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Hothouse   Listen
noun
Hothouse  n.  
1.
A house kept warm to shelter tender plants and shrubs from the cold air; a place in which the plants of warmer climates may be reared, and fruits ripened.
2.
A bagnio, or bathing house. (Obs.)
3.
A brothel; a bagnio. (Obs.)
4.
(Pottery) A heated room for drying green ware.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hothouse" Quotes from Famous Books



... every direction bright-colored leaves, painted with "autumnal hectic," strewed the bier of the declining year. Beulah sat down on a tuft of moss, and gathered clusters of golden-rod and purple and white asters. She loved these wild wood-flowers much more than gaudy exotics or rare hothouse plants. They linked her with the days of her childhood, and now each graceful spray of golden-rod seemed a wand of memory calling up bygone joys, griefs, and fancies. Ah, what a hallowing glory invests our past, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... liked innovations, but he had tolerated 'the fine arts within a certain sphere,' and had in consequence put up in his garden, between the hothouse and the lake, an erection after the fashion of a Greek temple, made of Russian brick. Along the dark wall at the back of this temple or gallery were placed six niches for statues, which Odintsov had proceeded to order from abroad. These statues were to represent ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... face was not pale, but had that waxen bloom still upon it that belongs to a barber's dummy. He stood quite still, with his face towards me; and I can't tell you how horrid he looked among the tulips and all those tall, gaudy, almost hothouse-looking flowers. It looked as if we'd stuck up a waxwork instead of a statue in the centre ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... a pool of cool water, very pleasant in the hothouse climate of Singhalut. The only shortcoming was the lack of the lovely young servitors Murphy had envisioned. He took it upon himself to repair this lack, and in a shady wine-house behind the palace, called the Barangipan, he made the acquaintance of a girl-musician named ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance

... intervals, during his life, he had aided his father in the occupation of gardening. He could dig, plant, and sow. He could prune trees, and propagate flowers to perfection. He understood the management of the greenhouse and hothouse, the cold-pit and the forcing-pit; nay, more—he understood the names and nature of most of the plants that are cultivated in European countries; in other words, he was a botanist. His early opportunities in the garden of a great noble, where his father was superintendent, had given him ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid

... lamps of the park went out, but the moon shone on, lustrous and splendid. First he reviewed his odd adventure in the archbishop's gardens. He had spoken to princesses before, but they were women of the world, hothouse roses that bloom and wither in a short space. The atmosphere which surrounded this princess was idyllic, pastoral. She had seen nothing of the world, its sports and pastimes, and the art of playing at love was unknown to her. Again he could see her serious eyes, the delicate ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath

... and plants of the jungle were very exciting. Ah! what a delight it is to see trees and plants at home which one has only seen as the exotics of a hothouse, or read of in books! In the day's journey I counted one hundred and twenty-six differing trees and shrubs, fifty-three trailers, seventeen epiphytes, and twenty-eight ferns. I saw more of the shrubs and epiphytes than ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... direct to poor Verena, perhaps, who, in the crowded street-car which deposited her finally at Miss Chancellor's door, had to stand up all the way, half suspended by a leathern strap from the glazed roof of the stifling vehicle, like some blooming cluster dangling in a hothouse. She was used, however, to these perpendicular journeys, and though, as we have seen, she was not inclined to accept without question the social arrangements of her time, it never would have occurred to her to criticise the railways of her native ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James

... prairies of Nebraska. She wore a tailor-made suit of dark material, a sailor hat, tan gloves with big welts on the back and stout, low-heeled Oxfords. This was the young woman who had come five thousand miles to improve her health! This was the child of the Orient, and in the Orient, woman is a hothouse flower. This was the timid young recluse to whom the soft-spoken diplomats were to carry a few ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade

... had been a sort of hothouse existence; for Lochlynne, you know, is the toy of a Pennsylvania coal baron, who breeds hackneys, not for profit, but for the joy there is in it; just as other men grow orchids and build cup defenders. At the Lochlynne stables they turn on the steam heat in ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford

... household expenditure, and scanty would have been the supply it would have furnished; as it was we had a profusion of fruit of all kinds, from the humble gooseberry and currant to the finest peaches, nectarines, and hothouse grapes, as well as an abundant supply of ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton

... and free from all the guiles of heartless coquetry, an orphan girl in an Indian village, with neither prudery on the one hand, nor hothouse teachings on the other, which turn the heads of so many girls, Astumastao was to herself a riddle which she could not solve—a problem the most difficult of any she had tried ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young

... all very charming. When the beetle woke up, he crept forth and looked around him. What splendour was in the hothouse! In the background great palm trees growing up on high; the sun made them look transparent; and beneath them what a luxuriance of green, and of beaming flowers, red as fire, yellow as amber, or ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... done was to take the whisky, make him look at it all round and tell it, with his own conviction and not mine, to go to hell. I ought never, never to have protected him, and made him a hothouse plant." ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... of his capital, that he was obliged to have recourse to the Bank of Avio for assistance. The bank (avio meaning pecuniary assistance, or advance of funds) was established by Don Lucas Alaman, and intended as an encouragement to industry. But industry is not of the nature of a hothouse plant, to be forced by artificial means; and these grants of funds have but created monopolies, and consequently added to the general poverty. Machinery, to the amount of three thousand eight hundred and forty spindles, was ordered for Antunano from the United States, and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... sat looking around at the handsome furnishings: the thick Persian rugs, the old portraits, the tall, burnished harp in the corner, the bowl of hothouse violets on the table at her elbow, until Lloyd returned, bearing a toasting fork and a plate of thinly sliced bread. Miss Sarah turned ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston

... mite to the fund which purchased spring flowers—hothouse-grown, for this April was a villainous prolongation of winter—with which to strew the approach to the station and fill the reserve ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... exist; and that is all that any one can say. The gift is not handed down: the man of talent has a fool for a son. Nor is it acquired; but it is improved by practice. He who has not the germ of it in his veins will never possess it, in spite of all the pains of a hothouse education. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... Mr. Lloyd-Jones as a garden pink. But then, Auntie, you remember how eloquent he was about the hills and the stars. That speech did not at all indicate a hothouse nature." ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... she remarked as we emerged from the hothouse into the moist, heavy air. "How I hate the country! except whilst the strawberries are ripe. Let's go back to the house, and read with our feet on the ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... at the tip than at the stalk), and racemes of little white flowers of a delicious honey-scent. {118a} It ought to be, if it be not yet, introduced into England, as a charming addition to the winter hothouse. As for the other plant, would that it could be introduced likewise, or rather that, if introduced, it would flower in a house; for it is a glorious climber, second only to that which poor Dr. Krueger ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... head. The cause of this I suppose to be, that (I do not remember it at least) I never once in my whole life turned back in fear of the weather. Prudence is a plant, of which I no doubt possess some valuable specimens, but they are always in my hothouse, never out of the glasses, and least of all things would endure the climate of the mountains. In simple earnestness, I never find myself alone, within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... Barnum and Bailey circus lingo, Big. This isn't a thing to mock at. I should think the origin of man would be something that would appeal even to your hothouse imagination. Modern science believes—knows—that Asia was the first home of the human race. That's where we're going, to the great Central Asian plateau north ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill

... you hurl at a work of art and which strikes a heart behind you. A face not to be omitted surely, if ever some painter in love with things modern should conceive the idea of reproducing on canvas that perfectly typical manifestation of Parisian life, the opening of the Salon in that vast hothouse of statuary, with the yellow gravelled paths and the great glass ceiling, beneath which, half-way from the floor, the galleries of the first tier stand forth, lined with heads bending over to look, and ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... an early start for the summer palace of the King of Chala, situated about eight miles from Tachienlu in a beautiful, lonely valley among the mountains. This is the favourite camping-place of Chengtu missionaries, who now and then brave the eleven days' journey to and fro to exchange their hothouse climate for a brief holiday in the glorious scenery and fine air of these health-giving uplands. We were mounted, the interpreter and I, on ponies provided by the Yamen, one worse than the other, and both ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall

... conducted in England in 1913 mercury glass-tube arcs were used in one part of a hothouse and the other part was reserved for a control test. The same kind of seeds were planted in the two parts of the hothouse and all conditions were maintained the same, excepting that a mercury-vapor lamp was operated a few hours in the evening in one of them. Miss Dudgeon, ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... talents and possessions, but children of the same parents are often strangely unlike, physically and mentally. One is radiantly beautiful, and another has no charm in appearance or in manners. One is physically vigorous, and another is frail as a hothouse flower. One is so quick that lessons are no trouble at all, and another wearily plods over them till ready to give up in despair. Evidences of this unevenness of distribution meet us everywhere. One man will make a fortune where ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... if you want to?" inquired Robbie Belle as she reflectively picked up her roll again. "We can invite somebody else to take your place at the table. Bea and Lila are going to the hothouse ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz

... now began to feel the effects of the arduous campaign. The rainy season was imminent, and malaria and blackwater fever claimed their victims by the score. The troops who had spent the previous five months stewing in the hothouse atmosphere of the Jordan Valley suffered particularly heavily through malignant malaria, contracted during those months, which lay dormant while operations were actually in progress and appeared when men were run down and weakened ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... wins your wager or not," Ellen reminded him as she obediently separated the indicated blooms, magnificent great hothouse specimens with stems like pillars. That the finest of all these roses, not excepting those she had sent herself, had come from private greenhouses, she well knew. The Kings lived in the centre of the wealthiest ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond

... a meal for the colored man, which was served in another part of the hotel, Dave joined his friends in the restaurant. A special table had been placed in a cozy corner, and that was decorated with a large bouquet of hothouse flowers, with a smaller bouquet ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer

... alone in their midst, listening to their talk, their tales, their jests, and their laughter, the unseen mantle fell upon Naomi at last, which made her a woman who had hitherto been a child. In this hothouse of sickly odours these women lived together, having no occupation but that of eating and drinking and sleeping, no education but devising new means of pleasing the lust of their husband's eye, no delight than that of supplanting one another in his love, no passion but jealousy, no ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine

... still place. She went first to the kitchen-garden, where the espaliered pear-trees drew complicated patterns on the walls, and pigeons were fluttering and preening about the silvery-slated roof of their cot. There was something wrong about the piping of the hothouse, and she was expecting an authority from Dorchester, who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis of the boiler. But when she dipped into the damp heat of the greenhouses, among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of old-fashioned exotics,—even ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... him seek any exacting employments. He might have collected stamps or coins, or translated Horace, or bound books, or invented new species of diatoms. But, as it happened, he grew orchids, and had one ambitious little hothouse. ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... in asseverations to the contrary; and Madame, running into the little salon, brought thence a pretty basket, filled with fine hothouse fruit, rosy, perfect, and tempting, reposing amongst the dark green, wax-like leaves, and pale yellow stars of, I ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... In the arrival of those flowers for decoration, at the moment when chance, clumsily or wickedly, so suddenly revealed that crushing news, Guy saw so much irony that he could not forbear looking at them for a moment, almost insulting in their beauty and their hothouse bloom. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... the early compositions we know were those produced at the Sorbonne about the eleventh century. By the thirteenth or fourteenth century the pre-eminence had been transferred to the Low Countries, and the Netherlands became the great hothouse of contrapuntal development. ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews

... best advantage. Let it develop each nation's products as the result of natural selection. We can grow rice in India, we can grow wheat in Russia. We can put up a high tariff wall and grow rice in Russia, if we grow it in a hothouse; but it would not be so profitable as raising wheat. Tariff walls are trade restrictions. They are as obsolete as the great ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor

... doubtful Lydes, Neaeras, and Pyrrhas, it is pleasant to come across a young beauty like this Phyllis, sic fidelem, sic lucro aversam. She, at least, is a fresh and fragrant violet among the languorous hothouse splendours ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... eleven flights, divided by as many spacious and handsomely balustraded landing-places, each flight consisting of twelve steps, and all of white marble—with its southern exposure has almost the temperature of a hothouse. There are two or three beggars basking in the sunshine near the bottom of the steps. But our models do not consort with these. Not only are they not beggars, but they belong to a different caste and a different race. We leisurely saunter up the huge stair, pausing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various

... the final implacable breaking-up of the human organism? And she suffers thus, poor wretch! in one of the servant's rooms, where the sun, shining in through a window in the sloping roof, makes the air as stifling as in a hothouse, and where there is so little room that the doctor has to put his hat on the bed. We struggled to the last to keep her, but finally we had to make up our minds to let her go away. She was unwilling to go to Maison Dubois, where we ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

... that women cannot hurl projectiles without looking like viragos and fools. The weakly-feminine might burst into tears or into a silly rage and leave the table. There was a distinct breath's space of pause, and Betty, cutting a cluster from a bunch of hothouse grapes presented by the footman at her side, answered as clearly as he ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... sunny towers of stately Seville, to the eternal snows and lovely vega of Granada: let the geologist clamber over mountains of marble, and metal-pregnant sierras, let the botanist cull from the wild hothouse of nature plants unknown, unnumbered, matchless in colour, and breathing the aroma of the sweet south; let all, learned or unlearned, listen to the song, the guitar, the Castanet; let all mingle with the gay, good-humoured, temperate peasantry, the finest in ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... with me, Dicky," he said, "and if my people haven't any cake, I can at least give you all the hothouse grapes you can eat, and some to carry home. How does ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... Nobody turns up his or her nose at the cup of tea, the delicately cut sandwiches, the tiny cakes that are handed round during the course of the evening. Nobody goes away groaning, "Heavens! how hungry I am!" Madame la Marquise cannot afford to give her friends pate de foie gras and hothouse strawberries, and they neither expect to have them nor blame her for not offering them. If she were obliged to offer costly and delicate viands to her friends whenever she invited them to her house, she would not be able to invite them at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... offices cut off the major part of a highly decorated ceiling where cupids with crimson-daubed bottoms swam in all attitudes in a sea of pink-and blue-and lavender-colored clouds, wreathing themselves coyly in heavy garlands of waxy hothouse flowers, while cornucopias spilling out squashy fruits gave Andrews a feeling of distinct insecurity as he looked up ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... you yourself provide the demonstration,— A good old Norse one, sound, true-born, home-bred. You draw distinction between wedded pledges And those of Love: your Logic's without flaw. They are distinguished just as roast from raw, As hothouse bloom from wilding of the hedges! Love is with us a science and an art; It long ago since ceased to animate the heart. Love is with us a trade, a special line Of business, with its union, code and sign; It is a guild of married folks and plighted, Past-masters ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen

... Crewe. "You can't hurt the flowers unless you bump against the pots, and if you walk straight you can't do that. I brought the plants down from my own hothouse in Leith. Those are French geraniums—very hard to get. They're double, you see, and don't look like the scrawny things you see in this country. Yes (with a good-natured smile), I guess they do cost something. I'll ask my secretary what I paid for that plant. Is that dinner, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... poetry. It is too much of an unconscious outflow, and partakes too much of the genial and the human nature for him. His fancy is lively and copious, but its poetical products often resemble the forced fruits of a hothouse rather than those of a natural soil and climate. His description of Sporus, lauded by Byron as a piece of imagination, is exceedingly artificial and far-fetched in its figures—a mere mass of smoked ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... hungry; and this is a combination which kills sentiment in bigger people than myself. The emotions, like a hothouse flower or a sea-dianthus, wither curiously when aired in an east wind, or kept ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... this difference," he cautioned as they stepped out of the elevator into a sort of a plaza, "that, whereas you people on the earth have only begun to use the hothouse principle, ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... this she often came To bring me fruit or wine, Or sometimes hothouse flowers. And at nights I lay awake Often and often thinking What to do for her sake. Wet or dry it was the same: She would come in at all hours, Set me eating and drinking, And say I must grow strong; At last the day seemed long And home seemed ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti

... The Balfour greenhouse has been stripped and they have such a lovely company of violets and primroses and white hyacinths with plenty of green moss and ivy. The Baikies have a hothouse and have such roses and plumes of curled parsley to put behind them, and lilies-of-the-valley; and I have robbed thy greenhouse, Mother, and taken all thy fairest ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... answer the propositions in your letters in regular rotation as they come; and so, with regard to the peaches, those that I have tasted on this side of the Atlantic I should say were not comparable to fine hothouse peaches in England and fine French espalier peaches; but then the peach trees here are standard trees, and there are whole orchards of them. Their chief merit, therefore, is their abundance, and some of that abundance is certainly fit for nothing but to feed pigs withal. [It is by no means a ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... ever happen to meet a Mr. William Hunt and his wife? He is a very good sort, and she is a perfect darling, one of those rare flowers whose fragrance fills the air even on the highway; not one of the hothouse kind that has been forced to bloom out of season, for out of season and in season she is always blooming and shedding forth her sweetness." Miss ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard

... to care for his exotic plants he built adjoining the upper garden a considerable conservatory or hothouse. In this he placed many of the plants sent to him as presents and also purchased many others from the collection of the celebrated botanist, John Bartram, at Philadelphia. The structure, together with the servants' quarters adjoining, was burned down in December, 1835, ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth

... even living without apparent extravagance. I do not run a yacht or keep hunters or polo ponies. My wife does not appear to be particularly lavish and continually complains of the insufficiency of her allowance. Our table is not Lucullan, by any means; and we rarely have game out of season, hothouse fruit or many flowers. Indeed, there is an elaborate fiction maintained by my wife, cook and butler that our establishment is run economically and strictly on a business basis. Perhaps it is. I hope so. I do not know anything about it. Anyhow, here is the smallest budget ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train

... Major, in alarm. "For mercy's sake, John, don't go to sleep and catch any more of those terrible ideas. No one knows where the next one might carry us—to Timbuktu or Yucatan, probably. Let's stick to California and settle the question before your hothouse ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne

... expedition that put the finishing touch to Philip Steele. He came back a big hearted, clear minded young fellow, as bronzed as an Aztec—a hater of cities and the hothouse varieties of pleasure to which he had been born, and as far removed from anticipation of his father's millions as though they had never been. He possessed a fortune in his own right, but as yet he had found no use for the income ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood

... 'chops and tomato sauce' a la Mrs. Bardell; order fried oysters in a browned loaf; get a quart of ice cream, the most expensive variety they have, a loaf of the richest cake in the bakery, and two chocolate eclairs apiece. Buy hothouse roses, or orchids, for the table, and give five cents to that dirty little boy on the corner there. In short, as Frank Stockton says, 'Let us so live while we are up that we shall forget we have ever been down'!" and Polly plunged upstairs to make a toilet ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... has had both its original formation and its regeneration in a job. In a job it was conceived, and in a job its mother brought it forth.... This board is a sort of temperate bed of influence: a sort of gently ripening hothouse, where eight members of Parliament receive salaries of a thousand a year for a certain given time, in order to mature at a proper season a claim to two thousand, granted for doing less" (Speech on Economical Reform). Gibbon, with entire good humour, acknowledges ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison

... at the station, looking reassuringly cheerful and at ease a magnificent new motor stood in waiting outside, with a cart for the luggage. Inside the beautiful old house the atmosphere was warmed by hot pipes, and scented with the fragrance of hothouse plants, banked together in every corner. It was not the usual case of being warm and cosy inside a room, and miserably chilled every time one crossed a passage or ascended the stairs. Mrs Percival and the girls were marvels of elegance in ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... I am, indeed, pretty sure that if there were no Aschers, if Gorman succeeded in abolishing the class, neither the city clerk, nor his pretty wife, nor any one else in England would eat hothouse peaches. There would not be any. I am inclined to think that if Ascher were done away with there would not even be any tinned peaches. Tinned peaches come from California. Somebody grows them there. That man must be kept going, fed, clothed sufficiently, ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... circus-tunes, 'way in some other room Jes' chokin' full o' hothouse plants and pinies and perfume; And fountains, squirtin' stiddy all the time; and statutes, made Out o' puore marble, 'peared-like, sneakin' ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley

... reaching beyond, touched a small table on which stood a vase of white frosted glass; over the rim of it profuse crimson carnations hung their heads. They were one of her favorite winter flowers, and he had had these sent out to her this afternoon from a hothouse of the distant town by a half-frozen messenger. Near her head curtains of crimson brocade swept down the wall to the floor from the golden-lustred window cornices. At her back were cushions of crimson ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen

... these wonders is my friend!" Their eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever. They think a fine estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with ten times more. I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... said: "The day I land is going to be a great day for some of the waiters and a hard day on some of the cooks. Persons who happen to be near by when I am wrestling with my first ear of green corn will think I am playing on a mouth organ. My behaviour in regard to hothouse asparagus will be reminiscent of the best work of the late Bosco. In the matter of cantaloupes I rather fancy I shall consume the first two on the half shell, or au naturel, as we veteran correspondents say; but the third one will contain about as much vanilla ice cream ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb

... the more brilliant sisterhood of the hothouse, Miss Rushton," exclaimed Mr. Lawson with an ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... cold afterward. Both these arguments alike, however, are based upon a misunderstanding. The frequency of colds in winter is chiefly due to the fact that, at this time of the year, we crowd into houses and rooms, shutting the doors and windows in order to keep warm, and thus provide a ready-made hothouse for the cultivation and transmission from one to another of the influenza and other bacilli. As the brilliant young English pulmonary expert, Dr. Leonard Williams, puts it, "a constant succession of colds implies a mode of life in which all aerial microbes are ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... never looked. The glories of the tropical forest closed us in with their depth, colour, and redundancy. Here the operations of nature are rapid and decisive. A rainfall of eleven feet in a year and a hothouse temperature force every plant into ceaseless activity, and make short work of decay. Leafage, blossom, fruitage, are simultaneous and perennial. The river, about as broad as the Cam at Cambridge, leaped along, clear like amber, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... spots the fertility and growth of the plants was astounding. They seemed to be shooting up out of a natural hothouse, but where to attempt to pass them meant ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn

... Caladiums.—Favourite hothouse foliage plants, generally grown in peat soil at a temperature of 70 degrees. They require plenty of light while growing, and to be kept moderately moist at the roots. As the leaves lose colour less water ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink

... means, in the Middle West, raised luxuriously on the basis of waxing wealth, educated abroad and in America in a school which shields its pupils from every reality of life and forces their growth in a hothouse atmosphere specially adapted to these human orchids, and then presented as a finished product for the acceptance of the New York circle which, by virtue of much painful and expensive advertising in the newspapers, ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... consumption that the markets of this country can by possibility produce. The loss upon a pound of tripe has been found to be, in the boiling, seven-eights of a fifth more than the loss upon a pound of any other animal substance whatever. Tripe is more expensive, properly understood, than the hothouse pine-apple. Taking into account the number of animals slaughtered yearly within the bills of mortality alone; and forming a low estimate of the quantity of tripe which the carcases of those animals, reasonably well butchered, would yield; I find ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens

... being rudely shattered. Such an intellectual feat is likely to produce what, in the most obvious sense, one would call highly artificial work. Modern classicism must be fine-spun, and smell rather of the hothouse than the open air. Undoubtedly some exquisite literary achievements have been accomplished in this spirit; but they are, after all, calculated for the small circle of cultivated minds, and many of their merits ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... fever, nevertheless we went down to the work-shed. It was a pitch-dark night, the air was like that in a hothouse, smelling of earth and mould. The surf boomed sullenly on the beach, and heavy squalls flogged the forest. Sometimes a rotten branch snapped, and the sound travelled, dull and heavy, through ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... necessary rebuke comes in tone of tenderest reproach; when "You have grieved me" has been the heaviest penalty for a youthful fault; when no anxiety has ever been allowed to trouble the young heart—then, when the hothouse flower is transplanted, and rough winds blow on it, ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant

... month the canals were full, and the fields were flooded and a thin coat of fine pulverized soil was spread over the ground like a carpet and when seed was placed in the ground it grew like in a hothouse. At Cairo the Nile would often ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols

... of course, confined to the lady's health. She thought that she was, perhaps, getting better, though, as the doctor had told her, the reassuring symptoms might too probably only be too fallacious. She could eat nothing,—literally nothing. A few grapes out of the hothouse had supported her for the last week. This statement was foolish on Lizzie's part, as Mr. Emilius was a man of an inquiring nature, and there was not a grape in the garden. Her only delight was in reading and in her child's society. Sometimes she thought that she ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... and strive perpetually with heavy baggage. This false position, combined with his nervous excitement, brought about the very consummation and catastrophe of his miseries; for when in the moment of parting he aimed a flower, a hothouse flower that had cost money, at the fair hand of Mercy, it reached, instead, the coachman on the box, who thanked him kindly, and stuck ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... a gleam of light can creep through the misty atmosphere. The earth seems clothed in a garment of clouds, and the air is positively reeking with damp warmth, like the air of a hothouse. This explains the luxuriant growth ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin

... VINE AND ITS BRANCHES.—The unity of the vine. The vine and its branches constitute one plant. Some branches may be trailed along the trellis-work outside the cottage door, others conducted through hothouse after hothouse; yet one life, one stream of sap, one essential quality and character pervades them all, from the dark root, buried in the soil, to the furthest twig or leaf. Yonder branch, waving its fronds high up against the hothouse glass, cannot ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... the last century. The hum of the mosquito is now just beginning to be heard in the land, especially in some big London hotels. The Colorado beetle is hourly expected by Cunard steamer. The Canadian roadside erigeron is well established already in the remoter suburbs; the phylloxera battens on our hothouse vines; the American river-weed stops the navigation on our principal canals. The Ganges and the Mississippi have long since flooded the tawny Thames, as Juvenal's cynical friend declared the Syrian Orontes had flooded the Tiber. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... conductor Pugnani, with his pupil Viotti (the latter playing second violin in the orchestra), were members of the company. And the King's band of foreign and native players has been called one of the best in Europe. Still, all this was but the hothouse bloom of exotics. To bring about a natural harvest of home produce something else was wanted than royal patronage, and this something sprang from the series of disasters that befell the nation in the latter half of the last century, and by shaking it to its very heart's ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... of the Kaiser, with two crossed sabres and a pair of pistols under it, and a cuckoo clock were exhibited on the wall close by. There was also a big flower table, but on near view it was seen that its fine roses and tulips had not originated in a hothouse, but under the scissors of an artist in ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg

... mighty purpose. Those at the faro tables of the market increased the stakes and opened new tables. New industrial companies sprung up overnight like mushrooms, watered and sunned by the easy optimism of the hour. The rumors of war disturbed this hothouse growth. But the "big people" took advantage of these to squeeze the "little people," and all worked to the glory of the great god. In the breast of every man on the street was seated one conviction: 'This ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... difficult to endure, and whose health was so fragile, for when only a few months old he had almost died of infantile enteritis. His parents had been obliged to carry him hastily to Switzerland, and then to Hyeres, and to keep him in an atmosphere like that of a hothouse. Petted and spoiled, tended by women, like Achilles at Scyros among the daughters of Lycomedes, would he not bear all his life the stamp of too softening an education? Too pretty and too frail, with his curls and his dainty little frock, he ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux

... had stopped. He had caught sight of an enormous bunch of hothouse flowers in a vase on the floor by the writing-table. Stanistreet's card was in the midst of the bunch, and a note from Stanistreet lay open on ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair

... rejoicing to see how many evidences of affection to the Rector were called forth by this illness; presents of fruit poured in from all quarters, from Lord Rotherwood's choice hothouse grapes, to poor little Kezia Grey's wood-strawberries; inquiries were continual, and the stillness of the village was wonderful. There was no cricket on the hill, no talking in the street, no hallooing in the hay-field, and no burst of noise when the ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge

... into a hothouse from a keen winter walk, our arrival at the beautiful but nerveless city after ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... the servant handed round the plate containing these, she took them all, and could not account for the amused and even censuring looks of some of the other guests, till she heard that it was expected that she should have helped herself to one bunch only of the hothouse treasure.] magnolias with their fragrant blossoms, and that queen of trees the beautiful ilanthus, the "tree of heaven" as it is called; and everywhere foliage so luxuriant that it looked as if autumn and decay could never come. And ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... listened with patience and understanding. Here was laid out before her the bared heart of the "poor little rich girl." She pieced the bits together until she had the whole picture of this odd, unnatural, hothouse child—antagonistic to her parents, to her school, yet full of feeling, and coming into the age when the emotions play such havoc. No wonder she had settled her youthful affections upon Jerry. He was so preeminently the type one loves at sixteen, Jane ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke

... profusion of the multiflora rose. The garden sloped away from the house, and contained an abundance of both flowers and fruits. There was the aloe, and more than one kind of cactus, growing freely in the open air, with many other plants which would need the hothouse or greenhouse in a colder climate. Fig-trees, vines, standard peach, and nectarine trees were in great abundance, while a fence of the sharp Kangaroo Island acacia effectually kept all inquisitive cattle at a respectful distance. The inside of the house was ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson

... but a telegraph wire was run from Chazy Junction to Bob West's former storage shed and a telephone gang came along and placed a private wire, with long-distance connections, in the new newspaper office. The office itself became transformed—"as full o' winders as a hothouse!" exclaimed Peggy McNutt, with bulging eyes—and neat partitions were placed for the offices. There was no longer any secret as to the plans of the "nabobs"; it was generally understood that those ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne

... the jug orchid—a veritable jug, lid and all. Raising the lid you would find the jug half filled with water. Sometimes in the tangle up above, between two trees, you would see a thing like a bird come to ruin. Orchids grew here as in a hothouse. All the trees—the few there were—had a spectral and miserable appearance. They were half starved by the voluptuous ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... Chippendale sideboard against the wall, a round, gate-legged table on which stood a blue china bowl filled with pink roses, a couple of luxurious easy-chairs, some old prints upon the wall. On the sideboard was a basket, as yet unpacked, filled with hothouse fruit, and on a low settee by the side of one of the easy-chairs were a little pile of reviews, several volumes of poetry, and a couple of library books. In the centre of the mantelpiece was a photograph, the photograph of a man a little older, perhaps, ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... was perfect. The delicate, disdainful poise and the gay provocation in the dark, slanting eyes were enough to tell that she was no novice in the game of sex. He judged her an expensive orchid produced in the civilization of our twentieth-century hothouse. Across the bottom of the picture was scrawled an inscription in a fashionably angular hand. Lane moved closer to read it. The words were, "Always, Phyllis." Probably this was the young woman to whom, if rumor were true, James Cunningham, ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine

... when she came in and shut the door behind her, at a table fairly naped, with fine glass, silver, and flowers upon it. There was hothouse fruit, too, a melon, a little pyramid of strawberries in fig- leaves. He was eating smoked salmon and bread and butter with appetite. By his side, half empty, was a champagne glass. A pint bottle stood ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... under the ban of official displeasure are Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, and Cezanne—the latter represented by two of the most veracious fruit-pieces I ever saw. The Manet is the famous Hothouse, and in the semi-darkness (not a ray of artificial light is permitted) I noted that the canvas had mellowed with the years. The Monets are of rare quality. Altogether a magnificent object-lesson for young Germany, in which tender colour, an exquisite vision (poetic ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... were below, but one after the other they came up, complaining that the between-decks was more like a stew-pan or hothouse than any place they had ever before been in. The officers also made their appearance on deck; but though they began to walk up and down as usual, one after the other they stopped and leant against the bulwarks or a gun-carriage, turning their faces ...
— Sunshine Bill • W H G Kingston

... because, so far as in her gentle spirit lay, she hated it. It was slowly killing her man, and all her chance of future happiness; she hated it, and read it every morning. To the monthly rose and straggly little brown-red chrysanthemums in the tiny hothouse there had succeeded spring flowers—a few hardy January snowdrops, and one by one blue scillas, and the little ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... nothing to cling to, nothing but black despair; and half bewildered, she received the noisy greeting of Jessie, who met her at the door, and dragged her into the drawing-room, decorated with flowers from the hothouse, told her to guess who ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes

... Doubtless, in quiet and secluded nooks, there were many human wild flowers that had not lost their primitive freshness and delicacy, but they did not flourish in the withering atmosphere of the great world. The type in vogue savored of the hothouse. With its striking beauty of form and tropical richness of color, it had no sweetness, no fragrance. Many of these women we can only consider on the worldly and intellectual side. Sydney Smith has ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... a handsome apartment, hung round with pictures and decorated with choice hothouse flowers and evergreens, as unlike as possible anything one might expect ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson



Words linked to "Hothouse" :   conservatory, nursery, indoor garden, greenhouse, glasshouse



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