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More "Birch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... face and tore deep through the skin before he could lift his wide-flung arms to protect it. And then, almost before he realized what had happened, she stood back, groping blindly away from him until her hands found a birch sapling. She clung to it with a desperately tight clasp as if to hold herself erect. A little spot of red flecked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at her throat ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... felled, the limbs were lopped away, and the outside rudely fashioned to the likeness of a boat. If they were making a periagua, they left the stern "flat"—that is, cut off sharply without modelling; if they were making a canoa, they pointed both ends, as a Red Indian points his birch-bark. The bottom of the boat in either case was made flat, for convenience in hauling over shoals or up rapids. The inside of the boat was hollowed out by fire, with the help of the Indians, who were very expert at the management of the flame. For oars they had paddles made ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... movement of the leaves on a branch of birch shows that something living is there, and presently the little head and neck of a whitethroat peers over them, and then under, looking above and beneath each leaf, and then with a noiseless motion passing on to ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... kinds of junk that might be more or less useful to have: a couple of lawn-mowers, an old sleigh hoisted up on the rafters of the carriage house, a weird old buggy, a plow, a grindstone, a collection of old chairs and sofas that had seen better days, a birch-bark canoe—things like that. ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... the house-entrance, which is carved in the Russian style, with two little felled birch-trees. And so with all the houses—the thin white trunks with their scant dying verdure adorn the exterior near the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... And for its beauty wild and picturesque; The bound and goal of each day's pilgrimage, Where were all forms of graceful and grotesque; And countless hues, from the dark stately pine That whispered its wild mysteries to my ear, To the smooth silver of the birch-trees shine, Showing between the aspens straight and fair; With forest flowers, and delicate vines that crept From the rich soil far up among the trees, Seeking that light their boughs did intercept, And dalliance ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... birch-stub, in which a family of raccoons dwelt, and together they set to work to destroy the household of their own smaller brother. They dug and tore at the base of the stub until they had undermined it, and then ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... featly footed, With the herd-boy hasting after, Sprang she on a trunk uprooted, Clung she by a roping vine; Leaped behind a birch, and told, Still eluding, through its fine, Mocking, slender, leafy laughter, Why her finger ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... or the rare and long-wished-for gift (it matters not whether the vessel be of gold, or silver, or iron, or wood, or clay, or just a small bit of birch bark folded into a cup), may carry a message something ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... believes, besides all the shame and trouble he [Sir John Minnes, who performed the duties inefficiently.] hath brought on the office, the King had better have given 100,000l. than ever have had him there. He did discourse about some of these discontented Parliament-men, and says that Birch is a false rogue, but that Garraway is a man that hath not been well used by the Court, though very stout to death, and hath suffered all that is possible for the King from the beginning. But discontented as he is, yet he never knew a Session of Parliament but that he hath ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... herself alone amidst its stoniness, the native population only just beginning to bestir itself in the street above the quay, and making believe, by an inordinate splashing and a frantic vehemence in the use of birch-brooms, to be the cleanest population under the sun; an assertion of superiority somewhat belied by an all-pervading odour of decomposed vegetable matter, a small heap of which refuse, including egg-shells and fishy ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, 50 Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves; The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, 55 As one who ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Newton, Botta, Rassam, Schliemann, Birch, G. Smith, and a crowd of archaeologists, and even unscientific explorers, are collecting the materials from which the history of ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... whipping-post; physical dictionaries may be had in Jesuits' bark; a treatise upon duels in touchwood; the history of opposition in wormwood; Shakespeare's works in cedar, his commentators in rotten wood; the reviewers in birch, and the history of England ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... existence 30,000 years, and have not undergone the slightest change in that period." But we can go still further back, and demonstrate the permanence of vegetable structure. Hugh Miller says: "The oak, the birch, the hazel, the Scotch fir, all lived, I repeat, in what is now Britain, ere the last great depression of the land. The gigantic northern elephant and rhinoceros, extinct for untold ages, forced their ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... hunting parties, and at last they came to a deserted village. Either it had been abandoned because of warfare or to escape an unhealthy location, but the five examined it with great curiosity. Many of the lodges built of either poles or birch bark were still standing, with fragments of useless and abandoned household goods here and there. Paul found in one of the lodges a dried scalp with long straight hair, but, obeying a sensitive impulse he hid it from the ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... if he had only known beforehand of the advertisement of the Christmas Monks. However, they made the most of the time remaining, and were so good all over the kingdom that a very millennium seemed dawning. The school teachers used their ferrules for fire wood, and the king ordered all the birch trees cut down and exported, as he thought there would be no more call for them ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... with my gallant gray. Ganymede you are, and Ganymede I hope you will be! Win the county cup but once more, old fellow, and then it will be our own! This horse was bred on the farm here; he is the produce of a gray mare that you may recollect my father mounted on in our birch-rod days. He deserves the name of 'Thousands' undeniably; for Lord Oxfence, who was in the regiment with me, offered a 'carte blanche' ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... way through the landscape in long curves. From the south bow window in the hotel, the mother and daughter followed its course through tangled underwood and birch forest; sometimes it disappeared, and then shone out again, and at last became fully visible. There was a great deal of traffic going on, the hum ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... graceful body had retained most of the lines and slender curves of childhood; and she was long of limb and broad of shoulder. Her head was poised alertly above her strong young throat, and she was as straight as a fir-tree and as supple as a birch. A life out-of-doors had given to her skin a tone of warm brown, which, in a land that expected women to be lily-fair, was like a mask added to her disguise. The blackness of her hair was equally unconnected with Northern dreams of beautiful maidens. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... other kinds of trees. Curly grained white poplar has been propagated from hybrid trees by growing cuttings of shoots from the roots of the curly trees (Ref. 9). In Sweden it has been possible to grow figured birch, much of which has the curly type grain. In birch, seedling strains producing curly grain have been developed and are being grown. It is of interest to note that with these birches, the trees with curly grain ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... had orders to remain at Norway House until my successor arrived; and as but one opportunity was offered for Mrs Young and the children to travel in those days of limited opportunities, they started on several weeks ahead in an open skiff manned by a few Indians, leaving me to follow in a birch canoe. So terrible was the heat that hot July, in that open boat with no deck or awning, that the beautiful child sickened and died of brain-fever. Mrs Young found herself with her dying child on the banks of Red River, all alone ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... considered under that head is the one employed by some of the Ojibways and Swampy Crees of Canada. A small cavity is scooped out, the body deposited therein, covered with a little dirt, the mound thus formed being covered either with split planks, poles, or birch bark. ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... Fries, and he entirely devoted himself to me: but imagine our conversation—he spoke in Latin and I in French: however we understood each other very well. It is on the whole a dreary country except where enlivened by lakes: some parts are pine forests and birch forests, but others are featureless ground with boulder stones, like the worst part ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... from Kim, whose back ached with holding back, and whose big toe was nigh cut off by his grass sandal-string. Through the speckled shadow of the great deodar-forests; through oak feathered and plumed with ferns; birch, ilex, rhododendron, and pine, out on to the bare hillsides' slippery sunburnt grass, and back into the woodlands' coolth again, till oak gave way to bamboo and palm of the valley, ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... impress as carriers the sheep and cattle upon a thousand hills. The Touch-me-not and the herb Robert adopt a different plan, and convert their seed-cases into pistols for the firing of seeds at as wide range as twenty feet or more. The maple, the ash, the hornbeam, the elm and the birch have yet another method of escape from the home acre. Their seeds are winged, and torn off in a gale are frequently borne two hundred yards away. And stronger wings than these are plied in the cherry tree's service. The birds bide the time when a blush ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... Das Staupenspiel im Paradies ("the Walloping in Paradise"), a procedure to which every apprentice was exposed annually and to which on this occasion he bade a final farewell. This part of the ceremony consisted in setting apart a space enclosed within birch boughs, on entering which the blindfolded and scantily attired youth who was to be initiated into the order of journeymen was thoroughly trounced by "angels of paradise" in the form of lusty companions who were usually unsparing of the rod. A festive procession ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... appears clear that the same Scotch fir was afterwards supplanted by the sessile variety of the common oak, of which many prostrate trunks occur in the peat at higher levels than the pines; and still higher the pedunculated variety of the same oak (Quercus robur, L.) occurs with the alder, birch (Betula verrucosa, Ehrh.), and hazel. The oak has now in its turn been almost superseded in Denmark by the common beech. Other trees, such as the white birch (Betula alba), characterise the lower part of the bogs, and disappear from the higher; while others again, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... at a farm house, some miles north of the town, got a job on the woodpile, and astonished the farmer by the amount of birch he could saw in an hour. He took his pay in the shape of a bountiful dinner, and—after half an hour's smoke and talk with the farmer, to whom he gave a few pamphlets from the store in his knapsack—said ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... Christmas-tree; to tell the children to prepare for the visit of the Christ Kindlein on Christmas Eve, who would bring good gifts to the good, but would leave the naughty to Pelsnichol to come and whip them with his great birch. In some villages like ours an old man disguised with a long beard and gown, and a great bag, would go about at Christmastide to the houses where the people had expected him, and would carry the gifts to the children, and would show others who were ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... Kitty among them. He had seen their carriage at the gate. It was a lovely day, and the gaily-clad fashionable people, the Russian izbas with their carved woodwork, the paths gleaming with snow, and the old birch-trees, brilliant with icicles, combined to render the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... substantial than the wigwams of the Canadian Indians, which are formed in a conical shape by uniting at the top a dozen straight poles stuck in a circle in the ground, and by covering them thickly with birch-bark. In both cases a hole is left at the top to serve as a chimney. Inside the tents of my present friends the ground was spread with mats all round the edges, except in the centre, where a bare spot ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... on the bow of a canoe, where the paddle at every stroke comes within eighteen inches of them. I know nothing which can be eaten that they will not take, and I had one steal all my candles, pulling them out endwise, one by one, from a piece of birch bark in which they were rolled, and another pecked a large hole in a keg of castile soap. A duck which I had picked and laid down for a few minutes had the entire breast eaten out by one or more of these birds. I have seen one alight in the middle of my canoe and peck away at the carcass of a beaver ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... important matter of education had been occupying the attention of the Queen and her husband. After careful inquiry during nearly a year the Rev. Henry Mildred Birch was selected and on April 10, 1844, the Prince Consort wrote, in a private and family letter, that "Bertie will be given over in a few weeks into the hands of a tutor whom we have found in Mr. Birch, a young, good-looking, amiable man who was a tutor at ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... knew anything about were quite small, and were called canoes. They were made either of birch bark fastened over a light wooden frame, or of logs that had been hollowed by burning ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... kinds from many climes, until he has an arboretum hardly equaled anywhere. There are pines in endless variety—from the Sierra and from the seashore, from New England, France, Norway, and Japan. There flourish the cedar, spruce, hemlock, oak, beech, birch, and maple. There in peace and plenty are the sequoia, the bamboo, and the deodar. Eucalypts pierce the sky and Japanese ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... away and so near his heart; for the sake of which he bad gone to seek work, for the sake of which he had suffered such agonies that night. A flood of memories came back to him of his village, running down the steep slope to the river and losing itself in a whole forest of birch trees, willows, and mountain-ashes. These memories breathed something warm into him and cheered him up. "Ah, it would be ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... been at a neighbouring farm-house, where there lived one of Mr. Walsingham's tenants; a man of the name of Birch, a respectable farmer, who was originally from Ireland, and whose son was at sea with Captain Walsingham. The captain had taken young Birch under his particular care, at Mr. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... men are liable to be in some degree frost-bitten in this sort; all are partly encumbered and crusted over with idle matter; only, if they have real life in them, they are always breaking this bark away in noble rents, until it becomes, like the black strips upon the birch tree, only a witness of ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... The silver birch is a dainty lady, She wears a satin gown; The elm tree makes the old churchyard shady, She will not live ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... of angling for catfish and tapping the birch trees for sap, had been suffered to fall into disuse. Rather, it seemed interesting to wander vaguely together, or in the long grass to read together from the books which Reuben would borrow from the cobwebby ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of fifty years since were naughty, the schoolmaster of the period was not accustomed to punish them by appealing to their sense of honour. If a boy wanted a flogging, in those days, the educational system seized a cane, or a birch-rod, and gave it to him. Mr. Gallilee entered his wife's room, with the feelings which had once animated him, on entering the schoolmaster's study to be caned. When he said "Good-morning, my dear!" his face presented the expression of fifty years ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... however an Englishman might be reproached with ingratitude for depreciating the merits and results of a measure which he is taught to regard as the source of his liberties—however ungrateful it might appear in Alderman Birch to question for a moment the purity of that glorious era to which he is indebted for the seasoning of so many orations—yet an Irishman who has none of these obligations to acknowledge, to whose country the Revolution brought nothing but injury ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Saint Giles of Holy Thorn." Of course to Isoult it was different. She had been a forester all her life. To her there were names (and names of dread) not to be known of any map. Deerleap, One Ash, the Wolves' Valley, the Place of the Withered Elm, the Charcoal-Burners', the Mossy Christ, the Birch- grove, the Brook under the Brow—and a hundred more. She steered by these, with all foresters. What she did not remember, or did not know, was that Maulfry had also lived in Morgraunt and knew the ways by heart. Still, she had a better mount than the Lady of Tortsentier, ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... tribe dwelt four orphan brothers. They had erected a very comfortable hut, although the materials used were only willows, hay, birch bark, and adobe mud. After the completion of their hut, the oldest brother laid out the different kinds of work to be done by the four of them. He and the second and third brothers were to do all the hunting, and the ...
— Myths and Legends of the Sioux • Marie L. McLaughlin
... dejection; yet he bore his woes in silence, doubtless avoiding any concession that should suggest the need of another clarification of his system. Once, when nobody was looking, he cautiously withdrew a handful of scraped birch bark from his pocket and gave it to me, remarking that he thought it was "a little more bracin' ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... Alan again, and after that, for an hour or more, something lived for him in the glow of the fire which Olaf kept burning. It was the memory of Mary Standish, her quiet, beautiful eyes gazing at him, her pale face taking form in the lacy wisps of birch-smoke. His mind pictured her in the flame-glow as she had listened to him that day in Skagway, when he had told her of this fight that was ahead. And it pleased him to think she would have made this same ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... The birch-bark canoe, made by the Indians of the northern rivers and lakes, is really a work of art. It is a model of lightness, and when we consider its frailty, and then the way in which it can be managed in the most turbulent ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... sheathing, three feet of the third strake under the wale were found to be stove in, and the timbers within started. The farther they proceeded in removing the sheathing, the more they discovered the decayed state of the ship's hull. The chief damage was repaired with a birch tree, which had been cut down when they were there before, and was the only one in the neighbourhood large enough for the purpose; but Captain King gave orders that no more sheathing should be ripped off, being apprehensive that further ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... One day when all were away I stole my fathers gun. It was a double barreled muzzle loader, one barrel shot and the other rifle. I had quite an experience—I saw a partridge just as I entered the woods budding in the top of an old birch tree. I leveled the gun up against an old ash tree and fired I had never before fired a gun, I held it rather loosely aginst my shoulder and the recoil lamed my arm and bloodeyed my pug noose. But this was soon forgotten ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... will scald it, and prevents its rising. Most ovens require heating an hour and a half for bread. A brisk fire should be kept up, and the doors of the room should be kept shut, if the weather is cold. Pine and ash, mixed together, or birch-wood, is the best for heating an oven. To ascertain if your oven is of the right temperature, when cleaned, throw in a little flour; if it browns in the course of a minute, it is sufficiently hot; if it turns black directly, wait several minutes, before putting in the ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous
... to his astonishment a mountain stream was now foaming down it, leaping from rock to rock, and filling the glen with babbling murmurs. He, however, made shift to scramble up its sides, working his toilsome way through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witchhazel, and sometimes tripped up or entangled by the wild grapevines that twisted their coils or tendrils from tree to tree, and spread a kind of network in ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... right of the lady-birch to grow, To grow as the Lord shall please, By never a sturdy oak rebuked, Denied nor sun nor breeze, For all its pliant slenderness, kin ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... is a long inlet of the sea, extending up country over a score of miles. The district is hilly, and is covered by a forest of rather small trees, spruce and birch, but further inland the hills are generally bare. There are comparatively few European ...
— Report by the Governor on a Visit to the Micmac Indians at Bay d'Espoir - Colonial Reports, Miscellaneous. No. 54. Newfoundland • William MacGregor
... or made by time, [1] Nor, as perchance thou rashly deem'st, the Cairn Of some old British Chief: 'tis nothing more Than the rude embryo of a little Dome 5 Or Pleasure-house, once destined to be built [2] Among the birch-trees of this rocky isle. [3] But, as it chanced, Sir William having learned That from the shore a full-grown man might wade, And make himself a freeman of this spot 10 At any hour he chose, the prudent Knight [4] Desisted, and the quarry and the mound Are monuments ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... of speech, Who sweep'st with birch a youngster's breech, Oh! now awhile withhold your hand! So may the trembling crop-hair'd band Around your desk attentive hear, And pay you love instead of fear; So may yours ever be as full, As writing ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... with the march that still lengthen'd before him, He stopp'd by the way in a sylvan retreat; The light shady boughs of the birch-tree waved o'er him, The stream of the mountain fell soft at ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... grilling in the sun between cool groves, and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled. Nor must it be forgotten that, in all this part, you come continually forth upon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... garlands of birch leaves hung here and there on the white walls and festooned the carved pulpit. Green wreaths crowned the golden angels that supported, each with one lifted hand, the sculptured altar-piece; while in the other, outstretched, they loosely held wild flowers, as if ready to strew them in the ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... of dank heavy windfall that obstructs the streams and causes an endless succession of swamps. In these the paddlers had to wade to mid-waist, 'tracking' their canoes through perilous passage-way, where the rip of an upturned branch might tear the birch from the bottom of the canoe. When the swamps finally narrowed to swift rivers, blankets were hoisted as sails, and the brigade of canoes swept out to the sandy sea of Hudson Bay. 'We were in danger to ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... of birch bark under the trees. But it hasn't any stove-pipe!" said Flaxie, who had never forgotten that ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... the house a few trees were growing. Some were cherry trees, and one was a birch, with long, slender branches which swayed in the wind, and with every breeze its leaves touched the dilapidated moss-covered straw thatch of the roof; when the stronger gusts of wind bent its boughs to the wall, and pressed its twigs and the waves of leaves against the roof, it would ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... position, they were entitled to the kick-off. Bert took careful aim and lifted the ball far and high. Ordinarily it would have been good for at least fifty yards, but the wind limited it to thirty-five. Caldwell was down under it like a flash, but Birch, of the Army, made a fair catch and kicked back for twenty yards. Drake got possession of the ball, and the Blues had it on the Army's forty ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... exhibit of forest products consisted of sections of the great fir trees, pines, cedars, oaks, hemlocks, birch, ash, walnut, cherry, etc., and specimens of rough and polished lumber from every variety of wood grown in the Dominion, together with a large pyramid of pulp wood, of which Canada possesses millions of acres, ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... will to go Outside the olive-bordered path Of peace to cut the birch of wrath, And strip your body ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... will complete this sketch of his character. Stretched out as if to guard the countess, as a miser guards his hoard, that enormous hand was covered with hair so thick, it presented such a network of veins and projecting muscles, that it gave the idea of a branch of birch clasped with a growth of ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... soft shades Across the lake; sequester'd leafy glades, That through the dimness of their twilight show Large dock leaves, spiral foxgloves, or the glow Of the wild cat's eyes, or the silvery stems Of delicate birch trees, or long grass which hems A little brook. The youth had long been viewing These pleasant things, and heaven was bedewing The mountain flowers, when his glad senses caught A trumpet's silver voice. Ah! it was fraught With many joys for him: the warder's ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... sprig of mint by the wayward brook, A nibble of birch in the wood, A summer day, and love, and a book, And I wouldn't be a king ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... Cleiteadh mor, big ridge of rocks. Bothanairidh, summer sheiling. Birrican, a place name. Rhuda ban, white headland. Bealach an sgadan, Herring slap. Skein dubh, black knife. Crubach, lame. Mo ghaoil, my darling. Direach sin, (just that), (now do you see). Lag 'a bheithe, hollow of the birch. Mo bhallach, my boy. Ceilidh, visit (meeting of friends); ceilidhing; ceilidher. Cha neil, negative, no. Mo leanabh, my child. Cailleachs, old women. Og, young. Mhari nic ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... from this windy upland perch, Mine eyes have seen the forest break in bloom, The rose-red maple and the golden birch, The dusty yellow of the elms, the gloom Of the tall poplar hung with tasseled black; Ah, I have watched, till eye and ear and brain Grew full of dreams as they, the moted plain, The sun-steeped wood, ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... sounds that ever grated the ears of a Vandal; thus, rasped, scratched, wrenched, bridled, fangled, birchen, hardened, strengthened, quickened, &c. almost frighten us when written as they are actually pronounced, as rapt, scratcht, wrencht, bridl'd, fangl'd, birch'n, strength'n'd, quick'n'd, &c.; they become still more formidable when used contractedly in the solemn style, which never ought to be the case; for here instead of thou strength'n'st or strength'n'd'st, thou quick'n'st or quick'n'd'st, we ought to pronounce ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... brilliant day, but the cold was intense, and I think we were all glad that Pong was a closeable car. That Winter's reign had begun was most apparent. There was a bleak look upon the country's face: birch-rods that had been poplars made us gaunt avenues: here and there the cold jewellery of frost was sparkling. I fell to wondering how far south we must go to ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... spruce trees, which it "closely resembles in color." Menge says that it is common in Prussia, where it is seen in great numbers on fir trees, whose spotted bark it resembles in color, so that it is not easily seen. We have found them, most commonly, upon birch trees, and in this situation their color adaptation is perfect. Both the spider and the peeling bark of the tree are of a light silvery brown, covered with little blackish marks. On the bark these marks are, of course, irregular, ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... curl of birch bark and made a little wigwam, and because the voice came from the skies he painted the wigwam with blue mud, and to show that it came from the Sunland he painted a red sun on it. On the floor he spread a scrap of his own white blanket, then for a fire he breathed into it a spark of life, ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... particular works of creation, you will find how curious journeyman Nature has been to trim up the vegetable beaux; observe how sparkish a periwig adorns the head of a beech, and what a fine doublet of white satin is worn by the birch." The fault is not in any inaptness of the images, nor in the mere vulgarity of the things themselves, but in that of the associations they awaken. The "prithee, undo this button" of Lear, coming where it does and expressing what it does, is one of those touches ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... band was a beautiful maiden named Alin. She was as fair and delicate as a young birch tree in spring among the dark old pines and firs, and Ving loved her with all his heart. His soul thrilled with rapture at the thought that he and she together should drink from the fountain of immortality, ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... last Thursday, and went by railway to Riviere de Loup. There I had a fall, and hurt my ribs. Next day I drove over the, new, Temiscouata road to the Lake, and thence took a birch bark canoe and two men and paddled down the Lake, and down the river Madawasca to Little Falls, where I arrived in a drenching storm of rain at one o'clock in the morning—having had 'perils by water.' Our canoe leaked, and we damaged its bottom in going through a rapid, and had to haul ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... and balked the paper, and taken Master B.'s bell away and balked the ringing, and if they could suppose that that confounded boy had lived and died, to clothe himself with no better behaviour than would most unquestionably have brought him and the sharpest particles of a birch-broom into close acquaintance in the present imperfect state of existence, could they also suppose a mere poor human being, such as I was, capable by those contemptible means of counteracting and limiting ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... like gigantic wildernesses of upheaved pudding stone. Then, as the voyage progresses, the hillsides put on greenery, sombre when it is pine, cheerful when the hangings are supplied by the silver birch, and bright ever when the emerald patches bear testimony to the industry of the farmer, winning his scanty harvests against heavy odds. The calling places are numerous, but often consist of some half a dozen houses of the usual weatherboard, red ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... are the canoes of the North American Indians. These are built of thin laths and ribs of wood, and are covered with the bark of the birch-tree. The sheets of bark are not a quarter of an inch thick. Several sheets are used in the covering of one canoe. They are sewed together with the long pliant roots of the pine, and the seams are rendered tight with gum procured from the same tree. So light are ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... untried muscles of the younger Scouts. Soon after leaving the sandy banks and tundra of the lower stream, the creek began to wind its way through dense forests of spruce, poplar and oak with the ghostly bark of the birch lighting up the dim that marks the tangled wildwood of more southern climates, showing how little the sunlight of these northern ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... at the top of a dusty hill we were just climbing; but there was nothing else anywhere, except a clear brown creek, and some sweet-smelling meadows with a white horse gazing in a bored way over rather a queer fence, and some cows asleep under a clump of maple trees on our side of a young birch grove. ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... hurry to put themselves under the power of a pedagogue's birch," answered Ernst's patron, looking down upon him. "Have you thought on that subject, Ernst? The road to learning is not always one of roses. You must be prepared for many things to which you have not been ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... feel an interest in Professor Shaw, it may be agreeable to know, that in his wanderings, having discovered in a green lane, on the margin of a duck-pond, a district school in want of a pedagogue, he forthwith assumed the birch, and may be now seen at almost any hour of the day, in the midst of his noisy populace, commanding silence, or dusting them on their least honorable parts. 'Tough, are you? I'll see if I can find a tender ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... Heights—and but a single bridge left across the Harlem. To boat it means to be beaten in detail. I tell you, gentlemen, that the only chance I might have in an attempt upon any part of Washington's army must be if he advances. In formal council, Generals Kniphausen, Birch, and Robertson sustain me; and, believing I am right, I am prepared to suffer injustice and calumny in silence from my detractors here in New York and ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... children are pleased, thought I, why should not others be amused also? In a few days Dr. Birch's young friends will be expected to reassemble at Rodwell Regis, where they will learn everything that is useful, and under the eyes of careful ushers continue the business ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to Hermiston runs for a great part of the way up the valley of a stream, a favourite with anglers and with midges, full of falls and pools, and shaded by willows and natural woods of birch. Here and there, but at great distances, a byway branches off, and a gaunt farmhouse may be descried above in a fold of the hill; but the more part of the time, the road would be quite empty of passage and the hills of habitation. Hermiston parish is one of the least populous in Scotland; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... itself. If it speak like a sensible child, prithee, pat its cheek, and say so; but if it be ridiculous when it would be serious, smile, and permit the foolish attempt to pass. But do not, O goody critic, apply the birch, because its unpractised tongue cannot lisp the language of Shakspeare, nor be very much enraged, if you find it has to creep before ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... beautiful, it is not the sunset nor the pale green sky shimmering through the curtain of the silver birch, nor the quietness; it is not the hopping of birds upon the lawn, nor the darkness stealing over all things that ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... slumbers, indeed, of a Freshman, who, just escaped the trammels of "home, sweet home," and the pedagogue's tyrannical birch, for the first time in his life, with the academical gown, assumes the toga virilis, and feels himself a Man.—Alma ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... perhaps, whisper in confidence to the discreet, that even editors are mortal, and that Steele was conceivably capable of the enormity of reading papers carelessly. Philips was furious, and hung up a birch in Button's Coffee-house, declaring that he would apply it to his tormentor should he ever show his nose in the room. As Philips was celebrated for skill with the sword, the mode of vengeance was certainly unmanly, and stung the soul of his adversary, always morbidly ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... and deadened all other sounds with its solemn and soothing rumble. In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir's shimmering arm-spread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder. Reserved, shy, but full of significance, it hid whatever it might hold behind a veil, keeping it till the hour should come, and, with the hour, those who were called ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... had crossed the Borders, and would pass through a narrow defile, which he mentioned, where he could be attacked with great advantage. Sir James gave instant orders to march to the spot; and, with that genius for scheming, for which he was so remarkable, commanded his men to twist together the young birch-trees on either side of the passage to prevent the escape of the enemy. This finished, he concealed his archers in a hollow way, near ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... trees—but the peaches gave out and were not renewed. He also raised grapes, quinces, and small fruit in abundance. The rosebush he prized as his mother's favorite is still flourishing, as are also the fine magnolia, laburnum, and cut-leaved birch of his planting. The ash tree in front of the house ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... the same preference is unhesitatingly accorded to the same effect in nature herself. Whatever beauty there may result from effects of light on foreground objects, from the dew of the grass, the flash of the cascade, the glitter of the birch trunk, or the fair daylight hues of darker things, (and joyfulness there is in all of them), there is yet a light which the eye invariably seeks with a deeper feeling of the beautiful, the light of the declining or breaking day, and the flakes of scarlet cloud burning like watch-fires in the green ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... crimson not-weeping variety, and three young trees, "now six or seven years old, show a decided tendency to be pendulous, but as yet are not so much so as the mother-plant." According to Mr. MacNab,[45] seedlings from a magnificent weeping birch (Betula alba), in the Botanic Garden at Edinburgh, grew for the first ten or fifteen years upright, but then all became weepers like their parent. A peach with pendulous branches, like those of the weeping willow, has been found capable ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... some one she can hold on to, and reckon on to blame her when she's wrong and praise her when she's right. If she breaks your best jug by accident don't go for to scold her, but if she takes a bit of sugar on the sly ye may take the birch to her." If young master's like most of the little lads I've known, Miss Angel, he'll put them first that loves him well enough to put what's fair before what's pleasant for ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... story, in which Mr. Massereene figures as the principal feature, and is discovered during school hours on the top of a neighbor's apple-tree, with a long-suffering but irate usher at the foot of it, armed with his indignation and a birch rod. ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... the Aleuts always use—rested the end of the paddle on the bottom on the other side of the bidarka, and, steadying himself by this means, slipped into place in the front hatch of the boat, just as one would step into a tottery birch-bark, although not even the latter can be more ticklish than one of these skin-covered native boats. Skookie was less particular, but, with the confidence born of long experience, took a running jump as he pushed off the bidarka and scrambled into the rear hatch. An instant later his ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... suffered considerable injury during the siege. The defenders used the lead from the chapter-house roof to cover the keep of the castle, and possibly also to make bullets. Finally, on December 18th, through the treachery of Colonel Birch, the governor of the city, Hereford was once more taken, and this time the whole place was overrun by a rabble ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... Moose Jaw, somewhere it was they stopped the train and all ran out in the snow where the white moon was shining down a valley of birch trees. It was the Snowbird Valley where all the snowbirds of Canada come early in the winter and ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg
... me what's going on at Pokrovskoe. Is the house standing still, and the birch trees, and our schoolroom? And Philip the gardener, is he living? How I remember the arbor and the seat! Now mind and don't alter anything in the house, but make haste and get married, and make everything as it used to be again. Then I'll ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the morning of September 2nd, rapid firing was heard in the direction of the Agency. The scouts reported that the detachment under Major Brown was attacked and surrounded at Birch Coolie, 20 miles from the fort and 3 miles from the Lower Agency. A second detachment under Colonel McPhail, consisting of the Hickory Guards (Company B), Sigel Guards (Company E), Young Men's Guard ...
— History of Company E of the Sixth Minnesota Regiment of Volunteer Infantry • Alfred J. Hill
... painted the maples in flame. Song birds, the glory of the St. Lawrence valley, were no longer to be heard, but the waters literally swarmed with duck and the forests were alive with partridge. Where to-day nestle church spires and whitewashed hamlets were the birch wigwams and night camp fires of Indian hunters. Wherever Cartier went ashore, Indians rushed knee-deep to carry him from the river; and one old chief at Richelieu signified his pleasure by presenting the whites with two Indian children. Zigzagging leisurely, now along the north shore, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... In the Maine Wilderness. Voyaging up the Kennebec. The Huntress of the Lakes. Extraordinary Story of Mrs. Trevor. Two Hundred Miles from Civilization. Sleeping in a Birch-bark Canoe. A Fight with Five Savages. A Victorious Heroine. The Trail of a Lost Husband. Only just in Time. A Narrow Escape, Voyaging in an Ice-boat. Snow-bound in a Cave. Fighting for Food. Grappling with a Forest Monster. Mrs. Storey, the Forester. Alida Johnson's Thrilling Narrative. ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... it is done by hand or stenciled. Nearly all kinds of woods are used, the difference in cost being caused by the grade and amount of labor needed, the kind of wood chosen and its abundance and the fineness of grain and the seasoning. Mahogany costs more than stained birch, and walnut than gum wood, but there are certain people who for some strange reason feel that they are getting something a little smarter and better if it is tagged "birch mahogany" than if it were simply called birch. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... glared meaningly at Peter Lauchie, one of the most bellicose Highlanders, but that young man dodged cleverly behind Pat Murphy's broad shoulders. "Ye'll think Ah'll not find ye out?" the master shouted triumphantly. "But Ah'll soon do that! Aye, it was at the Birch Crick ye were fightin' like a pack o' wild beasts; ye thought ye were far enough away to be safe. But Ah'll find out who started it!" His eye ranged quickly round the room and fell upon Scotty, sitting ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... it may mean the short birch for me, Steele," said the factor gloomily. "Lac Bain is just now the emptiest, most fallen-to-pieces, unbusiness-like post between the Athabasca and the Bay. We've had two bad seasons running, and everything has gone wrong. Colonel Becker is a big one ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... yards. Its banks, which are clothed with verdure to the water's edge, recede by a gradual slope until they terminate in a high ridge, running parallel to the river on both sides. This ridge yields poplar, birch, and maple, with a few pines, proving the excellence of the soil. The interior, however, is said to ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... it was in a feeble voice that I inquired whether there was no such thing as a little skiff a fellow might paddle about in? No, nothing of the kind; would a canoe do? Somehow a canoe would not do. I never took kindly to canoes, excepting always the Canadian birch-bark pattern; evidently there was no boat for me. There was no place on the great river for an indolent, dreamy particle like myself, apt to drift up into nooks, and to spend much time absorbing those pleasures ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... rest of Russia. Throughout the whole of it the climate is very severe. For about half of the year the ground is covered by deep snow, and the rivers are frozen. By far the greater part of the land is occupied by forests of pine, fir, larch, and birch, or by vast, unfathomable morasses. The arable land and pasturage taken together form only about one and a half per cent, of the area. The population is scarce—little more than one to the English square mile—and settled chiefly along the banks of the rivers. ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... countenance, he addressed him in the language of Scripture, saying "O! Ephraim what shall I do unto thee?" "It wouldn't take me long to find out what to do, if he was mine," said Aunt Lucinda. "I'd take a good birch rod, and give him such a tanning, that he wouldn't cut up another clothes-line in a hurry, I'll promise you." "Upon the whole I think your counsel is wise, Cousin Lucinda," replied his father, ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... that he was made Bishop of Myra and died in the year 343. It was once the custom to send a man around to personate St. Nicholas on St. Nicholas Eve, and to inquire how the children had behaved through the year, who were deserving of gifts, and who needed a touch of the birch rods that he carried with him into every home. St. Nicholas still goes about in some parts of the country, and in the bazaars and shops are sold little bunches of rods, real or made of candy, such as St. Nicholas is supposed to deal in. In some places Knight Rupert takes ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... tent. In the open ground, on the way to a solitary birch-tree, we could see a group of soldiers.... Sara ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... ever the indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the Celt's touch in the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakspeare's touch in his daffodil, Wordsworth's in his cuckoo, Keats's in his Autumn, Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy among the Swiss farms. To decide where the gift for natural magic originally lies, whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... and rain fell, in considerable quantity almost every day. In this part of his voyage, Mr. Pike was accompanied by a Mr. Frazer and two other persons, with three birch canoes. On the 16th of September, they passed the mouth of the Sauteaux or Chippeway river, a deep and majestic stream, which has a communication, by a short passage, with the Montreal river, and, by this river, with Lake Superior. ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... landscape. A few blades of grass sprouted at the edge of the cape. Further back, in places sheltered from the winds, the ground was clothed in rich verdure, and adorned with flowers. Still further inland were little patches of dwarf birch, scarcely a foot high, crouching close to the ground to escape being torn away by the furious winds that sweep over the land. There was none of the abundant life that we see around us in our fields and woods. A spider, a bumble-bee, ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... kept right up against the hills on one side and there were groves of quaking asp and cottonwoods that made shade, and service-bushes and birches that shut off the ugly hills on the other side. We dismounted and prepared to noon. We caught a few grasshoppers and I cut a birch pole for a rod. The trout are so beautiful now, their sides are so silvery, with dashes of old rose and orange, their speckles are so black, while their backs look as if they had been sprinkled with gold-dust. ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... river. The houses on the other shore, each surrounded with its patch of cleared land, were sadly distant from one another. Behind the clearings, and on either side of them to the river's bank, it was always forest: a dark green background of cypress against which a lonely birch tree stood out here and there, its bole naked and white as the ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... Piskaret drew a long breath, grasped his war-club, and stealthily pushing aside the loose birch-bark door-flap of the nearest lodge, peeped inside. By the ember light he saw that every Iroquois, man and woman, was fast asleep, under furs, on spruce boughs around ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... down the herd's grass for the cows; Heard the horse whinnying for his corn; And sharply clashing horn on horn, Impatient down the stanchion rows, 15 The cattle shake their walnut bows; While peering from his early perch Upon the scaffold's pole of birch, The cock his crested helmet bent And down his querulous ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... the healthful pastime of weeding, his troubles slipped from him. The path became littered with little tufts of grass, and he Was just considering the possibility of outflanking the birch-broom, which had taken up an advantageous position by the kitchen window, when a young man came down the side-entrance and greeted him with ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... upon another fragment from the same state. This impression may have been made by a piece of birch bark or fine fabric with a pattern sewed into it with ...
— Prehistoric Textile Fabrics Of The United States, Derived From Impressions On Pottery • William Henry Holmes
... gave the word, and the marine leg, gravely, deliberately descended. There is a magnificent audacity about that sort of performance. The leg was ninety feet long, steel-booted, framed of great timbers, heavy enough to have wrecked the barge like a birch bark canoe if it had got away. It went down bodily into the hold and the steel boot was buried in wheat. Then Pete threw another lever, and in a moment another endless series of cups was carrying the wheat aloft. It went over the cross-head and down a spout, then stretched out in a ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... time with success. For after a little they came into the shadow of the island, the keel grunted upon sand, and they got out. There was a little crescent of white beach, with an occasional exclamatory green reed sticking from it, and above was a fine arch of birch and pine. They hauled up the boat as far as they could, and sat down to wait for the tide to turn. Firm earth, in spite of her awful spiritual forebodings, put Margaret in a more cheerful mood. Furthermore, the woods and the ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... trees, I mean only those ordinary forest or copse trees of Europe, which are the chief subjects of the landscape painter. I do not mean to include every kind of foliage which by any accident can find its way into a picture, but the ordinary trees of Europe,—oak, elm, ash, hazel, willow, birch, beech, poplar, chestnut, pine, mulberry, olive, ilex, carubbe, and such others. I do not purpose to examine the characteristics of each tree; it will be enough to observe the laws common to all. ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... the very verge of the line with a dense fence of stunted trees just before him and the wilderness of snow beyond, sloping up to the crest, outlined in white against the solid gray sky. The Spartans of the forest were around him—fir, pine, spruce, birch, and trembling little aspens up there among the stoutest. All were of one height, clean-shaven by the volleys of the wind-driven sand and pebbles that clipped off any treetop that aspired above the mass. In solid numbers was their salvation, and ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... of newspapers were deposited in the bow. Holliday waved his hand. The Druro churned the water and swung out into midstream again. Bennie looked curiously after her. To the north lay a sandy shore dotted by a scraggy forest of dwarf spruce and birch. A few fishing huts and a mass of wooden shanties fringed the forest. To the east, seaward, many miles down that great stretch of treacherous, sullen river waited a gray bank of fog. But overhead ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... Jackson, Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight. It is all set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Saxon's silvery laughter, and his humming hives of gain. Swiftly sped the tawny runner o'er the pathless prairies then, Now the iron-reindeer sooner carries weal or woe to men. On thy bosom, Royal River, silent sped the birch canoe Bearing brave with bow and quiver on his way to war or woo; Now with flaunting flags and streamers—mighty monsters of the deep— Lo the puffing, panting steamers through thy foaming waters sweep; And behold the grain-fields golden, where the bison grazed of eld; ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... plumage, they give animation to the frozen solitude long after all other birds have retired from the desolate scenery. Their food consists of the tender shoots of pines, the seeds of plants, the berries of the arbutus and bilberry, the buds of the birch and alder, the buds of the heather, leaves, and grain. The nest is very simply constructed, consisting of dried grasses placed upon the ground ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... name of Him who made earth and heaven: but they found nothing which they thought would suit the blessed St. Boniface, save that they stayed a little at the place which is called Ruohen-bah, 'the rough brook,' to see if it would suit; but it would not. So they went back to their birch huts to fast and pray ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... wormwood, and mountain ash; and as he watched the fresh fertile wilderness and solitude of this steppe country, the greenness, the long slopes, and valleys with stunted oak bushes, the grey villages, and scant birch trees,—the whole Russian landscape, so long unseen by him, stirred emotion at once pleasant, sweet and almost painful in his heart, and he felt weighed down by a kind of pleasant oppression. Slowly his thoughts wandered; their outlines were as vague and indistinct as the ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... put the yeast in when the dough is hot, as it will scald it, and prevents its rising. Most ovens require heating an hour and a half for bread. A brisk fire should be kept up, and the doors of the room should be kept shut, if the weather is cold. Pine and ash, mixed together, or birch-wood, is the best for heating an oven. To ascertain if your oven is of the right temperature, when cleaned, throw in a little flour; if it browns in the course of a minute, it is sufficiently hot; if it turns black directly, wait several minutes, before putting in the things that ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous
... he remembers his own youth, and also considers the special joys of childhood. For it is not Nature lessons that come into his calculations but "the mere association of plants and children." So the birch tree is chosen, partly for its grace and beauty, but also because of its bark, for one can scribble on its papery surface; the hazel, because children delight in the catkins with their showers of golden dust, and the ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... afternoon, stopped for a half hour at sunset, when the sky, for a few moments, showed streaks of red, then closed in for a night's drizzle. I had built what shelter I could for the woman out of boughs covered with sheets of paper birch and elm. I had made a similar shelter for myself that I might not seem to discriminate too much in favor of the Englishman, and had told the men to do the same. But they were indolent, and stopped at chopping a few hemlock boughs, which they laid across crotched aspens. In truth, our shelters accomplished ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... I see fear prohibit glands from secreting, hope bring back colour to the face and tone to the blood. I see something not material make Jekyl into Hyde; and thank God, make Hyde over into Jekyl again, when birch rods and iron bars have no effect whatever. I have seen love do physical things which the mere intellectual convictions cannot—make hearts beat and eyes sparkle, that would not respond even to digitalis and strychnine. ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... information, how to load and discharge a gun. One day when all were away I stole my fathers gun. It was a double barreled muzzle loader, one barrel shot and the other rifle. I had quite an experience—I saw a partridge just as I entered the woods budding in the top of an old birch tree. I leveled the gun up against an old ash tree and fired I had never before fired a gun, I held it rather loosely aginst my shoulder and the recoil lamed my arm and bloodeyed my pug noose. But this was soon forgotten when I saw I had plugged my meat. In haste I began to load to prepare ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... Diana. Ye have the cat show and the horse show and the military tournaments where the privates look grand as generals and the generals try to look grand as floor-walkers. And ye have the Sportsmen's Show, where the girl that measures 36, 19, 45 cooks breakfast food in a birch-bark wigwam on the banks of the Grand Canal of Venice conducted by one of the Vanderbilts, Bernard McFadden, and the Reverends Dowie and Duss. And ye have the French ball, where the original Cohens and the Robert Emmet-Sangerbund Society dance the Highland ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... king gave to Dr. Juxon, on the scaffold, the regicides took away, so that they were, at least, the publishers of this prayer; and Dr. Birch, who had examined the question with great care, was inclined to think them the forgers. The use of it, by adaptation, was innocent; and they who could so noisily censure it, with a little extension of their malice, could contrive what they ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... despair. A little crisp rustle ran along the bushes; the leaves fluttered, then hung quite still. And he heard a voice—Alicia's—speaking. "My lovely, lovely world!" And moving forward a step, he saw her standing on the river-bank, braced against the trunk of a birch-tree, her head thrown back, and her arms stretched wide apart as though to clasp the lovely world she had apostrophised. To have gone up to her would have been like breaking up a lovers' interview, and he turned ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... they had long before this been compelled to build up the entrance with a wall of firewood, the interstices being stuffed with moss; the hut was lighted by lamps of bear and deer fat melted down and poured into tin drinking-cups, the wicks being composed of strips of birch bark. A watch was regularly kept all day, two always remaining in the hut, one keeping watch through a small slip cut in the curtain before the narrow orifice in the log wall, that served as a door, the other ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... for the sake of another five minutes with her beloved Emma, she very agreeably persuaded to walk in the train of Lord Larrian, and forth they trooped down a pathway of nodding heads and curtsies, resembling oak and birch-trees under a tempered gale, even to the shedding of leaves, for here a turban was picked up by Sir Lukin, there a jewelled ear-ring by the self-constituted attendant, Mr. Thomas Redworth. At the portico rang a wakening cheer, really worth hearing. The rain it rained, and hats were formless,' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and very well, was the moment when the bird fluttered towards the window; he could see it resting on the sill, hesitating a moment, doubting its power of flight. But it had ventured out in the air and had reached a birch, on which it alighted. There had been a rush downstairs and out of the house, but the hawk was no longer in the birch, and was never seen by him again, yet it persisted in ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... You climb the inviting hills and woods day by day, week after week, ever to find fresh enchantment. Not a bend of road or winding mountain-path but discloses a new scene—here a fairy glen, with graceful birch or alder breaking the expanse of dimpled green; there a spinny of larch or of Scotch fir cresting a verdant monticule; now we come upon a little Arcadian home nestled on the hill-side, the spinning-wheel hushed whilst the housewife turns her hay or cuts her patch of rye or wheat growing just outside ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... over six weeks, during which the labour was continued without intermission, and the house was raised of logs, squared and well fitted; the windows and doors were also put in, and the roof well covered in with large squares of birch-bark, firmly fixed on the rafters. The house consisted of one large room, as a dining-room, and the kitchen, with a floor of well-beaten clay, a smaller room, as a sitting-room, and three bed-rooms, all ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... beginning to feel that I am at home alone quite too much. Faye was in Washington two months, and almost immediately after he got back he was ordered to command the paymaster's escort from Helena here, and now he is off again for the summer! The camp is on Birch Creek not far from the Piegan Agency. The agents become frightened every now and then, and ask for troops, more because they know the Indians would be justified in giving trouble than because ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... two as evidence of the shabby treatment she had met with; but when she got home these two were nothing less than precious stones. She at once ran back to where she had shaken out the supposed coals; but they were all gone. So a recompense of straws, dust, birch leaves, or shavings becomes, as elsewhere told, pure gold, pure silver, or thalers. Nor is the story confined to Europe. In Dardistan it is related that a boy, taken down by a Yatsh, or demon, into an underground palace, is allowed to be present ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... in it; and it has birthdays. Thoreau, the man who loved Nature so much that the birds and the fishes took care of him and were never afraid of their master, used to visit certain trees on certain days in the year. The pine has a birthday worth celebrating in December, the maple in October, and the birch in May. You think this is all fancy, and believe persons must be very imaginative to find such friends in Nature? Oh, no; along with fancy Nature tucks very real things into our thoughts about her. You only ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... again, and after that, for an hour or more, something lived for him in the glow of the fire which Olaf kept burning. It was the memory of Mary Standish, her quiet, beautiful eyes gazing at him, her pale face taking form in the lacy wisps of birch-smoke. His mind pictured her in the flame-glow as she had listened to him that day in Skagway, when he had told her of this fight that was ahead. And it pleased him to think she would have made this same fight for Alaska if she had lived. It was a thought which brought a painful thickening ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... he waited till the deer came, Till he saw two antlers lifted, Saw two eyes look from the thicket, Saw two nostrils point to windward, And a deer came down the pathway, Flecked with leafy light and shadow. And his heart within him fluttered Trembled like the leaves above him, Like the birch-leaf palpitated, As the deer ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... to the beholder from more easy-going conditions. Everything is kept up with a strenuous virtue that imparts an air of self-respect to the landscape, which the bleaching and blackening stone walls, wandering over the hill-slopes, divide into wood lots of white birch and pine, stony pastures, and little patches of potatoes and corn. The mowing-lands alone are rich; and if the New England year is in the glory of the latest June, the breath of the clover blows honey—sweet into the car windows, and the fragrance of the new-cut ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... trees and palms growing almost side by side with the birch, the pine, and the spruce. Among other things, their attention was attracted to some beautiful fern trees, which were fully twenty feet high, and there were climbing plants in great profusion, some of them clinging to the trees, and ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... him, but one golden feather only fell down, and the bird flew away. The man took the feather and carried it to his brother, who looked at it and said, "It is pure gold!" and gave him a great deal of money for it. Next day the man climbed into a birch-tree, and was about to cut off a couple of branches when the same bird flew out, and when the man searched he found a nest, and an egg lay inside it, which was of gold. He took the egg home with him, and ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... "cart whips," etc., when I say flogging is not the most degrading punishment in the world. It may be so to a white man in most countries, but how is it to the white boy? That necessary coadjutor of the schoolmaster, the "birch," is never thought to have rendered infamous the unfortunate victim of pedagogue ire; nor did Solomon in his wisdom dream that he was counseling parents to debase their offspring, when he exhorted them not to spoil the child by sparing the rod. Pardon me for recurring ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... and a round shield of dressed leather, made (wrote Champlain) "from the skin of an animal like the buffalo".[26] The chief of the party explained many things to the white man by drawing with a piece of charcoal on the white bark of the birch tree. He gave him to understand that the present occupation of his band of warriors was the gathering of blueberries, which would be dried in the sun, and could then be preserved for ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... successful novel was The Spy, 1821, a tale of the Revolutionary War, the scene of which was laid in Westchester County, N. Y., where the author was then residing. The hero of this story, Harvey Birch, was one of the most skillfully drawn figures on his canvas. In 1823 he published the Pioneers, a work somewhat overladen with description, in which he drew for material upon his boyish recollections of frontier life at Cooperstown. This was the first of the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... flame. Song birds, the glory of the St. Lawrence valley, were no longer to be heard, but the waters literally swarmed with duck and the forests were alive with partridge. Where to-day nestle church spires and whitewashed hamlets were the birch wigwams and night camp fires of Indian hunters. Wherever Cartier went ashore, Indians rushed knee-deep to carry him from the river; and one old chief at Richelieu signified his pleasure by presenting the whites with two Indian children. Zigzagging leisurely, now along the north shore, now ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... upon them might last for days—they set about preparing a shelter. With a little search, whooping to each other lest they stray away, they found a big dry stub that some gale had snapped off a few feet above the snow. While Mooka scurried about, collecting birch bark and armfuls of dry branches, Noel took off his snow-shoes and began with one of them to shovel away the snow in a semicircle around the base of the stub. In a short half-hour he had a deep hole there, with the snow banked up around it to the ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... bark, used for tanning Boughs for bed Wood for rubbing-sticks Illustration of Banshee Basswood Usually hollow Leaf illustration Beavering Bear hunt Beaver River Beech Illustration of Blue, illustration of Biddy Birch— White Black Canoe Dishes Mahogany Sweet Black Illustration of Blackbirds, Red-winged Blackbird, purple (Jack) Black Cherry Lung balm As a remedy Blaze— Special Road Blood Robin Blood Root Bloody-Thundercloud-in-the-Afternoon Bluebird Blue-bottle ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... part of himself. This has to be done daily, hourly, momently, in order that the draught of life may steadily increase. And to do this unflinchingly, a man must be his own schoolmaster, must recognise that he is always in need of wisdom, must be ready to practise any austerities, to use the birch-rod unhesitatingly against himself, in order to gain his end. It becomes evident to any one who regards the subject seriously, that only a man who has the potentialities in him both of the voluptuary and ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... glanced round him uneasily. It was only the moonlight on the bark of a silver birch. Conscious of having betrayed weakness, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... Birch trees, little trees, dwarfed by sharp winds and poor soil, encircled a level space perhaps ten feet across, carpeted with new soft grass, reindeer moss and cupped lichens. Here sat seven or eight children eagerly listening to a story told by an older child as she divided the ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... topmost source—fons et origo—of our chosen river. This single spring, crystal-clear and ice-cold, gushing out of the hillside in a forest of spruce and yellow birch and sugar maple, gave us the clue that we must follow for a week ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... met with. The aristocratic elegant Rumohr was obliged to put up with the following from her: "Why are you not willing to exchange your boredom, your melancholy caprices, for a rifle? With your figure, slender as a birch, you could leap over abysses and spring from rock to rock; but you are lazy and infected with the disease of neutrality. You cannot hear the voices saying: 'Where is the enemy? On, on, for God, the Kaiser, and the Fatherland!'" Even Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, who ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... reached the place of many pines, God's country, that no white man yet had named— They beached their birch canoe 'neath swinging vines, For here, the Indian read by many signs, Lay the wild land the tribe ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... Betulina, from betula, a birch. This has a somewhat corky, leathery cap, firm and without zones, woolly, sessile, deeply grooved concentrically, margin of the ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... nearly so incapable as they let men make them out to be. I never built a house before, but I am sure this one of mine is going to be a success. After we have eaten I am going to look for birch-bark to make the covering, but there's one thing ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... cannot make it enter the pores of the leather; the black colour is produced by rubbing it over with a solution of green vitriol, the sulphate of iron. Russian leather is tanned in an infusion of birch bark, and is said to be afterwards mixed with a quantity of birch tar, to give it that odour for which it is peculiar, which renders it valuable for book-binding, on account of preventing it from being attacked by insects. Tawed leather, used for gloves, is made by impregnating ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... Dolls Molly gone A Backward Spring Looking Across At a Seaside Town in 1869 The Glimpse The Pedestrian "Who's in the next room?" At a Country Fair The Memorial Brass: 186- Her Love-birds Paying Calls The Upper Birch-Leaves "It never looks like summer" Everything comes The Man with a Past He fears his Good Fortune He wonders about Himself Jubilate He revisits his First School "I thought, my heart" Fragment Midnight on the Great Western Honeymoon Time at an Inn The Robin "I rose and ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... many who didn't. Henry James, for instance, wrote a review of "Drum Taps" in the Nation, November 16, 1865. In the lusty heyday and assurance of twenty-two years, he laid the birch on smartly. It is just a little saddening to find that even so clear-sighted an observer as Henry James could not see through the chaotic form of Whitman to the great vision and throbbing music ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... had been the scene of incessant nautical exploits. Stilling had rowed, sailed, paddled indefatigably, and all Highfield had been impressed to bear him company, and to admire his versatility. Then motors had come in, and he had forsaken aquatic sports for the flying chariot. The canoes of birch-bark and canvas had been hoisted to the roof, the sail-boat had rotted at her moorings, and the movable floor of the boat-house, ingeniously contrived to slide back on noiseless runners, had lain undisturbed through several seasons. Even the key of the boat-house had been mislaid—by Isabel's ...
— The Choice - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... life. But Colonel Zane's house proved an exception to this. Most interesting was the large room. The chinks between the logs had been plastered up with clay and then the walls covered with white birch bark; trophies of the chase, Indian bows and arrows, pipes and tomahawks hung upon them; the wide spreading antlers of a noble buck adorned the space above the mantel piece; buffalo robes covered the ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... a little woodland glen, with a streamlet tumbling through it. She sat with her back to a snowy birch-tree, gazing into the eddies of a pool below; and he lay beside her, upon the soft, mossy ground, reading out of a book of poems. Images of joy were passing before them; and there came four lines ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... you shall be given to Nannie Cameron, and you shall wear your old one to the kirk. How will that suit your vanity? And you may be off to bed now directly, without any supper. There are twigs enough for a birch rod, my lady, if bed does not bring you to a better frame of mind. Run in now, and don't let me see your face ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... wildly about the wide expanse of water for his lost mother, he had run his canoe violently against the top rail of a fence. The delicate birch bark was ripped off. In another minute it sank and turned bottom up. It was a canoe of the smallest size, Winklemann having preferred to continue his search alone rather than with an unwilling companion. The German was a good swimmer; a mere upset might not have been serious. ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... made earth and heaven: but they found nothing which they thought would suit the blessed St. Boniface, save that they stayed a little at the place which is called Ruohen-bah, 'the rough brook,' to see if it would suit; but it would not. So they went back to their birch huts to ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... thought I, why should not others be amused also? In a few days Dr. Birch's young friends will be expected to reassemble at Rodwell Regis, where they will learn everything that is useful, and under the eyes of careful ushers continue the business of ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and his father's young seignior, Jacques de Repentigny, stepped from a birch canoe on the bank near the fort, two Chippewa Indians following with their game. Hunting furnished no small addition to the food supply of the settlement, for the English conquest had brought about scarcity at this as well as other Western posts. Peace was ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... of its forms, and of the names of its gods, than they had before. It is impossible, and probably always will be, to state with precision the theology on which it rested. It is impossible, because that theology was different in one time and with one school from what it was at other times. Mr. S. Birch, of the British Museum, says, "The religion of the Egyptians consisted of an extended polytheism represented by a system of local groups." But Mr. Pierret says, "The polytheism of the monuments is but an outward show. The innumerable gods of the Pantheon are ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... parted, the latter keeping to the sunny thoroughfare, the former plunging into the narrow, heavily shaded track that ran through ravine and over ridge, now beside the water and now in close woods of birch and hemlock. The road was bad, but Selim and his master bent to it grimly, with no nice avoidance of rut or stone or sunken place. To the horse there was before him food and rest, to the man his home. They took at the same pace the much of ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... tried to think of another way to accomplish his purpose. None presented itself; so with glowing words he appealed to their nobler selves, telling them all the great need of the travelers who were obliged to pass that way. First he appealed to a fine birch which ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... them,' cried Grania, 'one on each side of the stream, and we will travel on foot.' So they went on till they reached Galway, and there Diarmid cut down a grove, and made a palisade with seven doors of wattles, and gathered together the tops of the birch trees and soft rushes for a bed ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... suddenly lifted his eyes and gazed at the Pearl, who sat almost the length of the room away from him. The cabin was lighted only by the great log fire, and the leaping, ardent flames of the pine, mingled with the soft, glowing radiance of burning birch, invested the room and its occupants with that atmosphere of mystery and glamour, essential in flame-illumined shadow. And Hugh was playing the music the masters dreamed in the twilight hours when silence and shadow permitted them, ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... one were a novelist, one could weave several pages of valuable copy out of the stalk. The stag made for the strath here, and Dick, who had no gillie, but was an independent sportsman of the old school, pursued on foot. Plunging down the low, birch-clad hills, the stag found the flooded river before him, black and swollen with rain. He took the water, crossing by the big pool, which looked almost like a little loch, tempestuous under a north wind blowing up stream, and covered with small white, vicious crests. The stag crossed and staggered ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... pond; and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... took the towel and comb and ran away as fast as their feet could possibly carry them. The dogs were after them, but they threw them the cookies that were left; the gates did not open themselves, but the children smoothed them with oil; the birch tree near the path almost scratched their eyes out, but the gentle girl fastened a pretty ribbon to it. So they went farther and farther and ran out of the dark forest into the wide, ...
— Folk Tales from the Russian • Various
... of hundreds for every franc that they advanced towards the expenses of the undertaking. With cheerful haste, therefore, they agreed to pay the cost of the expedition. La Verendrye was delighted and lost no time in employing such persons as he needed—soldiers, canoe-men, and hunters. Birch-bark canoes were procured and laden with provisions, equipment, and packages of goods to trade with the Indians; and in the early summer of 1731 all was ready for the great western journey. With La ...
— Pathfinders of the Great Plains - A Chronicle of La Verendrye and his Sons • Lawrence J. Burpee
... than the drive to Strathfield-saye, passing, as we do, through a great part of Heckfield Heath,* a tract of wild woodland, a forest, or rather a chase, full of fine sylvan beauty—thickets of fern and holly, and hawthorn and birch, surmounted by oaks and beeches, and interspersed with lawny glades and deep pools, letting light into the picture. Nothing can be prettier than the approach to the duke's lodge. And the entrance to the demesne, ...
— The Lost Dahlia • Mary Russell Mitford
... arranged, Piskaret drew a long breath, grasped his war-club, and stealthily pushing aside the loose birch-bark door-flap of the nearest lodge, peeped inside. By the ember light he saw that every Iroquois, man and woman, was fast asleep, under furs, on spruce ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... worked since Tudor days, by sloping desks with safety inkpots and scientifically adjustable seats, "with grave misgivings." And though he never birched a boy in his life, and was, I am convinced, morally incapable of such a scuffle, he retained the block and birch in the school through all his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters' Conference in temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it, dear soul! to the power of ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... appearance there my tale has nothing to do; the Doomster, as I have said, had the handling of them with birch. What I have described of this kirk-session's cognisance of those rough fellows' ill behaviour is designed ingeniously to convey a notion of its strict ceremony and its wide dominion,—to show that even in the heart of Arraghael we were not beasts in that year when the red flash of the sword ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... me. I sent my card to Professor Fries, and he entirely devoted himself to me: but imagine our conversation—he spoke in Latin and I in French: however we understood each other very well. It is on the whole a dreary country except where enlivened by lakes: some parts are pine forests and birch forests, but others are featureless ground with boulder stones, like the worst part of ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... red ochre, which they use to colour their bodies, bows, arrows, and canoes. The canoes are built in shape like wherries on the river Thames, but that they are much longer, made with the rinds of birch trees, which they sew very artificially and close together, and overlay every seam with turpentine. In like manner they sew the rinds of birch trees round and deep in proportion like a brass kettle, to boil their meat in; which hath been proved to me by three mariners ...
— Lecture On The Aborigines Of Newfoundland • Joseph Noad
... lakes, rivers, springs, and fountains, are held in high reverence. In the Kalevala the oak is called Pun Jumalan (God's tree). The mountain-ash even to this day, and the birch-tree, are held sacred, and peasants plant them by ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... Inch-Worm, was measuring his way carefully around a birch tree. Since Toadie Todson's death, he spent a large part of every day looking at trees and measuring distances, so that Stingy could spin his webs in the ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... cedar trees and chestnut trees and birch trees of three kinds; and there were white pine trees and pitch pine trees, and the pitch pine trees ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins
... every well-instructed angler knows. The bright emerald tips that break from the hemlock and the balsam like verdant flames have a pleasant savour to the tongue. The leaves of the sassafras are full of spice, and the bark of the black-birch twigs holds a fine cordial. Crinkle-root is spicy, but you must partake of it delicately, or it will bite your tongue. Spearmint and peppermint never lose their charm for the palate that still remembers the delights ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... end of the table, whispering and shivering, debarred the vent of all natural spirits, for fear of making a noise; and strangely uniting the idea of the domestic hearth with that of a hobgoblin, and the association of dear papa with that of a birch rod." ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Hudson, with name, derived from the Indian word Apokeepsing, signifying "safe harbor." Near the landing a bold headland juts out into the river, known as Kaal Rock, and no doubt this sheltering rock was a safe harbor in days of birch canoes. It has been recently claimed that the word signifies "muddy pond," which is neither true, appropriate or poetic. Poughkeepsie does not propose to give up her old-time "harbor name," particularly ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... warm spring rain had fallen the day before, and now wherever the ground was not paved the grass shone green. The birch trees in the gardens looked as if they were strewn with green fluff, the wild cherry and the poplars unrolled their long, balmy buds, and in shops and dwelling-houses the double window-frames were being removed and ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... aisy to catch a 'coon, Uncle Zack,' was the lad's rejoinder from the fork of a birch where he had taken refuge, and sucked his stolen goods at ease. Similar raids harassed the long line of cooling tins, and not all the efforts of the sugar-makers at mounting guard could protect them, until the guerilla corps of youngsters became in some degree surfeited, and slid away through the ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... I readily entered into an alliance with her, for I found nothing at Tunbridge half so entertaining, except, indeed, Miss Birch, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... in a much later stage. She must take heart—there may yet be a round dozen of little Joe Taylors to look after—run after—to sort and switch and train up in the way they should go—that is, with a generous use of pickled birch. From whom do you think I have received a couple of notes lately? From Alice. They are returned from the Continent, it seems, and are now at Torquay. The first note touched me a little by what I thought its subdued tone; I trusted her character might be greatly improved. There ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... retention. The Ephemerides contains examples of extrauterine pregnancy remaining in the abdomen forty-six years; Hannaeus mentioned an instance remaining ten years, the mother being pregnant in the meantime; Primperosius speaks of a similar instance; de Blegny, one of twenty-five years in the abdomen; Birch, a case of eighteen years in the abdomen, the woman bearing in the meantime; Bayle, one of twenty-six years, and the Ephemerides, another. In a woman of forty-six, the labor pains intervened without expulsion of the fetus. Impregnation ensued twice afterward, each followed ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Hassell, had arrived many hours before them, and to excuse his flight told so frightful a story of the fate of his comrades that his hearers were seized with a panic, shamefully abandoned their post, and set out for the settlements, leaving a writing on a piece of birch-bark to the effect that all the rest were killed. They had left a supply of bread and pork, and while the famished eleven rested and refreshed themselves they were joined by Solomon Keyes, the man who, after being thrice wounded, had floated away in a canoe ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... left the road by school and church, A pencilled shadow, nothing more, That parted from the silver birch And ended at the ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... cannot be glad even in sunshine. Some of them are like gigantic wildernesses of upheaved pudding stone. Then, as the voyage progresses, the hillsides put on greenery, sombre when it is pine, cheerful when the hangings are supplied by the silver birch, and bright ever when the emerald patches bear testimony to the industry of the farmer, winning his scanty harvests against heavy odds. The calling places are numerous, but often consist of some half a dozen houses of the usual weatherboard, red and ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... were tolerably inured to the vicissitudes of traveling. We had experienced them under various forms, and a birch canoe was as familiar to us as a steamboat. The restlessness, the love of wilds and hatred of cities, natural perhaps in early years to every unperverted son of Adam, was not our only motive for undertaking the present journey. My companion hoped ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... she disappeared from view behind a clump of birch trees. Then leaving the highway he walked slowly along the trail leading ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... material and direction available, for she was the best ship which His Majesty's representative had at his disposal. The Supply was pretty well beyond renovation. She was American built, and her timbers of black birch were never suitable for service in warm waters. Shortly after the discovery of Port Hacking, Hunter set about the overhauling of the vessel that was at once his principal means of naval defence, his saluting battery, his official inspecting ship, his transport, and his craft of all work. He wanted ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... if not, e'en turn aside your heads, and let the wanton youngling laugh by itself. If it speak like a sensible child, prithee, pat its cheek, and say so; but if it be ridiculous when it would be serious, smile, and permit the foolish attempt to pass. But do not, O goody critic, apply the birch, because its unpractised tongue cannot lisp the language of Shakspeare, nor be very much enraged, if you find it has to creep before it ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... into explicit directions, and Max pinned them in his memory. In fact, Obed simply told them to follow the stream up three miles until they came to a bunch of seven birch trees on the right-hand bank. There they were to pick up a trail they would find, follow it half a mile, and at that they would see a cabin under the hemlocks and pines, which would be his humble ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... every child seen speaking to another child with a lower-class badge, or any child wearing a higher badge than that allotted to it by, say, the College of Heralds, should immediately be skinned alive with a birch rod. It might even be insisted that girls with high-class badges should be attended by footmen, grooms, or even military escorts. In short, there is hardly any limit to the follies with which our Commercialism would infect any system that it would tolerate at all. But ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... There were birch twigs caught in the straps of the digger's "swag," and he had a bit of rata flower stuck in the band of his hat. "That's where he's come from!" Tresco pointed in the direction of the great range of mountains which could be seen distinctly through ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... that they might become flexible to wear. And begging her sisters for a few wampum shells, the eldest did but call her "a lying little pest," but the other gave her a few. And having no clothes beyond a few paltry rags, the poor creature went forth and got herself from the woods a few sheets of birch bark, of which she made a dress, putting some figures on the bark. [Footnote: Probably by scraping. Birch bark (moskwe) peeled in winter can have the thin dark brown coat scraped away, leaving a very light yellowish-brown ground. Tornah Josephs and his niece Susan, of Princeton, Maine, are ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... ache's goin' on," sez he, "So 'elp me, it'll spoil the war!" Five collared Trigger on his perch, They wired his molar to a bough, Then give the anguished one a lurch, 'N' down he pitches. From that birch His ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... wife—and in some instances where there were families by four or five. Some of them who had finished their houses earlier than the rest, had already commenced gathering their provisions for the winter. These consisted of the leaves and soft twigs of several species of trees—such as willow, birch, and mulberry—and we saw collections of these floating in the water in front of several of ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... neighbouring rath. The bilingual Ogham was found at St. Dogmael's, near Cardiganshire. The Ogham alphabet is called beithluisnion, from the name of its two first letters, beith, which signifies a birch-tree, and luis, the mountain-ash. If this kind of writing had been introduced in Christian times, it is quite unlikely that such names would have been chosen. They are manifestly referable to a time when a tree had some significance beyond the useful or the ornamental. ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... at twilight? Have you heard the birch log burning? Are you quick to read the noises of the night? You must follow with the others for the young men's feet are turning To the camps of ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... outside the forest. She sat on the bank of a narrow stream; she had a red handkerchief on her head and a small basket was lying on the ground near her hand. At a little distance could be seen a cluster of log cabins, with a water-mill over a dammed pool shaded by birch trees and looking bright as glass in the twilight. He approached her silently, his hatchet stuck in his iron belt, a thick cudgel in his hand; there were leaves and bits of twig in his tangled hair, in his matted beard; bunches of rags he had wound round the links fluttered from his ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... come back to her memory as a riot of roses. The frocks of the people on the lawn looked as though they were made of the petals of flowers, and a mad little haunting waltz was being played by the band, and there under a great copper birch on the green velvet turf near her stood Jem, looking at her with dark, liquid, slanting eyes! They were only a few feet from each other,—and he looked, and she looked, and the haunting, mad little waltz played on, and it was as though they had been standing there since ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... they went on to Doire-da-Bhoth, the Wood of the Two Huts. And Diarmuid cut down the wood round about them, and he made a fence having seven doors of woven twigs, and he set out a bed of soft rushes and of the tops of the birch-tree for Grania in the very middle of ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... the most part level, with little variation of surface; chiefly overspread with tracts of thick forest; where open, the distant horizon was always skirted with wood (chiefly pines and firs, intermixed with beech, birch, and small oaks). The occasional breaks presented some pasture- ground, with here and there a few meagre crops of corn. The natives were poorer, humbler, and more miserable than any people we had yet observed in the course of our travels: whenever we stopped they flocked around us in crowds; ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... luminous as though promising snow—careered out of the north and followed me along my way. I was soon out of the cultivated basin of the Allier, and away from the ploughing oxen and such-like sights of the country. Moor, heathery marsh, tracts of rock and pines, woods of birch all jewelled with the autumn yellow, here and there a few naked cottages and bleak fields,—these were the characters of the country. Hill and valley followed valley and hill; the little green and stony cattle-tracks wandered in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... He watched his father, Puckeshinwau, make the flint arrow-head and split the wooden shaft to receive it, bind it firmly with a thong, and tip the other end of the shaft with a feather to wing it on its flight; and saw the men build the birch canoe, so light that one man could shoulder it, yet strong enough to carry ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... With pine trees lining all their sides like hair, Or as their own straight needles clothe their boughs; Until at length in broader light it ran, With more articulate sounds amid the stones, In the slight shadow of the maiden birch, And the stream-loving willow; and ere long Great blossoming trees dropt flowers upon its breast; Chiefly the crimson-spotted, cream-white flowers, Heaped up in cones amid cone-drooping leaves; Green hanging leaf-cones, towering white flower-cones Upon the great cone-fashioned ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... bark is very rough and shaggy looking, as on the oak, ash, walnut, and pine; on others, the bark is smooth, as on the beech, apple, and birch. ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... had from his youth stalked the wary stag, and every saugh and birch and alder in our course was made to yield us its cover. Once a muircock whirred from my very feet and brought my heart to my mouth. Presently we topped the bluff and disappeared over its crest. Another hour of steady tramping down hill and the blue waters ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... stupid suspicion at the approaching carriage, the long ditches, overgrown with mugwort, wormwood, and mountain ash; and as he watched the fresh fertile wilderness and solitude of this steppe country, the greenness, the long slopes, and valleys with stunted oak bushes, the grey villages, and scant birch trees,—the whole Russian landscape, so long unseen by him, stirred emotion at once pleasant, sweet and almost painful in his heart, and he felt weighed down by a kind of pleasant oppression. Slowly his thoughts wandered; their outlines were as vague and indistinct as the outlines ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... torch. It blazed up brightly, throwing a glare over the surface of the stream, and reflecting in red light every object upon both banks. We, on the other hand, were completely hidden from view by means of the birch-bark screen, which stood up between us ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... full of signs and the man must be deaf and blind that does not believe in them. I have seen just round Hatton that the whole bird world is ruled by the signs that the trees hang out.' And she asked me what they were, and I told her to notice next spring that as soon as the birch-leaves opened, the pheasant began to crow and the thrush to sing and the blackbird to whistle; and when the oak-leaves looked their reddest, and not a day before, the whole tribe ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... of a Triptolemus Yellowlee would have found exceedingly little to gratify it in the parish of Lairg thirty years ago. The parish had its bare hills, its wide, dark moors, its old doddered woods of birch and hazel, its extensive lake, its headlong river, and its roaring cataract. Nature had imparted to it much of a wild and savage beauty; but art had done nothing for it. To reverse the well-known antithesis in which Goldsmith ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... the leafy covering of a young birch when the sun broods over the forest. Often I visit that cold, cruel mistress of mine by night and lie on my knees before her, with the face pressed against the cold pedestal on which her feet rest, and my prayers go ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... body had retained most of the lines and slender curves of childhood; and she was long of limb and broad of shoulder. Her head was poised alertly above her strong young throat, and she was as straight as a fir-tree and as supple as a birch. A life out-of-doors had given to her skin a tone of warm brown, which, in a land that expected women to be lily-fair, was like a mask added to her disguise. The blackness of her hair was equally unconnected with Northern dreams of beautiful maidens. "Dark-haired ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... his pebbled shore, O'erhung with wild woods, thickening green; The fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar Twined amorous round the raptured scene: The flowers sprang wanton to be pressed, The birds sang love on every spray, Till too, too soon the glowing west Proclaimed the speed ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... very simple fashion, in two birch-bark canoes, with five white voyageurs and a moderate supply of smoked meat and Indian corn, the two travelers set out to solve a perplexing problem, by tracing the course of the great river. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... to be trusted with a birch. I'm glad they look at things that way. If you're satisfied with yourself, I suppose I ought to be, though I did look forward once to seeing a nephew of mine famous. You've 'ad all your fame at Cambridge, with your ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... doubted not he could reconcile Patty's parents to the long hoped-for marriage, and deliver his mistress from anxieties which had for some time made life almost intolerable. He dined in the servants' hall. About the same time Clare also visited by invitation General Birch Reynardson, of Holywell Park—a visit full of romance, as narrated by Mr. Martin, a beautiful young lady, governess to the General's children, having to all appearances fallen desperately in love with the poet at first sight. The only unromantic incident of the day ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... parcel of mail, and a huge bundle of newspapers were deposited in the bow. Holliday waved his hand. The Druro churned the water and swung out into midstream again. Bennie looked curiously after her. To the north lay a sandy shore dotted by a scraggy forest of dwarf spruce and birch. A few fishing huts and a mass of wooden shanties fringed the forest. To the east, seaward, many miles down that great stretch of treacherous, sullen river waited a gray bank of fog. But overhead the air was crystalline with ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... formerly had graced his master's shoulders, and possessed of a nose and a pair of lips whose coarseness communicated to his face rather a sullen expression. Behind the portmanteau came a small dispatch-box of redwood, lined with birch bark, a boot-case, and (wrapped in blue paper) a roast fowl; all of which having been deposited, the coachman departed to look after his horses, and the valet to establish himself in the little dark anteroom or kennel where already he ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... which there are many. I also gave orders to the people who were with me, to take an exact account of the canoes which were hauled up to convey their forces down in the spring. This they did, and told fifty of birch bark, and an hundred and seventy of pine; besides many others which were blocked out, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... English should not disturb the women cooking their rice at Rangoon; and now that they had not only been disturbed, but driven from their homes, he resolved to be revenged on them. The first conflict took place on the 16th of May, when Captain Birch dislodged the enemy from the village of Kemmendine, a war-boat station three miles above Rangoon. Nothing daunted, however, the enemy, as their numbers increased, gradually approached the British position, and threw up stockades in the jungle within hearing of our advanced posts. Of this work the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... destroy. Then we turned away to the glen down which the torrent plunged. And there, at the foot of the fall, in the midst of the boiling water, the foam, and spray, rose a tall crag crowned with silver birch, and hung with moss and creeping vines, bearing on its gray, weather-beaten face: "Rotterdam Schnapps." Bah! it made us sick. The caldron looked like a punch-bowl, and the breath of the zephyrs smelt of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... it is," said Bob. "I ran the car right up under that big birch tree so that I could ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... hundred and thirty paces west of the house in which I live stand two birch trees. One windy winter day I made some fresh tracks in the snow near my house, and within a few minutes the cavities looked as though some one had sprinkled wheat bran in them, on account of the many birch seeds ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... his father and Mr. Croyden go off on the long tramps they had each season been accustomed to take together, and during their absence he remained with Franz, who was very kind to him. The Indian had a great many devices for entertaining him. Now he fashioned for the boy's amusement a miniature birch-bark canoe; now he showed him how to weave baskets from lithe twigs of alder. Sometimes he whittled wonderful whistles and toys from bits of wood; sometimes made tiny bows and arrows or snowshoes. His resources seemed ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... order of fine or entertainment. The formal method of outcasting consists in seating the culprit on the ground and drawing the tribal mat over his head, from which the turban is removed; after this the messengers of the eight companies inflict a few taps with slippers and birch brooms. It is alleged that unfaithful women were formerly tied naked to trees and flogged with birch brooms, but that owing to the fatal results that occasionally followed such punishment, as in the case of the five kicks among Chamars (tanners) and the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... great use and of considerable value on some estates for making brooms, and the timber for all purposes of turnery-ware and carving. The sap of the Birch-tree is drawn by perforating the bark in the early state of vegetation. It is fermented, and makes a very pleasant and potent ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... that idea of its rending around the tree's stem having been, in the very earliest human efforts at botanical description, {172} attached to it by the pure Aryan race, watching the strips of rosy satin break from the birch stems, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Benjamin Bigelow Oliver Bigelow Thomas Biggs Jean Bilarie Charles Bill (2) Garden Bill John Bill (2) Pierre Bill John Billard James Biller Samuel Billing Benjamin Billings Bradford Billings Ezekiel Billings Robert Billings David Billows Frarey Binnen Cirretto Biola Pierre Biran Alexander Birch Nathaniel Birch Joseph Bird Weldon Bird Thomas Birket Samuel Birmingham Ezekiel Bishop Israel Bishop John Bishop (2) John Bissell Jack Bissick Osee Bissole Pierre Bitgayse Peter Bitton Daniel Black James Black (3) John Black Joseph Black Robert N Black Samuel Black (2) Timothy ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... impatient, and thought her as big an imposter as the Indian woman whom she called her mother. He finally gave them each a loaf of bread, and told them they could go back to their lodge. This lodge consisted of a few poles set up in wigwam fashion, and covered with skins and old blankets and birch. A foul, ugly place it was, but in this wigwam lived two Indian women and ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... night he had been exceedingly put out by little cold wet dabs which kept continually falling on his back. The Blackbird had changed his position—he had done it several times: he had moved from a birch to an elm, and then to a beech-tree. But it was of no avail, the little cold droppings seemed to pursue him wherever he went, and it was not till quite late in the night that he found real shelter, and got a little rest in a thick mantle of ivy which completely ...
— What the Blackbird said - A story in four chirps • Mrs. Frederick Locker
... larks sang loud in the blue clear air; the birch-wood clothed itself in tender green; the stream, with its melting snow-drifts, wound down the mountains singing on its way; but no plough furrowed the loosened earth, and from the heights was heard no wood-horn calling the cattle at feeding time. All ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... stage), we find far more of hope and promise in the broad free stretches of the flagellant head-master of Eton and the bibulous Bishop of Bath and Wells; and must admit that hands used to wield the crosier or the birch proved themselves more skilful at the lighter labours of the stage, more successful even in the secular and bloodless business of a field neither clerical nor scholastic, than any tragic rival of the opposite party to that so jovially headed by Orbilius Udall ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the Celt's touch in the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakespeare's touch in his daffodil,[278] Wordsworth's in his cuckoo,[279] Keats's in his Autumn, Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy among the Swiss farms.[280] To decide where the gift for natural magic originally lies, whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... it sang I always Till my songs grew poor and poorer, Till the dells alone would hear me, Only the deaf fir-trees listen? Not in life is she, my mother, She no longer is aboveground; She, the golden, cannot hear me, 'T is the fir-trees now that hear me, 'T is the pine-tops understand me, And the birch-crowns full of goodness, And the ash-trees now that love me! Small and weak my mother left me, Like a lark upon the cliff-top, Like a young thrush 'mid the flintstones In the guardianship of strangers, In the keeping ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... wild and rugged. It is a lofty eminence covered with huge boulders of sandstone, between which rise birch trees and oaks, their foliage already yellowed by autumn. These tall trees stand out from the background of red light, which the sun has left in the west, resembling the reflection of a ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... did not come home for some hours. When they did, Esdras slunk up the ladder, his garments being in a state which, as Silas had just kindly informed him, "smelt of the birch," and not desiring the application of that remedy sooner than could be helped. Silas flung his cap into the furthest corner, with a shout of "Hooray!" which sent his mother's ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... had roared and crashed among Its branches, breaking here and there a limb; But every now and then broad sunlit days Lovingly lingered, caught among the leaves. Yes, it had known all this, and yet to us It does not speak of mossy forest ways, Of whispering pine trees or the shimmering birch; But of quick winds, and the salt, stinging sea! An artist once, with patient, careful knife, Had fashioned it like to the untamed sea. Here waves uprear themselves, their tops blown back By the gay, sunny wind, which whips the blue And breaks it into gleams and sparks of light. Among the flashing ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... frozen solitude long after all other birds have retired from the desolate scenery. Their food consists of the tender shoots of pines, the seeds of plants, the berries of the arbutus and bilberry, the buds of the birch and alder, the buds of the heather, leaves, and grain. The nest is very simply constructed, consisting of dried grasses placed upon the ground and ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... of Le Brun stood in a birch-grown hollow, not far off, where a stream cascaded into the St. Lawrence, and had worn down the precipitous bank of earth. It was a wild picture. The gable of the cot was stained Indian red down to the eaves, and a stone chimney was embedded irregularly in its log side. The ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... kisses me!' Eagerness, and a sort of languor, were running in her veins; she did not look at him from under her shady hat. Sun light poured down through every chink in the foliage; made the greenness of the steep wood marvellously vivid and alive; flashed on beech leaves, ash leaves, birch leaves; fell on the ground in little runlets; painted bright patches on trunks and grass, the beech mast, the ferns; butterflies chased each other in that sunlight, and myriads of ants and gnats and flies seemed possessed by a frenzy of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... excited by the unswathing of an Egyptian mummy at the residence of Lord Londesborough, at which Mr. Birch of the British Museum, describing the embalming process, and following in this the narrative of Herodotus, said the subject had evidently suffered from the use of bitumen and the application of heat, as the bones were charred and the muscles ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Persian Gulf. In May, 1880, on a dark night, about 11:30 P.M., there suddenly appeared on each side of the ship an enormous luminous wheel, whirling around, the spokes of which seemed to brush the ship along. The spokes would be 200 or 300 yards long, and resembled the birch rods of the dames' schools. Each wheel contained about sixteen spokes, and, although the wheels must have been some 500 or 600 yards in diameter, the spokes could be distinctly seen all the way round. The phosphorescent ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... America. Had he not changed the course of his vessel by reason of the mysterious conduct of that man-of-war hawk, not a soul would probably have survived the night. It was stated by the rescued passengers, among whom was Billy Birch, that the Central America had sailed from Aspinwall with the passengers and freight which left San Francisco on the 1st of September, and encountered the gale in the Gulf Stream somewhere off Savannah, in which she sprung ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... daring a rampageous river that runs the devil knows where; My hand is athrill on the paddle, the birch-bark bounds like a bird. Hark to the rumble of rapids! Here in my morris chair Eager and tense I'm straining — isn't it most absurd? Now in the churn and the lather, foam that hisses and stings, Leap I, keyed for the struggle, fury and fume ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... "Mr. Birch," said Mrs. Van Kirk, "this is my daughter Miss Edith," and as Halfdan sprang to his feet and bowed with visible embarrassment, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn? Where may the grave of that good man be?— By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, Under the twigs of a young birch tree! The Oak that in summer was sweet to hear, And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year; And whistled and roar'd in the winter alone, Is gone,—and the birch in its stead is grown.— The Knight's bones are dust, And his good sword rust;— ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... he muttered, "this is my wife."' She refuses to eat the beavers he has shot, but at night he hears a noise, 'krch, krch, as if beavers were gnawing wood.' He sees, by the glimmer of the fire, his wife nibbling birch twigs. In fact, the good little wife is a beaver, as the pretty Indian girl was a frog. The pair lived happily till spring came and the snow melted and the streams ran full. Then his wife implored the hunter to build her a bridge over every stream and river, that she might cross dry-footed. 'For,' ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... from more easy-going conditions. Everything is kept up with a strenuous virtue that imparts an air of self-respect to the landscape, which the bleaching and blackening stone walls, wandering over the hill-slopes, divide into wood lots of white birch and pine, stony pastures, and little patches of potatoes and corn. The mowing-lands alone are rich; and if the New England year is in the glory of the latest June, the breath of the clover blows honey—sweet into the car windows, and the fragrance ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Mr. Birch has contributed a number of spirited illustrations that bring clearly before the eye the forms of Roland and his friend Oliver, of Ogier, the Dane, and other famous knights and paladins, as well as the scenes of their ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... astonishment a mountain stream was now foaming down it, leaping from rock to rock, and filling the glen with babbling murmurs. He, however, made shift to scramble up its sides, working his toilsome way through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witch-hazel, and sometimes tripped up or entangled by the wild grapevines that twisted their coils from tree to tree, and spread a kind of network in ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... of Gallatin, though more tempered in tone, reveal quiet content with the simple life and a thorough enjoyment of nature in its original wildness. In the summer they followed the tracks of the moose and deer through the primitive forests, and explored the streams and lakes in the light birch canoe, with a woodsman or savage for their guide. In the winter they made long journeys over land and water on snowshoes or on skates, occasionally visiting the villages of the Indians, with whom the Lesderniers were on the best of terms, studying their habits and witnessing their feasts. Occasional ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... the most beautiful, picturesque, and romantic country that I ever saw, alternately presenting to the eye wood, water, and pasture fields, interspersed with the majestic oak, the lofty beech, the trembling birch, the lime, the ash, and every other species of beautiful forest tree. There were nearly five hundred acres of woodland upon this estate, and it was well stocked with game and fish of every description; but the whole country was congenial ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... to punish a child for a misdeed, than to explain and argue. But the gentler method is better. Yet we all admit that the birch must be used sometimes. However, if it is used only for serious trangressions, the child will have a sense of proportion regarding what offenses are grave. But for ordinary small misdemeanors I think we need a new motto: Spoil the rod ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... themselves together, both men, women, and children, olde and young, all indifferently, and goe into the woodes and groves, hilles and mountaines, where they spend the night in pastyme, and in the morning they returne, bringing with them birch bowes and braunches of trees to deck their assembly withal. . . . They have twentie or fourtie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweete nosegay of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these draw home this Maypole (this stincking idol rather) which is covered ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... an hour later, we had got down to the table-land, I found myself suddenly in front of a long, quaint, double log cottage, set between two immense bowlders, and roofed with layers of birch bark, covered with turf, which was blue with wild pansies. It was as if it were built under a bed of heart's-ease. It was very old, and had evidently been a house of some pretension, for there was much curious ...
— Elsket - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... Chat Moss rises above the level of the surrounding country. Like a turtle's back, it declines from the summit in every direction, having from thirty to forty feet gradual slope to the solid land on all sides. From the remains of trees, chiefly alder and birch, which have been dug out of it, and which must have previously flourished upon the surface of soil now deeply submerged, it is probable that the sand and clay base on which the bog rests is saucer-shaped, and so retains the entire mass in position. In rainy weather, such ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along behind. The sled was without runners. It was made of stout birch-bark, and its full surface rested on the snow. The front end of the sled was turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of soft snow that surged like a wave before it. On the sled, securely lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box. There were other things on the sled—blankets, ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... Howland continued slowly between the thick forest walls, one hand clutching the butt of the revolver in his coat pocket. Where the trail twisted abruptly into the north he found the charred remains of a camp-fire in a small open, and just beyond it a number of birch toggles, which had undoubtedly been used in place of tent-stakes. With the toe of his boot he kicked among the ashes and half-burned bits of wood. There was no sign of smoke, not a living spark to give evidence that human presence ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... squirrel, to study its mode of flight, but quickly carried it back to the wood. He possessed true instincts of topography, and could conceal choice things in the bush and find them again.... If Thoreau needed a box in his walk, he would strip a piece of birch bark off the tree, fold it, when cut straightly, together, and put his tender lichen or ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... of about five miles on the left of the town the course of the river was interrupted by a small and thickly wooded island, along whose sandy beach occasionally rose the low cabin or wigwam which the birch canoe, carefully upturned and left to dry upon the sands, attested to be the temporary habitation of the wandering Indian. That branch of the river which swept by the shores of Canada was (as at this day) the only navigable one for vessels ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... strange people, all of whom were laughing and applauding his words, from the German Princess in the Royal box to the straight-backed Tommy in the pit. Instead of the painted scene before her, she saw the birch-trees by the river at home, where he had first read her the speech to which they were now listening so intensely—the speech in which the hero tells the girl he loves her. She remembered that at the time she had thought how wonderful it would be if some day some one made such a speech ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... equipment than he was able to furnish. The old English schoolmasters were 'bruisers.' They had thick skins, hard heads, and solid fists. The symbols of their office were a Greek grammar and a flexible rod. They were skillful either with the book or the birch. It has taken many years to convince the world that the short road to the moods and tenses does not necessarily lie through the valley of the shadow of flogging. Perhaps Priestley objected to school-mastering because it was laborious. It was indeed ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... by school and church, A pencilled shadow, nothing more, That parted from the silver birch And ended ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... built a house of birch bark under the trees. But it hasn't any stove-pipe!" said Flaxie, who had never forgotten that unfortunate house that ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... and raised her to my arms: spiling thereby a new weskit and a pair of crimson smalcloes. I rushed forrard. I say, very nearly knocking down the old sweeper who was hobbling away as fast as posibil. We took her to Birch's; we provided her with a hackney-coach and every lucksury, and carried her home ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... employed by some of the Ojibways and Swampy Crees of Canada. A small cavity is scooped out, the body deposited therein, covered with a little dirt, the mound thus formed being covered either with split planks, poles, or birch bark. ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... length, and, at half way from the mouth, full a mile wide. Into this main river run innumerable smaller rivers, there called CREEKS. On the sides of these creeks the land is, in places, clear of rocks; it is, in these places, generally good and productive; the trees that grow here are the birch, the maple, and others of the deciduous class; natural meadows here and there present themselves; and some of these spots far surpass in rural beauty any other that my eyes ever beheld; the creeks, abounding towards their sources in water-falls of endless variety, as well ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... occasionally, to examine whether any of the Sioux had recently visited that quarter. In one of these excursions, there was found, suspended to a tree, in an exposed situation, a piece of birch-bark, made flat, by being fastened between two sticks, about eighteen inches long by fifteen broad. This bark contained the answer of the Sioux nation, to overtures which the Chippeways had made, on Governor Cass' offer of mediation:—which overtures had been found and ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... and thought, "Those were quite merry days. But they may come again. Klumpey-Dumpey fell downstairs, and yet he married the princess. Perhaps I may marry a princess, too!" And then the Fir Tree thought of a pretty little Birch Tree that grew out in the forest; for the Fir Tree, that ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Thomas Birch, in a letter dated June 15, 1764, says that this letter was by Mr. Philip Yorke, afterwards Earl of Hardwicke, who was author also of another piece in the Spectator, but his son could not remember ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... too bad," she cried, hastening toward him sympathetically, "but see, there is a redbird on the top of that old birch tree. Try again! You will have better success this time, I am sure ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... fell in with Blount, who had been separated from the rest; and, with some difficulty, I induced him to return. We had got back to our rooms, when one of the ushers discovered the whole party. The master was called up, and, with birch in hand, went round the room, and inflicted summary punishment on all offenders. The next morning they were called up by name, their crime announced, and severe tasks being inflicted, they were all sent to Coventry ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... paper, and taken Master B.'s bell away and balked the ringing, and if they could suppose that that confounded boy had lived and died, to clothe himself with no better behaviour than would most unquestionably have brought him and the sharpest particles of a birch-broom into close acquaintance in the present imperfect state of existence, could they also suppose a mere poor human being, such as I was, capable by those contemptible means of counteracting and limiting the powers of the disembodied spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?—I ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... we two together again at last. What a week of weeks we spent, pacing back and forth on the veranda of our log cabin, where we overlooked the pleasant sinuosities of the Sebois and gazed out together over golden beech and ghostly birch and blood-red maple banners to the far violet mountains of the Aroostook! And how we did take stock of the immediate past, chuckling to find that it had not been a quarter so bad as I had stupidly supposed. What ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... of discovering some short cut to the high road of mental acquirement. The toilsome learner's "Progress" through the barren outset of the alphabet; the slough of despond of seven syllables, endangered as they both are by the frequent appearance of the compulsive birch of the Mr. Worldly-wisemen who teach the young idea how to shoot, must ever be looked upon as a probation, the power of avoiding which is "a consummation devoutly to be wished." Imbued with this feeling, the more speculative ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... removed a part of the weight from their young hearts, which were saddened by the sight of so much wretchedness. Perceiving a pure and bright little fountain at a short distance from the cottage, they approached it, and, using the bark of a birch-tree as a cup, partook of its cool waters. They then pursued their homeward ride with such diligence, that, just as the sun was setting, they came in sight of the humble wooden edifice which was ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a roar of voices. "Let anyone come my way now," thought Rostov driving his spurs into Rook and letting him go at a full gallop so that he outstripped the others. Ahead, the enemy was already visible. Suddenly something like a birch broom seemed to sweep over the squadron. Rostov raised his saber, ready to strike, but at that instant the trooper Nikitenko, who was galloping ahead, shot away from him, and Rostov felt as in a dream that he continued to be carried forward with unnatural speed but yet stayed ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... collection—part of the Medici collection, and contains some of the finest Italian and Spanish specimens," remarked the blind connoisseur. "Birch of the British Museum is quite right in declaring that the seal, portable and abounding in detail, not difficult of acquisition nor hard to read if we set about deciphering the story it has to tell, takes us back as we look upon it to the very time of its ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... painter. It was a magnificent sweep of landscape that lay before them—a glen glowing with purple and green, alive with flickering sunlight and shadow, with richest browns and reds and coolest greys in the foreground; precipices, crags, verdant slopes of bracken, pine and birch woods hanging on the hillsides, in the middle distance, and blue mountains mingling with orange skies in the background, with MacRummle's favourite stream appearing here and there like a silver thread, running through it all. But Barret saw nothing ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... Ample and long and low, with elm-trees feather- ing over them: Borders of box in the yard, and lilacs, and old- fashioned flowers, A fan-light above the door, and little square panes in the windows, The wood-shed piled with maple and birch and hickory ready for winter, The gambrel-roof with its garret crowded with household relics,— All the tokens of prudent thrift and ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... time that we did. Red flannel shirts should be worn in the woods, if only for the fine contrast which this color makes with the evergreens and the water. Thus I thought when I saw the forms of the explorers in their birch, poling up the rapids before us, far off against the forest. It is the surveyor's color also, most distinctly seen under all circumstances. We stopped to dine at Ragmuff, as before. My companion it was who wandered up the stream to look for moose this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... manner improved the tone of the English court, and, after the first flush of welcome from his subjects, surprised and delighted to have an Englishman and a gentleman once more upon the throne, was getting over his early lessons in adversity from the birch of Wilkes and Junius, and entering upon a second series from that of Washington, all preparatory to the longest and most brilliant reign in British annals. Frederick II. was an old man, occupied with assuring to the power he had created the position it now holds as the first ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... his way from Birch Grove to Rathnllan House the next day when he was met by Barney Casey, who had been on the lookout for him. Barney, who knew not his person, was not capable of determining whether he was the individual whom he wanted or ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Captain Calver devised an arrangement not unlike that employed by the coral- fishers. He fastened half a dozen swabs, such as are used for drying decks, to the dredge. A swab is something like what a birch-broom would be if its twigs were made of long, coarse, hempen yarns. These dragged along after the dredge over the surface of the mud, and entangled the creatures living there—multitudes of which, twisted up in the strands of the swabs, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... some miles from the place where they lit their fire, when a somewhat unmistakable sound made Rodriguez look ahead of him. An arrow had struck a birch tree on the right side, ten or twelve paces in front of him; and as he looked up another struck it from the opposite side just level with the first; the two were sticking in it ten feet or so from the ground. Rodriguez drew his sword. ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... history lesson one day, Nejdanov wandered out into the garden, and from thence into a birch wood adjoining it on one side. Certain parts of this wood had been cleared by merchants about fifteen years ago, but these clearings were already densely overgrown by young birches, whose soft silver trunks encircled by grey rings rose as straight as pillars, and whose bright green leaves ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... for a great part of the way up the valley of a stream, a favourite with anglers and with midges, full of falls and pools, and shaded by willows and natural woods of birch. Here and there, but at great distances, a byway branches off, and a gaunt farmhouse may be descried above in a fold of the hill; but the more part of the time, the road would be quite empty of passage and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... birches—the crimson ray would often rest on the end of his long nose, and the word "rum" be passed tittering along the benches. For some men are born to the mill, and others to the mitre, and still others to the sceptre; but Mr. Daaken was born to the birch. His long, lanky legs were made for striding after culprits, and his arms for caning them. He taught, among other things, the classics, of course, the English language grammatically, arithmetic in all its branches, book-keeping in the Italian manner, and the elements ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Foot, and some more; and those Oaks very common in the upper Parts of both Rivers; also a very tall large Tree of great Bigness, which some call Cyprus, the right Name we know not, growing in Swamps. Likewise Walnut, Birch, Beech, Maple, Ash, Bay, Willow, Alder, and Holly; and in the lowermost Parts innumerable Pines, tall and good for Boards or Masts, growing, for the most part, in barren and sandy, but in some Places up the River, in good Ground, being mixt amongst Oaks and other Timbers. We saw Mulberry-Trees, Multitudes ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... parts of speech, Who sweep'st with birch a youngster's breech, Oh! now awhile withhold your hand! So may the trembling crop-hair'd band Around your desk attentive hear, And pay you love instead of fear; So may yours ever be as full, As writing or as dancing school. The ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... more than twenty inches. The frozen substratum does not of itself destroy vegetation, for forests flourish on the surface, at a distance from the coast.") In a like manner, in Siberia, we have woods of birch, fir, aspen, and larch, growing in a latitude (64 degrees) where the mean temperature of the air falls below the freezing point, and where the earth is so completely frozen, that the carcass of an animal embedded in it is perfectly ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... be there, Master Julius, to the third seat from the front; but it ain't becoming for a woman of my age, seventy-nine come Christmas, to sit under a slip of a lad as hasn't got the taste of the birch off his back." ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... In the background a pool, bordered by reeds and dotted by water plants, lies in a grove of alder trees and bushes of hazelnut, willow and beech. The meadows extend on either side encircled by immemorial oaks, elms, beeches and birch trees. Between the foliage of the trees and bushes the church spires of distant villages are visible. To the left, behind the bushes, arise the thatched roofs of the ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... plainly he remembered all himself; and he thought: "That was a merry time! But it can come! it can come! Klumpy-Dumpy fell down stairs, and yet he got a princess! Maybe I can get a princess too!" And all of a sudden he thought of a nice little Birch Tree growing out in the woods: to the Pine, that would be a ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... Ottawa, reached Lake Nipissing, and passed by way of Georgian Bay to the islands of Lake Huron. As late as the nineteenth century this was the common route of the fur trade, for it was more certain for the birch canoes than the tempestuous route of the lakes. At the Huron islands two ways opened before their canoes. The straits of Michillimackinac[63] permitted them to enter Lake Michigan, and from this led the two routes to the Mississippi: one by way of Green bay and the Fox and Wisconsin, and ...
— The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin • Frederick Jackson Turner
... know that whenever you want anything for the Church from a hymn book or a hassock or a pew to a pulpit or a screen or a spire you go to Fortune, East and Sabre, Tidborough. Similarly in the scholastic line, anything from a birch rod to a desk—Fortune, East and Sabre, by return and the best. No, they're the great, the great, church and school-furnishing people. 'Ecclesiastical and Scholastic Furnishers and Designers' they call themselves. And ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... which single-stick possesses is that you may learn to play fairly well even if you take it up as late in life as at five and twenty; whereas I understand that, though many of my fencing friends were introduced to the foil almost as soon as to the corrective birch, and though their heads are now growing grey, they still consider themselves mere tyros ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... Samson and the Philistines, of David and Goliath, of the prophets Elijah and Elisha; and after these came the New Testament stories and parables. Assisted by my uncles, I began to collect a library in a box of birch-bark about nine inches square, which I found quite large enough to contain a great many immortal works,—Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack and the Bean-Stalk, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Blue Beard, and Sinbad the Sailor, and Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, with several others ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... he again headed them off by hiding in the stalks of a large yucca.[10] The sheep passed within five steps of him, and again when the time to pull the bow came his arm stiffened. The crow people were watching him all the time. He again followed the sheep and got ahead of them and hid behind a birch tree in bloom; he had his bow ready, but as the sheep approached him they became gods. The first one was Hasjelti, the second was Hostjoghon, the third was Naaskiddi, the fourth one was Hadatchishi. At ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... deny that in clothes the Squire was all consequence; and when he loomed into 'Court,' all over the steel chain, believe it, there were bows and servilities without stint. Taking his seat on a high birch block, the plank table being set before him, on which to spread his inseparable law-book, the plaintiffs and defendants assembled, and took seats on a wooded bench in front. 'All persons whatsoever havin' any business whatever with this 'ere court—Squire Belhash sitting—must come for'ard now or ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... the Apostle's voice was wont to sound, had fallen an immemorial time ago. But the soil, being of the rudest and most broken surface, had apparently never been brought under tillage; other growths, maple and beech and birch, had succeeded to the primeval trees; so that it was still as wild a tract of woodland as the great-great-great-great grandson of one of Eliot's Indians (had any such posterity been in existence) could have desired for the site and shelter of his wigwam. These after-growths, indeed, lose ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... himself as clad in a scant piece of cloth made of grass or as totally nude or as robed in silk or in skin of the black antelope or in cloth made of flax or in sheep-skin or in tiger-skin or in lion-skin or in fabric of hemp, or in barks of birch or in cloths made of the produce of prickly plants, or in vestures made of threads woven by worms or of torn rags or in diverse other kinds of cloth too numerous to mention. The soul regards himself also as wearing diverse kinds ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... year, when just eighteen years old, P. Henry, Junior, got married—married a rollicking country lass, as foolish as himself—done in bravado, going home from a dance, calling a minister out on his porch, in a crazy-quilt, to perform the ceremony. John Henry would have applied the birch to this hare-brained bridegroom, and the father of the girl would have stung her pink-and-white anatomy, but Patrick coolly explained that the matter could not be undone—they were duly married for better or for worse, and so the less fuss the better. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... carefully back on the returning flood. But most of them were lying where they had been built, or left by the preceding tide, along high-water mark, as hopelessly stranded, for the next two hours, as a birch log after a freshet. As the old women with children arrived, Bawr rushed them down the wet beach to the rafts which were afloat, appointing to each clumsy raft four men, with long, rough flattened poles, to manage it. For the moment, all these ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... which flowed a limpid, gurgling stream. On a log beside him sat a girl of perhaps eighteen years, exceedingly handsome with the flaming kind of beauty like a poppy's, striking to the eye, shallow-petaled. She was vividly effective against the background of deep green spruces and white birch in her bright pink dress and large drooping black hat. Her coloring was brilliant, her lips full, scarlet, ripely sensuous. Beneath her straight black brows her sparkling, black eyes gleamed with restless eagerness. ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... Henry James, for instance, wrote a review of "Drum Taps" in the Nation, November 16, 1865. In the lusty heyday and assurance of twenty-two years, he laid the birch on smartly. It is just a little saddening to find that even so clear-sighted an observer as Henry James could not see through the chaotic form of Whitman to the great vision and throbbing music that seem so plain to us to-day. Whitman himself, writing about "Drum Taps" before its publication, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... deep breath. The safe disappearances he had read about flashed through his mind. But he didn't believe it. It couldn't be! Yet, there was the empty corner with the birch panels forming the back of the show-windows, and no safe. In a daze, he walked over to the corner, intending to feel about with his hands and make sure the safe was really gone. Before he got there, there flashed into sight ...
— The Einstein See-Saw • Miles John Breuer
... after went away, and in the evening Yeobright strolled as far as Fairway's cottage. It was a lovely May sunset, and the birch trees which grew on this margin of the vast Egdon wilderness had put on their new leaves, delicate as butterflies' wings, and diaphanous as amber. Beside Fairway's dwelling was an open space recessed from the road, and here were now collected all the young people from ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... frying-pan out upon the bow, and was in reality rather a fire of pine-knots than a torch. It blazed up brightly, throwing a glare over the surface of the stream, and reflecting in red light every object upon both banks. We, on the other hand, were completely hidden from view by means of the birch-bark screen, which stood up ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... He also knew where the great peel rested, on their annual migration from sea to moor; where the kingfisher's nest of fish-bones lay hidden; where the otter had her home beneath the bank, and its inland vent-hole behind a silver birch. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... company! he got Taliesin—Owen Glyndwr—Iolo Morganwg and all the rest of them! and he's quite happy in their company. But once he comes down to live with us he's as rough and prickly as a birch-broom. Indeed he wass nevver used to be like this whatever; 'tis ever since his brother John die, and leave ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... woman to be proud of; for today after three vargs of marriage the memory of her trim trunk with four pairs of eyes laughing mischievously, filled his five brains with flame. Slim as a birch she stood in his memory, and eight eyes whispered lovers' thoughts across space ...
— Solar Stiff • Chas. A. Stopher
... I learned to paddle a canoe pretty well. I'd rather have a good row-boat, though, than any birch I ever saw. If you run one of them on a sharp stone, it may be cut ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... to a safe distance while Billy secured the clothes and went into the timber. From a birch tree he pulled off a pile of bark, and as he stripped he put his old clothes on it. McTabb could hear the crackling and snapping of the fire when Billy reappeared arrayed in Indian Joe's "second best"— buckskin trousers, ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... tossed aside her hat. She sat leaning against the crisp trunk of a silver birch. Her hands were in her lap. Her dress was crumpled up, displaying her crossed feet and the tantalizing line of her slim ankles. Against the copper green of the tree trunk the mass of her hair was pressed, gold upon the shadow of gold. Her moist lips were half open. Her eyes were away, playing ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... determined to proceed, no matter whither. Be with me therefore all ye troops of conjugations and declensions, dread spectres, and approach thou chiefest, Shade and Phantom of the disused (thank Heaven) Birch, at whose entry to my imagination a sudden shiver takes my rump, and a trifle then more would make me begin to let down my breeches to my calves, and turning boy, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... but you are mistaken, you lazy, ill-behaved wench. The new frock I had bought you shall be given to Nannie Cameron, and you shall wear your old one to the kirk. How will that suit your vanity? And you may be off to bed now directly, without any supper. There are twigs enough for a birch rod, my lady, if bed does not bring you to a better frame of mind. Run in now, and don't let me see your face before ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... of glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves, and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled. Nor must it be forgotten that, in ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tropical forest and that of our temperate zone, which at once challenges the notice of the traveler, is that trees of the same families do not characterize any particular spot. We have pine forests, oak forests, cedar, birch, and maple woods, and the like; but a tropical forest contains specimens of the most widely different classes, with every possible variety of family; and the same may be said of the countless climbing plants which cling ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... bits and curbs to headstrong steeds,— Which for this fourteen years we have let sleep, Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave, That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers, Having bound up the threat'ning twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sight For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead; And liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... probably belongs to a much more recent period, a fish-hook in reindeer horn, now in the Christiania Museum. It was found in a tomb in the island of Kjelnoe, not far from the Russian frontier. Numerous skeletons, wrapped up in swathings of birch-bark, repose in this tomb. All around lay fragments of pottery, lance- and arrow-heads,[69] and combs of reindeer horn, the date of which it ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... at their sewing in what had been known, since his accident, as Bressant's room. There was no stove; but a rustling, tapering fire was living its ardent, yellow, wavering life upon the brick hearth, and four or five logs of birch and elm were reddening and crackling into embers beneath its intangible intensity. It made a grateful contrast to the soft, cold bank of snow that lay, light and round, upon the outside sill and the slighter ridges ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... daintily spread for them under a birch-tree near the keeper's lodge. The keeper's wife served them with smiles and curtsies, and then discreetly disappeared. Falloden waited on Constance as a squire on his princess; and all round them lay the ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... happened the next day, at least, not till two o'clock, when I went with Mr. Bowman to Birch's eating-house (it is not Birch's now, but this was the name of the original founder, who became an alderman, and has long been dead) for a basin of turtle-soup. It was very rich, very good, better than we had at the Lord Mayor's, and the best I ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for the moment disappeared in the deep fringe of evergreens which lined the shore. Fairly in the twinkling of an eye a rude frame of bent poles was made, above which were spread strips of unrolled birch bark from the cargo of the canoe. Over the spaces left uncovered by the supply of bark sheets there were laid down long mats made by Indian hands from dried reeds and bulrushes, affording no inconsiderable protection against the weather. Inside the lodge, bales of goods and ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... in the market-place about a hundred yards, leaving an open space or lane between them of about five yards' distance; then the offender, being naked to the waist, was brought to one end of the lane or open place. The people had rods or switches of birch given to as many as would take them; the offender was to run or go, as he pleased (and one of them walked but a Spanish pace), from one end of the lane of people to the other, twice or thrice forward and backward; and all ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... a tenacious, semi-transparent substance, having a balsamic odour; which the bees gather from the buds of certain trees in the spring, such as the horse-chestnut, the willow, the poplar, and the birch. ...
— A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive • W. Augustus Munn
... surrounded with its patch of cleared land, were sadly distant from one another. Behind the clearings, and on either side of them to the river's bank, it was always forest: a dark green background of cypress against which a lonely birch tree stood out here and there, its bole naked and white as the column ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... wood, either green or dry, the latter lying along the shore on both sides the straits, which are almost covered with the trees, that, having grown on the banks, have been blown down by the high winds. These trees are somewhat like our birch, but are of so considerable a size, that the trunks of some of them are two feet (surely an error, yards must be intended) and a half in diameter, and sixty feet in length. Many of these we cut down for our carpenters ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... color may likewise be obtained from birch-bark, set with alum. The bark should be covered with water, and boiled thoroughly in brass or tin. A bit of alum half as big as a hen's egg is sufficient. If copperas be used instead of alum, slate color ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... for an hour or more, something lived for him in the glow of the fire which Olaf kept burning. It was the memory of Mary Standish, her quiet, beautiful eyes gazing at him, her pale face taking form in the lacy wisps of birch-smoke. His mind pictured her in the flame-glow as she had listened to him that day in Skagway, when he had told her of this fight that was ahead. And it pleased him to think she would have made this same fight for Alaska if she ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... that is concerned, you need not be disappointed. Not in Van Huyn's time, nor for nearly two centuries later, could the meaning of that engraving have been understood. It was only when the work was taken up and followed by Young and Champollion, by Birch and Lepsius and Rosellini and Salvolini, by Mariette Bey and by Wallis Budge and Flinders Petrie and the other scholars of their times that great results ensued, and that the true ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... on its way by now—though Gwendolyn could not recall the moment of starting. The Piper had not waited to be invited, but strolled along with the others, his birch-stemmed tobacco-pipe in a corner of his mouth, his hands in his pockets, and the ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... will burn all right, but it is a good thing to have the birch. We shall have a supper worth while in a few minutes. Stacy, get ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Alaska - The Gold Diggers of Taku Pass • Frank Gee Patchin
... the hill, or that Tytler had worked round to the village in the rear. Some attacks, however, were made upon the Afghan intrenchments. These, however, were unsuccessful, and some valuable lives were lost. Major Birch and Lieutenant Fitzgerald, both of the 27th Native Infantry, were killed; Captain Maclean, of the 14th Sikhs, was wounded; and between thirty and forty rank and ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... yung men and maides, old men and wives, run gadding over the night to the woods, groves, hils, and mountains, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes, and in the morning they return, bringing with them birch and branches of trees, to deck their assemblies withall; and no meruaile, for there is a great Lord present amongst them as superintendent and Lord of their sports, namely, Sathan prince of hel. But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their May-pole, (say rather their stinking ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... quickly good-night came—that sad, that dreaded good-night. But sadness may be of such a kind as to give rise to the happiest, the purest feelings—and such was this.... He and I sat in the Moss house. Never saw the glen more beautiful; the birch glittering in the sun and waving its feathery boughs; the burn murmuring more gently than usual; the wood-pigeons answering one another from tree to tree. Had not courage ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... of one hundred and fifty feet, as nearly as I could estimate. They were formed by stumps of trees and poles, set upright on the ground, and these were linked together by horizontal poles, and against the latter were reared birch poles and branches of trees, varying from six to ten feet in height, without the slightest attempt at neatness, the whole being as rude as well could be; but withal, this inclosure was sufficiently secure to answer the purpose of its builders. On the south ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... made Bishop of Myra and died in the year 343. It was once the custom to send a man around to personate St. Nicholas on St. Nicholas Eve, and to inquire how the children had behaved through the year, who were deserving of gifts, and who needed a touch of the birch rods that he carried with him into every home. St. Nicholas still goes about in some parts of the country, and in the bazaars and shops are sold little bunches of rods, real or made of candy, such as St. Nicholas is supposed to deal ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... to Hurstbourne Tarrant, another charming "highland" village, and the road, sloping down the entire distance, struck me as one of the best to be on I had travelled in Hampshire, running along a narrow green valley, with oak and birch and bramble and thorn in their late autumn colours growing on the slopes on either hand. Probably the beauty of the scene, or the swift succession of beautiful scenes, with the low sun flaming on the "coloured shades," served to keep out of my mind something that should ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... the draw. His ornery three kings was no good. But he just knew there was another king coming—that was his hunch—and he got it. And I tell you-all I got a hunch. There's a big strike coming on the Yukon, and it's just about due. I don't mean no ornery Moosehide, Birch-Creek kind of a strike. I mean a real rip-snorter hair-raiser. I tell you-all she's in the air and hell-bent for election. Nothing can stop her, and she'll come up river. There's where you-all track my moccasins in the near future if you-all want ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... Bellfont, happy Bellfont, still blest with Sylvia's presence! permit me, oh permit me into those sacred shades, where I have been so often (too innocently) blest! Let me survey again the dear character of Sylvia on the smooth birch; oh when shall I sit beneath those boughs, gazing on the young goddess of the grove, hearing her sigh for love, touching her glowing small white hands, beholding her killing eyes languish, and her charming bosom rise and ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... hand clutching the butt of the revolver in his coat pocket. Where the trail twisted abruptly into the north he found the charred remains of a camp-fire in a small open, and just beyond it a number of birch toggles, which had undoubtedly been used in place of tent-stakes. With the toe of his boot he kicked among the ashes and half-burned bits of wood. There was no sign of smoke, not a living spark to give evidence that human presence had been ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... from the sitting-room windows, I saw another canoe cross the pathway of uncertain light upon the water, and disappear at once into the impenetrable gloom that lay beyond. This time I saw more distinctly than before. It was like the former canoe, a big birch-bark, with high-crested bows and stern and broad beam. It was paddled by two Indians, of whom the one in the stern—the steerer—appeared to be a very large man. I could see this very plainly; and though the second canoe was much nearer the island than the first, I judged that they were both ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... to Cheemaun this summer and had asked her lawyer to sell all this property. And now it would appear that old Sandy's farm was for sale, too. For Sandy had no deed of his property; in fact, had merely worked it for Mr. Jarvis, who, Sandy declared, had told him that all south of the Birch Creek belonged to him. But it wasn't in writing, and lawyers did not believe anything ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... me as to my friends in London, and said, "You have seen something of the aristocracy, I would like you to see some of the business people." So he invited me to a dinner at the Reform Club, to meet a few friends. Among these was a Mr. Birch, son of the celebrated Alderman Birch. He had directed the dinner, being a famous gourmet, and Soyer had cooked it. That dinner cost my host far more than he had made out of me. We had six kinds of choicest ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... think of another way to accomplish his purpose. None presented itself; so with glowing words he appealed to their nobler selves, telling them all the great need of the travelers who were obliged to pass that way. First he appealed to a fine birch which bordered the forest. ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... from the scarlet fever. Hippocrates, Hygeia, King Bladud, and a wreath of serpents surmount the cup to this day; which was executed in their finest manner, by Messrs. Abednego, of Milsom-street; and the inscription was by Mr. Birch tutor ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Iberian Shoar, To rob the Natives of their fatal Stoar. I smil'd to hear my young Logician Thus reason like a Politician; Who ne're by Father's Pains and Earning Had got at Mother Cambridge Learning; Where Lubber youth just free from birch Most stoutly drink to prop the Church; Nor with (u) Grey Groat had taken Pains To purge his Head and Cleanse his Reines: And in obedience to the Colledge, Had pleas'd himself with carnal knowledge: And tho' I lik'd the youngster's Wit, I judg'd the Truth ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... flapped his elbows up toward his face, as if they were wings, and contrived to beat away a few of the mosquitoes with them; Mrs. Sewell, in silent exasperation, fought them from her with the bough which she had torn from an overhanging birch-tree. ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... to do with myself. The dog was continually dancing around me with friendly advances, the sunlight was spread out cheerfully over the fields, and the green birch-trees shone brightly. I had a feeling as if I had something to do requiring haste. Accordingly, I caught the little dog, tied him fast in the room, and took the cage, with the bird in it, under my arm. The dog cringed and whined over this unusual treatment; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... breakfast and gone out of the cottage to escape his mother's pleadings and reproofs. "I'm glad she isn't near me. If she was here, I could not keep my tongue from her. She should hear the truth for once, if she never heard it again. They should be words as sharp as the birch rod she ought to have had, when she first began her nonsense, and her ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... this time by constant submergence in the water and in the unusually moist soil above it to betray without any serious question the nature of the materials used and the mode of their employment. One of the corner-posts was a black birch and the bark on it is in a good state of preservation at and below the surface of ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... things which lay strewed about here, were a spearshaft, eight feet in length, recently made and ochred; parts of old canoes, fragments of their skin-dresses, &c. For some distance around, the trunks of many of the birch, and of that species of spruce pine called here the Var (Pinus balsamifera) had been rinded; these people using the inner part of the bark of that kind of tree for food. Some of the cuts in the trees with the axe, were evidently made the preceding year. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... white blossom should not be painted, because they make no picture, just as birches with their foliage are unfit for the foreground of a picture, because the delicate foliage does not adequately balance the white trunk. Said Goethe, "Ruysdael never placed a foliaged birch in the foreground, but only broken birch stems, without leaves. Such a trunk suits the foreground admirably, for its bright form stands out ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the mouth of the Saguenay, under the shadow of savage and inaccessible rocks, feathered with pines, firs, and birch-trees, they built a cluster of wooden huts and store-houses. Here they left sixteen men to gather the expected harvest of furs. Before the winter was over, several of them were dead, and the rest scattered through the woods, living on the ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... call it, which, when a boy makes it in the street is no formidable thing, but when made by a multitude is a most hideous shriek, almost as terrible as an Indian yell; the people crying, "Kill them, kill them. Knock them over," heaving snowballs, oyster shells, clubs, white-birch sticks three inches and a half in diameter; consider yourselves in this situation, and then judge whether a reasonable man in the soldiers' situation would not have concluded they were going to kill him. I believe if I were to reverse the scene, I should bring it home to our own bosoms. Suppose ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... o'clock, a man from Clapp and Beazley's with some patterns of socks and underwear. Disposed of him, dressed, and by a quarter-to-eleven I was in the Park. Strolled up and down with Lady Ventnor and Sir Hill Birch and saw everybody there was to be seen. I nevah make a single note; my memory's marvellous. Left the Park at twelve and took a taxi to inquire after Lord Harrogate, Charlie Sievewright, and old Lady Dorcas Newnham. I'm ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... mine! I'll kill any other man that touches you!" Barney got up, and his face was flaming; he started off with a great stride, and then he stopped short and flung an arm around the slender trunk of a white-birch tree, and pulled it against him and leaned against it as if it were Charlotte, and laid his cheek on the cool white bark and sobbed again like a girl. "Oh, Charlotte, Charlotte!" he moaned, and his voice was drowned out by the manifold ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... which was almost as soft as a load of hay, they drove back to the barn, and alighted. Mr. Preston now appeared, and led the horse into the orchard, where, with the aid of the boys, he scattered the birch twigs around the young trees, so as to protect their roots from the fierce heat of the sun. There was not enough for all the trees, but he told them they need not get any more at ...
— Oscar - The Boy Who Had His Own Way • Walter Aimwell
... either side stand tall shovel and tongs, like sentries, mounted in brass. The tongs, like the two-handed sword of Bruce, cannot be wielded by puny people. We burn in it hickory wood, cut long. We like the smell of this aromatic forest timber, and its clear flame. The birch is also a sweet wood for the hearth, with a sort of spiritual flame and an even temper,—no snappishness. Some prefer the elm, which holds fire so well; and I have a neighbor who uses nothing but apple-tree wood,—a solid, family sort of wood, fragrant ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... pictures on a motley screen. Whence arises the harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring,—compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations?—From this, that the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified ab intra ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... them all, perhaps, are the canoes of the North American Indians. These are built of thin laths and ribs of wood, and are covered with the bark of the birch-tree. The sheets of bark are not a quarter of an inch thick. Several sheets are used in the covering of one canoe. They are sewed together with the long pliant roots of the pine, and the seams are rendered tight with gum procured from the same tree. So light are these canoes, that ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the White River, pleasant springs on a hillside, bubbling forth among the first trees we had seen since we left the Laramie. Then we descended into a fine shady valley: all our old friends were there in thickets—the box-elder, willow, birch and cottonwood, the alder, osier and wild cherry, currant, gooseberry, buffalo-berry and clematis. As we went on, brushing through the thick foliage, the hills on either side became higher, and grew into bastions, castles, donjon-keeps and fantastic clustered chimneys, like Scott's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... it down to lowliness and rest, Betwixt wet walls of darkness, darker yet With pine trees lining all their sides like hair, Or as their own straight needles clothe their boughs; Until at length in broader light it ran, With more articulate sounds amid the stones, In the slight shadow of the maiden birch, And the stream-loving willow; and ere long Great blossoming trees dropt flowers upon its breast; Chiefly the crimson-spotted, cream-white flowers, Heaped up in cones amid cone-drooping leaves; Green hanging leaf-cones, towering white flower-cones ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... four or five. Some of them who had finished their houses earlier than the rest, had already commenced gathering their provisions for the winter. These consisted of the leaves and soft twigs of several species of trees—such as willow, birch, and mulberry—and we saw collections of these floating in the water in front of several of ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... the devil, The peasants make ready To sleep by the roadside. They light a large fire, And collecting some farthings 110 Send two of their number To buy them some vodka, The rest cutting cups From the bark of a birch-tree. The vodka's provided, Black bread, too, besides, And they all begin feasting: Each munches some bread And drinks three cups of vodka— But then comes the question 120 Of who can, in Russia, Be ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... the meaning of his words, would ask him to repeat them, but Platon could never recall what he had said a moment before, just as he never could repeat to Pierre the words of his favorite song: native and birch tree and my heart is sick occurred in it, but when spoken and not sung, no meaning could be got out of it. He did not, and could not, understand the meaning of words apart from their context. Every word and action of his was the manifestation of an activity unknown to him, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... rights, wrestled lovingly with their errors, mediated in their quarrels, and was idolized by them as was no other of his race. Pokanoket, Massasoit and Canonicus were his hosts and guardians during the winter and spring; and in summer he descended the river in a birch-bark canoe to the site of the present city of Providence, so named by him in recognition of the Divine mercies; and there he pitched his tent beside the spring, hoping to make the place "a shelter for persons distressed ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... neighboring the Great Lakes, whereby you see, as through a magic glass, the boats, loaded on the shoulders when navigation was no longer possible, and the journey made over the watershed till a stream was followed far enough to float the birch-bark canoe once more. Prairie is another word full of interest. Pampas is a word, Peruvian in origin, designating the prairies of South America; while prairie is a French word, meaning meadow. Pampas is the Peruvian ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Penningham, and author of the celebrated song of the Hills of Galloway"—with which I confess myself unacquainted. Broadfoot had facetiously signed his communication Clashbottom,—"a professional appellation derived," says Mr. Train, "from the use of the birch, and by which he was usually addressed among his companions,—who assembled, not at the Wallace Inn of Gandercleuch, but at the sign of the Shoulder of Mutton in Newton-Stewart." Scott received these ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... evening; but to his astonishment a mountain stream was now foaming down it, leaping from rock to rock, and filling the glen with babbling murmurs. He, however, made shift to scramble up its sides, working his toilsome way through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witch-hazel; and sometimes tripped up or entangled by the wild grape vines that twisted their coils and tendrils from tree to tree, and spread a kind of network in ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... tight till he is satisfied; The wet of woods through the early hours, Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep, one with an arm slanting down across and below the waist of the other, The smell of apples, aromas from crush'd sage-plant, mint, birch-bark, The boy's longings, the glow and pressure as he confides to me what he was dreaming, The dead leaf whirling its spiral whirl and falling still and content to the ground, The no-form'd stings that sights, people, objects, sting me with, The hubb'd sting of myself, stinging me as much as it ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... creatures, a boy and a girl, who stared on Petrea with astonishment. She quickly made herself acquainted with them, and they promised to conduct her to the cottage, which lay at a little distance. On their way they gave Petrea bilberries out of their full birch-wood measure, and related to her that the reason of their being out so late was, that they had been looking for the cow which was lost in the wood; that they should have driven her home, but had ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... were full of birch, exclaimed against this weak, and, as he said he would venture to call it, wicked lenity. To remit the punishment of such crimes was, he said, to encourage them. He enlarged much on the correction of children, and quoted many texts ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... a letter to Dr. Birch, mentions this as one of the very few inaccuracies in this admirable address, the laurel not being barren in any sense, but bearing fruits and flowers. Boswell's Life, vol. i. p. 160. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... first along the edge of the forest, then along a broad forest clearing; they caught glimpses of old pines and a young birch copse, and tall, gnarled young oak trees standing singly in the clearings where the wood had lately been cut; but soon it was all merged in the clouds of snow. The coachman said he could see the forest; the examining magistrate could see nothing ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... shooting rapids in their birch-bark canoes? And perhaps you have yourself sailed a toy boat on a stream, and made a dam of clay, and waited with more or less patience till the water rose nearly to the top, and then broken a bit of your dam out and made a waterfall and let your boat drift over the edge of it. You ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... for original incidents. But the Lancelot in its original form was held by so competent an authority as the late M. Gaston Paris to have been one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of French prose texts. (Cf. M. Paris's review of Suchier and Birch-Hirschfield's Geschichte der Franz. Litt.) The adventure in question is a 'Gawain' adventure; we do not know whence it was derived, and it may well have been included in an early version of the romance. Apart from the purely literary question, from the strictly critical ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... conception of an "impossible" as little as with the actual visible facts of his ragged shirt-sleeves and faded, earth-stained overalls. They toiled upwards in silence for some moments, the man still chewing on his birch-twig. He noticed her sidelong half-satirical glance at it. "Don't you want one?" he asked, and gravely cut a long, slim rod from one of the saplings in the green wall shutting them into the road. As he gave it to her he explained, "It's the kind they make birch ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... a crown of white birch bark and her braid of hair, twined with running ever-green, fell to her waist. Patty was wreathed with columbines and decked with some turkey feathers that she had put in her basket as too pretty to throw away. Waitstill looked rather conscious in her ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... his reel, the rush of a brown mountain stream with its fringe of silver birch and stunted alder, the white side of a leaping salmon, and the gasp of that noble fish towed deftly into the shallows at last, afforded him a natural and unmixed pleasure. He loved the heather dearly, the wild hillside, the keen pure air, the steady setters, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... necessary, particularly for logging up new fallows. Yet notwithstanding their usefulness, I do not know a worse treated set of animals than Canadian oxen. Their weight, when fat, varies from seven to eight hundred weight. A yoke and bows, made of birch or soft maple, is the only harness needed; and, in my opinion, for double draught, better, and certainly less troublesome than the collar ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... in the branches of the silver birch before the house a thrush was singing, while the swallows were already busy ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... really. And those country officers have threatened us before, you know. I suppose they are a little bit jealous that we girls and not their boys, are scattered over the landscape with yells and other appropriate noises. Sit down" (they had reached a birch bench), "I must tell you ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... eight feet of a plank in the wale were found to be so very rotten as to make it necessary to shift it. The carpenters were sent on shore in search of a tree large enough for the purpose: luckily they found a birch, which was the only one of sufficient size in the whole neighbourhood of the bay. The crews were employed in various necessary occupations: amongst which, four men were set apart to haul the seine for salmon, which were caught in great abundance, and of excellent ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... several important ambassadorial posts and at one time was Assistant Secretary of State in charge of American Republic Affairs. In recent years, Mr. Braden has given leadership to many patriotic organizations and efforts, such as For America and The John Birch Society; and, in testimony before various committees of Congress, he has given much valuable information about communist influences ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... crowned with flowers, BRITANNIA'S trident's wreathed with posies, And Fancy sees in Flora's showers Thistles and Shamrocks blent with Roses. The Indian Lotus let us twine With gorgeous bloom from Afric's jungles Canadian Birch with Austral Pine. Tape-bound Officialdom oft bungles; Some blow too hot, some breathe too cold, O'er-chill are some, and some o'er-gushing; But the same blood-stream, warm and bold, Through all our veins is ever rushing; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world. There were many things new to me. For instance, hay-ricks in the trees, and here and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... of Biblical Archaeology. This work, which is not yet (1883) complete, is entitled The Bronze Ornaments of the Gates of Balawat, Shalmaneser II. 859-825, edited, with an introduction, by Samuel BIRCH, with descriptions and translations by Theophilus G. PINCHES, folio, London. The three first parts are before us. The motive reproduced above belongs to the plate ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... the appendiculate sporidia are similar, and the conidia would also appear to partake of the character of Stilbospora. We may remark here that we have seen a brown mould, probably an undescribed species of Dematiei, growing in definite patches around the openings in birch bark caused by the crumpent ostiola of the perithecia of Melanconis stilbostoma, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... between Ruerdean and High-Meadow, or even from Gloucester, if the Beacon, which formerly stood on the crest of Edge Hill, were included in the range. Such posts would be serviceable to the Parliamentary Colonel Birch, when engaged in the siege of Goodrich Castle, not more than four miles north of Ruerdean; for his supplies would be drawn chiefly from the Forest, as indeed appears from a letter dated 4th July, 1646, in which he says, "We ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... all around, like giants, to "sentinel this enchanted land." On leaving the island, we saw the Goblin's Cave, in the side of Benvenue, called by the Gaels, "Coirnan-Uriskin." Near it is Beal-nam-bo, the pass of cattle, overhung with grey weeping birch trees. Here the boatmen stopped to let us hear the fine echo, and the names of "Rob Roy," and "Roderick Dhu," were sent back to us apparently as loud as they were given. The description of Scott ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... whispered, looking into the white sunlight. She was noting how it was flashed from the bark of the birch-trees near ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... around the fields of the homestead; on three sides Valleys and mountains and hills, but on the fourth side was the ocean. Birch-woods crowned the summits, but over the down-sloping hillsides Flourished the golden corn, and man-high was waving the rye- field." TEGNER, Frithiof Saga ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... have decided not to birch boys in the future, but to fine their parents. Several soft-hearted boys have already indicated that it will hurt ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... To the right there are only a few single trees, between which the fiord is visible. In front is seen the corner of a boat-shed with a boat drawn up. Under the old trees on the left stands a table with a bench and one or two chairs, all made of thin birch-staves. It is a heavy, damp day, with driving ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... furniture in the old-fashioned snug parlor was so essential as we? How could the fragrant hickory and birch sticks have sent their cheering light and warmth over the faces of the happy family circles ...
— Who Spoke Next • Eliza Lee Follen
... celebrated as a summer festival. In Northern Germany house doors are wreathed with birch twigs, while young birch trees are placed upright on the wings of ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... and Rosen. Both go on Monday. I give them on Saturday (to-morrow) an evening party of literati, to which I have invited Wilson, Norris, Loftus, Birch, etc., etc. Mohl, as well as Rosen, would like to see you. Could not you by a stroke of genius fly here, rest yourself Sunday, and think on Monday if you really need go back again? Theodore is here, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... how much swamp and sea must have existed there a thousand years ago. Yes, in these respects the same was to be seen there as is to be seen now. The rushes had the same height, the same sort of long leaves, and blue-brown, feather-like flowers that they bear now; the birch tree stood with its white bark, and delicate drooping leaves, as now; and, in regard to the living creatures, the flies had the same sort of crape clothing as they wear now; and the storks' bodies were white, with black and red stockings. Mankind, on the ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... five Miss Mohuns appeared in white frocks, new bonnets were plenty, the white tippets of the children, and the bright shawls of the mothers, made the village look gay; Wat Greenwood stuck a pink between his lips, and the green boughs of hazel and birch decked the dark oak carvings in ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... teller Hans Christian Andersen. Reader, will they strike you as pleasantly as they did me? I know not. Let us glance them over. They have at least the full flavor of the North, of the healthy land of frost and pines, of fragrant birch and of sweeter meadow-grass, and simpler, holier flowers than the rich South ever showed, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... we passed was very beautiful, commencing with dark-green ilex, glistening holly, and sombre brown oak, interspersed with groups of the dainty, graceful, white-stemmed birch, and wreathed with festoons of the scarlet Himalayan vine. As we mounted higher, trees became fewer and the foliage less luxuriant, till at length only oaks were to be seen, their branches twisted into all sorts of weird, fantastic ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... light tent, made with poles stuck into the ground, in a circle, fastened together at the top, and covered on the outside with skins of wild animals, or with birch bark. The Indians light a fire of sticks and logs on the ground, in the middle of the wigwam, and lie or sit all round it; the smoke goes up to the top and escapes. In the winter, they bank it up with snow, and it ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... Signore Tommaso de' Medici, the Chamberlain of the Court, and gave him instructions to set the boy at liberty, after administering the useful punishment of twenty strokes with a birch rod, and giving him a severe ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... down the lake came Half-breed Tom with russet sail a-flying, And the word he said was "War" again, so what was I to do? Oh the dogs they took to howling, and the missis took to crying, As I flung my silver foxes in the little birch canoe: Yes, the old girl stood a-blubbing till an island hid ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... the New Forest over a slightly undulating stretch of velvety grass, bracken, heather and stunted oak-trees, which gave the place a park-like aspect, running right up to where the oaks were clustered thickly, with an occasional silvery or ruddy barked birch, and made dense ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... the woods, and in all my recent fire-making I have contented myself with the tinder used for ages by the red men: that is, cedar wood finely shredded between two stones. Some use the fringes that grow on birch, improving it by rubbing in ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... morning there passed a church, At ten there passed me by the sea, At twelve a town of smoke and smirch, At two a forest of oak and birch, And ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... held in the Council Chamber, a space between the birches and hazels on the bank of the Ownashee; a fair and green room, ceiled with tremulous leaves, encircled and made secret by high bracken, out of which rose the tarnished-silver stems of the birch trees and the multitudinous hazel-boughs, and furnished with boulders of limestone, planted deep in a green fleece of mingled moss and grass. On one side only was it open to the world, yet on that same side it was most effectively divided from it, by the swift brown stream, speeding ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... last we have got a beautiful day, quite warm and bright. Nothing can be more lovely than this Strath of the Dee, with its birch woods and pine-covered mountains. We went up a hill yesterday—the Coyle—and looked across the glen to the broad snow fields which still encircle the black cliffs of Lochnagar. To-day we are going up to Alt na Ghuissac, and shall lunch at the Queen's hut. H. M. ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... by the birch-tree's root In the heather. The hare was running with nimble foot O'er the heather. Was ever brighter a sunshine-day, Before, behind me, and every way, ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... curious features of the establishment at St.-Gobain is a subterranean lake. The fine forests around St.-Gobain and La Fere—forests of oak, beech, elm, ash, birch, maple, yoke-elm, aspen, wild cherry, linden, elder, and willow—flourish upon a tertiary formation. The surface of clay keeps the soil marshy and damp, but this checks the infiltration of the rainwater ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... tell. I believe I was never quite so bad after the time Effie gave me my Bible." And she gave Miss Gertrude the history of the miserable day with which our story commenced—of her trying to pray under the birch-tree by the brook, of Effie's coming home with the book-man, and of their walk to the kirk and the long ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... similes or not, there were we two together again at last. What a week of weeks we spent, pacing back and forth on the veranda of our log cabin, where we overlooked the pleasant sinuosities of the Sebois and gazed out together over golden beech and ghostly birch and blood-red maple banners to the far violet mountains of the Aroostook! And how we did take stock of the immediate past, chuckling to find that it had not been a quarter so bad as I had stupidly supposed. What gilded forest trails were those which we blazed into the glamorous land of to-morrow! ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... of chicken sat on and dried at the fire; and with lime juice against scurvy, extracted from the peel of his oranges and a little economised juice. He made a North Pole one morning from the whole of his bedclothes except the bolster, and reached it in a birch-bark canoe (in private life the fender), after a terrible encounter with a polar bear fashioned from the bolster and four skittles dressed up in "Da's" nightgown. After that, his father, seeking to steady his imagination, brought him Ivanboe, Bevis, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... ginger ales, and other soft drinks were triumphs of insipidity, and their birch beer sickened the thirstiest child. But the making and the marketing and even the drinking of them were matters of high emprise compared to the keeping ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... autograph letter of her sister, Miss Pinkerton, was an object of as deep veneration as would have been a letter from a sovereign. Only when her pupils quitted the establishment, or when they were about to be married, and once, when poor Miss Birch died of the scarlet fever, was Miss Pinkerton known to write personally to the parents of her pupils; and it was Jemima's opinion that if anything could console Mrs. Birch for her daughter's ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fancied he saw, on the knee-shaped crag above, the slouched figure of a buccaneer silhouetted against the sky. It was not the bearded giant called Herriot, but another, Jeremy was sure. He had no time for conjectures, for they plunged into the thicket and birch limbs whipped him ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... andirons or claw-footed chair and table. Sometimes he glanced shyly at the mother, but getting no answering smile kept silence. Once or twice the girl whispered a word to him, as the logs fell and a sheet of flame from the hickory and the quick-burning birch set free the stored-up sunshine of many a summer day. A moment later, the girl caught ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... the party passed out of this inhospitable region, and, after passing a stream which they named Thompson's (now Birch) Creek, after one of their men, they were glad to make this entry ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... its babble for several hundred feet of the ascent. Some time ere we had reached the base of the hill we had lost sight of the summit, and there was before us only the broad steep bank, with its surface of alternate stone and heather, and a few birch-trees peeping timidly forth from crevices in the rock. After a considerable period of good hard climbing, accompanied by nothing worthy of note either in the variations of the scenery or in the incidents encountered, we ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... till they found That butt was out and heard the mournful sound." He praised a poacher, precious child of fun! Who shot the keeper with his own spring gun; Nor less the smuggler who th' exciseman tied, And left him hanging at the birch-wood side, There to expire;—but one who saw him hang Cut the good cord—a traitor of the gang. His own exploits with boastful glee he told, What ponds he emptied and what pikes he sold; And how, when blest with sight alert ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... of having been inhabited for some time. There was a cunningly contrived fireplace made of stones, against which pieces of birch bark were placed in such a position that not a ray of light could get out of the cavern. The bed of black coals between the stones still smoked; a quantity of parched corn lay on a little rocky shelf which jutted out from the wall; ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... Moscouie glasse.] We had diuers shewes of Study or Muscouy glasse shining not altogether vnlike to Christall. [Sidenote: A fruit like corinths.] We found an herbe growing vpon the rocks whose fruit was sweet, full of red iuice, and the ripe ones were like corinths. We found also birch and willow growing like shrubbes low to the ground. These people haue great store of furres as we iudge. They made shewes vnto vs the 30 of this present, which was the second time of our being with them, after they perceiued we would ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... says, represented 'hell' for him when Browning Hill stood for paradise. The instruction 'was wretched,' The fagging system was a 'horrid despotism.' The games were too much for his strength. His industry, however, enabled him to escape the birch, no small achievement in those days,[206] and he became distinguished in the studies such as they were. He learned the catechism by heart, and was good at Greek and Latin verses, which he manufactured for his companions as well as himself. He had also the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Lochness, and the road upon the side of it, shaded with birch trees, and the hills above it, pleased us much. The scene was as sequestered and agreeably wild as could be desired, and for a ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... silver Trent, The whispering birch by every zephyr bent, The woody island, and the naked mead, The lowly hut half hid in groves of reed, The rural wicket, and the rural stile, And frequent interspersed, the woodman's pile. Above, below, where'er I turn my eyes, Rocks, waters, woods, in grand succession rise. ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... rain had fallen the day before, and now wherever the ground was not paved the grass shone green. The birch trees in the gardens looked as if they were strewn with green fluff, the wild cherry and the poplars unrolled their long, balmy buds, and in shops and dwelling-houses the double window-frames were being removed ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... see, Fred told me about where he expected to break away and so of course I kept looking; and I saw that you'd turned out just about under that bunch of birch trees. Why, you left a plain track in the dust on the road. After that I used my eyes and my head, and kept pushing right along. I'm reckoned something of a scout in ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... westerly direction across a hill of some elevation: the remainder of it was over kheties and level ground. The plants evidently increase in interest as we advance in the interior, Compositae and Labiatae being most numerous. A large tree occurs not uncommonly, which is either a Birch or a Prunus, most probably from the venation of its leaves, the latter; the bark is exactly like that of a Birch. Close to Premsong's I gathered a Clematis, Valerian and a fine Botrychium, a Carex and ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... and sat down in the little rock chapel. There was a picnic at the Lovers' Leap, and I had that side of the island to myself. I was leaning back, half asleep, in the deep shadow, when the sound of voices roused me; a birch-bark canoe was passing close in shore, and two were in it,—Jeannette and our surgeon. I could not hear their words, but I noticed Rodney's expression as he leaned forward. Jeannette was paddling ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... judicial gentleman look more upish. In fact, nobody could deny that in clothes the Squire was all consequence; and when he loomed into 'Court,' all over the steel chain, believe it, there were bows and servilities without stint. Taking his seat on a high birch block, the plank table being set before him, on which to spread his inseparable law-book, the plaintiffs and defendants assembled, and took seats on a wooded bench in front. 'All persons whatsoever havin' any business whatever with this 'ere ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... the birch which Sister Gabrielle kept in the dormitory was put away in a cupboard, and in the refectory the salad was turned with two long wooden spoons. These were the only changes. We went into class from nine o'clock till twelve, and in the afternoon we cracked nuts, which were sold to ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... who did not only refuse to give it, but having shook her as she lay in bed, sent her, accompanied with most fearful curses, to a higher tribunal." Such is the awful account of the scene by Francis Osborne. Dr. Birch says the words used by Elizabeth were, "God may forgive you, but I never can." It was the death-blow to the proud old queen, whose regret for the death of Essex could not be quenched by her pride and belief in his ingratitude. A confirmed melancholy settled upon her; she died ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... destroy the ferocious beast, lest she should escape through some unknown fissure of the rock. His neighbors strongly remonstrated against the perilous enterprise; but he, knowing that wild animals were intimidated by fire, and having provided several strips of birch-bark, the only combustible material he could obtain that would afford light in this deep and darksome cave, prepared for his descent. Having accordingly divested himself of his coat and waistcoat, and having a long rope fastened about his legs, by which he might be pulled back at a concerted ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... Yaupaae, where that river expands itself into a lake. The sides of the ravine, along its whole sweep upwards, was covered quite to the top with immense oaks and chestnuts, the growth of centuries, interspersed with ash trees, while in the colder and moister part in the centre, the smooth-barked birch threw out its gnarled branches. There was no undergrowth, and under and between the limbs of the trees, the eye caught a view towards the south of the widened Yaupaae and of the islands that dotted its surface, with hills sweeping round in a curve, and presenting an irregular ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... silk spotted with diamond stars and striped with black bands. On the other side of the river, in a wide, natural meadow, the moonlight rested quietly on the pastures, where it was spread out like a sheet. Some birch-trees scattered here and there over the savannas, sometimes blending, according to the caprice of the winds, with the background, seemed to surround themselves with a pale gauze—sometimes rising up again from their chalky foundations, hidden in the darkness, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... more than carry death and confusion into the ranks of the grey geese. They caused surprise and something like wild excitement in the hearts of a number of Eskimos who, in their kayaks, happened to be at that moment pushing up the Ukon River, pioneered by a birch-bark canoe, which was propelled by an Indian man ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... inhabitants. Higher up, on the uneven surface of the plateau, are scattered villages built on limestone foundations—tiny fortresses, like Rumigny and Champlat, the scene of hard-fought battles. Almost the entire surface is covered with forests of pine and oak and birch. These are the woods of Le Roi, Courton, Pourcy, and Reims, where hand-to-hand fighting went on for more than a fortnight, British, Italians, and French succeeding at first in checking the enemy and then in forcing him back, ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... anything approaching comfort? A second glance showed her how compactly and conveniently everything was arranged. The narrow cots, with their scarlet blankets and blue check pillows, stood on either side; between them was a table, with blotter of birch bark, and an inkstand made by hollowing out a quaintly shaped piece of wood and sinking in the hollow a small glass tumbler. Above the head of each bed hung a long shoe-bag with many pockets, while opposite the foot were rows of ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... the best. Too long poles, therefore, are not good, and care should be taken that the vines do not run beyond the poles, twisting off their tops will prevent it. The best kinds of wood for poles are alder, ash, birch, elm, chestnut, and cedar, their durability is directly the reverse of the order in which they stand; charring, or burning the end put into the ground, will preserve them. Hops should not be poled till the spring of the second year, and then not till they have been dressed. All that is necessary ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... old birch I came, Where I whittled my school-boy name: The nimble squirrel once more ran skippingly over the rail, The blackbirds down among The alders noisily sung, And under the blackberry-brier ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... service is an evil sad mass in English, they want nothing of the mass but the liftings." (Speech of King James VI, to the Central Assembly of the Church of Scotland, at Edinburgh, August 1590. Calderwood's Hist. of the Ch. of Scot. p. 206.) What is called the birch or "birk in Yule even'" was probably the Yule clog. On Christmas eve at no very remote period, the Yule clog, which was a large shapeless piece of wood, selected for the purpose, was dragged by a number of persons bearing ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... golden bodkin from her hair She drew, and from a green-tress'd birchen tree She pluck'd a strip of smooth white bark and fair, And many signs and woful graved she, A message of the evil things to be. Then deftly closed the birch-bark, fold on fold, And bound the tokens well and cunningly, Three times and four times, with a ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... both to the bamboo and to the yellow cane, which grew plentifully both in the islands of the Greek Archipelago and in Southern Italy, as notably at Cannae in Apulia, where it gave a name to the scene of the great battle. The virga was also used, a rod commonly of birch, a tree the educational use of which had been already discovered. The walls of Pompeii indeed show that the practice of Eton is truly classical ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... Green, or Kennington Park, or Clapham Common, and sit on a bench, and watch the young folks enjoying their sports and diversions. He was better dressed now, and she had got into the way of calling him 'Sir.' He told her a great deal about Scotland, and the mountains, and the glens with the birch-trees and waterfalls; but he always got into a difficulty when he came to the sea, which she had never seen. She could ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... among them. He had seen their carriage at the gate. It was a lovely day, and the gaily-clad fashionable people, the Russian izbas with their carved woodwork, the paths gleaming with snow, and the old birch-trees, brilliant with icicles, combined to render the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Northern trees by bark and leaf; how to know the shrubs new to me, like that strange plant whose root is like a human body and which the Chinese value at its weight in gold; and the aromatic root used in beer, and the bark of the sweet-birch whose twigs are golden-black. ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... work to be done was to make a fire to brew some ale, so they went off together to the forest to cut firewood. The giant carried a club in place of an axe, and when they came to a large birch-tree he asked Ashpot whether he would like to club the tree down or climb up and hold the top of it. The boy thought that the latter would suit him best, and he soon got up to the topmost branches ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... important of these characteristics of race or species are those which are concerned with the relation of each to light, heat, and moisture. Thus, a river birch will die if it has only as much water as will suffice to keep a post oak in the best condition, and the warm climate in which the balsam fir would perish is just suited to the requirements of a long ...
— The Training of a Forester • Gifford Pinchot
... name. Vocation, school-teacher. Present avocation, getting lost in the snow. Age, yum-yum (the Persian for twenty). Take to the woods if you would describe Miss Adams. A willow for grace; a hickory for fibre; a birch for the clear whiteness of her skin; for eyes, the blue sky seen through treetops; the silk in cocoons for her hair; her voice, the murmur of the evening June wind in the leaves; her mouth, the berries of the wintergreen; fingers as light as ferns; her toe as small as a deer track. General impression ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... or Bhurjapatra is a species of birch, the bark of which resembles that of the tree common in Europe, in being separable into fine smooth layers; but these are of a fine chesnut colour. This bark is imported into the low country in considerable quantity, and is used both in the religious ceremonies of the Hindus, and ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... tone, reveal quiet content with the simple life and a thorough enjoyment of nature in its original wildness. In the summer they followed the tracks of the moose and deer through the primitive forests, and explored the streams and lakes in the light birch canoe, with a woodsman or savage for their guide. In the winter they made long journeys over land and water on snowshoes or on skates, occasionally visiting the villages of the Indians, with whom the Lesderniers were ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... day of July Sylvia found a little birch bark boat full of strawberries at the beech in the hollow. They were the earliest of the season; the Old Lady had found them in one of her secret haunts. They would have been a toothsome addition to the Old Lady's own slender bill of fare; but she never thought of eating them. ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... eyes look from the thicket, Saw two nostrils point to windward, And a deer came down the pathway, Flecked with leafy light and shadow. 205 And his heart within him fluttered, Trembled like the leaves above him, Like the birch-leaf palpitated, As the deer came down the pathway. Then, upon one knee uprising, 210 Hiawatha aimed an arrow; Scarce a twig moved with his motion, Scarce a leaf was stirred or rustled, But the wary roebuck ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... gate, and all the family went out to inspect the articles of their own manufacture, which the Indians humbly offered for sale. These consisted of baskets ornamented with porcupine quills, moccasins of deer-skin, and boxes of birch bark. Mrs. Lee's and Aunt Abby's heart bled for the way-worn looking mothers and their patient babes; they relieved their feelings, however, by making them eat as much as they would. Uncle John and Tom were glad to buy some of the ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... pleasant springs on a hillside, bubbling forth among the first trees we had seen since we left the Laramie. Then we descended into a fine shady valley: all our old friends were there in thickets—the box-elder, willow, birch and cottonwood, the alder, osier and wild cherry, currant, gooseberry, buffalo-berry and clematis. As we went on, brushing through the thick foliage, the hills on either side became higher, and grew into bastions, castles, donjon-keeps and fantastic clustered chimneys, like Scott's description ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... and where what ought to be put clearly is presented in a confused and intricate way as if it were a collection of puzzles." The poor boys, he declared, were almost frightened to death. They needed skins of tin; they were beaten with fists, with canes and with birch-rods till the blood streamed forth; they were covered with scars, stripes, spots and weals; and thus they had learned to hate the schools and all that was ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... was reddening before sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of Thelsen on a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... ounces of white soap, cut small, dissolved in four pints of water, rather hot, in a large basin; make the solution into a lather, by beating it with birch rods, or wires. Introduce the feathers, and rub well with the hands for five or six minutes. After this soaping, wash in clean water, as hot as the hand ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... not understand the life we lead; If we asked Dr. Birch to play, no doubt he'd rather read; He hates all scrambling restlessness, and chattering, scuffling noise; If he could catch us we should fare ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... formidable thing, but when made by a multitude is a most hideous shriek, almost as terrible as an Indian yell; the people crying, "Kill them, kill them. Knock them over," heaving snowballs, oyster shells, clubs, white-birch sticks three inches and a half in diameter; consider yourselves in this situation, and then judge whether a reasonable man in the soldiers' situation would not have concluded they were going to kill him. I believe ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... green sward and the luxuriance of its wild woodland, from the contiguity of overhanging mountains, and from the beauty of Lovel Tarn, a small lake belonging to the property, studded with little islands, each of which is covered with its own thicket of hollies, birch, and dwarfed oaks. The house itself is poor, ill built, with straggling passages and low rooms, and is a sombre, ill-omened looking place. When Josephine Murray was brought there as a bride she thought it to be very sombre and ill-omened; but ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... above them breathless, he looked up to the maple-twigs, over which a faint reddish bloom had been cast in the night, beyond to the lower slopes of the mountain, delicately patterned with innumerable white stems of young birch-trees, and clasped his hands to see that a shimmer of green hung in their tops like a mist. His lips quivered, he laid his hand upon a tuft of grass with glossy, lance-like blades, and ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... and found the desired implement, but he could not find paper. The lining of his cap occurred to him; it was soft and unfit for his purpose. Looking sadly round, he observed that the tree against which he leaned was a silver-stemmed birch, the inner bark of which, he knew, would serve his purpose. With great difficulty he tore off a small sheet of it and began to write, while a little smile of contentment played ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... me some finely woven baskets, and a beautiful pappoose-basket or cradle, such as they carry their own babies in. This was made of the lightest wood, and covered with the finest skin of fawn, tanned with birch bark by their own hands, and embroidered in blue beads; it was their best work. I admired it, and tried to express to them my thanks. These squaws took my baby (he was lying beside me on the bed), then, cooing and chuckling, they looked about the room, until they found a small pillow, which they ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... O Birch-tree! Of your yellow bark, O Birch-tree! Growing by the rushing river, Tall and stately in the valley! I a light canoe will build me, Build a swift Cheemaun for sailing, That shall float upon the river, Like a yellow leaf in Autumn, Like a ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... singing and hardly breathed, they stood so still. They looked at St. Nicholas with big, big eyes. In one hand St. Nicholas carried two large packages; in the other, a birch rod. ...
— The Dutch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... retorted, "he may possibly deprive you of your nursing-bottle, or he may even birch you, but he will most assuredly not fight you, so long as I have any say in the affair. I' cod, we are all friends here, I hope. D'ye think Mr. Vanringham has so often enacted Richard III. that to strangle infants is habitual ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... ever forget it as long as they live. The hit does that; for a kick is a very striking thing, that's a fact. There has been no good scholars since birch rods went out o' school, and sentiment ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... just been at a neighbouring farm-house, where there lived one of Mr. Walsingham's tenants; a man of the name of Birch, a respectable farmer, who was originally from Ireland, and whose son was at sea with Captain Walsingham. The captain had taken young Birch under his particular care, at ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... as destructive to the intestinal dragons he promises to destroy. Then we turned away to the glen down which the torrent plunged. And there, at the foot of the fall, in the midst of the boiling water, the foam, and spray, rose a tall crag crowned with silver birch, and hung with moss and creeping vines, bearing on its gray, weather-beaten face: "Rotterdam Schnapps." Bah! it made us sick. The caldron looked like a punch-bowl, and the breath of the zephyrs smelt of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... for gutta percha is obtained by boiling the bark of the birch tree, especially the outer part, in water over an open fire. This produces a black fluid mass, which quickly becomes solid and compact upon exposure ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world. There were many things new to me. For instance, hay-ricks in the trees, and here and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the delicate ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... away, for the eddies around the tent will make the stove smoke occasionally beyond all endurance. Since you will need but little fire to keep you warm, you can use a funnel made of boards, barrel-staves, old spout, and the like. Old tin cans, boot-legs, birch-bark, and stout paper can be made to do service as elbows, with the assistance of turf, grass-ropes, and large leaves. But I forewarn you there is not much fun, either in rigging your stove and funnel, or in sitting by it and waiting for the storm to blow it ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... bought you shall be given to Nannie Cameron, and you shall wear your old one to the kirk. How will that suit your vanity? And you may be off to bed now directly, without any supper. There are twigs enough for a birch rod, my lady, if bed does not bring you to a better frame of mind. Run in now, and don't let me see your face before six o'clock ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... strange lot. Of the nine men, five were brown-skinned Kanakas, but the other four were white, and seemed to be all old men, though they moved about spryly enough. Dailey was wrinkled and leathery, Birch had only one very black and sparkling eye, Yorke's mouth was twisted into a perpetual smile, and Borden was a quiet little man like ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... girls were glad to throw themselves down and sleep, while Claude kept watch by the fire outside. On the next day, and the two following ones, he employed himself in thatching the primitive dwelling with birch bark and whatever materials he could find which would shed the rain from its sloping sides. For himself, he found a sheltered hollow among the rocks, where neither wind nor rain could affect him greatly, and their stores he disposed among the many ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... They did all the work on the early pioneer farm. They were the gods whose rude strength first broke the soil. They could live where the moose and the deer could. If there was no clover or timothy to be had, then the twigs of the basswood and birch would do. Before there were yet fields given up to grass, they found ample pasturage in the woods. Their wide-spreading horns gleamed in the duskiness, and their paths and the paths of the cows became the future roads and highways, or even the ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... ascended the preceding evening; but to his astonishment a mountain stream was now foaming down it, leaping from rock to rock, and filling the glen with babbling murmurs. He, however, made shift to scramble up its sides, working his toilsome way through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witch-hazel, and sometimes tripped up or entangled by the wild grapevines that twisted their coils from tree to tree, and spread a kind of ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... and the bird flew away. The man took the feather and carried it to his brother, who looked at it and said, "It is pure gold!" and gave him a great deal of money for it. Next day the man climbed into a birch-tree, and was about to cut off a couple of branches when the same bird flew out, and when the man searched he found a nest, and an egg lay inside it, which was of gold. He took the egg home with him, and carried it to his brother, who ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... changed the course of his vessel by reason of the mysterious conduct of that man-of-war hawk, not a soul would probably have survived the night. It was stated by the rescued passengers, among whom was Billy Birch, that the Central America had sailed from Aspinwall with the passengers and freight which left San Francisco on the 1st of September, and encountered the gale in the Gulf Stream somewhere off Savannah, in which she sprung a leak, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... BIRCH.—Everyone knows what "the Assisted Education (Ireland) Bill" is. Why should not an Assisted Education (England) Bill be brought in to enable public school-boys to secure, without payment of any additional fee beyond that included for "swishing" in the Bill sent home to the parents, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the fox-glove, the wild brier-rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plovers, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... third strake under the wale were found to be stove in, and the timbers within started. The farther they proceeded in removing the sheathing, the more they discovered the decayed state of the ship's hull. The chief damage was repaired with a birch tree, which had been cut down when they were there before, and was the only one in the neighbourhood large enough for the purpose; but Captain King gave orders that no more sheathing should be ripped off, being apprehensive ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... Old Birch, who taught the village school, Wedded a maid of homespun habit; He was stubborn as a mule, And she was playful as a rabbit. Poor Kate had scarce become a wife Before her husband sought to make her The pink of country polished life, And prim and formal—as ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... as fond fathers, Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sight For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead; And liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... the Council of State are met at Whitehall, Annesley in the chair as usual. Colonel Birch, one of the members, entering late, informs General Monk that there is a gentleman at the door who desires to speak with him. Monk goes to the door, finds Sir John Greenville there, and receives him as a perfect stranger, the guards looking on. Sir John delivers to him a letter, and tells him ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... in sight of Loughveigh lying cradled among the rocks, and got a glimpse of the white tower of Glenveigh Castle. There is a small skirting of wood near the castle where the silver barked birch prevails from which the glen takes its name, interspersed with holly trees, which grow here in profusion, and some dark yews, prim and stately, drawn up like sentinels to guard ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... a deep breath. The safe disappearances he had read about flashed through his mind. But he didn't believe it. It couldn't be! Yet, there was the empty corner with the birch panels forming the back of the show-windows, and no safe. In a daze, he walked over to the corner, intending to feel about with his hands and make sure the safe was really gone. Before he got there, there flashed into sight in place of the safe, ...
— The Einstein See-Saw • Miles John Breuer
... distressed nor a widow ill-treated by me. I have never repelled a workman nor hindered a shepherd. I gave alike to the widow and to the married woman, and have not preferred the great to the small in my gifts." And we have the high authority of the late Dr. Samuel Birch for the statement that the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty abound in injunctions of a high ethical character. "To feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, bury the dead, loyally serve the king, formed the first duty of a pious man and faithful subject." ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... heather than oats, more boulders than trees, and more snow than anything. It was a solitary, thinly peopled region, mostly of bare hills, and partially cultivated glens, each with its small stream, on the banks of which grew here and there a silver birch, a mountain ash, or an alder tree, but with nothing capable of giving much shade or shelter, save cliffy banks and big stones. From many a spot you might look in all directions and not see a sign of human or any other habitation. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... put yourself to school among pedants and Jacobites, when you might be pushing your fortune in the world! Why not go to Westminster or Eton at once, man, and take to Lilly's Grammar and Accidence, and to the birch, too, ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... to travel along the road, through forests and villages, with a birch-bark sack over her shoulders, and a staff ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... of Indians shooting rapids in their birch-bark canoes? And perhaps you have yourself sailed a toy boat on a stream, and made a dam of clay, and waited with more or less patience till the water rose nearly to the top, and then broken a bit of your dam out and made a waterfall ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... sides. When it weeps, it weeps like some little old peasant woman crouching and rocking in her grief. It has all the boisterousness and hoarseness of voices that sound out of peasant-cabins and are lodged in men who wear birch-bark shoes and eat coarse food and suffer cold and hunger. Within its idiom there are the croonings and wailings of thousands of illiterate mothers, of people for whom expression is like a tearing of entrails, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... and yet never got any farther. There might be seen machinery for making spools—with water-driven lathes, which turned these articles, variously known as "bobbins" and "pirns," literally off the reel by the thousand. It was a sweet, birch-smelling place and my favourite haunt on all holidays. William Lyon, my grandfather, had had a tempestuous youth, from which, as he said, he had been saved "by the grace of God ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... grey fur is interspersed with numerous black and white long hairs. They breed perfectly true, and have long been kept in warrens. When they escape and cross with common rabbits, the product, as I hear from Mr. Wyrley Birch, of Wretham Hall, is not a mixture of the two colours, but about half take after the one parent, and the other half after the other parent. Secondly, chinchillas or tame silver-greys (I will use the former name) have short, paler, mouse or slate-coloured fur, interspersed with long, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... beside my fire, slipping on a great roll of birch bark which blazed up brightly, filling the woods with light. There, under a spruce, where a dark shadow had been a moment agone, stood the mother, her eyes all ablaze with the wonder of the light; now staring steadfastly ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... sticks to be had in that part of the wood; twigs and branches from the dead tree, fragments of bark, odds and ends of dry brush. Close by stood a white birch. The thin, paper-like covering hung loose on its stem, like grey-white curls. Archie could pull off large pieces, and he enjoyed this so much that he pulled till the birch trunk, as far up as he could reach, was perfectly ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... been for many years the permanent senior officer of the Post Office, married my sister, whom he took with him into Cumberland, where he was stationed as one of our surveyors. He has been my friend for more than forty years; as has also Peregrine Birch, a clerk in the House of Lords, who married one of those daughters of Colonel Grant who assisted us in the raid we made on the goods which had been seized by the Sheriff's officer at Harrow. These have been the oldest and ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... gilded drinking vessels of various makes—Venetian, Turkish, Tscherkessian, which had reached Bulba's cabin by various roads, at third and fourth hand, a thing common enough in those bold days. There were birch-wood benches all around the room, a huge table under the holy pictures in one corner, and a huge stove covered with particoloured patterns in relief, with spaces between it and the wall. All this was quite familiar to the two young men, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... (which are ranged there for the purpose) with sweetmeats or rods, according to his opinion of their owner's conduct during the past year. The Saint is supposed to travel through the air, and to be followed by an ass laden with two panniers, one of which contains the good things, and the other the birch, and he leaves his ass at the top of the chimney and comes down alone. The same belief is entertained in Holland; and in some parts of Germany he is even believed to carry off bad boys and girls in his sack, answering in this ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... I declare I was beat, and I hav'n't never got over bein' beat about that. So we growed up together, always out in the woods between schools, huntin' checker-berries, and young winter-greens, and prince's piney, and huckleberries, and saxifrax, and birch, and all them woodsy things that children hanker arter; and by-'n'-by we got to goin' to the 'Cademy; and when Hetty was seventeen she went in to Hartford to her Aunt Smith's for a spell, to do chores, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... of this stolen reading by a circumstance that stirs your young blood very strangely. The master is looking very sourly on a certain morning, and has caught sight of the little weak-eyed boy over beyond you, reading "Roderick Random." He sends out for a long birch rod, and having trimmed off the leaves carefully,—with a glance or two in your direction,—he marches up behind the bench of the poor culprit,—who turns deathly pale,—grapples him by the collar, drags him out over the desks, his ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... That evening the birch which Sister Gabrielle kept in the dormitory was put away in a cupboard, and in the refectory the salad was turned with two long wooden spoons. These were the only changes. We went into class from nine o'clock till twelve, and in the afternoon we cracked nuts, which ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... as the horses climbed the crest of the long hill the lady in green was by his side on the box. He looked anxiously ahead, and there, in a hedge of young alder bushes, he saw something stirring, and, unless he was greatly mistaken, a birch broom lay on the ground near ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... on the other shore, each surrounded with its patch of cleared land, were sadly distant from one another. Behind the clearings, and on either side of them to the river's bank, it was always forest: a dark green background of cypress against which a lonely birch tree stood out here and there, its bole naked and white as the column of a ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... first mentioned No. 81, and occurs but rarely after [88]; 'tis found but once in the Editor's MS, where it is written boter. The usual substitutes for it are oil-olive and lard; the latter is frequently called grees, or grece, or whitegrece, as No. 18. 193. Capons in Grease occur in Birch's Life of Henry prince of Wales, p. 459, 460. and see Lye in Jun. Etym. v. Greasie. Bishop Patrick has a remarkable passage concerning this article: 'Though we read of cheese in Homer, Euripides, Theocritus, and others, yet they never mention butter: nor hath Aristotle ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... have already come several four-foot maple-leaved vibernums, which, though moved in June, throve and have made a fine new growth. There will be, also, a shadbush or two and certainly some hobble bushes, with here and there a young pine and small, slender canoe birch. Here and there will be a clump of flowering raspberry. I shall not scorn spireas, and I must have at least one big white syringa to scent the twilight; but the great mass of my screen will be exactly what nature would plant there if she were left alone—minus the choke cherries. You always ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one's breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges—this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. Nothing else would do, nothing else would satisfy, except this coolness ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... prevents its rising. Most ovens require heating an hour and a half for bread. A brisk fire should be kept up, and the doors of the room should be kept shut, if the weather is cold. Pine and ash, mixed together, or birch-wood, is the best for heating an oven. To ascertain if your oven is of the right temperature, when cleaned, throw in a little flour; if it browns in the course of a minute, it is sufficiently hot; ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous
... source of wealth to Mongolia lies in her magnificent forests of pine, spruce, larch and birch which stretch away in an almost unbroken line of green to far beyond the Siberian frontier. As yet but small inroads have been made upon these forests, and as I stood one afternoon upon the summit of a mountain gazing over the miles of timbered hills ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... The strong double-bladed pocket knife is the best model I have yet found and, in connection with the sheath knife, is all sufficient for camp use. It is not necessary to take table cutlery into the woods. A good fork may be improvised from a beech or birch stick; and the half of a fresh-water mussel shell, with a split stick by way of handle, ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... we spent after our little caribou hunt. Miss Jelliffe, who had had some slight experience with small target rifles, made a good shot at a fine stag, and we were all very cheerful. The fire burned brightly before the tent she shared with Susie, and the dry dead pine with logs of long-burning birch crackled merrily. Over the little lake, behind the dark conifers and the distant hills, the sun had gone down in a glory ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook. If, he says, she watches over sentimentalism with a birch-rod, she is not opposed to romance. You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are honest. Do not offend reason. A lover pretending too much by one foot's length of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap. In Comedy is the singular scene of charity ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... showed. They were valuable, for, in Scattergood's rude printing, one could read upon them the owner of every piece of timber, every farm, the acreage in each piece of timber, with a careful estimate of the amount of timber to the acre—also its proportions of spruce, beech, birch, ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... is wild and rugged. It is a lofty eminence covered with huge boulders of sandstone, between which rise birch trees and oaks, their foliage already yellowed by autumn. These tall trees stand out from the background of red light, which the sun has left in the west, resembling the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... was flooded in moonlight and the birch trees wavered their stark shadows across it like supplicating arms. Suddenly I heard the soft padded sound of snow falling upon snow, to slowly perceive a figure, the slender figure of a young child attempting to arouse itself ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... a dinner we have but one or two remarks to offer. If he be a bachelor, he had better give his dinner at a good hotel, or have it sent in from Birch's or Kuehn's. If a married man, he will, we presume, enter into council with his wife and his cook. In any case, however, he should always bear in mind that it is his duty to entertain his friends in the best manner that his means permit; ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... crossed the trails of Indian hunting parties, and at last they came to a deserted village. Either it had been abandoned because of warfare or to escape an unhealthy location, but the five examined it with great curiosity. Many of the lodges built of either poles or birch bark were still standing, with fragments of useless and abandoned household goods here and there. Paul found in one of the lodges a dried scalp with long straight hair, but, obeying a sensitive impulse he hid it from the ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Chipmunk were having a play party in the woods. They had their lunch in little birch-bark baskets, and they used a nice, big, flat stump for a table. They took an old napkin for a tablecloth, and they had pieces of carrots boiled in molasses and chocolate, and cabbage with pink frosting on, and nuts all covered with candy, ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... and fastening the cap together, he dropped it down, and, leaning forward, tried to catch the top of a young birch rustling close by the wall. Twice he missed it; the first time he frowned, but the second he uttered ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... of certain trees must be procured, so if you can find either oak, hemlock, birch or beech trees, we can probably make a tanning compound which will ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... agrees with Lord Mayor Birch (grandfather of Dr Samuel Birch of the British Museum) to pay L600, for the transfer to himself, of Medina's Broker's medal (at that time the few Jewish brokers admitted had to pay an extraordinarily high fee for the privilege); he is engaged ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... Brandy, Laurel. Birch-Wine. Brewing. Beef Cake-Soup. Ditto to Pot like Venison. Beef, to Collar. Brocoli, to boil. Butter, good in Suffolk. Buckingham-Cheese, to make. Butter, why good or bad. Ditto in general. Butter, what Milk is good. Ditto made over the Fire. Ditto wash'd. Ditto churn'd in Summer. ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... woodman's axe had opened only here and there a patch of the woods to the light of the sun. These forests abounded with game, and had long been the hunting ground of the red men. The river swarmed with water-fowl of various names and plumage, and often the Indian's birch canoe darted over its ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... from the service by Perron, who had probably very good reason to believe that they would not join in fighting against the army of their own sovereign. Carnegie, Stewart, Ferguson, Lucan, two Skinners, Scott, Birch, and Woodville, are the only names recorded, but there may have been others also who were dismissed from the army at Perron's disposal. The prospects of those who were absent on duty in the Deccan, and elsewhere, soon became far more serious. Though not at present ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... had been taking short trial runs, to test our pace and powers of endurance; and Birch (my fellow-"hare") and I had more than once surveyed the course we proposed to take on the occasion of the "great hunt," making ourselves, as far as possible, acquainted with the bearings of several streams, ploughed ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... scene it is early morning; the servants come in and adorn the inn with boughs of birch as is the custom ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... and tore deep through the skin before he could lift his wide-flung arms to protect it. And then, almost before he realized what had happened, she stood back, groping blindly away from him until her hands found a birch sapling. She clung to it with a desperately tight clasp as if to hold herself erect. A little spot of red flecked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... of a diameter of one hundred and fifty feet, as nearly as I could estimate. They were formed by stumps of trees and poles, set upright on the ground, and these were linked together by horizontal poles, and against the latter were reared birch poles and branches of trees, varying from six to ten feet in height, without the slightest attempt at neatness, the whole being as rude as well could be; but withal, this inclosure was sufficiently secure to answer the purpose of its builders. On the south ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... required. Nothing remained but to cord the split wood in the shed beside the house, where it was sheltered from the snow; the huge piles mingling the resinous cypress which gives a quick hot flame, spruce and red birch, burning steadily and longer, close-grained white birch with its marble-like surface, slower yet to be consumed and leaving red embers in the morning after ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... himself out to rightward, so as to outflank Kesselsdorf;—neglecting Grune (refusing Grune, as the soldiers say):—"our horse of the right wing reached from the Wood called Lerchenbusoh (LARCH-BUSH) rightward as far as Freyberg road; foot all between that Lerchenbusch and the big Birch-tree on the road to Wilsdruf; horse of the left wing, from there to Roitsch." [Stille (p. 181), who was present. See Plan.] It was about two P.M. before the old man got all his deployments completed; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... detail, exactly the same things were seen then that may yet be beheld. The reeds had the same height, and bore the same kind of long leaves and bluish-brown feathery plumes that they bear now; the birch stood there, with its white bark and its fine loosely-hanging leaves, just as now; and as regards the living creatures that dwelt here—why, the fly wore its gauzy dress of the same cut that it wears now; and the favourite colours ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... A low barren cliff overhung the house in which he was born, fir and birch looked down on the roof, and wild-cherry strewed flowers over it. Upon this roof there walked about a little goat, which belonged to Oeyvind. He was kept there that he might not go astray, and Oeyvind carried leaves and grass up to him. One fine day the goat leaped down, and—away to the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... the winter," said the old goblin, "and also about the fir and the birch-trees, and the ghost stories, and of the tingling frost. You shall tell your tales, for no one over there can do it so well; and we will sit in the stone rooms, where the pine logs are burning, and drink mead out of the golden drinking-horn of the old Norwegian ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... used-up little fellow, suffering from the sad effects of a night's carouse. But he is an honest bird, notwithstanding his late hours and his idle sleeping days; he is also domestic in his habits, and the father of an interesting family, close at hand, in a hollow white-birch, and he is ever ready to give them ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... leisure, and the opportunity of consulting many books, both printed and manuscript, are as necessary as they are impossible to be attained in my present way of life. However, to acquire a general insight into my subject and resources, I read the life of Sir Walter Raleigh by Dr. Birch, his copious article in the General Dictionary by the same hand, and the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James the First in Hume's History of England." Beriton, January 1762. (In a month's absence from the Devizes.)—"During this interval ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring,—compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations?—From this, that the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified ab ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... trip. He wanted to try his own mouth at 'calling.' He had never really done it before. But he had been practicing all winter in imitation of a tame cow moose that Johnny Moreau had, and he thought he could make the sound 'b'en bon.' So he got the birch-bark horn and gave us a sample of his skill. McDonald told me privately that it was 'nae sa bad; a deal better than Pete's feckless bellow.' We agreed to leave the Indian to keep the camp (after locking up the whisky flask in my bag), and take Billy with us on Monday to ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... principles. The anticipated day and Susan arrived. She looked very meek to the barbarian of fifteen, so he soon began his antics. He was called to the platform, told to lay aside his jacket, and, thereupon, with much astonishment received from the mild Quaker maiden, with a birch rod applied calmly but with precision, an exposition of the argumentum ad hominem based on the a posteriori method of reasoning. Thus Susan departed from her principles, but not ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... half a bow-shot from the house on that side (i.e. due north thereof) was a little hazel-brake, and round about it the trees were smaller of kind than the oaks and chestnuts he had passed through before, being mostly of birch and quicken-beam and young ash, with small wood betwixt them; so now he passed through the thicket, and, coming to the edge thereof, beheld the Lady and the King's Son walking together hand in ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... of style in the work of various countries are well indicated by Walter de Gray Birch, who says: "The English are famous for clearness and breadth; the French for delicate fineness and harmoniously assorted colours, the Flemish for minutely stippled details, and the Italian for the gorgeous yet calm dignity apparent in their ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... not really fair play. The true woodcrafter limits himself to the things that he can get in the woods, and in all my recent fire-making I have contented myself with the tinder used for ages by the red men: that is, cedar wood finely shredded between two stones. Some use the fringes that grow on birch, improving it by rubbing ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... don't think it can all be fancy. I am sure I mind the lake, with the swans sailing, on it, and the wee green islets, and the branches of the birch trees drooping down into the water. Don't ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... in large flocks, fly about sundown to selected roosting-places on tall trees, and to feeding-places in the morning,—unhusked corn-fields, if any are to be found in the neighborhood, or thickets of dwarf birch and willows, the buds of which furnish a considerable part of their food ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along behind. The sled was without runners. It was made of stout birch-bark, and its full surface rested on the snow. The front end of the sled was turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of soft snow that surged like a wave before it. On the sled, securely lashed, was a ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... But instead of that he found himself hors'd up in a trice, though he appeal'd in vain to the priviledges of the University, pleaded adultus and invoked the mercy of the spectators. Nor was he let down till the master had planted a grove of birch in his back-side for the terrour and publick example of all waggs that divulge the secrets of Priscian and make merry with their teachers. This stuck so with Triplet that all his life-time he never forgave the doctor, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... for the occasion, and attended, at a little distance, by Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, the Hobby-horse, and a band of morrice-dancers. Then came the crowd, pellmell, laughing, shouting, and huzzaing,—most of the young men and women bearing green branches of birch and other ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... firewater burst upon the red men and swept their whole race away from the cold fountains. Endicott and his followers came next, and often knelt down to drink, dipping their long beards in the spring. The richest goblet then was of birch-bark. Governor Winthrop, after a journey afoot from Boston, drank here out of the hollow of his hand. The elder Higginson here wet his palm and laid it on the brow of the first town-born child. For many years it was the watering-place, and, as it were, the washbowl, of the vicinity, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... active, with clean-cut aquiline features, olive-red complexion and long dark hair; but developed by her white-man training so that the shy Indian girl had given place to the alert, resourceful world-woman, at home equally in the salons of the rich and learned or in the stern of the birch canoe, where, with paddle poised, she was in absolute and fearless control, watching, warring and winning against the grim rocks that grinned out of the white rapids to tear the frail craft and mangle ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... Harvey Birch, the hero of The Spy, is a portrait from the life of a revolutionary patriot who appears in the book as a peddler with a keen eye to trade as well as to the movements of the enemy. One of the best ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... of summer thicken, And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken, Yearly you turn from our side, ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... of which was sent to General Monk. It was chiefly brewed from the rind and tops of firs, and was esteemed very powerful against the formation of stone, and to cure all scorbutick distempers. Various herbs, as best approved by the maker, were infused with the mum in concocting it, such as betony, birch, burnet, brooklime, elder-flowers, horse-radish, [582] marjoram, thyme, water-cress, pennyroyal, etc., together with several eggs, "the shells not cracked or broken"! The Germans, especially in Saxony, have so great a veneration for mum that they fancy their bodies ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... year 343. It was once the custom to send a man around to personate St. Nicholas on St. Nicholas Eve, and to inquire how the children had behaved through the year, who were deserving of gifts, and who needed a touch of the birch rods that he carried with him into every home. St. Nicholas still goes about in some parts of the country, and in the bazaars and shops are sold little bunches of rods, real or made of candy, such as St. Nicholas is supposed to deal in. In some places Knight Rupert takes the place ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... was worthy of its name that day, and it was considerably past noon before they arrived at the Indian village to which they were bound. At first they could not find anyone at home, the whole community being away in the forest peeling bark from the birch trees for the making of canoes. But the same kind of thing had happened before, so Katherine was not at a loss. Picking up a tin pan, she commenced beating a military tattoo upon it with a thick stick; while Phil, with a trumpet improvised from ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... the tent. In the open ground, on the way to a solitary birch-tree, we could see a group of soldiers.... Sara pointed to them ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... or 10 per cent. birch tar, which has a characteristic pungent odour and is recommended as a remedy for eczema ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... who punished with death any one who might dare to look upon them. The height of land or plateau which constitutes the interior of the Labrador peninsula is from 2,000 to 2,500 feet above the sea level, fairly heavily wooded with spruce, fir, hackmatack, and birch, and not at all the desolate waste it has been pictured by many writers. The barrenness of Labrador is confined to the coast, and one cannot enter the interior in any direction without being struck by the latent possibilities of the peninsula were it not for the abundance ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt-out to a dead grammatical cinder? The Hinterschlag Professors knew syntax enough; and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, and could be acted-on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch-rods. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... other trees. It is made by steeping it in a strong solution of saltpetre and cutting it in small pieces. It is also called German tinder. Thome says that Boletus laricis and Polyporus fomentarius yield the "amadou" of commerce. Then, again, the birch Polyporus, P. betulinus, is used for razor strops. We need not say anything on the uses of fungi as articles of food. This subject has been exhausted by many able mycologists, and, excepting the mere mention ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... and thither he would go when this heart-sickness seemed too grievous to be borne. It was down in a glen beyond the fir-wood; and here the ordinary desolation of this bleak coast ceased, for there were plenty of young larches on the sides of the glen, with a tall silver-birch or two; while down in the hollow there were clumps of alders by the side of the brawling stream. And this dell that he sought was hidden away from sight, with the sun but partially breaking through the alders and rowans, and bespeckling ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... crimson ray would often rest on the end of his long nose, and the word "rum" be passed tittering along the benches. For some men are born to the mill, and others to the mitre, and still others to the sceptre; but Mr. Daaken was born to the birch. His long, lanky legs were made for striding after culprits, and his arms for caning them. He taught, among other things, the classics, of course, the English language grammatically, arithmetic in all its branches, book-keeping in the Italian manner, and the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... [Footnote 2: Dr. Thomas Birch, in a letter dated June 15, 1764, says that this letter was by Mr. Philip Yorke, afterwards Earl of Hardwicke, who was author also of another piece in the Spectator, but his son could not ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... command was heard to "mount" and the soldiers crossed themselves and mounted. Rostov riding in front gave the order "Forward!" and the hussars, with clanking sabers and subdued talk, their horses' hoofs splashing in the mud, defiled in fours and moved along the broad road planted with birch trees on each side, following the infantry and a battery that had ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... manipulated the birch. Head was all; heart and hand nothing. This was schoolteaching. As a punishment for failure to memorize lessons, there were various plans to disgrace and discourage the luckless ones. Standing in the corner with face to the wall, and the dunce-cap, had ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... catfish and tapping the birch trees for sap, had been suffered to fall into disuse. Rather, it seemed interesting to wander vaguely together, or in the long grass to read together from the books which Reuben would borrow from the cobwebby library of ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... coniferae, especially of the Lawsoniania and the Douglassi— the latter being one of the finest accessions to our list of conifers. It is graceful in form, and perfectly hardy. I also interspersed with these several birch-trees, whose slender and graceful habit of growth forms so fine a contrast to the dense foliage of the conifers. To thus paint, as it were, with trees, is a high source of pleasure in gardening. Among my various enjoyments this has been ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... a little wood of thick young pines, interspersed with hard maple and an occasional birch, close by the lake of the Eagles, where my summers are made happy. The closeness of the pines has caused their lower branches to die, as always in the deep forest, and the falling needles, year by year, have deepened the soft brown carpet that covers the forest ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... 17, 1673, in very simple fashion, in two birch-bark canoes, with five white voyageurs and a moderate supply of smoked meat and Indian corn, the two travelers set out to solve a perplexing problem, by tracing the course of the great river. Their only ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... glitter; surrounded by the fascinating specious life of the store, but drifting merely superficially upon it. The great place, with its columns of artificial marble and white censers of upward-shining electricity, glimmered like a birch forest by moonlight. Silver and jewels and silks and slippers flashed all about him. It was a marvellous education, for he soon learned to estimate these things at their proper value; which is low, for they have little to do with life itself. His work was tiring in the extreme—merely ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... two later I strolled out to the Giant's Stairway and sat down in the little rock chapel. There was a picnic at the Lovers' Leap, and I had that side of the island to myself. I was leaning back, half asleep, in the deep shadow, when the sound of voices roused me; a birch-bark canoe was passing close in shore, and two were in it,—Jeannette and our surgeon. I could not hear their words, but I noticed Rodney's expression as he leaned forward. Jeannette was paddling ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... Regime.] Aster's American Fur Company practically controlled the trade of Wisconsin and Michigan. It shipped its guns and ammunition, blankets, gewgaws, and whiskey from Mackinac to some one of the principal posts, where they were placed in the light birch canoes, manned by French boatmen, and sent throughout the forests to the minor trading-posts. Practically all of the Indian villages of the tributaries of the Great Lakes and of the upper Mississippi were regularly visited by ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... a turf seat, placed under a weeping birch of unusual magnitude and age, as Judah is represented sitting under her palm-tree, with an air at once of majesty and of dejection. Her figure was tall, commanding, and but little bent by the infirmities of old age. ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... was a large grove of oaks and birch-trees which had recently been purchased by the street railway company of Rowe, and it was to be used for the free entertainment of the people, with an undercurrent of consideration for the ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... especial, the story of Samson and the Philistines, of David and Goliath, of the prophets Elijah and Elisha; and after these came the New Testament stories and parables. Assisted by my uncles, I began to collect a library in a box of birch-bark about nine inches square, which I found quite large enough to contain a great many immortal works,—Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack and the Bean-Stalk, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Blue Beard, and Sinbad the Sailor, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... mean the short birch for me, Steele," said the factor gloomily. "Lac Bain is just now the emptiest, most fallen-to-pieces, unbusiness-like post between the Athabasca and the Bay. We've had two bad seasons running, and everything has gone wrong. ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... man's craftiness with a white man's superior intelligence. Insatiable in their thirst for adventure, they were willing to assume all manner of risks or privations. Spring might find them at Lake Champlain, autumn at the head-waters of the Mississippi, a trusty birch-bark having carried them the thousand miles between. Their work did not figure very heavily in the colony's annual balance-sheet of progress with its statistics of acreage newly cleared, homes built and harvests stowed ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... characteristic Swedish oven—a round column of white glazed bricks, with highly polished brass shutters in front of the small cubical fire-place, where nothing but birchwood was burned. In the narrow crack between the oven and the wall rested always a birch rod, which was often referred to at critical moments. A new rod, with brightly coloured feathers attached to the tip of every twig, appeared regularly on Shrove Tuesday and tended slightly to spoil that otherwise glorious day, when large cross buns ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... them from each other: In the sycamore, the bark is mottled; in the white birch, it is dull white; in the beech, it is smooth and gray; in the hackberry, it is covered with numerous corky warts; in the blue beech, the trunk of the tree is fluted, as in Fig. 54, and in the ironwood, the bark peels in thin ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... needed here on the farm since uncle cannot work as he used, and that he shall neither go away to marry, nor bring a wife home here. They had a bitter quarrel one day. I was gathering sassafras and birch buds for her and they did not know I was there. And Rachel said if he married Clarissa, she would persuade uncle not to leave him any part of the farm. Ought not the farm belong ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the coast not penetrating above three feet, and at Bear Lake, in latitude 64 degrees, not more than twenty inches. The frozen substratum does not of itself destroy vegetation, for forests flourish on the surface, at a distance from the coast.") In a like manner, in Siberia, we have woods of birch, fir, aspen, and larch, growing in a latitude (64 degrees) where the mean temperature of the air falls below the freezing point, and where the earth is so completely frozen, that the carcass of an animal embedded in it is perfectly preserved. (5/10. See Humboldt ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... even far into the era of the Reformation a yearly holiday was observed under the name of "The Procession of the Rods," in which all the pupils of the schools went out in the summer to the woods, and came back heavily laden with birch-twigs, cracking jokes by the ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... has a copy of Bishop Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" that he prizes highly. It is the first edition of this noble work, and was originally presented by Percy to Dr. Birch of the British Museum. The Judge found these three volumes exposed for sale in a London book stall, and he comprehended them without delay—a great bargain, you will admit, when I tell you that they cost the Judge but three shillings! How came these precious volumes into that book ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... more it said, the more clearly did it remember everything, and thought, "Those were quite merry days! But they may come again. Klumpey-Dumpey fell downstairs and yet he married the Princess. Perhaps I may marry a Princess too?" And then the Fir Tree thought of a pretty little Birch Tree that grew out in the forest: for the Fir Tree, that Birch was ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... having received a pressing letter from my Brother. I intended to have sent the Picture of the Riposo, which is nearly finished much to my satisfaction, but not quite. You shall have it soon. I now send the four numbers for Mr. Birch with best respects to him. The reason the Ballads have been suspended is the pressure of other business, but they will go ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... came to a deserted village. Either it had been abandoned because of warfare or to escape an unhealthy location, but the five examined it with great curiosity. Many of the lodges built of either poles or birch bark were still standing, with fragments of useless and abandoned household goods here and there. Paul found in one of the lodges a dried scalp with long straight hair, but, obeying a sensitive impulse he hid it from the ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... haste, and when we got there not a trace of the forest was to be seen. At last I asked a maize-reaper I fell in with, where on earth the Talpadi forest was? Over there, said he, pointing to a spot where some fifty birch-trees were withering in the sand like so many broomsticks, all set nicely in a row. And that, if you please, was the Talpadi forest which I had planted at a very great cost! You had better tell the man to plant ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... every law there are counsels attached. A law may be said to be a nucleus of precept, having an envelope of counsel. Every law has also a pendent called punishment for those who break it: this is called the sanction of the law. A law is also for promulgation, as a birch rod for application. The promulgation, or application, brings the law home to the subject, but is not part of the law itself. So much ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... other varieties of fish, with which this pond seemed to be almost inconveniently crowded, had all the appearance of veritable flying-fish. It was almost impossible to believe that they were not absolutely suspended in the air. A light birch canoe that lay placidly on the water, was reflected in its minutest fibres with a fidelity unsurpassed by the most exquisitely polished mirror. A small island, fairly laughing with flowers in full bloom, and affording little more space than just enough for a picturesque little building, seemingly ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... &c. removed regularly once in a fortnight, and have your KITCHEN CHIMNEY swept once a month; many good dinners have been spoiled, and many houses burned down, by the soot falling: the best security against this, is for the cook to have a long birch-broom, and every morning brush down all the soot within reach of it. Give notice to your employers when the contents of your COAL-CELLAR are diminished ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... Ridgely to the Lower Agency, to feel the enemy, bury the dead, and perform any other service that might arise. They went as far as Little Crow's village, but not finding any signs of Indians, they returned; and on the 1st of September they reached Birch Coulie, and encamped at the head of it. Birch Coulie is a ravine extending from the upper plateau to the river bottom, nearly opposite the ferry where ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... Not always, however, could their actions be thus described. Two soldiers who had just returned from an expedition to the Indian country, started for St. Paul on the evening of their return, carrying with them their blankets which they meant to sell for "refreshment". But their birch canoe upset and before aid could reach ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... lay without moving, his eyes fixed on the man. Carvel had seated himself on the snow-covered end of a birch log and was filling his pipe. Baree watched him light it; he noted with new interest the first purplish cloud of smoke that left Carvel's mouth. The man was not more than the length of two trap chains away—and he ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... whenever and wherever met with. The aristocratic elegant Rumohr was obliged to put up with the following from her: "Why are you not willing to exchange your boredom, your melancholy caprices, for a rifle? With your figure, slender as a birch, you could leap over abysses and spring from rock to rock; but you are lazy and infected with the disease of neutrality. You cannot hear the voices saying: 'Where is the enemy? On, on, for God, the Kaiser, and the Fatherland!'" ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... and began to look about. There was a moon, the evening was calm, and the dew sparkled on the grass by the hedgerows. A thick wood bordered one side of the road, which went up a long hill, and pale birch trunks that caught the light stood out against dusky firs. Now and then a rabbit ran across the road and plunged into the grass, and presently there was a sharp rattle of wings. A flock of wood-pigeons circled round in the moonlight ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... peoples, in the course of which a given art was brought from one part of the world to another. Hence, when we find the art duly installed in a particular place, and utilizing the local product, the bamboo in the south, let us say, or the birch in the north, as it naturally does, we easily slip into the error of supposing that the local products of themselves called the art into existence. Similar needs, we say, have generated similar expedients. No doubt there is some truth in this principle; but ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... loose-jointed man, with long black hair that lay well over his Byronic collar. He had a humorous eye and a cavernous mouth that was always twisting itself into grimaces, alternately side-splitting and terrifying. On occasions he would use the birch—and very thoroughly, too, as I have reason to remember —but he ruled us by fear of authority. For though he dressed like a clergyman, he always smelled strongly of stale cigar smoke, and his language at times was more forcible than ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... century, and forest-fires have devastated portions at different times; yet there is still an abundance left. Whitney speaks of the region as abounding in oak of various kinds, chestnut, white ash, beech, birch, and maple, with some butternut and walnut trees. The vigorous growth of the primeval forest indicated the strength and richness of the soil which has since been turned to such profitable use by the farmers. The houses in which the people live are all substantial, ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... the crumbling earth. He knelt above them breathless, he looked up to the maple-twigs, over which a faint reddish bloom had been cast in the night, beyond to the lower slopes of the mountain, delicately patterned with innumerable white stems of young birch-trees, and clasped his hands to see that a shimmer of green hung in their tops like a mist. His lips quivered, he laid his hand upon a tuft of grass with glossy, lance-like blades, ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... are of the following books: 'Birch's History of the Royal Society;'[Dagger] 'Murphy's Gray's Inn Journal;'[Dagger] 'Warton's Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, Vol. I.'[Dagger] 'Hampton's Translation of Polybius;'[Dagger] 'Blackwell's Memoirs of the Court of Augustus;'[Dagger] ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Canada, then possessed by the French, who carried on an extensive trade with the Indians, who brought their furs down to Montreal in their birch canoes. The French finally settled in the country of the savages, and married among the natives, thenceforward entirely devoting themselves to the life of the trapper and hunter. These marriages produced a race of half-breeds who were especially successful ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... roots and berries laid up for a time of scarcity were the property of the wife, and the husband would not touch them without her permission. In many cases such property was very extensive. Among the Menomini Indians, for instance, a woman of good circumstances would own as many as from 1200 to 1500 birch-bark vessels.[140] In the New Mexican pueblo what comes from outside the house, as soon as it is inside is put under the immediate control of the women. Bandelier, in his report of his tour in Mexico, tells us that "his host at Cochiti, New Mexico, ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... The Five Students The Wind's Prophecy During Wind and Rain He prefers her Earthly The Dolls Molly gone A Backward Spring Looking Across At a Seaside Town in 1869 The Glimpse The Pedestrian "Who's in the next room?" At a Country Fair The Memorial Brass: 186- Her Love-birds Paying Calls The Upper Birch-Leaves "It never looks like summer" Everything comes The Man with a Past He fears his Good Fortune He wonders about Himself Jubilate He revisits his First School "I thought, my heart" Fragment Midnight on the Great Western Honeymoon Time at an Inn The Robin "I rose and went to Rou'tor town" The ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... to conceive a more ideal place for fishing than this most beautiful lake, situated on a high plateau, surrounded by its reedy banks and flanked by woods of pine and birch, with waters of the deepest blue swarming with fish, while overhead is a cloudless sky. Ten years ago it was but seldom visited, now it is somewhat of a summer resort for the people of Kamloops; ...
— Fishing in British Columbia - With a Chapter on Tuna Fishing at Santa Catalina • Thomas Wilson Lambert
... speaking to the point—a circumstance commented on pleasantly by the President. The articles of the Constitution and By-Laws were discussed seriatim, and adopted, and then the Constitution, as a whole, was adopted. A letter was presented by Mrs. Lucy Stone, from the proprietor of the Birch House, Water Street, offering to entertain a few delegates—free. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... ambassadorial posts and at one time was Assistant Secretary of State in charge of American Republic Affairs. In recent years, Mr. Braden has given leadership to many patriotic organizations and efforts, such as For America and The John Birch Society; and, in testimony before various committees of Congress, he has given much valuable information about communist influences ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... etcetera; and the natives assert that white fish is sometimes taken. These lakes are generally fed by mountain streams, and many of them spread out, and are lost in the surrounding marshes. On the banks of the river, and in the interior, the trees consist of poplar, cypress, alder, cedar, birch, and different species of fir, spruce, and willow. There is not the same variety of wild fruit as on the Columbia; and this year (1827) the berries generally failed. Service berries, choke-cherries, gooseberries, strawberries, and red whortleberries are gathered; but among the Indians the service-berry ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... occasional wolverine. Sometimes at night a red fox would circle about the clearing and bark querulously, the cry contrasting oddly with the notes of whippoorwills and the calls of loons. The trees were largely oak and beech and ash and birch, and in the spring there were great splashes of white where the Juneberry trees had burst into bloom. In summer there was a dense greenness everywhere, and in autumn a great blaze of ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... mistaken, you lazy, ill-behaved wench. The new frock I had bought you shall be given to Nannie Cameron, and you shall wear your old one to the kirk. How will that suit your vanity? And you may be off to bed now directly, without any supper. There are twigs enough for a birch rod, my lady, if bed does not bring you to a better frame of mind. Run in now, and don't let me see your face before six ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... I saw violets, geraniums, roses, strelitzias, in full bloom, some growing under the shade of palms from Ceylon, Central Africa, and the warmest parts of North Australia, while others flourished beneath the bare branches of the oak, beech, birch, and lime ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... form, there are an hundred, exclusive of officers, of which there are many. I also gave orders to the people who were with me, to take an exact account of the canoes which were hauled up to convey their forces down in the spring. This they did, and told fifty of birch bark, and an hundred and seventy of pine; besides many others which were blocked out, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... grow greener while you wait," Kitty Clark said, reining her horse beside a chuckling brook and pointing to a near-by birch grove. "I feel just like this water. I want to run as fast as I can, calling, 'Spring is here! Spring is here!' Don't you perfectly love this odor of growing things? Listen to that phoebe! Doesn't it sound as if he were saying, 'Spring's ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... formerly used as a Naval School of Merchant Sailors. A two and one-half story building, facing the Dvina River and surrounded by about two acres of land, over one-half of which was covered with an attractive growth of white birch trees. The entire building, with the exception of one room, Chief Surgeon's Office, and two smaller rooms, for personnel of the Chief Surgeon's Office and the Convalescent Hospital, was devoted to the ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... regular contributor. Mr. Furniss's first sketch (published on p. 204, Vol. LXXIX., 1880) was a skit on what is ignorantly called the Temple Bar Griffin—(it is really an heraldic dragon, designed by Horace Jones)—executed by his friend C. B. Birch, A.R.A. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... tried to have a school, and to this end had hired an elderly Irishman, who gave hard lessons and a taste of the birch to children who had exhausted themselves in the mills and had no zest for learning. Mr. Dale had taken on more than two hundred pauper children from the workhouses and these were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... from Colonel ——, and briefly stated that peremptory orders had just been received from head-quarters, that all officers absent on leave should instantly return to duty. This was a disagreeable piece of intelligence, particularly at that hour, but necessitas non habet legem, as Dr. Birch used to tell our hero at school—the orders were imperative. Long and loud were the laments and remonstrances of the party, we are assured. After ordering Dart to be saddled, the Lieutenant stepped into the hall to have a moment's survey of the bearer of the letter, who the Colonel ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... Wilks," the lawyer cried; "another bump like that and the old thing'll split in two. Now, then, we'll drop the paddles and slip her along the bridge to the bank. There's a hole under that birch tree there, and some fine young birches that will do for rods back of it. Doesn't the birch make you feel like England, home ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... just seen widow Platts (formerly Sarah Birch), a poor, fat, decent woman, who keeps a small greengrocer's shop, in West Bar, Sheffield. She says she was born in Spring Street in the same town, on the 29th Sept. 1781; well remembers wondering why she was so much looked at when a girl: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... seems a trifle, but the making of all the spools requires the cutting of hundreds of acres of New England's best birch woods. Butter dishes, fruit crates, baskets, wooden boxes of all kinds, tools and handles, kitchen utensils, toys and sporting goods, picture molding and frames, grille and fretwork, excelsior, clothes-pins, matches, tooth-picks,—all these are mowing down our ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... and bolts and hammered them into the walls and roof; the goose plucked moss and stuffed it into the seams; the cock crew, and looked out that they did not oversleep themselves in the morning; and when the house was ready, and the roof lined with birch bark and thatched with turf, there they lived by themselves and were ...
— East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon • Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
... all Dutch artists, painted the portraits of Englishmen, and engraving was first illustrated by foreigners. Jacob Houbraken, another Dutch artist, born in 1698, was employed to execute portraits for Birch's "Heads of Illustrious Persons of Great Britain," published at London in 1743, and in these works may be seen the aesthetic taste inherited from his father, author of the biography of Dutch artists, and improved ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... and Max pinned them in his memory. In fact, Obed simply told them to follow the stream up three miles until they came to a bunch of seven birch trees on the right-hand bank. There they were to pick up a trail they would find, follow it half a mile, and at that they would see a cabin under the hemlocks and pines, which would be his humble ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... less than five kilometres; in the two days we had been descending nearly a metre for every kilometre we made in advance; and it hardly seemed as if this state of things could last, for the aneroid showed that we were getting very low down. How I longed for a big Maine birch-bark, such as that in which I once went down the Mattawamkeag at high water! It would have slipped down these rapids as a girl trips through a country dance. But our loaded dugouts would have shoved their ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... repelled a workman nor hindered a shepherd. I gave alike to the widow and to the married woman, and have not preferred the great to the small in my gifts." And we have the high authority of the late Dr. Samuel Birch for the statement that the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty abound in injunctions of a high ethical character. "To feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, bury the dead, loyally ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the tangled paths by the tiny pond! Oh, the little sandy spot below the tumbledown dike, where I used to catch gudgeons! And you tall birch-trees, with long hanging branches, from beyond which came floating a peasant's mournful song, broken by the uneven jolting of the cart, I send you my last farewell!... On parting with life, to you alone I stretch out my hands. Would I might ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... forth spokes of flaming light which threw the old trees into striking relief as they stood there with their dense crowns of green showing against a blue patch of sky. The light and shimmer of that patch contrasted sharply with the heavy pink cloud which lay massed above a young birch-tree visible on the horizon before us, while, a little further to the right, the parti-coloured roofs of the Kuntsevo mansion could be seen projecting above a belt of trees and undergrowth—one side of them reflecting the glittering rays of the sun, and the other ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... boys," said a deep voice which all recognised full well. The door opened, and old Rowley himself, habited in his dressing-gown, with a candle in one hand and a birch in the other, appeared at the entrance, followed by good kind Mrs Jones, the housekeeper. Every one scuttled away to their beds as fast as they could go, except Alick Murray and Terence. Murray was the first Rowley laid ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... Haro! a l'aide mon prince, on me fait tort!" preserves the custom of Normandy, and of Rollo the Dane, in Jersey, so that the sound of it "makes the workman drop his tools, the woman her knitting, the militiaman his musket, the fisherman his net, the schoolmaster his birch, and the ecrivain his babble, to await the judgment of the ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... oats, more boulders than trees, and more snow than anything. It was a solitary, thinly peopled region, mostly of bare hills, and partially cultivated glens, each with its small stream, on the banks of which grew here and there a silver birch, a mountain ash, or an alder tree, but with nothing capable of giving much shade or shelter, save cliffy banks and big stones. From many a spot you might look in all directions and not see a sign of human or any other habitation. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... heavy, gold is heavier; Ossa and Olympus are rough and unequal; the steppes of Tartary, though high, are of uniform elevation: there is not a rock, nor a birch, nor a cytisus, nor an arbutus upon them great enough to shelter a new-dropped lamb. Level the Alps one with another, and where is their sublimity? Raise up the vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... of red birch, white birch and scrub oak grafted with European hazels and chinkapins, but the grafts all died. The grafting was done as an experiment in the hope that we might possibly utilize our waste lands which are covered with birch and scrub oak by grafting these trees with ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... had now reached the Mississippi poured swiftly downward, its waters swollen, and bearing upon them great sheets of ice, the contribution of the distant north. It was no safe channel for their frail birch-bark canoes, and they were obliged to wait a week till the vast freightage of ice had run past. Then, on the 13th of February, 1682, they launched their canoes on the great stream, and began their famous voyage down its ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... thousand years ago. Yes, in detail, exactly the same things were seen then that may yet be beheld. The reeds had the same height, and bore the same kind of long leaves and bluish-brown feathery plumes that they bear now; the birch stood there, with its white bark and its fine loosely-hanging leaves, just as now; and as regards the living creatures that dwelt here—why, the fly wore its gauzy dress of the same cut that it wears now; and the favourite colours of the stork were ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... your name on them," said Sara Ray. "His father told him he would whip him if he didn't stop, but Cyrus keeps right on. He told Flossie it relieved his feelings. Flossie says he cut yours and his together on the birch tree in front of the parlour window, and a row ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... its attractive waxy white flowers, and potentilla, with bloom of gold, are shrubs which lend a charm to much of the mountain-section. Black birch and alder trim many of the streams, and the mountain maple is thinly scattered from the foothills to nine thousand feet altitude. Wild roses are frequently found near the maple, and gooseberry bushes fringe ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... browse your way through the forest, nipping here and there a rosy leaf of young winter-green, a fragrant emerald tip of balsam-fir, a twig of spicy birch, if by chance you pluck the leaves of Wood-Magic and eat them, you will not know what you have done, but the enchantment of the tree-land will enter your heart and the charm of the wildwood will flow ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn? Where may the grave of that good man be?— By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, Under the twigs of a young birch tree! The Oak that in summer was sweet to hear, And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year; And whistled and roar'd in the winter alone, Is gone,—and the birch in its stead is grown.— The Knight's bones are dust, And his good sword rust;— ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... garters were wrapt as neatly and as firm below the knee as if they had been newly tied. The shoes were all open in the seams, the hemp having decayed, but the soles, upper leathers and wooden heels, which were made of birch, were all as fresh as any of those we wore. There was one thing I could not help remarking, that in the inside of one of the shoes there was a layer of cow's dung, about one-eighth of an inch thick, and in the hollow of the sole fully one-fourth of an inch. ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... out of the tent. In the open ground, on the way to a solitary birch-tree, we could see a group of soldiers.... Sara pointed ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... softly, scarcely audibly, or loudly demanding their wages for the previous day, but they were not paid for fear they should go away before to-morrow. Old Tsybukin, with his coat off, was sitting in his waistcoat with Aksinya under the birch-tree, drinking tea; a lamp was burning on ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... devoted to groceries and glory. His venerable schoolmistress, who has outlived her illustrious pupil, and is now supported by the town whose founders were formed by her care, and who laid the foundation of our hero's greatness by the powerful application of birch at the seat of learning, assured us, in a recent interview, that the military propensities of Muggs were developed at an early age. She observed that it was impossible to fix his attention on the classic page of Noah Webster when the ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... The houses on the other shore, each surrounded with its patch of cleared land, were sadly distant from one another. Behind the clearings, and on either side of them to the river's bank, it was always forest: a dark green background of cypress against which a lonely birch tree stood out here and there, its bole naked and white as the column ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... his face and tore deep through the skin before he could lift his wide-flung arms to protect it. And then, almost before he realized what had happened, she stood back, groping blindly away from him until her hands found a birch sapling. She clung to it with a desperately tight clasp as if to hold herself erect. A little spot of red flecked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at her ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... dolphin, spouted through the orifice; along all its humble coasts, it had undermined and rafted-down the goodlier timber of the forest; and on these rough clearings it now set and tended primrose gardens, and planted woods of willow, and made a favourite of the silver birch. Through all these friendly features the path, its human acolyte, conducted our two wanderers downward—Otto before, still pausing at the more difficult passages to lend assistance; the Princess following. From time to time, when he turned to help ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my birth I had no aptitude for the sciences. I received from fifty to a hundred birch rods nearly every day, but ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... education, was not fortunate in his teachers. Saint- Laurent, to whom he was first confided, was, it is true, the man in all Europe best fitted to act as the instructor of kings, but he died before his pupil was beyond the birch, and the young Prince, as I have related, fell entirely into the hands of the Abbe Dubois. This person has played such an important part in the state since the death of the King, that it is fit that he should be made known. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... that two hunters had crossed the creek that morning, and had not yet returned. These were the two men who had been so inhumanly murdered. Immediate search was made for the canoe, and it was found a little above the spot where the men were hiding. It was a very large buoyant birch canoe, constructed for the transportation of a numerous household, with all their goods, and such game ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... with the unassisted hand, a way for the water. I have found in the ravine—which I learned very much to like as a scene of exploration, though I never failed to quit it sadly bemired—handfuls of hazel-nuts, of the ordinary size, but black as jet, with the cups of acorns, and with twigs of birch that still retained almost unchanged their silvery outer crust of bark, but whose ligneous interior existed as a mere pulp. I have even laid open, in layers of a sort of unctuous clay, resembling fuller's earth, leaves of oak, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... sheepskin over his shoulders, and legs bare below the knee, and to him the charge of the flock was committed, with signs which he evidently understood and replied to with a gruff 'Ay, ay!' The three went on the way, over the slope of a hill, partly clothed with heather, holly and birch trees, as it rose above the moss. Hob led the pony, and there was something in his grim air and manner that hindered any conversation between the two young people. Only Hal from time to time gathered a flower for the young lady, scabious and globe flowers, and ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... never acted according to such instructions, but always followed his own devices). Then he unleashed the hounds, fastened the leashes to his saddle, whistled to the pack, and disappeared among the young birch trees the liberated hounds jumping about him in high delight, wagging their tails, and sniffing and gambolling with one another as they dispersed ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... caught on fire last Tuesday night. He reckons it was caused by a defective flue, for the fire caught in the north wing. This is one of Plum's bon mots, however. He tries to make light of it, but the wood he has been using all winter was white birch, and when he got a big dose of hickory at the same place last week it was so dark that he didn't notice the difference, and before he knew it he had a bigger fire than he had allowed. In the midst of a pleasant flow of conversation ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... of a Freshman, who, just escaped the trammels of "home, sweet home," and the pedagogue's tyrannical birch, for the first time in his life, with the academical gown, assumes the toga virilis, and feels himself a Man.—Alma Mater, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... and hardly breathed, they stood so still. They looked at St. Nicholas with big, big eyes. In one hand St. Nicholas carried two large packages; in the other, a birch rod. ...
— The Dutch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... such a spring day, when the air was pungent with the smell of sprouting birch and pine, that General Viggo and his trusty army had betaken themselves to the cataract to share in the sport. They were armed with their bows, as usual, knowing that they were always liable to be surprised by their vigilant ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... some dry brush and a lot of birch bark, piled them up against the wall inside, and threw plenty of firewood on this. With flint and steel Quonab made the vital spark, the birch bark sputtered, the dry, resinous logs were easily set ablaze, and ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... pine are found in the numerous peat bogs which supply a large proportion of the fuel locally used. In Bornholm, it should be mentioned, the flora is more like that of Sweden; not the beech, but the pine, birch and ash are ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
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