not altogether unlike to crystal. We found an herb growing upon the rocks whose fruit was sweet, full of red juice, and the ripe ones were like currants. We found also birch and willow growing like shrubs low to the ground. These people have great store of furs as we judged. They made shows unto us the 30th of this present, which was the second time of our being with them, after they perceived we would have skins and furs, that they would go into the country ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... nightmares that haunted him, toward morning he fell into a deep sleep. He dreamed he was in barracks, and the bread had just been taken out of the oven, and he crawled into the oven and lathered himself with a birch broom. He slept for two days and on the third day in the afternoon two sailors came down and carried him ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... there. The runaway, Hassell, had arrived many hours before them, and to excuse his flight told so frightful a story of the fate of his comrades that his hearers were seized with a panic, shamefully abandoned their post, and set out for the settlements, leaving a writing on a piece of birch-bark to the effect that all the rest were killed. They had left a supply of bread and pork, and while the famished eleven rested and refreshed themselves they were joined by Solomon Keyes, the man who, after being thrice wounded, had floated away in a canoe from the place of the fight. ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... Saxon's silvery laughter, and his humming hives of gain. Swiftly sped the tawny runner o'er the pathless prairies then, Now the iron-reindeer sooner carries weal or woe to men. On thy bosom, Royal River, silent sped the birch canoe Bearing brave with bow and quiver on his way to war or woo; Now with flaunting flags and streamers—mighty monsters of the deep— Lo the puffing, panting steamers through thy foaming waters sweep; And behold ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... brotherhood, whose duty was to purge the community of its unruly members. Mounted, armed, and commanded by a leader, they proceeded to arrest such notorious offenders as were deemed fit subjects of exemplary justice; their operations were generally carried on in the night. Squire Birch, who was personated by one of the party, established his tribunal under a tree in the woods, and the culprit was brought before him, tried, and generally convicted; he was then tied to a tree, lashed without mercy, and ordered to leave the country within ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... a Triptolemus Yellowlee would have found exceedingly little to gratify it in the parish of Lairg thirty years ago. The parish had its bare hills, its wide, dark moors, its old doddered woods of birch and hazel, its extensive lake, its headlong river, and its roaring cataract. Nature had imparted to it much of a wild and savage beauty; but art had done nothing for it. To reverse the well-known antithesis in which Goldsmith sums up his description of Italy,—the ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Douglas Sir Hugh the Montgomer-y; Sir Davy Lewdale, that worthy was, his sister's son was he; Sir Charles of Murray in that place that never a foot would flee; Sir Hugh Maxwell, a lord he was, with the Douglas did he dee. So on the morrow they made them biers of birch and hazel so gay; Many widows with weeping tears came to fetch their makis away. Tivydale may carp of care, Northumberland may make great moan, For two such captains as slain were there on the March parti ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... larkspur, the former in great abundance. Earlier in the summer the hills were literally carpeted with flowers. I could not learn that any skilled botanist had ever visited Kamchatka and classified its flora. Among the arboreal productions the alder and birch were the most numerous. Pine, larch, and spruce grow on the Kamchatka river, and the timber from them is brought to Avatcha from the mouth of ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... is concerned, you need not be disappointed. Not in Van Huyn's time, nor for nearly two centuries later, could the meaning of that engraving have been understood. It was only when the work was taken up and followed by Young and Champollion, by Birch and Lepsius and Rosellini and Salvolini, by Mariette Bey and by Wallis Budge and Flinders Petrie and the other scholars of their times that great results ensued, and that the true ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... a curl of birch bark and made a little wigwam, and because the voice came from the skies he painted the wigwam with blue mud, and to show that it came from the Sunland he painted a red sun on it. On the floor he spread a scrap of his own white blanket, then for ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... green and sunny meadow, Where the grass hangs thick with glistening dew,— In the birch-wood's flickering light and shadow, Where, between green leaves, the sun ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... bird flew away. The man took the feather and carried it to his brother, who looked at it and said, "It is pure gold!" and gave him a great deal of money for it. Next day the man climbed into a birch-tree, and was about to cut off a couple of branches when the same bird flew out, and when the man searched he found a nest, and an egg lay inside it, which was of gold. He took the egg home with him, and carried it to his brother, who again said, "It is ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... his father, Puckeshinwau, make the flint arrow-head and split the wooden shaft to receive it, bind it firmly with a thong, and tip the other end of the shaft with a feather to wing it on its flight; and saw the men build the birch canoe, so light that one man could shoulder it, yet strong enough to carry a ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
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