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Scrub   /skrəb/   Listen
Scrub

adjective
1.
(of domestic animals) not selectively bred.



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"Scrub" Quotes from Famous Books



... Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at The Scrub Oaks, Spring Lake, Michigan. Mr. Pierrepont has been promoted again, and the old man sends him a little advice ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer

... Following came not one but many riders; a half dozen, a score,—enough to make up the allotment, and again. In silence they came, grim-faced, more grimly accoutred. All manner of horseflesh was represented: the broncho, the mustang, the frontier scrub, the thoroughbred; all manner of apparel, from chaperajos to weather-beaten denim; but, saddled or saddleless, across the neck of every beast stretched the barrel of a long rifle, at the hip of every rider hung a holster, from every belt peeped the hilt ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge

... The brigalow scrub was about half a mile in length, and stood between the swamp and the high river bank. At the dried-up bed of the swamp itself he did not care to look a second time; its once reedy margin was now a sight of horror, for many hundreds ...
— In The Far North - 1901 • Louis Becke

... than you do. But it ought to be easy tellin' when a man's on the spot. The middle peak ought to be a good fifty feet higher than the others and flat lookin' on top. In a ravine, between the tall boy and the one at the left, Juarez said there was a lot of scrub trees and brush. He said plow through the brush, keepin' to the up edge when you can get to it, until you come to about the middle of the patch. There a man would find a lot of loose rock, boulders ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory

... probably the last representative of great forests that grew where now is sterile moor. In the bogs trunks of oak and fir are found lying as they fell centuries ago. The local names preserve the tradition, with here and there patches of scrub oak that hug the ground close, to escape the blast from the North Sea. There is one such thicket near the hamlet of Taulund—the name itself tells of long-forgotten groves—and the story runs among the people yet that once squirrels jumped from tree ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis

... cheerfully enough, but it was quite hopeless. The breakaways were heading for the line of bush, and the sapling scrub along the creek was so thick that the boys would have been perfectly secure under its cover, even if the pursuers were not in hearty sympathy with the pursued, and the pursuit were not ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson

... ironbarks, Stretched o'er the valley's sloping bed— Half hidden in a tea-tree scrub, A flock of dusky sheep were spread; And fitful bleating faintly came On every joyous breath of wind, That up the stony hills would fly, And leave the hollows far behind! Wild tones of music from the Creek Were intermingling with the breeze, The ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall

... the hungriest cleared roads in New South Wales runs to within a couple of miles of Hungerford, and stops there; then you strike through the scrub to the town. There is no distant prospect of Hungerford—you don't see the town till you are quite close to it, and then two or three white-washed galvanized-iron roofs start out ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... will escape, this time. I confess the charge; we have hired the new theatre, and do intend to solicit the honour of the ladies coming to hear me murder Cato, and Scrub; a pretty climax of characters, you ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... woe drops out of sight. He's managed to keep hold of a little property that brings him in just enough to scrub along on, and he joins that hungry-eyed, trembly-fingered fringe of margin pikers that hangs around every hotel broker's branch in town, takin' a timid flier now and then, but tappin' the free lunch hard and reg'lar. You know the kind,—seedy ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... Tom shortly, "just as you like. If you feel yourself going, stoop down and pretend to fasten your shoe, and give a scrub to your cheeks before passing Miss Bruce. She'll spot you in a moment if you go in with a face ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... use for little shells is to cover small boxes with them. The shells are arranged in a simple pattern and fastened on with glue. If the shells are not empty and clean, boil them, and scrub them ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... said Skippy with a sigh. He went to the washstand, poured out the water and began to scrub diligently ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... small building, about twelve feet square, to be erected in his garden, and furnished with some ordinary chairs and tables, and a few prints of the cheapest sort. His hope was, that when the whitewashing frenzy seized the females of his family, they might repair to this apartment, and scrub, and scour, and smear to their hearts' content; and so spend the violence of the disease in this outpost, whilst he enjoyed himself in quiet at headquarters. But the experiment did not answer his expectation. It was impossible ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... was a rough wagon-road winding among patches of poplar scrub and willow. Issuing out upon the wide clearing which contained their village they saw afar the little storehouse burning like a ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... defeat, for they had lost over a hundred men, the Matabele, who were afraid to return to Buluwayo except as victors, did nothing of the sort. They only cut down a quantity of reeds and scrub, and moved their camp nearly to the banks of the river, placing it in such a position that it could no longer be searched by the fire of the two white men. Here they sat themselves down sullenly, hoping to starve out the garrison or to find some other way ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard

... fitted bow and stern with air tanks, well found in all her gear. Woe betide the seaman who abstracted an inch of rope from her to patch up the schooner's crazy rigging, or who left a life-belt lying loose around the deck or a rowlock unrestored to its due place after the weekly scrub-down! ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... snowing, and the mountain-tops soon hid themselves and sulked away among the leaden mists. Our tent was pitched among a low sort of scrub, the only apology for fire-wood procurable, and here we soon had a fine carpet of fresh snow, which put the unfortunate coolies, and the servants, and the three goats and the four ducks, and, in fact, everybody but ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... many hues! how much time will you need to paint and stain and grizzle and grain and tint and stripe and fill and shellac and oil and rub and scrub and cut and draw and putty and sand-paper and size and distemper and border and otherwise exalt and glorify the walls and woodwork of our house, after the other workmen are through, making allowance for what you ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner

... one of the children—a beautiful little girl, sick with what would be "la grippe" on Beacon Hill, but is only "grip" down in the slums. The mother had a little babe, and was in such delicate health that it was impossible for her to go out to wash or scrub. Her two narrow little rooms were scrupulously neat and clean, as were her children; but the tears ran down her cheeks as, in answer to our questions, she confessed, as if she had been admitting a crime, poor soul, that they had had nothing ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks

... broad laugh,—most delectable to hear, but not in the least like an ordinary woman's laugh,—"we women (there are four of us here already) will take the domestic and indoor part of the business, as a matter of course. To bake, to boil, to roast, to fry, to stew,—to wash, and iron, and scrub, and sweep,—and, at our idler intervals, to repose ourselves on knitting and sewing,—these, I suppose, must be feminine occupations, for the present. By and by, perhaps, when our individual adaptations begin to develop themselves, it may be that some of us who wear the petticoat will go afield, ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... quiet all winter; but the spring came, and the sap rose. I am not used to day labor. It is not in my nature to spend my life in fattening fowls; I cannot stoop about turning over the soil for vegetables, nor flourish a whip and drive a cart, nor scrub down a horse in a stable all my life, so I must die of starvation, I suppose? I am only happy when I am up there," he went on after a pause, pointing to the mountains. "And I have been about among the hills for the past week; I got a sight of a chamois, and I have the chamois ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac

... physical work—till you drop—till you're so tired, you must go to sleep—that's the only thing when you're as miserable as poor Nelly. You know it is, Will. Don't you remember that poor Mrs. Henessy whose son died here? Her letters to me afterwards used to be all about scrubbing. If she could scrub from morning till night, she could just get along. She scrubbed herself sane again. The bigger the floor, the better she liked it. When bedtime came, she just slept like a log. And at last she got all right. But it was touch-and-go ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... upon the Marshalls' delivery horse, tied in the shade, the girls had already taken their baskets and gone down the east road which wound through the sand and scrub. I could hear them calling to each other. The elder bushes did not grow back in the shady ravines between the bluffs, but in the hot, sandy bottoms along the stream, where their roots were always in moisture and their tops in the sun. The blossoms were unusually ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather

... is so always a boy, and has to have so much mothering and looking after. He has to be watched for fear his hair gets too long, and sent to the tailor's now and then for clothes. And if someone didn't turn his old pajamas into scrub rags and silver cloths, he would go on wearing their ragged skeletons long after the flesh had departed hence. (What comforting rags Irvin Cobb's pajamas ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... on their left, as they ran seaward, were clothed towards their summit with a tangle of broom and light scrub. The two forced their way through it, and found to their surprise that on this side there were no defences of the Huntingtower demesne. Along the crest ran a path which had once been gravelled and trimmed. Beyond, through a thicket of laurels ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan

... to the kitchen and grabbed the broom. She did not dare scrub the porch floor for fear that it would not dry in time, but she swept it carefully and spread down the rug. Then one by one, and making a separate trip each time, she carried out the table and the chairs. With a passing sigh for the bouquet abandoned ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson

... found chiefly on the tropical coasts, and in the west African equatorial basin with its extension towards the upper Nile; and savanna interspersed with trees on the greater part of the plateaus, passing as the desert regions are approached into a scrub vegetation consisting of thorny acacias, &c. Forests also occur on the humid slopes of mountain ranges up to a certain elevation. In the coast regions the typical tree is the mangrove, which flourishes wherever the soil is of a swamp character. The dense forests of West Africa contain, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... the sun came out; he went on, up and up. He would get to the top quicker than anyone ever had! It was something he could do better than that young beast. The pine-trees gave way to stunted larches, and these to pine scrub and bare scree, up which he scrambled, clutching at the tough bushes, terribly out of breath, his heart pumping, the sweat streaming into his eyes. He had no feeling now but wonder whether he would get to the top before he dropped, exhausted. He thought he would ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... is exaggerated. The saddle is well adapted to its peculiar local purposes. The projecting knee-pads, especially, save the rider from fractured knee-caps when galloping among closely timbered scrub. The ordinary English saddle is similarly varied by exaggeration of different parts to suit special requirements, as e.g. in the military saddle, with its enormous pommel; the diminutive racing saddle, to meet handicappers' "bottom-weights," ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... you say another word of impudence I'll tan your dirty hide, you bastely common scrub; and sorry I'd be to soil my ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous

... and quietest of rivers. She meets the little set of Concord people: Mr. Alcott, for whom she does not share Mr. Emerson's enthusiasm; and William Ellery Channing, whose figure stands out like a gnarled and twisted scrub-oak,—a pathetic, impossible creature, whose cranks and oddities were submitted to on account of an innate nobility of character. "Generally crabbed and reticent with strangers, he took a liking to me," says ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus

... relief. Hourly they expected it, but, being hampered by a score of wounded, it was not possible for them to break through the thickly populated scrub unassisted. ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... little maids—why should we quiz them?—they were there dressed and determined to do their best. At the first table sat a middle-aged major-general, a man of kindly face and habit. As a soldier—a fierce, intrepid leader—can you not remember the day when he lay amongst the scrub of the Modder bank with his chest laid bare by a raking bullet, and refused to be carried to hospital,—even entreated the doctors to let him carry out the mad effort, worthy of a Marshal Ney, which had ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer

... picture should have a point of chief interest, and the rest of the points simply go to make more beautiful the central idea, or to form a fine setting for it. Look at that picture over Miriam's head. See that lone pine, the beautiful curve of the hillside, the scrub undergrowth about the tree, the bit of sky beyond! As soon as one looks at that picture one's eye rests on the pine, and the other features seem to ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw

... plains and wooded hills east of Rio Paraguay; Gran Chaco region west of Rio Paraguay mostly low, marshy plain near the river, and dry forest and thorny scrub elsewhere ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... scarcely think so this time of year. Besides, up here he doesn't take to heavy timber like this same as he does in Maine and the Kanuck provinces. He runs in droves of hundreds and thousands up this way, and seems to like the scrub timber." ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor

... Washington, with which it was connected by railroad. This was the starting point. Lee's army was about fifteen miles away, with the Rapidan, a river difficult of passage, in front of it, the foothills of the Blue Ridge on its left, and on its right a densely wooded tract of scrub pines and various low growths, almost pathless, ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen

... I do? Tell me that. . . . We had to scrub the rooms out this evening, and how could we get you out of the house? There was no other way of getting you out. . . . But don't be angry, stupid. . . . I didn't want you to be dull in the arbour, so I sent the same letter to Mitya too! Mitya, have you ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80 Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and re-crossed, weaves A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, the ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... steep hillside. Presently Hazel could look away over an area of woodland undulating like a heavy ground swell at sea. Here and there ridges stood forth boldly above the general roll, and distantly she could descry a white-capped mountain range. They turned the end of a thick patch of pine scrub, and Bill pulled up in a small opening. From a case swinging at his belt he took out a pair of field glasses, ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... the spot a little critically. Scrub palmettoes and grass overhung the bank above, which made him wonder if there was any danger of their catching fire. A little breeze was springing up, but he decided that it was not strong enough to carry the ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine

... on, and in half an hour they came to the water, a deep, clear, slow stream, fringed with scrub willows, covered with lily-pads, and following the middle of a broad, boggy flat. Yan had looked for a pond, and was puzzled by the stream. Then it struck him. "Caleb said there was only one big stream through this swamp. This must be it. This ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton

... beautiful green woods that he had once roamed in, but turned towards a most horrible place—a great marsh full of pools of slimy black water, and reeds, and rough scrub and bushes. It was the most lonely place you can imagine, and people feared to go there because they said it ...
— Stories of the Saints by Candle-Light • Vera C. Barclay

... contemplatively, cocking her bronze head on one side, and looking up at him sweetly, her arms around her knees. "I know. I've read about them—I've read a lot. You have to give people blood out of your strong, bared right arm, and cure them of diphtheria, and scrub floors—oh, no, it's the nurses do that. 'A physician's life is not ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer

... nobody but your own guilty self knew that you were the sinner he was exhorting. Yet he did not spare rich nor poor: he preached at the Squire, and that great fat farmer, Mr. Bullock the churchwarden, as boldly as at Hodge the plowman, and Scrub the hedger. As for Mr. Stirn, he had preached at him more often than at any one in the parish; but Stirn, though he had the sense to know it, never had the grace to reform. There was, too, in Parson Dale's sermons, something of that boldness of illustration which ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... fact, all animals do not seem to know when they have enough of this food. All stock fattens readily on them. The hog will lay on flesh faster on a diet of peanuts, than on corn, potatoes, or any other product with which the writer is acquainted. The poorest scrub of a hog, turned into a peanut field, after the crop is removed, and where he can get nothing but the pods he may find by rooting for them, will change his appearance in three days, and in a week, will be so much improved ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones

... parasitically to all religions, though formally recognized by none. Whether we call it fetichism, shamanism, nature worship or heathenism in its myriad forms, it is there in awful reality. It is as omnipresent, as persistent, as hard to kill as the scrub bamboo which both efficiently and sufficiently takes the place of thorns and thistles as ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... to tell you. I've had little to do with him, but that little was enough. We avoid each other as much as possible and never speak except in the line of duty. I make no bones of the fact that I think he's a scrub." ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... while I was asleep, the damned skunk!" she flared. "I'd sooner hev rattlesnake-pizen on my lips!" She stopped rubbing the arm to scrub fiercely at her mouth with the back ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... champagne glass, emptied it. She must forget all those things! "I've played the fool once. I've learned my lesson. Surely I'll never do it again." As she drank, her eyes chanced upon the clock. Half-past ten. Mrs. Tucker had probably just fallen asleep. And Mrs. Reardon was going out to scrub—going out limping and groaning with rheumatism. No, Mrs. Reardon was lying up at the morgue dead, her one chance to live lost forever. Dead! Yet better off than Mrs. Tucker lying alive. Susan could see her—the seamed and broken and dirty old remnant of a face—could see the vermin—and the mice ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... misfit? About the only Percy I ever knew in real life was a great two-fisted husk who was foreman of a stereotypin' room; and here in the Corrugated Buildin', if you'll come in some night after five, I can show you a wide built scrub lady, with hair redder'n mine and a voice like a huckster—her front name is Violet. Yet I expect, when them two was babies, both those names sounded kind of cute. I could see where it would be easy enough for me to make ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford

... the fallen trunk of a tree half-buried in dense undergrowth affording us a perfectly ideal ambush; and we had scarcely settled ourselves comfortably therein when a violent swaying of the underbrush warned us that our quarry was approaching. The next instant the scrub parted right and left, the points of two enormous tusks protruded from the swaying tangle of leaves and creepers, and in the drawing of a breath the head and fore quarters of the biggest bull elephant I had ever seen came into view. For a moment the huge beast ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood

... lanky race of ordinary station-cats, who from time to time disappeared into the bush and contracted alliances with the still more degraded specimens of their class who had long been wild among the scrub. No: Sandy came of "pur sang," and held his small square head erect, with a haughty carriage as beseemed his ancestry. His fur was really beautiful, a sort of tortoiseshell red, the lighter stripes repeating exactly the different golden tints of a fashionable chignon. In early youth, ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker

... Street, Sniper's Spur and Sniper's Post. The country was flat and rather uninteresting except on the extreme left held by "D" Company, where the outlook was over sandy hills studded here and there with patches of scrub. Captain A.R. MacEwen and 2nd Lieut. T.C. Price were lent for temporary duty with a battalion of the 155th Brigade, and as a result the former took a hand in a successful night raid by the K.O.S.B. ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison

... Jock learnt to scrub, He gave the bairns their Saturday tub, He made the beds, he blacked the grates, He washed up saucers and cups and plates, He cleaned and polished, he boiled and baked Till every ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various

... land: 0% permanent crops: 0% other: 100% (mostly rock with sparse scrub oak, few trees, some commercial ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... animals—antelope, deer, horses—the protective colouration is also adapted to habitat and environment. Most deer belong to the forest, carefully avoiding the open deserts and staying near water. They live chiefly in the jungle or scrub, and are usually spotted with red and white in such a way as to be almost invisible to a casual observer; some, however, that live in the very shady places are uniformly dark so as to harmonise with their surroundings. The wild horses and asses of Central Asia are dun-coloured—corresponding ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon

... mountains which have already been deforested by human hands. Another shows a pebbly river-bed in southern Manchuria where what was once a great stream has dried up owing to the deforestation in the mountains. Only some scrub wood is left, which will disappear within a half century. Yet another shows the effect of one of the washouts, destroying an arable mountain side, these washouts being due to the removal of all vegetation; yet in this photograph ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... confuse me by flight I could not be sure I was not numbering the same one twice. With eight males, some of them fine large moths, one superb, from which to choose, my female mated with an insistent, frowsy little scrub lacking two feet and having torn and ragged wings. I needed no surer proof that ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter

... so smooth as to seem glazed, like a potter's vessel, though a single hour's rain rendered them so slippery as to be very dangerous to travellers." The roads in fact were and are, little more than lanes between the isolated woods across the low scrub of the ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton

... didn't marry you for a cook or a scrub-lady. If you had to do it, that would be another matter, of course; and if we did have to do it, we wouldn't have a big house like this for you to do it in. But I didn't marry for a cook, and I knew I wasn't getting one ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter

... stretches far northward from the Orange River between German SW. Africa and the Transvaal, an elevated plateau, not really desert, but covered with scrub and affording coarse pasturage ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... as we were riding, unconscious of our danger, through an opening out of our skirmishers in a momentary loss of direction. There were extensive thickets of the loblolly pine occasionally met, where these scrub trees were so thick and their branches so interlaced that neither man nor horse could force a way through them, and the movement would be delayed till these densest places were turned by marching around ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... clerkships are open to women, cannot quite realize their helplessness a few generations back. In Mary Wollstonecraft's time those whose birth and training had unfitted them for the more menial occupations—who could neither bake nor scrub—had but two resources. They must either become governesses or ladies' companions. In neither case was their position enviable. They ranked as little better than upper servants. Mary's first appearance on the ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... he had purchased a change of very cheap underwear, a towel, and a cake of soap. Every morning about daylight he went to a secluded spot on the levee, for a scrub and a swim. Then he washed out his towel and placed it with his other small belongings, in a storage place he had discovered in a great ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston

... scrub away energetically at the floor, deluged with water, and fix up things straight for me; making the place far more neat and tidy in five minutes than Harry the mulatto could have done if he had been all day over the job. He eclipsed the steward in his own line, ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... was a space of waste land, marsh and thicket, tapering to the narrow strip of sand and scrub joining the peninsula to the forest, and here and there upon this waste ground rose a mean house, dwelt in by the poorer sort. All were dark. We left them behind, and found ourselves upon the neck, with the desolate murmur of the river on either hand, ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston

... the head of our foremost battery back down again. The captain, of course, refused; but the colonel of the other regiment signed to his foremost battery to advance, and in spite of the care the driver took to keep among the scrub, the wheel of the first gun struck our captain's right leg and broke it, throwing him over on the near side of his horse. All this was the work of a moment. Our Colonel, who was but a little way off, guessed that there was a quarrel; he galloped ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac

... want to speak disrespectfully of poor Carlyle, but in spirit it is somewhat hard to keep one's hand off him, as we reconstruct those scenes in the gaunt house at Craigenputtock. There is a little detail in one scene which adds a deeper horror. I have said that Mrs. Carlyle had to scrub the floors, and as she scrubbed them Carlyle would look on smoking—drawing in from tobacco pleasant comfortableness and easy dreams—while his poor drudge panted and sighed over the hard work, which she had never done before. Do you not feel that you would like to break the pipe in his mouth, and ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... Harry, with a laugh. "I know one chap who did that; Edgar Burton. Do you know him? He joined at the beginning of the war, but he quickly got sick of it. He said the life was terrible; he described to me how he had to wash up dishes, and scrub the floors of his barracks, and how he had to be pals with a lot of chaps who didn't know the decencies of life. Besides, think of me on a shilling ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking

... knows the people of a community so well as the physician who lives among them? To the world the Doctor's patients were laborers, bankers, dressmakers, scrub-women, farmers, servants, teachers, preachers; to the Doctor they were men and women. Others knew their occupations—he knew their lives. The preachers knew what they professed—he knew what they practiced. Society saw them ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright

... went on Big Tom. "You don't scrub till to-morrow, so the day's clear for stringin' beads, or makin' vi'lets. And don't let me come home t'night and find no hot supper. You hear me." He chewed once or ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... ridge for a casual survey of the broad brule he had just crossed. The next instant he brought up rigidly erect as his eye caught a swift blur of motion far back on his trail at the opposite edge of the brule. He looked again but could make out only an army of blackened stumps. Entering the scrub with a vague sense of uneasiness, he circled among the stunted trees and took up a position under cover of a granite outcropping that gave him a view of his back trail. He had hardly settled himself before a man stepped from ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx

... banks and making now and then a little leap into a lower basin; along the stream great screens of reeds, sere, pale, with barely a pennon of leaves, rustling ready for the sickle; and behind, beneath the watery sky, rainy but somehow peaceful, the russet oak-scrub of the hill. Of spring there was indeed visible only the green of the young wheat beneath the olives; not a bud as yet had moved. And still, it is spring. The world is renewing itself. One feels it in the gusts of cool, wet wind, the songs of the reeds, the bubble of the brook; one feels ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... had started out of his doze. I wanted to see. We went round violently as I emerged, and, clinging to the side, I saw, in a whirl, tall, baked, brown hills dropping sheer down to a strip of flat land and a belt of dark-green scrub at the water's edge; little pink squares of house-walls dropped here and there, mounting the hillside among palms, like men standing in tall grass, running back, hiding in a steep valley; silver-gray huts with ragged dun roofs, like dishevelled shocks of hair; a great pink ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... leaving the railroad they had spent four days upon the trail, which sometimes ran plain before them, marked by dints of wheels among the wiry grass, and sometimes died away, leaving them at a loss in a wilderness of sand and short poplar scrub. ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss

... I was set adrift, and had a hard scrub of it to get along for a time. I almost starved for a while in Albany, trying to pick up odd jobs. Then I came ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.

... rough and, though by good fortune they met no one, since the few who dwelt in these wild parts had gone up to Bonsa Town to be present at the great feast, the sun was sinking before ever they reached the place. Moreover, this promontory proved to be covered with dense thorn scrub, through which they must force a way in the gathering darkness, not without hurt and difficulty. Still they accomplished it and at length, quite exhausted, crept to the very point, where they hid themselves between some ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard

... blaze of the prostrate forest, like the conqueror of some city who, having first prevailed over his adversary, applies the torch as the finishing blow to his conquest. For a long time Billy Kirby would then be seen sauntering around the taverns, the rider of scrub races, the bully of cock-fights, and not infrequently the hero of such sports as the one ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... superstitious monarch, Louis XI. of France, that he would never do any business on that day, and of our own Edward IV. that his coronation was postponed, because the date originally fixed was Childermas. In Cornwall no housewife would scour or scrub on Childermas, and in Northamptonshire it was considered very unlucky to begin any undertaking or even to do washing throughout the year on the day of the week on which the feast fell. Childermas was there called Dyzemas and a saying ran: "What is begun on Dyzemas Day ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles

... and, when day broke, they were once more in the scrub pines and cedars, with a cold wind blowing and nipping at their ears and noses. But Boyd, who went far back on the trail, could discover no sign of Felton's band, and they concluded to ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler

... instant. It evidently came from the moat behind him, and sounded to him as if some one had fallen in; he thought as he ran, for without a moment's hesitation he forced his way through the old hedge, dashed in amongst the clumps of hawthorn and hornbeam scrub, making straight for the moat, where he saw a sight which caused him to increase his pace and make a running dash right to the water, where the next moment he was swimming towards where Adela Norland was struggling feebly ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn

... edges, when the barn was finished and the hay safe stored therein. Then the old woodsman journeyed out to the settlement to buy his cow. He found one exactly to his whimsical liking,—a small, dark red, long-horned scrub, with a look in her big, liquid eyes that made him feel she would know how to take care of herself in the perilous wilds. He equipped her with the most sonorous and far-sounding bell he could find in all the ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... you that a film left untouched would always come out as a black patch against work that was pierced with the scrub, however slightly. ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall

... narrow valley which was strewn with great bowlders, and on the sides of the hills grew a great many scrub pines. Through the center of it ran ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor

... distressing family affairs of the maids; how many were the ignoble progeny of the elevator-man, and what his plebeian wife did for their croup; how much rent the hall-boy's low-born father paid for his mean two-story dwelling in Jersey City; and how many hours a day or night the debased scrub-women devoted ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... Pare, scrub and cut into small pieces, 1 lb. of artichokes and put immediately into a pan with a pint of water or milk and water. Boil till soft, then rub through a wire sieve, using a wooden spoon. Put back in pan, add a little more water, a little chopped parsley, and ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various

... them to grow. Bucket after bucket of water she tugged from the well to pour on their thirsty roots, and load after load of fertilizer she dragged in Allee's little cart to spread over the ground in her eager desire to increase their size. But when Gail found her with soap and scrub-brush polishing off each precious ball, she was forced to curb her zealous gardening. However, the vines throve through all this heroic treatment, and it seemed to Peace that she could almost see the fruit grow in circumference. Each night she consulted Mike, convinced that they had ripened ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown

... growth upward through the infinite blue into heaven. It is the spreading of many and various branches. If you are a willow, don't attempt to be a pine, and if the Lord made you to grow like an elm don't pattern yourself after a scrub oak. The rebuke "what will people say?" should never be applied to the waywardness of a child. Teach it rather to ask: "How will my own self-respect stand this test?" Such training will evolve something rarer in the way of development than ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden

... region of the island, but further east, extended wide central tracts of pine and scrub-oak, (charcoal was largely made here,) monotonous and sterile. But many a good day or half-day did I have, wandering through those solitary crossroads, inhaling the peculiar and wild aroma. Here, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... tongue? You are a buxom wife; they are a bundle of thread-papers. You are fair and fresh; they have all the Dutch rim under their bright eyes, that comes of dwelling in eternal swamps. There lies your crime. Come, gie me thy pitcher, and if they flout me, shalt see me scrub 'em all wi' my beard till they squeak holy mother." The pitcher was soon filled, and the soldier put it in Margaret's hand. She murmured, "Thank you ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... drawingroom for a week—not that he minded that much . . . Aunt Helen was a pretty woman. Gertrude and I never could think why she married Uncle Andrew, but I believe they got on all right, though she was a big handsome woman—a Clowes all over—while old Andrew looked like any little scrub out of Houndsditch. Never can tell why people marry each other, can you?" Bernard was becoming philosophical. I suppose if you go to the bottom it's Nature that takes them by the scruff of the neck and gives them a ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... cocked his piece, and the two boys advanced over the thick grass toward the patch of dense scrub, their hearts beating heavily as they drew nearer, and each feeling that, if he had been alone, he would have turned and run back as hard as ever ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn

... as we came in sight of the seemingly impregnable walls of this mountain stronghold, and lest we be seen I drew back with Woola behind a jutting granite promontory, into a clump of the hardy, purple scrub that thrives upon the barren sides ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... region is an area peculiarly adapted for the cultivation of tobacco; and east of the tobacco district, north of the coastal belt of wheat in a region of sandy scrub, the bush country, are the ostrich farms, in the hands mainly of men of considerable capital, who supply nearly all the feathers derived from the domesticated ostrich. The plumes are sometimes worth as much as $200 a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... Bays on the west coast of the Port Lincoln country. On this journey Mr. Stuart accomplished one of the most arduous feats in all his travels, having, with one man only (the black having basely deserted them), pushed through a long tract of dense scrub and sand with unusual rapidity, thus saving his own life and that of his companion. During this part of the journey they were without food or water, and his companion was thoroughly dispirited and ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart

... goin' you'll not have to pay a cent, and that's a blessing! It's small good they've done her here for all the money they've taken. (Gazing about the room critically.) It's neat and clean enough; and why shouldn't it, a tiny room and the lot of them nothing to do all day but scrub. (Scornfully.) Two sticks of chairs and a table! They don't give much for ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill

... that mud; it's filthy"; this was absolutely unnecessary and the fellows swore vehemently under their breath; to the drivers,—"Clean up that 'ere 'arness and get that mud hoff it"; he also compelled us to burnish the steel and made the gunners scrub the paint off the brass and sandpaper it up. This necessitated the men going to a shop and purchasing the sandpaper themselves, as disobedience of the order meant a sojourn in the clink and the excuse that he had no ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant

... towards Port Nolloth, stretches seventy-odd miles of desolate, waterless sand-scrub; eastward lie vast expanses of similarly dreary, featureless, undulating scrub, beyond which rise the unknown and mysterious mountains of the Richtersfeld and hundreds of miles of uninhabited country; westward is the ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell

... that individuality which you find highly developed in these colonial volunteers. To organize anything like a regular attack on such ground is almost impossible, as the officers cannot see their men, who, the moment they move forward in open order, are lost among the thick scrub. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... Lee, I suppose I might as well engage you. But there is one thing that I wish understood. The person that I hire to help do the washing must scrub up the kitchen after the clothes are all out. Are ...
— Woman's Trials - or, Tales and Sketches from the Life around Us. • T. S. Arthur

... where there's lots of it," said he, as if to himself, "out in the hills. It loves to ramble over scrub-oak in the open places where there's plenty of sun. I used to pick armloads of it the last year I went to school and carry it to the teacher. She liked to decorate the ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... country, bordered on one side by the swollen river, here flowing again through steeper banks which were overgrown with alders and pollard willows. Along the left of the Spanish army, as they moved in the direction of Herenthals, was a continuous fringe of scrub-oaks, intermixed with tall beeches, skirting the heath, and forming a leafless but almost impervious screen for the movements of small detachments of troops. Quite at the termination of the open apace, these thickets becoming ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... to toil and scrub early and late, with a husband and five children to do for, and to keep the place pretty much as you see it now, though I don't say as it ain't a little extry perhaps, in honour of your coming ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... lived alone in the little house, with his orderly, a clever Sicilian, who cooked for him; a peasant woman from a neighbouring farm-house came every morning to sweep the rooms, make the two beds, and scrub the two stone steps before the door and ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford

... matter of throwing them a bone; however, our dogs were not ordinary. It took time to feed them, and a prodigious amount of meat. We had packed between three and four hundred pounds of wild-horse meat, which had been cut into small pieces and strung on the branches of a scrub oak near camp. ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... my attention to making my cabin fit to live in. The cook had his flunky sweep and scrub the floor, and then, with the aid of blankets, pictures, and draperies from my trunks, the little place began to lose its forlorn look. White Mountain contributed a fine pair of Pendleton blankets, gay and fleecy. He spread a Navajo ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith

... other minds were set On smashing Jerry Bosch up With rifle, bomb and bayonet, I chiefly learned to wash-up, To peel potatoes by the score, Sweep out a room and scrub ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various

... enough above the brush, was still some eighth of a mile farther down the spit, and it took me a goodish while to get up with it, crawling, often on all-fours, among the scrub. Night had almost come when I laid my hand on its rough sides. Right below it there was an exceedingly small hollow of green turf, hidden by banks and a thick underwood about knee-deep, that grew there very plentifully; and in the centre of the dell, sure ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... its interminable suburbs, came out on to open rolling country, mostly covered with green scrub, and, in the afternoon, formed our first regular marching camp, on a bit of green sward, which was a delicious contrast after Green Point Sand. Guns and waggons were marshalled, picket-ropes stretched ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... Bowie called a halt on the edge of a small clearing leading up to a hill thickly overgrown with scrub pines. ...
— For the Liberty of Texas • Edward Stratemeyer

... he might fancy himself traversing a country destitute of the mammalian grade of animal life. If, however, after a weary day's journey, he could be awakened, and were to look out about the moonlight glade or scrub, or if he were to set traps by night, he would probably be surprised to find how great a number of interesting forms of mammalian animals were to Be met with, in places where there was not the slightest appearance of ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... other two should arrive, which they promised they would do by the evening. The track first led us across the maritime plain, here about two miles broad, and composed of sand overlying limestone, with boulders in the dry shallow watercourses, and with no vegetable life save a few scrub acacias and certain salsola. This traversed, we next wound along a deep ravine called Tug (river) Tura,[15] lying between the lower spurs of the mountain-range, and commenced a slight ascent up its cracked, uneven passage, until we reached a halting-place called Iskodubuk. The distance ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke

... Roper, by shifting round and round the trunk like an iguana. The woman also kept her face averted." A day or two afterwards, Mr Gilbert and Charley met some more natives. "Two gins were so horror-struck at the unwonted sight, that they immediately fled into the scrub; the men commenced talking to them, but occasionally interrupted their speeches by spitting and uttering a noise like pooh! pooh! apparently expressive of their disgust." Meetings with the natives now became of common occurrence; but as they showed much timidity, and, when ill disposed, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... farmyard is half hidden behind the yellowing elms; a boy is driving a flock of white geese along the twisting road; the hedges are red with the withering briers. Up here, along the hillsides, the woods of scrub-oak are glowing with every imaginable hue of gold, crimson and bronze, except where a few dark firs appear, or where a tuft of broom, pure and bright in its green, stands out among the faded brackens. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various

... soap and water and not gasoline, as gasoline will injure the rubber. Lay out on a flat surface and scrub lightly with soap and water; then rinse with clear water. Do not wring. Put on a coat-hanger ...
— Fowler's Household Helps • A. L. Fowler

... the great value of a good ancestry, it is only fair to utter a word of warning in this connection. Good ancestry does not necessarily make a man or woman a desirable partner. What stockmen know as the "pure-bred scrub" is a recognized evil in animal breeding, and not altogether absent from human society. Due to any one or more of a number of causes, it is possible for a germinal degenerate to appear in a good family; discrimination should certainly ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... of it had regained a measure of fertility. There was life now—some of it his own meat lizards who had wandered across the river and out of his control. And he had even seen some of the escaped pseudomen slinking through the scrub growth and ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole

... corner, which conveyed to the enlightened recipient what sort of party it was to be, and denoted the standard of dress. For one of Lucia's quaint ideas was to divide dresses into three classes, "Hightum," "Tightum" and "Scrub." "Hightum" was your very best dress, the smartest and newest of all, and when "Hightum" was written on a card of invitation, it implied that the party was a very resplendent one. "Tightum" similarly indicated ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... buffalo camp about eight o'clock and had a toilsome march of two hours over ridges of hills covered with a ragged forest of scrub-oaks and broken by deep gullies. Among the oaks I observed many of the most diminutive size, some not above a foot high, yet bearing ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck

... She had brought the Parsonage key to unlock the door, and after filling her bucket at the pump in the yard, she put on the apron, tucked up her sleeves, and set to work. And it was work! Gwen had never in her life before tried to scrub a floor, and though her arms were sturdy and strong at wielding a tennis-racket or the lawn mower, they soon began to ache at the unwonted exercise which she had set herself. The room seemed most enormously large, and she was ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil

... are open sheets of water surrounded by bands of greater or less width of tall grasses. The third day, between 30 and 40 miles from Myers, we left the pine tree lands and started across what are called in Southern Florida the "prairies." These are wide stretches covered with grass and with scrub palmetto and dotted at near intervals with what are called pine "islands" or "hammocks" and cypress swamps. The pine island or hammock is a slight elevation of the soil, rising a few inches above the dead level. The cypress swamp, on the contrary, ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley

... "living-room" absently, and stared vaguely at one of the old brown-plush rocking-chairs there. Upon her forehead were the little shadows of an apprehensive reverie, and her thoughts overlapped one another in a fretful jumble. "What will he think? These old chairs—they're hideous. I'll scrub those soot-streaks on the columns: it won't do any good, though. That long crack in the column—nothing can help it. What will he think of papa? I hope mama won't talk too much. When he thinks of Mildred's house, or of Henrietta's, or any of 'em, beside ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington

... another. He neglected his family and business, he wur thet fur gone; finally got hisself killed, and then she pizened herself with a sarpent, not a moccasin nor rattler, but a little short blue-brown scrub snake not ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin

... nucleus of a crowd which would not be long in collecting, and I was beginning to feel I was paying dearly for my virtuous resolution, when the front door burst violently open and we caught sight of the trembling form and shocked face of the scrub-woman. ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green

... a "royal forest," it is not a forest at all. Trees will hardly live on Exmoor, not even the black fir, the hardiest tree of all; only here and there a few twisted and stunted alders planted along the shelter of a wall, and degenerated into "scrub." As soon as you descend from the heights, indeed, the country becomes luxuriantly wooded, as at Glenthorne and Lynton and Horner Woods; but the great expanse of Exmoor is bare brown land, covered with short tussocky grass and grey furze. ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... I scrub me any'ow till I come to the skin. Also I'll put a clean shirt. You can wait? I'll leave ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable

... France. Once the theory of the nervous origins of hypochondria gained ground—here I merely note coincidence, not historical cause and effect—the disease became increasingly fashionable in England, particularly among the polite, the aristocratic, and the refined. Students of the drama will recall Scrub's denial in The Beaux' Stratagem (1707) of the possibility that Archer has the spleen and Mrs. Sullen's interjection, "I thought that distemper had been only proper ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill

... sickly pallor over the jagged scarp of the Mesa, bounding the chaotic labyrinth of bowlders, crag and canon beneath. Far up the rugged valley, jutting from the faded fringe of pine, juniper and scrub oak that bearded the Mogollon, a solitary butte stood like sentry against the cloudless sky, its lofty crown of rock just faintly signalling the still distant coming of the heralds of the god of day. Here in the gloomy depths of the basin, and at the banks of the murmuring stream, ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King

... very good advice. The slopes of the foot-hills seemed covered by a carpet of myrtle scrub, in which whole armies could have lain in ambush. And above that the cliffs of the Kara Dagh rose rocky and wild, suggesting ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... lying through waist-high fir scrub, was pretty bad underfoot, but beyond was a stretch of fine timber, where the trees had done much to arrest the snow, and the going was not so severe. Aladdin calculated that he should make the distance ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris

... pass through these mountains. The need was seen to be imminent. As the colony grew, the limits of occupation would press up to the foot of this blue range, which, with its precipitous walls, its alluring openings leading to stark faces of rock, its sharp ridges breaking to sheer ravines, its dense scrub and timber, defied the energies of successive explorers. Governor Phillip, in 1789, reached Richmond by way of the Hawkesbury. Later in the same year, and in the next, further efforts were made, but the ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... a fresh shell hole, under the half-burned scrub, and fell asleep. They were awakened at dusk by heavy artillery ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather

... the low hanging limbs of a cluster of scrub trees, and found a seat on the bowlders which the Indians had set for a landmark ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... majesty," with marveling chops, The verger answered, "we have got no mops In Salisbury that will reach so high." "Not mop, no, no, not mop it," quoth the king— "No, sir, our Salisbury mops do no such thing; They might as well pretend to scrub the sky." ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... work on his approach. But they went on almost immediately, all except one. He was a grizzled veteran, a man just past middle life. His face was deeply lined, and a scrub of whisker protected it from the cold. He had been seated on the log, but he stood up as the tall ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... are all the other handsome chambers on this story. The men were obliging and tried to find scrub-women, but the poor things ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... considered that about a quarter of a million acres of this land so close to the city is now scrub oak and uncultivated waste, and that there are about a million adult workers in the city, the importance of the experiment is obvious; especially as we learn from the United States census that over ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... and concentrated himself on observation. A certain change in the desert was becoming noticeable, as the air-liner flung herself at high speed into the south-east. At times there must be a little rainfall here, or else some hidden source of water, for a scrub, of dwarf acacia, of camel-grass, and tamarisk had begun ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... we got washed in India,' said Cyril. 'We should have been awfully late if we'd had to go home and scrub.' ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit

... grass-clad, the grass seeming to be very luxuriant and about three feet high, while dotted about pretty thickly all over the plains were clumps of palmetto, palms, trees of various kinds—some of which would probably be the fruit-trees that had restored Barber to life—and big clumps of bamboo and scrub. I anticipated that it would be among those clumps of scrub that we should eventually find the treasure hulk, if indeed the craft actually existed and was not the figment of a madman's imagination; and I also foresaw that ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood

... valley, at a point where the heat and dust have become intolerable, the monotonous expanse of wild oats on either side illimitable, and the distant horizon apparently remoter than ever, it suddenly slips between a stunted thicket or hedge of "scrub oaks," which until that moment had been undistinguishable above the long, misty, quivering level of the grain. The thicket rising gradually in height, but with a regular slope whose gradient had been determined by centuries of western trade winds, presently becomes a fair wood of live-oak, ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... extremely useful. Certainly doctors whose work is amongst the poor or in country places must often wish they understood something about the preparation of food. The girls who go to the Lette-Haus are taught the whole art of housekeeping, from the proper way to scour a pan or scrub a floor to fine laundry work and darning, and even how to set and serve a table. An intelligent girl who had been right through the courses at the Lette-Haus could train an inexperienced servant, because she would understand exactly how things ought to be done, how much time they should take, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

... of San Francisco Bay a line of bluffs terminates in a promontory, at whose base, formed by the crumbling debris of the cliff above, there is a narrow stretch of beach, salt meadow, and scrub oak. The abrupt wall of rock behind it seems to isolate it as completely from the mainland as the sea before it separates it from the opposite shore. In spite of its contiguity to San Francisco,—opposite also, but hidden by the sharp re-entering curve of coast,—the ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... respects this hill, which was about one hundred and fifty feet in height, made a strong and easily defended position; but, unfortunately, it was covered nearly to the summit with a dense growth of bushes and scrub, and was commanded by a range of higher hills a little farther to the eastward. The enemy, therefore, could not only creep close up to the camp under cover of the dense chaparral, but could fire down upon it from the higher slopes of the wooded range ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan

... stars!" she declared loudly, her needle flying in and out in time to her words, "I would rather get down on my marrow bones and scrub for my living if I was the Grant Girls than keep a young man at home. Gavin Grant's duty ain't at home any more than Trooper's is. The Grant Girls'll never want. Hughie Reid is just a brother to them, and he's to work the farm. ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith

... enough rations and grain from the cornfields purchased to send out a formidable expedition against the Cheyennes, so I set out for Arbuckle accompanied by my quartermaster, Colonel A. J. McGonigle. "California Joe" also went along to guide us through the scrub-oaks covering the ridge, but even the most thorough exploration failed to discover any route more practicable than that already in use; indeed, the high ground was, if anything, worse than the bottom land, our horses in the springy places ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan

... from the wood, the road runs within hail of the railway, under a steep and high chalk bank partly copsed with scrub. Three-quarters of a mile from the wood it passes through the skeleton of the village of Hamel, which is now a few ruined walls of brick standing in orchards on a hillside. Just north of this village, crossing ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield

... in Gully Ravine, that prince among ravines on the Peninsula. From my place I could see the gully floor, which was the dry bed of a water-course, winding away between high walls of perpendicular cliffs or steep, scrub-covered slopes, as it pursued its journey, like some colossal trench, towards the firing line. Down the great cleft, while I looked, a horseman came riding rapidly. He was an officer, with a slight open wound in his chin, and he rode up to our door and said: "Hardy's ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond

... through five years of life, and was put into smallclothes. Two weeks after this promotion his mother started off to scrub out a big house in the fashionable quarter, and took him with her: for the house possessed a wide garden, laid with turf and lined with espaliers, sunflowers, and hollyhocks, and as the month was August, and the family away in Scotland, ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... sound was heard. Then he had a glimpse of a dun colored object flitting through the scrub palmettoes ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne

... except little scrub bushes about six inches high, and the ground sloped gently down to the Boers from about 2000 yards. I don't suppose troops have ever been in a more damnable position. I sat up occasionally to see how things were going, but only for a moment, as it was always the signal for a perfect storm ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... "Scrub!" I said firmly. "I want to give them some of the easiest work, two kinds, but we can't touch the colored cards until all the hands are clean.—Shall we take soap and towels and all go down into the yard where the sink is, children, and ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... the joy of his heart and he made excursions constantly to see that they were kept in order. They were simple enough, wide tracks, grass covered, cut through the scrub or through the plantations; but trees had to be rooted out, rocks dug up or blasted, and here and there levelling had been necessary. He was proud that he had surmounted by his own skill such difficulties as they presented. He rejoiced ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham

... where the Mahars had a Village formerly. the Countrey above the Platt R has a great Similarity. Campd. on the L. Side. Clouds appear to rise in the west & threten wind. I found a verry excellent froot resembling the read Current, the Scrub on which it grows resembles Privey & about the Common hight of ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... had been gradual but marked, for, though trees were in abundance, rising in clumps of spires, their tops were well below the adventurers, while, where they trod, the forest was dwarfed and scrub-like, but thick enough ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn

... murmured Nort, and soon, after a bite to eat, they rolled themselves in their blankets, having tied the ponies to scrub bushes, and went to sleep. The riding of the boys, coupled with the pure air they had breathed, brought them slumber almost at once, and even Buck Tooth, alert as he usually was, neither saw nor heard anything of the sinister visitor who came softly upon the sleeping ones ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

... ranch a day later than I did. We rode small, tough ranch horses. The distance was some twenty miles. The whole country was marsh, varied by stretches of higher ground; and, although these stretches rose only three or four feet above the marsh, they were covered with thick jungle, largely palmetto scrub, or else with open palm forest. For three or four miles we splashed through the marsh, now and then crossing boggy pools where the little horses labored hard not to mire down. Our dusky guide was clad in a shirt, trousers, and fringed leather apron, and wore spurs on his bare feet; he had ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... the packed clusters of buildings constructed of wood, and skirt the green islands of gardens, and thrust aside the churches; whereafter, continuing its way through Council Square (still running inexorably straight), the thoroughfare stretches to, and traverses, a barren plain of scrub, and so reaches the pine plantation belonging to the Monastery of St. Michael the Archangel where the latter is lurking behind a screen of old red spruces of which the denseness seems to prop the very heavens, and which on clear, sunny days can be seen rising to mark the spot ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... think of such a wretch, And learn to shun his vices, one and all. Though richer than a Jew, he was more poor Than is the meanest beggar. At the cost Of other men a glutton. At his own, A starveling. A mere scrub. And such a coward, A cozener and liar—but a coward, And would have been a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various

... on the ground, and then, as he insisted on walking, we moved on a little further, and sat down by him to watch the progress of the conflagration. It quickly worked its way across the belt we had passed across; and then the scrub beyond towards the mountain caught fire and blazed up furiously, extending far away to the east, till the whole country before us seemed one mass of flame. Had it been night it would have been magnificent, but we were truly glad that it was day, that we might ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston

... southern slope he came to a deep gulch in which the tops of scrub pines showed above the snow. Following its edge for some distance his eye at length was caught by a dark shape on the rocks. He climbed slowly and painfully down to it and saw the body of a man, clothed like a German forester. His neck and many of his bones were broken, ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler

... both sexes, except for a short time during the breeding season when the male acquires brilliant colours; and this is probably connected with the fact of their inhabiting the open plains and thin scrub of Australia, where protective colours are as generally advantageous as they are ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... some men to do some work about my place, and those people at a distance who have widows here will relieve them (at least the widows will look up their well-to-do relatives), and the Church, in your person, will not be charged. And some of the widows will consent to scrub for payment, instead of sitting weeping in your kitchen—also for payment. They will, furthermore, compel their interesting sons to mind pigs, or scare birds, instead of hanging about the Heart of Oak, begging of the ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... Winston he turned directly to Helen, "what do you think Helen, I've furnished the attic all by myself, the only thing Marshland did was to scrub the floor ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford



Words linked to "Scrub" :   rub, cleaning, unimproved, swabbing, cleanup, schedule, wash, botany, scrub up, scratch, vegetation, flora, mopping, holystone, lave, cleansing



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