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More "Thatch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... men, in their strange attire, were brought on shore; and Ned saw that his suspicions were correct, and that they were regarded by their captors as gods. Further proof was given of this when they were escorted to a large shed, composed of a roof of thatch supported on four upright posts, which stood in the center ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... judge what an expensive Herr. Streets were hung with cloth, carpeted with cloth, no end of draperies and cloth; your oppressed imagination feels as if there was cloth enough, of scarlet and other bright colors, to thatch the Arctic Zone. With illuminations, cannon-salvos, fountains running wine. Friedrich had made two Bishops for the nonce. Two of his natural Church-Superintendents made into Quasi-Bishops, on the Anglican model,—which was always a favorite with him, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... very gay," said Eleanor, who began to lose her temper. "All Mr. Henley's sketches are gay. The thatch on the house reminds me of the 'ends' of Berlin wool that are kept, after a big piece of work, for kettle-holders. The yellow tree and the blue tree are very pretty: there always is a yellow tree and a blue tree in Mr. Henley's sketches. I don't know what kind ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... thrust the box up under the thatch of the roof so that it was impossible to suspect that the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... flights of fire-arrows into the fort to burn the straw-thatched houses. The flames caught in many places; but with the help of the Indians they were extinguished, though several Frenchmen were wounded, and there was great fright for a time. But the thatch was soon stripped off and the roofs covered with deer and bear skins, while mops fastened to long poles, and two large wooden canoes filled with water, were made ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... cliffs, flung himself upon the first horse he met, and rode furiously to the huts at Derncleugh. All was there dark and desolate; and, as he dismounted to make more minute search, he stumbled over fragments of furniture which had been thrown out of the cottages, and the broken wood and thatch which had been pulled down by his orders. At that moment the prophecy, or anathema, of Meg Merrilies fell heavy on his mind. "You have stripped the thatch from seven cottages, see that the roof-tree of your own house stand ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... is artistically carved by the Polynesians, Japanese, Hindoos, and other benighted heathen, who have not yet learnt the true methods of civilised machine-made shoddy manufacture. The leaves serve as excellent thatch; on the flat blades, prepared like papyrus, the most famous Buddhist manuscripts are written; the long mid-ribs or branches (strictly speaking, the leaf-stalks) answer admirably for rafters, posts, or fencing; the fibrous sheath at the base is a remarkable natural imitation of cloth, employed ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... had been left behind in the nest spread himself out to his full size. He was now, you know, a householder; but his grandeur did not last long: in the night red fire broke through the windows, the flames seized on the roof, the dry thatch blazed up high, the whole house was burnt, and the young sparrow with it; but the young married couple escaped, fortunately, with life. When the sun rose again, and every thing looked so refreshed and invigorated, as ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... flowers o'er the thatch, And the swallow chirps sweet from her nest in the wall; All trembling with transport, he raises the latch, And the voices of loved ones reply ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... had not been afraid of being ridiculous, I would have followed her. But I fancied that the apparition of a man in a red and yellow bath-robe, with an unkempt thatch of hair, walking up to her and assuring her that he would protect her would probably put her into hysterics. I had done that once before, when burglars had tried to break into the house, and had startled the parlor maid into bed for a week. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Cot! where thrives th' industrious swain, Source of his pride, his pleasure, and his gain, Screen'd from the winter's-wind, the sun's last ray Smiles on the window and prolongs the day; Projecting thatch the woodbine's branches stop, And turn their blossoms to the casement's top; All need requires is in that cot contain'd, And much that taste untaught and unrestrain'd Surveys delighted: there she loves to trace, In one gay picture, all the royal ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... house-top—for the house, you must know, was thatched with sods, and a fine crop of grass was growing there. Now their house lay close up against a steep down, and he thought if he laid a plank across to the thatch at the back he'd easily get the ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... with rhetoric loose, can we check man's brute? Assemblies of men on their legs invoke Excitement for wholesome diversion: there shoot Electrical sparks between their dry thatch And thy waved torch, more to kindle than light. 'Tis instant between you: the trick of a catch (To match a Batrachian croak) Will thump them a frenzy or fun in their veins. Then may it be rather the well-worn joke Thou repeatest, to stop conflagration, and write ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... parish church is partly Perpendicular and partly of a later date, while the chancel is modern, it stands upon the foundations of a small earlier church, which, surrounded by a few poor cottages, with walls of cob and roof of thatch, a rough ladder leading to a sort of loft, which was the sleeping apartment of all the family, and a little patch of herb garden in front of each, comprised the village of Lynton when we find it first, in the thirteenth century, mentioned ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... must be poverty-stricken folk indeed, for I saw that the houses showed no sign whatever of the ugliness that the Marquesan has aped from the whites. Yet neither were they the wretched huts of straw and thatch which I had seen in the valley and supposed to be the only remnants of ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... And nothing they gainsayed it; so she drew forth something hid, In wrappings of wheat-straw winded, and into Sinfiotli's place She cast it all down swiftly; then she covereth up her face And beneath the winter starlight she wended swift away. But her gift do the thralls deem victual, and the thatch on the hall they lay, And depart, they too, to their slumber, now dight was ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... without nails? He tried various ways. At last he laid the longest boughs in a row against the side of the fallen tree. This left a little place beneath their slope into which it was possible to creep. Archie smiled with satisfaction, and proceeded to thatch the sloping roof with moss and bits of bark. Then he grubbed up the green cushion and transferred it bodily ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... a charcoal-burner in the heart of the forests of Wiltshire. Upon reaching the hut, and showing to the man the king's signet-ring, which when leaving the standard he had told him would be the signal that any who might come for it were sent by him, the man produced the standard from the thatch of his cottage, in which it was deeply buried, and hearing that it was again to be unfurled called his two stalwart sons from their work and at once set out with Edmund and ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... stair of rock into the sea. The draught of air drew down under the foliage in the very bottom of the den, which was a perfect arbour for coolness. In front it stood open on the blue bay and the Casco lying there under her awning and her cheerful colours. Overhead was a thatch of puraos, and over these again palms brandished their bright fans, as I have seen a conjurer make himself a halo out of naked swords. For in this spot, over a neck of low land at the foot of the mountains, the trade-wind streams into Anaho Bay in a flood of almost constant volume ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... could wish, and the land around being exceedingly fertile, he applied himself diligently to build a church, magazines, and a house for himself, all of stone, the others being of timber covered with thatch, every person being allowed to build according to his own fancy and ability; but the plan was regularly marked out in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... hut warm and comfortable, and on my return found it very different. I fear we had not put enough thatch upon it, and the ten days' rain had proved too much for it. It was now neither air-tight nor water-tight; the floor, or rather the ground, was soaked and soppy with mud; the nice warm snow-grass on which I had lain so comfortably the night before I left, was muddy and wet; altogether, ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... half-an-inch to three inches in diameter, driven firmly into the ground, in an upright position, as close together as possible, and held in their places by pine-wood battens. The roof was composed of palm-leaves, or "fan-thatch." The ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... rushing profusion. The wild roses of June were like the high notes of a violin, and there was clover, and mown hay. In the southeast the clouds were banking, but still the moon rose high, and the cottage was clear as in daylight, clearer even in the mind's eye—the whitewashed walls, the thatch like silver, the swallows' nests beneath the eaves. The hard round sea-cobbles beneath his feet were clear and individual, and to where he sat in the haggard came a girl's song from ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... flames lighted up the sky that night. The little thatch houses, and the children in their quaint garbs moving against the flames composed ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... about four in the afternoon to rise in sudden strong gusts. The rooks had been pitch-falling all the morning, so we knew that bad weather was due; and when we came out from the schooling that Mr. Glennie gave us in the hall of the old almshouses, there were wisps of thatch, and even stray tiles, flying from the roofs, ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... tinge to be found amongst the browns and yellows, according to the respective periods of their construction. Some of them are enveloped in blue smoke, which oozes through every interstice of the thatch, and spreads itself, like a cloud hovering over these frail habitations, or moves slowly along, like a strata of vapour not far from the ground, as though too heavy to ascend, and loses itself in the thin air, so inspiring to all who have courage ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... partially cut the windows out of the walls, putting wood across to support the top. I should have explained that the turf used in building was the upper and coarser part of the peat, which was plentiful in the neighbourhood. The thatch-eaves of the cottage itself projected over the joining of the new roof, so as to protect it from the drip; and David soon put a thick thatch of new straw upon the little building. Second-hand windows were ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... go where there is peace, And where joy wakes for ever: There I shall meet my hunter; He shall build our lodge beside the murmuring stream, And thatch it with the vine, whose ripe, black grapes Shall hang adown in clusters; Our little babes shall pluck them. Warrior, I shall not be your wife— Father, you have no daughter— Brothers, your sister lies upon the earth, Cold, bleeding, lifeless, and ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... and his eyes are grown hollow; Like me, with my thatch of the snow; When he dies, then I hope I may follow, And go where the racehorses go. I don't want no harping nor singing — Such things with my style don't agree; Where the hoofs of the horses are ringing ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... the head of the vale. There are no villages; the houses stand here and there in the shadow of the groves, or are scattered along the banks of the winding stream; their golden-hued bamboo sides and gleaming white thatch forming a beautiful contrast to the perpetual verdure in which they are embowered. There are no roads of any kind in the valley. Nothing but a labyrinth of footpaths twisting and turning among the thickets ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... or it may be a mere shed. There are also regular log-cabins encountered with locked corners, especially among the southern Tarahumares. Finally, when a Tarahumare becomes civilised, he builds himself a house of stone and mud, with a roof of boards, or thatch, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... and spread it out; and therefore I have a right to look upon their foul frocks as scandalous and vile; at all events no miner should ever shake hands with 'em, or drink out of the same mug. I am determined too to die a man of honour, as I have grown old, without ever setting foot under their thatch roofs, or on their threshing-floors; I have preserved myself four and fifty years from this disgrace, and heaven will continue to guard me from it ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... and fir, the firs gradually dwarfing into a beautiful chaparral, the most beautiful, I think, I have ever seen, the flat fan-shaped plumes thickly foliaged and imbricated by snow pressure, forming a smooth, handsome thatch which bears cones and thrives as if this repressed condition were its very best. It extends up to an elevation of about fifty-five hundred feet. Only a few trees more than a foot in diameter and more than fifty feet high ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... down to Chagres for some stores, and returning, late in the evening, too tired to put away my packages, had retired to rest at once. My little maid, who was not so fatigued as I was, and slept more lightly, woke me in the night to listen to a noise in the thatch, at the further end of the store; but I was so accustomed to hear the half-starved mules of Cruces munching my thatch, that I listened lazily for a few minutes, and then went unsuspiciously into another heavy sleep. ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... week, and then the snow'll melt, and we'll all go back together." The cheerful gaiety of the young man and Mr. Oakhurst's calm infected the others. The Innocent, with the aid of pine boughs, extemporized a thatch for the roofless cabin, and the Duchess directed Piney in the rearrangement of the interior with a taste and tact that opened the blue eyes of that provincial maiden to their fullest extent. "I reckon now you're used ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... a hunter of beasts and a fighter of men. I discovered fire and covered my nakedness with the skins of animals. I builded cunning traps, and wove branches and long grasses and rushes and reeds into the thatch and roof-tree. I fashioned arrows and spears of bone and flint. I drew iron from the earth, and broke the first ground, and planted the first seed. I gave law and order to the tribe and taught it to fight with craft and wisdom. I enabled the young men to grow ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... may have been right. His red thatch of hair was thick as ever, for all he'd grandchildren of ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... who told the fact saw nothing of consequence in it; Mrs. Melville, to whom she was telling it, saw nothing but perhaps a lesson on the duty of having chimneys regularly swept, because of the danger to neighboring thatch. But had not Annie been seated in the shadow, her ghastly countenance would, even to the most casual glance, have betrayed a certain guilty horror, for now she knew that she had found and given away what she ought at ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... day. And I knew well the reason, for not many rods distant was the hut where dwelt one Margery Key, an ancient woman, who had been verily tied crosswise and thrown in a pond for witchcraft and been weighed against the church Bible, and had her body searched for witch-marks and the thatch of her house burned. I know not why she had not come to the stake withal, but instead she had fled to Virginia, where, witches being not so common, were treated with more leniency. It may have been that she had ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... much attention to his brother's curt query as he might have bestowed upon the buzzing of a fly. His dark eyes below his shaggy thatch of hair were fixed, deeply shining, ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... her way to the side of the hut; then her hand fumbled along the top of the wall; it seemed to Sunni for an interminable time. At a certain place she parted the thatch and put her hand into it with a little rustling that Sunni thought might be heard in the very heart of the palace. Then she drew out a small, tight sewn, oilskin bag, that had taken the shape of the book inside it, groped across the hut again, and gave it ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... unless she were warned off. But to show a light from the coast meant a hundred pounds fine or twelve months' hard labour. The King slewed round in his chair and looked at the great pile of shavings in the fireplace. A hundred pounds fine with the chance of burning the house-thatch about his ears! ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... proof of their prowess, would turn out to great advantage, it being resolved to convey him to the coast, and sell him to the Europeans. While some persons proposed one plan, and some another, an old man offered a scheme. This was, to strip the roof of a house of its thatch, and to carry the bamboo frame, (the pieces of which are well secured together by thongs,) and throw it over the lion. If, in approaching him, he should attempt to spring upon them, they had nothing to do but ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... from behind him, and a fox barked from the thicket's edge. Then he found himself on the stream-side, and he stayed and looked from side to side, and lo! on the other side of the stream a little house that looked familiar to him as a yeoman's dwelling in the builded lands, and the thatch thereon shone under the moon and its windows were yellow with candle-light; and so homely it seemed to him, that he thrust his sword into the sheath and lightly crossed the brook, and came to the door and laid his hand upon the latch and lifted ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman? Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers,— Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands, Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven? Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed! Scattered like ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... President [Ratcliffe] and Martin, being little beloved, of weake judgement in dangers, and loose industrie in peace, committed the management of all things abroad to Captain Smith; who by his own example, good words, and fair promises, set some to mow, others to binde thatch, some to builde houses, others to thatch them, himselfe always bearing the greatest taske for his own share, so that in short time he provided most of them with lodgings, neglecting any for himselfe. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... skirted it by climbing over the rocks, then on as fast as he could go, on the coast road now it was safe—he would meet no one there—then up along the little path that wound through dead whins and boulders, up to the cottage, where the rain was dripping from the thatch. Mick never stopped till he was at the door. There was no answer to his knock. "Pat," he whispered, "let me in." Still there was no answer. He looked in at the window: the fire was out, and the place looked deserted. "He's away," he ...
— The Weans at Rowallan • Kathleen Fitzpatrick
... cooking the supper, I prepared our bed, by breaking a quantity of fine hemlock-brush to thatch the bottom of the camp, to keep us from the damp ground, which it did quite effectually. I have camped out, I dare say, hundreds of times, both in winter and summer; and I never caught cold yet. I recommend, from experience, a hemlock- bed, and hemlock-tea, ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... The thatch on the roof was as golden, Though dusty the straw was and old, The wind had a peal as of trumpets, Though blowing and barren and cold, The mother's hair was a glory Though loosened and torn, For under the eaves in the gloaming ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... grass, and seeming a mere cart-path, stood a deserted-looking, black and white, timbered cottage, which was half a ruin. Close to it was a dripping spinney, its trees forming a darkling background to the tumble-down house, whose thatch was rotting into holes, and its walls sagging forward perilously. The bit of garden about it was neglected and untidy, here and there windows were broken, and stuffed with pieces of ragged garments. Altogether a sinister ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and by the light of a new fire I looked at him. Ye Saints! What hair! It must have been more than a foot in length, and the flaming strands radiated in all directions from an isolated and central spire which shot out straight toward the sky. I knew what to do with his tatters, but that crimson thatch dumfounded me. However there was no going back now, so I set to work upon him. Luckily my wardrobe represented three generations of O'Ruddy clothes, and there was a great plenty. I put my impostor in a suit of blue velvet with a flowered waistcoat and stockings of pink. ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... fingers of one hand slowly through his sunburnt thatch of hair. "Doggone my hide, if it don't look like they took it with them," he murmured. "But that ain't reasonable, Dave. The man in charge of this hold-up knew his business. It was smooth work all the way through. If it ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... reached his place among the hills, and the good white letters under the thatch showed clear to his eyes. Pulling himself together he drove with an air about the gable and into the wide open yard at the back, fowls clearing out of his way, a sheep-dog coming to welcome him, a calf mewing mournfully over the half-door ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... cried, "on my right hand, I swear to avenge it! If that I fail, if that I spill not ten men's souls for each, may this hand wither from my body! I broke this Duckworth like a rush; I beggared him to his door; I burned the thatch above his head; I drove him from this country; and now, cometh he back to beard me? Nay, but, Duckworth, this time ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are often formed by two exterior surfaces of stone, filled up with earth in the middle, which makes them very warm. The roof is generally bad. They are thatched, sometimes with straw, sometimes with heath, sometimes with fern. The thatch is secured by ropes of straw, or of heath; and, to fix the ropes, there is a stone tied to the end of each. These stones hang round the bottom of the roof, and make it look like a lady's hair in papers; but I should think that, when there is wind, they would come ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... the red road from the bungalow, looking like a huge beehive with its heavy enveloping roof of thatch, that was Jean Baptiste's head-quarters, was a particularly sacred pipal of huge growth. It was an extraordinary octopus-like tree, and most sacred, for perched in the embrace of its giant arms was a shrine that had been lifted from its base in the ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... at Whithyford. Mrs Schank lived down a lane a little way off the road, and thither, my mother carrying the Little Lady on one arm and holding me by the other, and my father laden with bundles and bandboxes, we proceeded. The cottage was whitewashed, and covered with fresh, thick thatch. In front was the neatest of neat little gardens, surrounded by a well-clipped privet hedge, and the greenest of green gates. Indeed, neatness and order reigned everywhere outside as it did, as I was soon to find, in the interior. The Misses Schank had been expecting us. Three of them appeared ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... manufactures of linen, or of linen mixed with cotton, or with wool, not particularly enumerated, or otherwise charged with duty, not being articles wholly or in part made up; magna-grocia ware; manuscripts; maps, and charts; matresses; meat, (salted or fresh), not otherwise described; medals; palmetto-thatch manufactures; parchment; pens; plantains; potatoes; pork, fresh and salted; silk, thrown or dyed, viz., silk, single or tram, organzine, or crape-silk; thread, not otherwise enumerated or described; woollens, viz., manufactures ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... no danger of exhaustin' the subject—not a chance. For she's some complicated old girl, take it from me. First off, there's that stick-around disposition of hers. Now, I expect that just naturally grew on her, same as my pink thatch did on me. She can't help it; and what's the ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... is but a very small place indeed, now-a-days,—yet it possesses a church, grey and ancient, whose massive Norman tower looks down upon gable and chimney, upon roof of thatch and roof of tile, like some benignant giant keeping watch above them all. Near-by, of course, is the inn, a great, rambling, comfortable place, with time-worn settles beside the door, and with a mighty sign a-swinging before it, upon which, plainly to be seen (when the ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... towns, Nottingham, Derby, Burton, Lichfield and Walsall. The outskirts of these were composed of wretched dwellings, visibly stamped with dirt and poverty. But the buildings in the exterior of Birmingham rose in a style of elegance. Thatch, so plentiful in other places, was not to be met with in this. The people possessed a vivacity I had never beheld. I had been among dreamers, but now I saw men awake. Their very step along the street showed alacrity. Every man seemed to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... you look now very much like the young Augustus," returned Rose, rather pleased on the whole to see what a finely shaped head appeared after the rough thatch was off. ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... "it's no sae bad now as it was in forty-six. The Hielands are what they call pacified. Small wonder, with never a gun or a sword left from Cantyre to Cape Wrath, but what tenty* folk have hidden in their thatch! But what I would like to ken, David, is just how long? Not long, ye would think, with men like Ardshiel in exile and men like the Red Fox sitting birling the wine and oppressing the poor at home. But it's a kittle thing to decide what folk'll ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The roof-thatch overhead Shall cover the stars' bright eyes; The fleecy quilt shall be coverlid For your meek virginities, And your wedding, ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... time I might attain this joy—that this book might find shelter beneath roofs of thatch, and that the village girls, as they spin and turn the wheel, humming the while their much-loved verses, of the girl who so loved to make music that while fiddling she lost her geese, or of the orphan, who, fair as the dawn, went to drive home the birds at eventide—if even those village girls might ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... during the winter. The savages were of fine figure and of olive complexion. They adorned themselves with an embroidery skilfully interwoven with feathers and beads, and dressed their hair in a variety of braids, like those at Saco. Their dwellings were conical in shape, covered with thatch of rushes and corn-husks, and surrounded by cultivated fields. Each cabin contained one or two beds, a kind of matting, two or three inches in thickness, spread upon a platform on which was a layer of elastic staves, and the whole raised a foot ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... of this wilde Wood, And every bosky bourn from side to side My daily walks and ancient neighbourhood, And if your stray attendance be yet lodg'd, Or shroud within these limits, I shall know Ere morrow wake, or the low roosted lark From her thatch't pallat rowse, if otherwise I can conduct you Lady to a low But loyal cottage, where you may be safe 320 Till further quest. La: Shepherd I take thy word, And trust thy honest offer'd courtesie, Which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds With ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... So all we've got to do is to look for some young duke of polished manners and exterior, with a thatch of light hair." ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... into a mat two feet wide, eight or ten feet long, and firmly bounded and held together on one side by the unbreakable backbone. This is a "jaolee," lighter than slates, or tiles, and more handy than any form of thatch. You have just to arrange your "jaolees" neatly on your bamboo frame, each overlapping the one below it, then tie them securely in their places with coir rope and your roof is made for ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... within awhile to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous. Now King Henry making a Masque at the Cardinal Wolsey's house, and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but idle smoak, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very ground. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabrick, wherein yet nothing did perish ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... silent comfort and there was so much going on; so much that even the "miserable women" could not hear, though they were free to come and go. But one day when Down was purring on Bija's lap in the straw thatch which was all the three had for lodging, a ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... delivering an address to his flock from the altar, urging them to the necessity of bestirring themselves in the repairs of the chapel, which was in a very dilapidated condition, and at one end let in the rain through its worn-out thatch. A subscription was necessary; and to raise this among a very impoverished people was no easy matter. The weather happened to be unfavourable, which was most favourable to Father Phil's purpose, for the rain dropped its arguments through the roof upon the kneeling people below in the most ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... similar machine. In 1885, at Preston, the competitions were concerned with two-horse, three-horse and four-horse whipple-trees, and packages for conveying fresh butter by rail. In 1886, at Norwich, a prize of L. 25 was awarded for a thatch-making machine. In 1887, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, a prize of L. 200 went to a compound portable agricultural engine, one of L. 100 to a simple portable agricultural engine, and lesser prizes to a weighing-machine for horses ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... upwards and along the roof until they rested on the spot directly over his head, where they became fixed, and, at the same time, opened out to a glare, compared to which all his previous glaring was as nothing—for there, in the thatch, looking down upon him, was the angular head of a huge python. The snake was rolled up in a tight coil, and had evidently spent the night within a yard of the professor's head! Being unable to make out what sort of snake it was, and fearing that it might ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... the details of our domain was reserved as a sort of reward for present task and toil. According to the formula neatly printed in official journals, the building of a slab hut is absurdly easy—quite a pastime for the settler eager to get a roof of bark or thatch over his head. The frame, of course, goes up without assistance, and then the principal item is the slabs for walls. When you have fallen your tree and sawn off a block of the required length, you have only to ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... There was the same healthy bronze upon his face, Clarissa perceived, when he took off his hat, and hung it up above him; rather a handsome face, with a long straight nose, dark blue eyes with thick brown eyebrows, a well cut mouth and chin, and a thick thatch of crisp dark brown hair waving round a broad, intelligent-looking forehead. The firm, full upper lip was half-hidden by a carefully trained moustache; and in his dress and bearing the stranger had altogether a military air: one could fancy him a cavalry soldier. That bare muscular hand seemed made ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... can had left a trailing stream of fluid behind it as it went spinning down to earth. All that stream of inflammable stuff was aflame. The can itself struck earth and seemed to explode, and the trailing mass of fire was borne onward by the wind and lay across a row of thatch-roofed buildings. An incredible sheet of fire spread out. The stuff in the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... us eggs and made us coffee. I remember that night as clearly as if it were yesterday. We sat in front of the fire with the bedding and the mattresses airing behind us until late into the night. The rain got worse too. There was a hole in the thatch overhead, and through it I saw the lightning slash the sky, as I lay in bed. Very few people ever came up or down that valley; and the next morning, after the storm, the chamois were close about the inn, on the grass. We went on together. That was ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... any sort is not even thought of. Mud cabins on the bogs of Ireland are not poorer places to live in. In the warmer regions, the common people live in mere huts of cane, consisting of a few poles covered with dry plantain leaves, palms, or cornstalks, made into a thatch by braiding and twining them together. A mat woven of dried husks and laid upon the ground forms the only bed. Neither chairs, tables, nor benches are seen in these cabins,—they are unknown luxuries. In the more tropical regions of ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... at the command, for in imagination he had been far away in a thatch-roofed cottage behind hawthorne hedges, where Anne, faithful Anne, had so often welcomed her wild lover. Their wills had clashed after their marriage. She had objected unreasonably when his career led him to London, had been sceptical as to his success, and even, ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... clean without them I'll thatch Groby pool wi' pancakes. But there arena sae mony now; and since they hae lost Jim the Rat, they hold together no better than the men of Marsham when they lost their common. Take a drop ere thou goest," he concluded, offering her the tankard; "thou wilt get naething at night save Grantham ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... in the distance, beneath a fog which is just beginning to dissolve, he perceives a vast mass of white and red houses, some with terraced roofs, others covered with thatch; through the humid veil which envelopes them, he sees the glistening of the glass in the windows; already he hears at his feet the confused noise of cities; murmuring voices reply; the measured sound of hammers and of mills even reaches ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... will be done!—and then, faith, sure enough, As the pig was desaiced, 'twas high time to be off. So we gothered up all the poor duds we could catch, Lock the owld cabin-door, put the kay in the thatch, Then tuk laave of each other's sweet lips in the dark, And set off, like the Chrishtians turned out of the Ark; The six childher with you, my dear Judy, ochone! And poor I ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to the bucks, a lot of women and children there, makin' thatch, cookin', and repairin' the pig-proof fencin'. I stayed a bit, and then came on board again, an' we made snug ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... lover had so often loitered hand in hand, a gay party of children and young people were assembled. The cottage had been purchased by an opulent and retired manufacturer. He had raised the low thatched roof another story high—and blue slate had replaced the thatch—and the pretty verandahs overgrown with creepers had been taken down because Mrs. Hobbs thought they gave the rooms a dull look; and the little rustic doorway had been replaced by four Ionic pillars in stucco; and a new dining-room, twenty-two feet ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... material to make them was scarce in New England. Old sails were often used instead, being stretched over poles,—perhaps after the fashion of a Sioux teepee. When these could not be had, the men built huts of sods, with roofs of spruce-boughs overlapping like a thatch; for at that early season, bark would not peel from the trees. The landing of guns, munitions, and stores was a formidable task, consuming many days and destroying many boats, as happened again when Amherst landed his cannon at this same place. Large flat boats, brought from Boston, ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... had passed through several villages, camping under double-thatch and inside heavy stockade guards. Being unable to release himself from the thrall of his life-quest, even while every element of his manhood was deep in the thrall of a "singing nautch-girl—undefamed—" Skag's trained ears had been extending ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... mine would turn white or potato color or something," said Lathrop, to whom Harry confided his expectation, "this red thatch of mine is a nuisance. At school I was always Brick-top or Red-Head and out here the natives all look at my carrot-colored top-knot as if they'd like to scalp me and keep it for ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... at Rip's red hair. "That's a fine thatch of hair you have. In a week or two it will be gone, and you'll have no more hair than an egg. A well person doesn't lose hair. Your head will shine ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... under thatch, and with sliding lights before it, the Admiral's favorite Munich glass, mounted by an old ship's carpenter (who had followed the fortunes of his captain) on a stand which would have puzzled anybody but the maker, with the added security of a lanyard from the roof. ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... and even in him spends itself without recovery, like music heard in a dream. Art, in establishing instruments for human life beyond the human body, and moulding outer things into sympathy with inner values, establishes a ground whence values may continually spring up; the thatch that protects from to-day's rain will last and keep out to-morrow's rain also; the sign that once expresses an idea will serve to recall it ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... hiding-places where he had heard of cottagers' hoards being found: the thatch, the bed, and a hole in the floor. His eyes travelling eagerly over the floor, noted a spot where the sand had been ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... and then, sure enough, I looked out, and the grass was on fire, but very far off, and a strong wind blowing it right to the slab huts on the head station with their thatch roofs. Nothing could save us if it came near, and as I have told you it was a busy time, and the men were all hither and thither, and nobody left on the place but Martha, and Jim, and myself, and the mistress ill, and two infants, as I may say, for Emily ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... flame ran up the stream that continued to flow, igniting the whole of the spirits in the cask, which blew up with a tremendous explosion, darting the fiery liquid over the whole interior, and communicating the flame to the thatch, and every part of the building, which was instantaneously in ardent combustion. The shrieks of the poor disabled wretches, stretched on the sails, to which the fire had communicated, and who were now lying in a molten sea of flame like that described ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the opening, hardy hart's-tongue and tufts of parsley fern sprang from every crevice in the stones, while the top was covered with a tangle of briars, nettles, and matted grass. These combined to form a species of thatch which perfectly protected the interior from both ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... them—all?" a long, furtively drawn breath. Then her eyes flashed open and fixed themselves on me. Relief was there, yet something stricken, as they traveled over me from my gray thatch to ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... does not reign. She's but a ward, at what late age she'll gain Her freedom and her kingdom, it were best To risk no surmise rash. E'en now she's drest Sometimes in skins. Give her ground-nuts and grain, Cattle and thatch'd hut, then she'll not complain, She's happier-hearted than ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... make into sheaves on the spot and transport to the beach selected for the bivouac. Double rows of these arundos, driven into the sand, formed the partitions of the cabins, for which their interwoven leaves made an appropriate thatch. The green halls with matted vaults were picturesque enough; each peon, seeing how easily they were constructed, chose to have a house for himself; and the Tiger's Beach quickly presented the appearance of a camp disposed in a long straight line, of which the timorous Indians ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... 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 seem as if the tree loved the ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... remove part of the roof which was thatched, and which, as it could easily be set on fire by arrows with burning tips, was likely to prove dangerous. The considerable force we brought enabled these operations to be rapidly carried on. The thatch was conveyed to a distance from the house, that it might not be employed for smoking us out, while all the men able to use saws and hammers set to work to fit and nail up the timbers. Every door and window was so strongly barricaded, that a cannon-shot ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... cycled to the little wattle-and-thatch Court House at Ikotobong, Miss Slessor being pushed by Dan up the hills. She took her seat at the table in the simplest possible attire. Before her was a tin of toffee, her only refreshment, with the exception of ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... daughter who shared his humble home. They generally kindled their fire inside the hut, which was made of most inflammable materials, and to judge by the clouds of smoke which poured out through the coarse thatch at cooking time, the operations were on rather a large scale. He also made a large bonfire of refuse bits of wood outside his hut on cold nights, and there he and a few friends would sit and toast themselves till ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... now—for, across the ravine beneath him, he sees a cottage. The same, the very same it is, save that the thatch has been renewed! A humble shepherd's cottage, only a but and a ben, built long ago by thrifty hands—but he first learned to ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... no further scandal. If only he could get at that anonymous letter-writer, he would teach him not to meddle and stir up mud at the bottom of water which he wished should remain stagnant!... A distant flash, a low rumble, and large drops of rain spattered on the thatch above him. He remained indifferent, tracing a pattern with his finger on the dusty surface of a little rustic table. Fleur's future! 'I want fair sailing for her,' he thought. 'Nothing else matters at my time of life.' A lonely business—life! What you had you never could keep to yourself! As ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... cellar is still visible. This long, low, gambrel-roofed structure, with a broad chimney showing the date of 1666, was a long way ahead of the first log cabins erected by the Pilgrims—farther than most of us realize, accustomed as we are to glass instead of oiled paper in windows; to shingles, and not thatch for roofs. It is fitting that this ancient and charming dwelling should be associated with one of the most romantic, most striking, names in the Plymouth Colony. There are few more picturesque personalities ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... sty, beneath a roof of thatch, Dwelt Obloquy, who in her early days Baskets of fish at Billingsgate did watch, Cod, whiting, oyster, mack'rel, sprat, or plaice: There learn'd she speech from tongues that never cease. Slander beside her, like a magpie, chatters, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... stone building, or rather pile of buildings, which, clustering around a conical hill, had the air of a fortress rather than a religious establishment. But, though the walls were of stone, the roof was composed of a light thatch, as usual in countries where rain seldom or never falls, and where defence, consequently, is wanted chiefly against the rays ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... the cowboy was well named, for he had quite a fiery thatch; but his freckled face seemed one of the sort that invited confidence, and Frank believed he would like the other right well. Of course, Reddy was attired as all well-ordered cowboys should be. Will was secretly wild for a chance to introduce him ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... lads, down to the river, and you women bring your 'pancheons,' pails, kettles, any thing that will hold water; and now, lads, pass them along, and we will soon put out this fire. Now, you lads, tear away the burning dry thatch from the tops of those cottages; never mind a little singeing. You won't have a house standing in the place if you don't look ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... very sleepy, rusty, irregular little places; huts and cattle-stalls huddled down, as if shaken from a bag; much straw, thick thatch and crumbly mud-brick; but looking warm and peaceable, for the Four-footed and the Two-footed; which latter, if you speak to them, are solid reasonable people, with energetic German eyes and hearts, though so ill-lodged. These Hamlets, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... Tang signifies Anglo-Saxon "thatch," from Sea Weed having been formerly used instead of straw to cover the roofs of houses. When bruised and applied by way of a poultice to scrofulous swellings and glandular tumours, the Sea Tang has been found very valuable. The famous John Hunter was ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... and give them a chance to manufacture mats for beds, bark-ropes, wicker- chairs and baskets, earthen jars, pans, and that kind of thing. The huts themselves were primitive to a degree, the floor being earth, the roof, of palm-thatch or the leaves of the cocoa-nut tree, the sides hard-posts driven in the ground and interlaced with wattle and plaster, and inside scarcely high enough for its owner to walk upright. The furniture was scant—a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... formed the seating accommodation. A table, made with a great expenditure of labor, and covered with an old blanket, served as a desk. Then, at the far end of the room, under a cotton ceiling, to save them from the dust from the thatch above, stood four trestle beds, each with ample blankets spread over it. Three of these were for wayfarers, and the fourth, in emergency, for the same purpose. Otherwise the fourth was Father Jose's own bed. Behind this building, and opening ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... morning, Christy Mahon. Wait till you lay eyes on her leaky thatch is growing more pasture for her buck goat than her square of fields, and she without a tramp itself to keep in order ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... at the end of his beard like the puling of a cat. The mill-wheel was going same as a "whirlingig"—was there nobody to "hould the brake?" The stable roof was stripped, and the mare was tearing herself to pieces in a roaring "pit of hell"—was there never a shoulder for the door? The cow-house thatch was flapping like a sail—was there nothing in the world but a woman (Nancy Joe) to help a man to throw a ladder and a stone ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... barley-broth, Decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat? And shall our quick blood, spirited with wine, Seem frosty? O, for honour of our land, Let us not hang like roping icicles Upon our houses' thatch, whiles a more frosty people Sweat drops of gallant youth in our rich fields! Poor we may call them ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]
... other passenger in the stage—a little boy with a soft thatch of straight, yellow hair that had been chopped short around the bowl of some domestic barber. He sat on the opposite seat and held a bundle in his arms, peering out over the top of ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... tied over their caps, To see if their poultry were free from mishaps; The turkeys they gobbled, the geese screamed aloud, And the hens crept to roost in a terrified crowd; There was rearing of ladders, and logs laying on, Where the thatch from the roof threatened soon to be gone. But the wind had passed on, and had met in a lane With a schoolboy, who panted and struggled in vain, For it tossed him, and twirled him, then passed, and he stood With his hat in a pool and ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... bed in the darkened room he lay in a deep silence, broken only at intervals by the hurried scampering of lizards darting through the interstices of the dry walls. His uncomprehending eyes were fixed upon the dust-laden thatch of the roof overhead, where droning wasps toiled upon their frail abodes. He lay with the portals of his mind opened wide. Through them, in ceaseless flow, passed two streams which did not mingle. The one, outward bound, turbid with its ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... The farms indeed looked very fertile, and the farmhouses very alluringly clean and neat, at least on the outside. They were not gray, as in the West of England, or brick as in the Southeast, but were of stone whitewashed, and the roofs were of slate, and not thatch or tile. As I have noted, they were not so much gathered into villages as in England, and again, as I have noted, it is out of such houses that the farmers' boys and girls go to the co-educational colleges of the Welsh University. It is still the preference of the farmers ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... got through the hedge a little lower down and walked towards the house, which was screened on one side by an old wall shaggy with ivy and roofed with thatch. ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... wished myself her friend! (So she wished that I were more) Jogging toward her journey's end At Saint Jean au Bois before, Where her father's acres fall Just without the abbey wall; By the cool well loiteringly The shaggy Norman horses stray, In the thatch the pigeons play, And the forest round alway Folds the hamlet, like ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... long, almost incoherent missive must suffice. Even Cranston's lips twitched under the heavy thatch of his moustache as he listened. Even we, who like Mrs. Cranston, must admit it wasn't quite kind in her, no matter how natural, to read it afterward to Agatha Loomis, who, although declining to read, did not quite decline to hear at least a ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... seen during a long experience of painful sights. The road to it as already described, is a quagmire, and the dwelling, when arrived at, exceeds the wildest of nightmares. Part of the stone wall has fallen in, and the two rooms which remain have the ground for a carpet and miserable starved-looking thatch for a roof. The horses and cattle of every gentleman in England, and especially Mr. Tankerville Chamberlayne's Berkshire pigs, are a thousand times better lodged than the family of the irreconcilable Browne. The chimney, if ever there were one, has ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... when she arrived home; before she could enter she had to go down a little over the worn rocks, for the cottage was placed on an incline towards the beach, below the level of the Ploubazlanec roadside. It was almost hidden under its thick brown straw thatch, and looked like the back of some huge beast, shrunk down under its bristling fur. Its walls were sombre and rough like the rocks, but with tiny tufts of green moss and lichens over them. There were three uneven steps before the threshold, and the inside ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... at buffets with angels in their fists about the thatch that blew off his house into the other's garden ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... because I say men are not thereby made members of Christ's body, or because I say that it is not essential to church- communion. Why should I be thought to be against a fire in the chimney, because I say it must not be in the thatch of the house? Consider, then, how pernicious a thing it is to make every doctrine (though true) the bond of communion; this is that which destroys unity, and by this rule all men must be perfect before they can be in peace: for do we not see daily, that as soon as men ...
— An Exhortation to Peace and Unity • Attributed (incorrectly) to John Bunyan
... to Crochallan came; The old cock'd hat, the grey surtout the same; His bristling beard just rising in its might, 'Twas four long nights and days to shaving night: His uncomb'd grizzly locks, wild staring, thatch'd A head for thought profound and clear, unmatch'd; Yet tho' his caustic wit was biting-rude, His heart was ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... efore her th' owd mare, so that aw my stock be gone. Waes me! waes me! Nowt prospers wi' me. My poor dame is besoide hersel, an' th' chilter seems possessed. Ey ha' tried every remedy, boh without success. Ey ha' followed th' owd witch whoam, plucked a hontle o' thatch fro' her roof, sprinklet it wi' sawt an weter, burnt it an' buried th' ess at th' change o' t' moon. No use, mesters. Then again, ey ha' getten a horseshoe, heated it redhot, quenched it i' brine, an' nailed it to t' threshold wi' three nails, heel uppard. No more use nor t'other. Then ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... shifting under the thatch of his heavy brows; he was like an old rat seeking for any hole of refuge. "Well—maybe I might. Anyhow, I'll go on—with ye. Kin I sit up? I 'm ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... the same place of concealment, which was mostly, as we have said, under ground. The tobacco was weighed and subdivided into small quantities, which, in addition to what he carried in his pocket, were distributed in various crevices and crannies of the house; sometimes under the thatch; sometimes under a dish on the dresser, but generally in ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... the doorpost, was gazing with ferocious solemnity at the open clothes-press in which some hanging dresses appeared like women standing. He smoothed his red beard and thrust his cap far back on his thatch of ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... Romulus for perpetrated crimes A sacred refuge made; with this, the shrine Where Pan below the rock had rites divine: Then tells of Argus' death, his murder'd guest, Whose grave and tomb his innocence attest. Thence, to the steep Tarpeian rock he leads; Now roof'd with gold, then thatch'd with homely reeds. A reverent fear (such superstition reigns Among the rude) ev'n then possess'd the swains. Some god, they knew- what god, they could not tell- Did there amidst the sacred horror dwell. Th' Arcadians thought him Jove; and said they saw The mighty Thund'rer with majestic ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... Woman! a she hell-cat, a witch! To prove her one, we no sooner set fire on the thatch of her house, but in she came running, as if the devil had sent her in ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... writings on the Trinity were condemned, and he took refuge at Nogent-sur-Seine, near Troyes, under the patronage of the Count of Champagne. He retired to a hermitage of thatch and reeds, the famous Paraclete, but even there students flocked to him, and young nobles were glad to live on coarse bread and lie on straw, that they might taste of wisdom, the bread of the angels. Again his enemies set upon him; he surrendered the Paraclete to Heloise ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... a book of ringing Irish ballads that will stir the heart of every lover of true poetry. "Here and there a verse may be as frankly unadorned as the peasant cabins themselves in their homely cloaks of thatch, but every line rings true to life and home and with the tone, as heartmoving as the Angelus which holds Millet's peasants in its spell," from ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... it may be a mere shed. There are also regular log-cabins encountered with locked corners, especially among the southern Tarahumares. Finally, when a Tarahumare becomes civilised, he builds himself a house of stone and mud, with a roof of boards, or thatch, or earth. ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... was better skilled in chemistry, knew how to manufacture gunpowder, that the Spaniard destroyed the Aztec. May not we, who are possessing ourselves of the world and its resources, and gathering to ourselves all its knowledge, may not we nip the Slav ere he grows a thatch to ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... captain, hardly articulating from under his thick, sandy-coloured moustache, which, growing downwards from his nose, looked like a heavy thatch put on to protect his mouth from the inclemency of the clouds above. 'A doosed sight,' ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Elijah had two feathered tenants, a pair of white owls—the birds he so much resembled. They occupied a small garret at the end of his bedroom, having access to it through a hole under the thatch. They bred there in peace, and on summer evenings one of the common sights of the village was Elijah's owls flying from the house behind the evergreens and returning to it with mice in their talons. At such seasons the threat to the unruly children would be varied to "Old Elijah's ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... sense, he was so full of wiles and cunning that he was the Ulysses of the five, and as such his fame had spread along the whole border, and among the Indian tribes. Hidden perhaps by his lazy manner, but underneath that yellow thatch of his the shiftless one was a thinker, a deep thinker, and a nobler thinker than the one who sat before Troy town, because his thoughts were to ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... more frost that winter. A fortnight passed before the place looked itself again, and even then congealed snow stood doggedly in the streets, while the country roads were like newly ploughed fields after rain. The heat from large fires soon penetrated through roofs of slate and thatch; and it was quite a common thing for a man to be flattened to the ground by a slithering of snow from above just as he opened his door. But it had seldom more than ten feet to fall. Most interesting of all was the novel sensation experienced as Thrums began ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... where Alice and her lover had so often loitered hand in hand, a gay party of children and young people were assembled. The cottage had been purchased by an opulent and retired manufacturer. He had raised the low thatched roof another story high—and blue slate had replaced the thatch—and the pretty verandahs overgrown with creepers had been taken down because Mrs. Hobbs thought they gave the rooms a dull look; and the little rustic doorway had been replaced by four Ionic pillars in stucco; and a new dining-room, twenty-two feet by ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Jasper, confidently. "'Ain't got room fer one under his yaller thatch. You wait till you set your lamps on him once before you go to gettin' excited. Why, he ain't one-two-three with our missionary! Gosh! I wish he'd come back an' see ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... grandmother first heard the cries of the villagers: "Fire them, let them both burn together." Franconnette rushed to the door and pleaded for mercy. "Go back," cried the crowd, "you must both roast together." They set fire to the rick outside and then proceeded to fire the thatch of the cottage. "Hold, hold!" cried a stern voice, and Pascal rushed in amongst them. "Cowards! would you murder two defenceless women? Tigers that you are, would you fire and burn ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... the fields, even a hovel may have a certain grace derived from the pure air, the verdure, the open country—a hill, a serpentine road, vineyards, quickset hedges, moss-grown thatch and rural implements; but poverty in Paris gains dignity only by horror. Though recently built, this house seemed ready to fall into ruins. None of its materials had found a legitimate use; they had been collected from the various demolitions which are going on ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... deer, and on the next day secured more game, which they cured, concluding now that they had enough to last them indefinitely. Will and the Little Giant, meanwhile, had been working on the house, and Boyd, his hunting over, joined them. The cured skins of the animals were put over the leaf thatch of the floor as they had planned, and as they procured them they intended to hang more on the walls, for the sake ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... timbers of our dwellings. They were held in place by weaving in, basket-wise, a network of briers and vines. Tufts of the long leaves which are the distinguishing characteristic of the Georgia pine (popularly known as the "long-leaved pine") were wrought into this network until a thatch was formed, that was a fair protection against the rain—it was like the Irishman's unglazed window-sash, which "kep' out the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... only the thatch would burn. For, before the baths were tessellated, I filled the area with alum and water, and soaked the timbers and laths for many months, and covered them afterward with alum in powder, by means of liquid glue. Mithridates taught ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... under his roof of thatch, Smoked thoughtfully and slow; The Slaver's thumb was on the latch, He ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... must be abandoned, but he would take a further revenge upon its owner. He ran quickly to a fire which burned dimly in Challoner's cooking-house, lit a bunch of dried palm leaves, and thrust it into the thatch of the dwelling-house. Then ...
— The Brothers-In-Law: A Tale Of The Equatorial Islands; and The Brass Gun Of The Buccaneers - 1901 • Louis Becke
... one-half. But they are still terrible. Not a breath of wind stirs the air at that season, for the collector cannot choose his time. The boxes are piled on deck; even the pitiless sunshine is not so deadly as the stewing heat below. He has a store of blankets to cover them, on which he lays a thatch of palm-leaves, and all day long he souses the pile with water; but too well the poor fellow knows that mischief is busy down below. Another anxiety possesses him too. It may very well be that on arrival at Savanilla he ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... considerable extent of ground, they have a very imposing effect, unlike any inhabited by persons of the same rank in England. But close even to the palaces of the most wealthy are to be seen wretched mud huts; and rows of native hovels, constructed of mats, thatch, and bamboos, often rest against their outer walls, while there are avenues opening from the principal streets, intersected in all directions by native bazaars, filled with unsightly articles ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... farms of southern France, trimmed neatly by the inch, swept past her. In Brittany came melancholy stretches of brown heath and rain-beaten hills; or great affluent estates, the Manor houses covered with thatch, stagnant pools close to the doors, the cattle breaking through ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... 170 Moscow! thou limit of his long career, For which rude Charles had wept his frozen tear[286] To see in vain—he saw thee—how? with spire And palace fuel to one common fire. To this the soldier lent his kindling match, To this the peasant gave his cottage thatch, To this the merchant flung his hoarded store, The prince his hall—and Moscow was no more! Sublimest of volcanoes! Etna's flame Pales before thine, and quenchless Hecla's tame; 180 Vesuvius shows his blaze,[287] an usual ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... gratitude, but rather the recognition of a certain admiration and awe which she inspires in your Excellency's foolish old servant. She has taken up her abode in a deserted hut, built of dried reeds and thatch, such as they keep cows in, among the olives on the cliffs. She was not there, but about the hut pecked some white pigeons, and from it, startling me foolishly with its unexpected sound, came the eerie bleat of her pet goat.... Among the olives it was twilight ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... walls of a nullah, stretched On naked stones, our Lord spied, as he passed, A starving tigress. Hunger in her orbs Glared with green flame; her dry tongue lolled a span Beyond the gasping jaws and shrivelled jowl; Her painted hide hung wrinkled on her ribs, As when between the rafters sinks a thatch Rotten with rains; and at the poor lean dugs Two cubs, whining with famine, tugged and sucked, Mumbling those milkless teats which rendered nought, While she, their gaunt dam, licked full motherly The clamorous twins, yielding her flank to them With moaning throat, and love stronger ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... give the Arabs no small amount of trouble to fish them out again. The place was next set on fire in every direction, when the party, each man carrying such booty as he had managed to pick up, left the fort to the destruction awaiting it. The flames spread amid the wooden and thatch-roof buildings, till the surrounding stockades caught fire, and the whole hornets' nest ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... "what here in this strange place? No, that I shall not, I can tell you. I never slept from under the thatch of my father's cottage in my life, but once, and that was at the wedding of my dear, obliging Rovena. But perhaps," added she, "my father and mother will come to me here. So I will even try and be compilable, for I never was obstinate. But indeed ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... Art, in establishing instruments for human life beyond the human body, and moulding outer things into sympathy with inner values, establishes a ground whence values may continually spring up; the thatch that protects from to-day's rain will last and keep out to-morrow's rain also; the sign that once expresses an idea will serve ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... being only a deep hole in the ground, by which meanes, they easily make a passage out from the bottom of it, to carry away all the water, which, if it should remain stagnating therein, would melt the Ice and Snow: but they thatch it with straw, in the shape of a Saucepan-cover, that the rain may not come at it. The sides (supposing it dry) they line not with any thing, as is done in St. Jeames's Park, by reason of the moistness of the ground. This Pit they fill {140} full of Snow or Ice (taking care that ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... chance might give her "a sight o' the squire afore he wint out, or afore he wint in;" and after spending her entire day in this idle way, at last the squire made his appearance, and Judy presented her son, who kept scraping his foot, and pulling his forelock, that stuck out like a piece of ragged thatch from his forehead, making his obeisance to the squire, while his mother was sounding his praises for being the "handiest craythur alive—and so ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... hombre and his beautiful senora, that they may soon have a hut to shelter them from the rains. It is not good to see so gentle a woman endure hardship within my boundary. Many tules, they will need," he added after a minute, "and it is unlikely that the Senor Seem'son understands the making of a thatch. Diego and Juan are skillful; and the tules they lay upon a roof will let no drop of rain fall within the room. ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... lamp was to be seen; nor in the whole street; nor in the whole town, so far as eye could reach. The house to the right was a roof rather than a house; nothing could be more mean. The walls were of mud, the roof was of straw, and there was more thatch than wall. A large nettle, springing from the bottom of the wall, reached the roof. The hovel had but one door, which was like that of a dog-kennel; and a window, which was but a hole. All was shut up. At the side an inhabited pig-sty told that ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... village, between low wooded hills, with a canal passing through it. Old Japanese cottages, dingy, neutral-tinted, with roofs of thatch, very steeply sloping, above their wooden walls and paper shoji. Green patches on all the roof-slopes, some sort of grass; and on the very summits, on the ridges, luxurious growths of yaneshobu, [1] the roof-plant, bearing pretty ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... a long, low building, with a narrow paving in front from end to end, of stones cast up by the plough. Its walls, but one story high, rough-cast and white-washed, shone dim in the twilight. Under a thick projecting thatch the door stood wide open, and from the kitchen, whose door was also open, came the light of a peat-fire and a fish-oil-lamp. Throughout the summer Steenie was seldom in the house an hour of the twenty-four, ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... trees in the west, The sunset round it glowing, A cottage lies like bird on nest, With thatch roof hardly showing. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... took the bungalow. Unless you knew how Indian bungalows were built you would never have suspected that above the cloth lay the dark three-cornered cavern of the roof, where the beams and the underside of the thatch harboured all manner of rats, bats, ants, ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... and commenced operations by lashing a pole across two trees at about his own height; the others cut sticks and shrubs for roofing. Three young saplings sloped back to the ground as principal rafters, and on these were laid a thatch of brushwood; the open ends of the hut were ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... backbrand in, The green logs steam and spit; The half-awakened sparrows flit From the riddled thatch; and owls begin To ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... poison, make use of the venom of snakes on the tips of their arrows. The heads of those serpents, from which they extract this deadly substance, are exposed on the sticks, which are thrust into the inside of the thatch of their dwellings as ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... neither dish, nor cup, nor plate, nor even the iron pot in which all the cookery of the Irish cottiers' menage is usually carried on. Beneath his feet was the damp earthen floor, and around him were damp, cracked walls, and over his head was the old lumpy thatch, through which the water was already dropping; but inside was to be seen none of those articles of daily use which are usually to be found in the houses ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... not one of those trim, modern park-lodges, all angles and peaks, which one sees everywhere now-a-days, but a low cottage, with a very thick, wig-like thatch, into which rose two astonished eyebrows over the stare of two half-awake dormer-windows. On the front of it were young leaves and old hips enough to show that in summer it must ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... your proneness to domestication, For he dwells in man's barn, and I build in man's thatch, As we say to each other—but, to our vexation, O'er your safety ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the broken meats before thou makest a feast. If there should follow a thousand swords to carry my bones away, Belike the price of a jackal's meal were more than a thief could pay. They will feed their horse on the standing crop, their men on the garnered grain, The thatch of the byres will serve their fires when all the cattle are slain. But if thou thinkest the price be fair, — thy brethren wait to sup, The hound is kin to the jackal-spawn, — howl, dog, and call them up! And if thou thinkest the price be high, in ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... occupied by a dozen of the plumed warriors who had now snatched up emblazoned shield and polished spear; and stood rigidly at attention. Women of all ages crouched and squatted against the fence and the sides of a large wattle and thatch building. ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... so impregnable or so vulgar, but a summer's grass will attempt it. It will try to persuade the yellow brick, to win the purple slate, to reconcile stucco. Outside the authority of the suburbs it has put a luminous touch everywhere. The thatch of cottages has given it an opportunity. It has perched and alighted in showers and flocks. It has crept and crawled, and stolen its hour. It has made haste between the ruts of cart wheels, so they were not too frequent. It has been stealthy ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... a rich man, Or if ever I grow to be old, I will build a house with deep thatch To shelter me from the cold, And there shall the Sussex songs be sung And ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Christy Mahon. Wait till you lay eyes on her leaky thatch is growing more pasture for her buck goat than her square of fields, and she without a tramp itself to keep in order her place ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... of night peace brooded over the distracted city and the Cyprian stars looked down on the old, sweet story of mother and child—as closely clasped beneath the gilded roof of the royal palace as under the thatch of a peasant shed—smiling, forgetful of the days of anguish that ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... burn any more candles, but mould some; do not paint any more windows, but mend a few where the wind comes in, in winter time, with substantial clear glass and putty. Do not vault any more high roofs, but thatch some low ones; and embroider rather on backs which are turned to the cold, than only on those which are turned to congregations. And you will have your reward afterwards, and attain, with all your flocks thus tended, to a place ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... bit the dust I know not, but others always supplied the places of those who fell. Hundreds of balls whistled by our ears and flattened themselves on the stone walls; the plaster was broken from the walls, and the thatch hung from the rafters, and as I turned for the twentieth time to fire, my musket dropped from my hand; I stooped to lift it, but I fell too: I had received a shot in the left shoulder and the blood ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... to the ground. And all the while the horn was a honkin', and Billings was a screechin', and the sand was a flyin'. Sand! Why, say! Do you see that extra bald place on the back of my head? Yes? Well, there was a two-inch thatch of hair there afore ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... species of plantain from which the wine of the country is drawn, and mwani, the wild plant which supplies a substitute for coffee. A collection of some fifty or more circular huts, covered with a flowering thatch, constituted the capital ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... had indeed been slight. One peasant had the reeds and thatch of his low-hanging roof a little singed. In another house the side of bacon left from last winter's pig and still hanging from the beam under the roof had been made to sizzle a bit. At a third, the brushwood that children ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... been part of the Bog itself, there stood—there stands still—a short, square tower, battlemented at top, and surmounted with a pointed roof, which seems to grow out of a cluster of farm-buildings, so surrounded is its base by roofs of thatch and slates. Incongruous, vulgar, and ugly in every way, the old keep appears to look down on them—time-worn and battered as it is—as might a reduced gentleman regard the unworthy associates with which an ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... are built of unburnt clay which hardens in the sun, covered with a beautiful thatch-long, peculiar grass—exhibiting only the walls to the streets, the doors all opening inside of these walls, which are entered by a gate or large doorway; the streets generally irregular and narrow, but frequently agreeably relieved by wider ones, or large, open spaces or ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... This pilot was a tall, raw—boned subject, about six feet or so, with a blue face—I could not call it red—and a hawk's—bill nose of the colour of bronze. His head was defended from the weather by what is technically called a south—west, pronounced sow—west,—cap, which is in shape like the thatch of a dustman, composed of canvass, well tarred, with no snout, but having a long flap hanging down the back to carry the rain over the cape of the jacket. His chin was embedded in a red comforter that rose to his ears. His trunk was first of all cased in a shirt of worsted ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the thatch roofs of those queer little huts—it makes me think of peaked Robinson Crusoe hats. Just see how they're pulled far down over the sun-burnt wall as if to shade their eyes from the ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... one, intercede for me," pleaded Bakuma, "for more have I none, I, Bakuma, daughter of Bakala, a girl of the hut thatch." ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... resides in it. He is a gentile, and is called Raheni.[203] He has in this place very large and handsome palaces, with numerous courts.... There are also in this city many other palaces of great lords, who live there. And all the other houses of the place are covered with thatch, and the streets and squares are very wide. They are constantly filled with an innumerable crowd of all nations and creeds.... There is an infinite trade in this city.... In this city there are many jewels which are brought from Pegu and ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... last he laid the longest boughs in a row against the side of the fallen tree. This left a little place beneath their slope into which it was possible to creep. Archie smiled with satisfaction, and proceeded to thatch the sloping roof with moss and bits of bark. Then he grubbed up the green cushion and transferred it bodily to ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... stream of fluid behind it as it went spinning down to earth. All that stream of inflammable stuff was aflame. The can itself struck earth and seemed to explode, and the trailing mass of fire was borne onward by the wind and lay across a row of thatch-roofed buildings. An incredible sheet of fire spread out. The stuff in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... ground, at the rate, I suppose, of a pint of water in a minute. The ferns grew immensely thick there; but someone had thinned out a few of the roots from the ground, leaving the uprooted plant with the ferns still living, to form a rough kind of thatch above a piece of earth big enough for a man's body. In the scented shade of this thatch, with the side of his face turned towards me, a big, rough, bearded man sat, filing away some bright steel ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... baldness is creeping insidiously up each side of my head. It is executing flank movements from the temples northward, and some day the two columns will meet and after that I'll be considerably more of a highbrow than I am now. At present I am craftily combing the remaining thatch in the middle and smoothing it out nice and flat, so as to keep those bare spots covered—thinly perhaps, but nevertheless covered. It is my earnest desire to continue to keep them covered. I am not a professional beauty; I am not even ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... massive bole of a breadfruit, a house had come into being. It was not much larger than a big hen-house, but quite sufficient for the needs of two people in a climate of eternal summer. It was built of bamboos, and thatched with a double thatch of palmetto leaves, so neatly built, and so well thatched, that one might have fancied it the production of several ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... old man owned a large rambling Mansion. The pillars were rotten, the galleries tumbling down, the thatch dry and combustible, and there was only one door. Suddenly, one day, there was a smell of fire: the old man rushed out. To his horror he saw that the thatch was aflame, the rotten pillars were catching fire one by one, ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... of clay, and one or two of stone, which were more like cottages. Hardly one had a window two feet square, and many of their windows had no glass. In almost all of them the only chimney was little more than a hole in the middle of the thatch. This rendered the absence of glass in the windows not so objectionable; for, left without ordered path to its outlet, the smoke preferred a circuitous route, and lingered by the way, filling the air. Peat-smoke, however, is both wholesome ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... fly, and next a bright yellow wasp who was telling a friend flying behind him that he knew where there was such a capital piece of wood to bite up into tiny pieces and make into paper for the nest in the thatch, but his friend wanted to go to the house because there was a pear quite ripe there on the wall. Next came a moth, and after the moth a golden fly, and three gnats, and a mouse ran along the dry ground with a curious sniffling ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... to reach the house of Little Black Fox, and this he came to at last. It was a large building; next to the Mission and Agency it was by far the largest house on the Reservation. It was built of logs and thatch and plaster, and backed into a thick clump of shady maple trees. The son was more lavish than the father. Big Wolf had always been content to live in a tepee. He was an older type of chief. The son moved with the times ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... but a number of populous cities, and several hundred thriving agricultural villages. Every foot of land which can be seen from the railroad is cultivated by the most careful spade husbandry, and much of it is irrigated for rice. Streams abound, and villages of grey wooden houses with grey thatch, and grey temples with strangely curved roofs, are scattered thickly over the landscape. It is all homelike, liveable, and pretty, the country of an industrious people, for not a weed is to be seen, but no very striking features or peculiarities arrest one at first ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... a long low cottage with a hipped roof of thatch, having dormer windows breaking up into the eaves, a chimney standing in the middle of the ridge and another at each end. The window-shutters were not yet closed, and the fire- and candle-light within radiated forth upon the thick bushes of box and laurestinus growing ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... party cycled to the little wattle-and-thatch Court House at Ikotobong, Miss Slessor being pushed by Dan up the hills. She took her seat at the table in the simplest possible attire. Before her was a tin of toffee, her only refreshment, with the exception of a cup of tea, during a long sitting. The jury, composed of the older and ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... people say 'home,' it's Whitecroft I think of, with its narrow windows and thatch roof and the farm-buildings about it, and the bits of trees all bent one way with the wind from ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... During her impurity the wife is fed by her husband apart from the rest of the family, and whenever she has to quit the house she is obliged to creep out on her hands and knees in order not to defile the thatch by her touch.[213] The Kharwars, another aboriginal tribe of the same district, keep their women at such seasons in the outer verandah of the house for eight days, and will not let them enter the kitchen or the cowhouse; during this time the unclean woman may not cook nor even ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... perfumery; the green nut affords a delicious beverage to the thirsty traveler; the fibrous covering of the nut is readily converted into strong and durable cordage, and the polished shells into drinking-cups, ladles and spoons; the leaves are frequently used for thatch, the wood for lathing and musical instruments, and the sap for toddy, an intoxicating drink very common in the East. The tree is graceful and pretty, with a tuft of large pinnated leaves at the top, and nestled cosily in their midst are the clusters ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... Newville, very different; for instance, in London, and in almost all our towns, the houses are mostly brick, with tiles or thatch; but here, they are built of wood, covered with shingles. Your churches are meetinghouses. Queer ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... cottage-door it was a cow-path. A natural spring of soft and pleasant water—a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula where the Puritan settlement was made—had early induced Matthew Maule to build a hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although somewhat too remote from what was then the centre of the village. In the growth of the town, however, after some thirty or forty years, the site covered by this rude hovel had become exceedingly ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wavering ghost moving in the vapour on the face of the deep. I can hear the far-off murmur of the sea. It is like the humming in a big shell. A bird is singing in the garden and the swallows are twittering in a nest under the thatch. A mist is lying over the meadows, and the tree tops seem to be floating between the earth ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... roof until they rested on the spot directly over his head, where they became fixed, and, at the same time, opened out to a glare, compared to which all his previous glaring was as nothing—for there, in the thatch, looking down upon him, was the angular head of a huge python. The snake was rolled up in a tight coil, and had evidently spent the night within a yard of the professor's head! Being unable to make out what sort of snake ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... he was crushed and broken, and pierced in many places with splinters and jagged broken ends of wood. But he had his senses still, and smiled as they cleared the thatch from above his face. ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... mentioned before: They are all built in the wood, between the sea and the mountains, and no more ground is cleared for each house, than just sufficient to prevent the dropping of the branches from rotting the thatch with which they are covered; from the house, therefore, the inhabitant steps immediately under the shade, which is the most delightful that can be imagined. It consists of groves of bread-fruit and cocoa-nuts, without underwood, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... that," said Bunting slowly. "Regular right-down queer. Leetle touched, you know, under the thatch," and, as he tapped his head significantly, both young people burst ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... allowed the negroes to cultivate their crops, and give them a chance to manufacture mats for beds, bark-ropes, wicker- chairs and baskets, earthen jars, pans, and that kind of thing. The huts themselves were primitive to a degree, the floor being earth, the roof, of palm-thatch or the leaves of the cocoa-nut tree, the sides hard-posts driven in the ground and interlaced with wattle and plaster, and inside scarcely high enough for its owner to walk upright. The furniture was scant—a quatre, or bed, made of a platform of boards, with a mat and a blanket, some low stools, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the storm was still raging with unheard-of fury; it swept the palm thatch from many of the houses, and beat the stream with such violence that it was like a surging sea. The full unbroken force of the flood beat again and again on the promontory on which stood the statues of the Imperial couple. Shortly before the first dawn of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... canted with the wind and flopped about his neck, and would have sailed away down many a mountain brook but for a faithful leather strap that lay buried in the half-moon whiskers and held on for dear life. And from under the rim of this thatch, and half hidden in the matted masses of badly adjusted hair, was a thin, peaked nose, bridged by a pair of big spectacles, and somewhere below these, again, a pitfall of a mouth covered with twigs of hair and an underbrush of beard, while deep-set in the whole tangle, like still ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... house top-for the house, you must know, was thatched with sods, and a fine crop of grass was growing there. Now their house lay close up against a steep down, and he thought if he laid a plank across to the thatch at the back he'd easily get ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... island. A flirt, and engaged, too, was she? No matter. He wrecked himself with her, and they lived on mussels and edible roots and berries, and some canned stuff from the ship, and he built a hut of "native thatch," and found a deposit of rubies, gathering bushels of them, and he became her affianced the very day the smoke of the rescuing steamer blackened the horizon. And throughout an idyllic union they ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... other three sides by a house and a holly-hedge. The house was the sexton's, who, apprehending the stramash to proceed from a resurrectionary surgeon mistaken in his latitude, thrust out a long duck-gun from a window in the thatch, and swore to blow out our brains if we did not instantly surrender ourselves, and deliver up the corpse. It was in vain to cry out our name, which he knew as well as his own. He was deaf to reason, and would not withdraw his patterero ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... directions by the Paths which go from House to House, so that nothing can be more grateful in a Climate where the sun hath so powerful an influence. They are generally built in form of an Oblong square, the Roofs are supported by 3 Rows of Pillars or posts, and neatly covered with Thatch made of Palm leaves. A middle-siz'd house is about 24 feet by 12, extream heigth about 8 or 9, and heigth of the Eves 3 1/2 or 4. The floors are cover'd some inches deep with Hay, upon which, here and there, lay matts for the conveniency of sitting down; few houses ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... having communicated, at length descended from before the altar, to administer the water to such as desired to receive it. Among these, Toussaint bent his head lowest—so low, that the first slanting sunbeam that entered beneath the thatch seemed to rest upon his head, while every other head remained in the shadow of the roof. In after days, the negroes then present recalled this appearance. Jean Francais, observing that General Hermona was making some remark about Toussaint to the officers about him, endeavoured to assume an ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... you,' said the Bat, 'I should go up into the attic where the youngest kitchenmaid sleeps. Feel between the thatch and the wall just above her pillow, and you'll find a little round looking-glass. But come back here before you look ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... fragments of richly-carved stone, and Ord, one of the historians of Cleveland, says: 'I have beheld with sorrow, and shame, and indignation, the richly ornamented columns and carved architraves of God's temple supporting the thatch of a pig-house.' ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... sprinkled about: very sleepy, rusty, irregular little places; huts and cattle-stalls huddled down, as if shaken from a bag; much straw, thick thatch and crumbly mud-brick; but looking warm and peaceable, for the Four-footed and the Two-footed; which latter, if you speak to them, are solid reasonable people, with energetic German eyes and hearts, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... become a ruin since I saw it last. The winter's winds had lifted the thatch, and the wall on one side had tumbled in. There was no sign of the old life we lived there. The little window from which the guiding light had shone so often was fallen to pieces. Even the friendly hearth within was ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... limb of each tree, about four feet from the ground. This was to form the ridge of a lean-to shelter. Poles were now cut and formed into a sloping roof by resting one end upon the ridge pole, the other upon the ground, and the poles covered with a thick thatch of branches to ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... post standing on a single stone, which is simply laid on the ground, not let into it; the vacancies between the posts and the cross-pieces of framework, are filled up with lath and plaster; and the roof is almost invariably of thatch. They resemble huge stools resting upon stones, to keep the legs from sinking into the earth, and look as if the first breeze would upset them. An earthquake shakes them, and makes them vibrate, but seldom or ever injures them; whereas a brick and mortar ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... thatch to cover the roofs of the houses, or shelter over their boats. Neatly fastened together with split rattans, they form the walls of the house. From the juice of the tree they make a fermented drink something like sweet beer, also brown sugar. The young shoots are eaten in curries and salads. The fruit ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... down stood a wayside inn; a desolate and villainous-looking lump of lichen-spotted granite, with windows paper-patched, and rotting thatch kept down by stones and straw-banks; and at the back a rambling court-ledge of barns and walls, around which pigs and barefoot children grunted in loving communion of dirt. At the door, rapt apparently in the contemplation of the mountain peaks which ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... and large of his age like his brother. His pale blue eyes were gravely vacant under his thick white thatch; his chin dropped; his mouth gaped with stolid patience. There was no mitigation for his dull task; he was not allowed to keep his vigil on a comfortable branch of a tree with the mossy trunk for a support to his back, lest he might be tempted to eat of the cherries, ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in the practical head of the gunner. It pushed its way into the upper air under the plain cap of the A.P. It budded under the (slighted tilted) head-dress of Number One, and blossomed forth into a full-blown project under the gilded oak-leaves that thatch the Bloke. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... morss the flower-ports Was-I mean were-crusted one and orl; Ther rusted niles fell from the knorts That 'eld the pear to the garden-worll. Ther broken sheds looked sed and stringe; Unlifted was the clinking latch; Weeded and worn their ancient thatch Er-pon ther lownely moated gringe, She only said 'Me life is dreary, 'E ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the spot and transport to the beach selected for the bivouac. Double rows of these arundos, driven into the sand, formed the partitions of the cabins, for which their interwoven leaves made an appropriate thatch. The green halls with matted vaults were picturesque enough; each peon, seeing how easily they were constructed, chose to have a house for himself; and the Tiger's Beach quickly presented the appearance of a camp disposed in a long straight line, of which the timorous Indians occupied the extremity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... and, with the exception of the waggon-shed and other outbuildings which were roofed with galvanised iron, that shone and glistened in the rays of the morning sun in a way that would have made an eagle blink, was covered with rich brown thatch. All along its front ran a wide verandah, up the trellis-work of which green vines and blooming creepers trailed pleasantly, and beyond was the broad carriage-drive of red soil, bordered with bushy orange-trees laden with odorous ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... fire, but I knew from the position of the blaze (which was only a few hundred yards from where I stood), that there was no house there, or any combustible that would burn, and what perplexed me most was to see pieces of burning thatch and timber sparks fall hissing into the water at my feet. When the fire seemed at its height the firing appeared to weaken, and when the clear sound of a bugle floated out on the midnight air, it suddenly ceased, and ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... girls in the wash-house," said Halldis. "All chattering together like starlings on a thatch. All talking at once, and none listening. ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... proceeded to stretch a line between two trees; then interlacing the line, on a slant between other trees, he constructed a slight network; upon which, after an excursion amid the surrounding woods, he laid a sort of thatch of boughs. ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... laid on in the same way, the leaves and twigs fitting in so accurately that after a busy two hours they had a strong shed of branches ready for stopping up at one end with thorns and more boughs, while Rob had to climb up the slope and thatch the place with the palm leaves, forming a roof ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... where night overtook me, was a hamlet of eight or ten houses, some mere stacks of thatch, out of the smoky doorway of which, three feet high, peered the half-naked inmates; others of adobe, large bricks of mud and chopped straw, which could be picked to ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... the red of the tillage is, Green are the pastures, and deep Down in the combes little thatch-covered villages Sleep. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... a priest, who was a sub-lieutenant, out of a wood of snuff-brown shadows and half-veiled trunks. Would it please me to look at a chapel? It was all open to the hillside, most tenderly and devoutly done in rustic work with reedings of peeled branches and panels of moss and thatch—St. Hubert's own shrine. I saw the hunters who passed before it, going to the chase on the far side of the mountain where their ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... emerged, massively quiet, out of the downward flow of silvery hair, with the striking delicacy of its clear complexion and the powerful width of the forehead. The first cast of his glance fell on you candid and swift, like a boy's; but because of the ragged snowy thatch of the eyebrows the affability of his attention acquired the character of a dark and searching scrutiny. With age he had put on flesh a little, had increased his girth like an old tree presenting no symptoms of decay; and even the opulent, lustrous ripple of white hairs upon his chest ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... had, I was told, been planted only three years ago by Hiraman and Motiram, and I sent for them, knowing that they would be pleased to have their good work noticed by any European gentleman. The trees are now covered with cones of thatch to shelter them from the frost. The merchants came, evidently much pleased, and I had a good deal ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... to expose his soldiers to the violent storms that break out, especially at that season, took up his quarters at Genabum, a town of the Carnutes; and lodged his men in houses, partly belonging to the Gauls, and partly built to shelter the tents, and hastily covered with thatch. But the horse and auxiliaries he sends to all parts to which he was told the enemy had marched; and not without effect, as our men generally returned loaded with booty. The Carnutes, overpowered by the severity of the winter, and the fear of danger, and not daring to continue long ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... was only at the head of his own startled and unwilling band of followers that Peter at length sallied forth. Not a word said Peter Rorke until he reached the Clancys' deserted cabin, and with his own hands set fire to the thatch; then falling back a step or two he rubbed ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... in addition to the bucks, a lot of women and children there, makin' thatch, cookin', and repairin' the pig-proof fencin'. I stayed a bit, and then came on board again, an' we made snug ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... a glance of suspicion at her from under the black thatch of brows that met above his nose and were as ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... season of the year—about August. Having thus discovered a spot on which a number of the sought-for trees grow, he descends, and as rapidly as possible leads his party to it, lest any others on the search should be before them. Huts are now built, roofed with long grass, or the branches of the thatch-palm. His furniture consists of a hammock swung between two posts, and a couple of stones on which his kettle is supported. Stages, on which the axemen stand, are erected round the trees, which are cut down about ten or twelve feet ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... paragraph of a long, almost incoherent missive must suffice. Even Cranston's lips twitched under the heavy thatch of his moustache as he listened. Even we, who like Mrs. Cranston, must admit it wasn't quite kind in her, no matter how natural, to read it afterward to Agatha Loomis, who, although declining to read, did not quite decline to hear at least a ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... up, they went, and passed a quaint, old, thatch-roofed house. Crazy place to build a house! And the people in it—probably all they could do was to shrug their shoulders in that stupid way when asked ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... cheese was gone. "A murrain take it!" quoth he. "If I had had this sword, I had had this cheese myself, and now another hath got it!" Also in the smith who took a red-hot iron bar and thrust it into the thatch of his smithy to destroy a colony of wasps, and, of course, burned down the smithy—a story which has done duty in modern days to "point a moral" in the form of a teetotal tract, with a drunken smith in place of ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... is her mistake, boy. Let God and our Little Father look to the world. It is none of my work to mend my neighbour's thatch. Why, last winter old Michael was frozen to death in his sleigh in the snowstorm, and his wife and children starved afterwards when the hard times came; but what business was it of mine? I didn't make the world. Let God and the Czar look to it. And then the blight came, and the black plague ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... wall of the garden—a snug comfortable Northumbrian cottage, built of stones roughly dressed with the hammer, and having the windows and doors decorated with huge heavy architraves, or lintels, as they are called, of hewn stone, and its roof covered with broad grey flags, instead of slates, thatch, or tiles. A jargonelle pear-tree at one end of the cottage, a rivulet and flower-plot of a rood in extent in front, and a kitchen-garden behind; a paddock for a cow, and a small field, cultivated with several crops of grain, rather for the benefit of the cottager than ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... little way off the road, and thither, my mother carrying the Little Lady on one arm and holding me by the other, and my father laden with bundles and bandboxes, we proceeded. The cottage was whitewashed, and covered with fresh, thick thatch. In front was the neatest of neat little gardens, surrounded by a well-clipped privet hedge, and the greenest of green gates. Indeed, neatness and order reigned everywhere outside as it did, as I was soon to find, in the interior. The Misses Schank had been expecting us. Three of ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... ovall, round, And rules Ge'metricall in beards are found. Besides the upper lip's strange variation, Corrected from mutation to mutation; As 'twere from tithing unto tithing sent, Pride gives to Pride continuall punishment. Some (spite their teeth) like thatch'd eves downeward grows, And some growes upwards in despite their nose. Some their mustatioes of such length doe keepe, That very well they may a maunger sweepe: Which in Beere, Ale, or Wine, they drinking plunge, And sucke the liquor up, as 'twere a Spunge; But 'tis a Slovens beastly Pride, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... Pale yellow thatch on the wheat-ricks becomes a deeper yellow; broad roofs of old red tiles smoulder under it. What can you call it but tawniness?—the earth sunburnt once more at harvest time. Sunburnt and brown—for it deepens into brown. Brown partridges, and pheasants, at a distance brown, their ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... since have made me almost forget all. He sayes there is incomparable fruite there, and that it may be termed the paradise of the world. He says that the spondyles of the backbones of the huge serpents there are used to sit on, as our women sitt upon butts. He taught them to build hovels, and to thatch and wattle. I wish I had a good account of his abode there; he is "fide dignus". I never heard of any man that lived so long among those salvages. A ship then sayling by, a Portughese, he swam to it; and they took him up and made use of ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... the first horse he met, and rode furiously to the huts at Derncleugh. All was there dark and desolate; and, as he dismounted to make more minute search, he stumbled over fragments of furniture which had been thrown out of the cottages, and the broken wood and thatch which had been pulled down by his orders. At that moment the prophecy, or anathema, of Meg Merrilies fell heavy on his mind. "You have stripped the thatch from seven cottages, see that the roof-tree of your own house stand ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... feed their horse on the standing crop, their men on the garnered grain, 15 The thatch of the byres will serve their fires when all the cattle are slain. But if thou thinkest the price be fair,—thy brethren wait to sup. The hound is kin to the jackal spawn,—howl, dog, and 20 call them up! And if thou thinkest the price be high, in steer and gear and stack, Give me my father's ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... The poorer houses have two rooms, an inner and an outer, both very small (say 6 x 6 feet and 4 x 6 feet respectively, inside measurement), cooking being done in the outer and the inner serving as a sleeping-room. There is no flooring; although the fire is under the roof (grass thatch), no smoke-hole has been thought of, and as there are no window-openings, and the entrance is shut up tight by night and the fire kept up if the weather be cold, the interior is as black as one ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... filled with brushwood, fire was set to the hut, and we heard the crackling of the palm thatch, while thick stifling wreaths of white smoke burst in upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... they were, each with a small garden behind it. The two that fronted the west were thatched with golden-coloured straw, and the glass in the little windows was almost as blue as the sky. The two that looked to the east had darker thatch and brown glass windows. The first were for Matty and Nelly, the others for ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... its glow. Village after village we passed through, returning the polite salutes of early rising grand-sires who uncovered their grey heads, or wrinkled, pink-faced grandmothers, who waved kerchiefs from gabled windows beneath the thatch and smiled the straight and dry-lipped smile of toothless age as they wished us ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... of heath and gorse but consisted partly of arable cultivated in strips with strict rules of rotation, partly of grazing land and partly of wood and heath. Most people in the village had a right to a strip of arable, to cut firing of brushwood and turf, and rushes for thatch, and to pasture one or more cows, their pigs and their geese. A village cowherd looked after all the animals and brought them back at night. Cobbett in his Cottage Economy (to a new edition of which Chesterton ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the tints on the thatch too dark, have you not?' as he returned Margaret's to her, and held out his hand for Mr. Lennox's, which was withheld from ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... something hid, In wrappings of wheat-straw winded, and into Sinfiotli's place She cast it all down swiftly; then she covereth up her face And beneath the winter starlight she wended swift away. But her gift do the thralls deem victual, and the thatch on the hall they lay, And depart, they too, to their slumber, now dight was the dwelling ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... the darkened room he lay in a deep silence, broken only at intervals by the hurried scampering of lizards darting through the interstices of the dry walls. His uncomprehending eyes were fixed upon the dust-laden thatch of the roof overhead, where droning wasps toiled upon their frail abodes. He lay with the portals of his mind opened wide. Through them, in ceaseless flow, passed two streams which did not mingle. The one, outward ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... some time I might attain this joy—that this book might find shelter beneath roofs of thatch, and that the village girls, as they spin and turn the wheel, humming the while their much-loved verses, of the girl who so loved to make music that while fiddling she lost her geese, or of the orphan, who, fair as the dawn, went to drive ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... my heart. It does not matter whether it means thatched cottage or manor-house, home is home; be it ever so homely, there is no place on earth like it. Green grows the house-leek on the roof forever, and let the moss flourish on the thatch. Sweetly the sparrows chirrup and the swallows twitter around the chosen spot which is my joy and rest. Every bird loves its own nest; the owls think the old ruins the fairest spot under the moon, and the fox is of opinion that his hole ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... and this seems to be the explanation. With the Mali may be classed the Barai, the grower and seller of the pan or betel-vine leaf. This leaf, growing on a kind of creeper, like the vine, in irrigated gardens roofed with thatch for protection from the sun, is very highly prized by the Hindus. It is offered with areca-nut, cloves, cardamom and lime rolled up in a quid to the guests at all social functions. It is endowed by them with great virtues, being supposed to ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... locks wild staring, thatch'd A head for thought profound and clear, unmatch'd: Yet tho' his caustic wit was biting, rude, His heart ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... door of the adjoining room was opened, and little Charlot appeared. He had heard his mother's voice, and came trotting into the apartment in his nightgown to give her a kiss. He was a chubby, pink little urchin, large and strong for his age, with a thatch of curling, straw-colored hair and big blue eyes. Silvine shivered at his sudden appearance, as if the sight of him had recalled to her mind the image of someone else that affected her disagreeably. Did she no ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... bethought him that a few hundred pounds might be raised on his mill. But when he went to look at it, he found "the dam broken, and scarcely a thimbleful of water in the mill-race, and the wheel rotten, and the thatch of the house all gone, and the upper millstone lying flat on the lower one, and a coat of dust and mould over everything." So he made up his mind to borrow a horse and take one more hunt to-morrow and ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... as the Eden Tree—and new as the new-cut tooth— For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth; And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart, The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, but was ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... now? She, accustomed to all the luxury that wealth could procure, no longer had any home except a poor thatch-covered hovel, whose walls were not even whitewashed, whose only floor was the earth itself, dusty as the public highway in summer, frozen or ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... are the most obvious things. There are many more; for instance, thatch. The same laying of the straw in the same manner, with the same art, has continued, we may be certain, from a time long before the beginning of history. See how in the Fen Land they thatch with reeds, and how upon the Chalk Downs with straw from the Lowlands. ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... principal subjects of his art. He learned to observe these things as a matter of business and at his father's command; thus we may say that he studied his life-work from his very infancy. All about him were beautiful hedgerows, picturesque cottages with high pitched roofs covered with thatch, and it was these beauties which bred one other great landscape painter besides Constable, of whom we ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... and might very likely have nursed children who had gone, more than two centuries ago, to found the commonwealth of which he was a citizen. If you considered them in one way, prosaically, they were ugly enough; but then there were the old latticed windows, and there the thatch, which was verdant with leek, and strange weeds, possessing a whole botanical growth. And birds flew in and out, as if they had their homes there. Then came a row of similar cottages, all joined on together, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stopped to rest, and each thought that he never had seen in all his life before such a hand at quarterstaff. At last Robin gave the stranger a blow upon the ribs that made his jacket smoke like a damp straw thatch in the sun. So shrewd was the stroke that the stranger came within a hair's-breadth of falling off the bridge, but he regained himself right quickly and, by a dexterous blow, gave Robin a crack on the crown that ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... yourself that's the dacent thing, any how; and I'm sorry that I can't be at home to thrate you with a bottle of the rale poteen. Never mind; tell Nancy it's in the thatch above the dure; and you're welcome to it all the same as if I ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... sunlight. It was a crazy affair constructed of logs laterally laid and held in place by uprights, with walls that looked to be just able to hold together while suffering under the constant threat of collapse. The place was roofed with a thatch of reeds taken from the adjacent stream-bed, and its doorway was protected by a sheet of tattered sacking. There was also a window covered with cotton, and a length of iron stove-pipe protruding through the thatch of the ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... come to-morrow. And the next night and the next it was the same. Sometimes I would go up the ladder, always standing against the gable so that one could go up, and standing on the roof, look out over the plain and see where our horses were grazing. There I would sit or lie on the thatch for hours. And I would cry: 'Come to me, my mother! I cannot live without you! Come soon-come soon, before I die of a broken heart!' That was my cry every night, until worn out with my vigil I would go back to my room. And she never came, and at last I knew that ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... visitors from all parts of the world yearly visit this relic of Old Shanklin. Pretty thatched cottages can be seen in many parts of the Island, but nowhere is there such a combination, there being three different styles of roof in thatch, the setting in a background of trees completing the illusion of the country. In the angle where the figures stand is the rustic fountain on which hangs the shield with the verse written by the poet Longfellow when staying at Hollier's Hotel, ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... of the wall; from this the ascent to the house was easy, round which was a fine gravel walk. The house was built, in all respects, like to their common dwelling-houses; that is, with posts and rafters, and covered with palm thatch. The eaves came down within about three feet of the ground, which space was filled up with strong matting made of palm leaves, as a wall. The floor of the house was laid with fine gravel; except, in the ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... the men who had been on the waggon—by this time had found a ladder, which Mark Clark ascended, holding on beside Oak upon the thatch. The smoke at this corner was stifling, and Clark, a nimble fellow, having been handed a bucket of water, bathed Oak's face and sprinkled him generally, whilst Gabriel, now with a long beech-bough in one hand, in addition to his crook in the other, kept sweeping ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... the white fret of Lachine Rapids and the dense forests that shrouded the base of Mount Royal. Checkerboard squares of farm patches had been cleared in the woods. La Salle's old thatch-roofed seigniory lay not far back from the water. St. Anne's was the launching place for fleets of canoes that were to ascend the Ottawa. Here, a last look was taken of splits and seams in the birch keels. With invocations ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... agricultural villages. Every foot of land which can be seen from the railroad is cultivated by the most careful spade husbandry, and much of it is irrigated for rice. Streams abound, and villages of grey wooden houses with grey thatch, and grey temples with strangely curved roofs, are scattered thickly over the landscape. It is all homelike, liveable, and pretty, the country of an industrious people, for not a weed is to be seen, but no very striking features or peculiarities arrest one at first sight, unless it ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... of a long, almost incoherent missive must suffice. Even Cranston's lips twitched under the heavy thatch of his moustache as he listened. Even we, who like Mrs. Cranston, must admit it wasn't quite kind in her, no matter how natural, to read it afterward to Agatha Loomis, who, although declining to read, did not quite decline to hear at least ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... that continued to flow, igniting the whole of the spirits in the cask, which blew up with a tremendous explosion, darting the fiery liquid over the whole interior, and communicating the flame to the thatch, and every part of the building, which was instantaneously in ardent combustion. The shrieks of the poor disabled wretches, stretched on the sails, to which the fire had communicated, and who were now lying in a molten sea of ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the field of battle. The city stands on the extremity of the cape, and has a very romantic appearance. The houses and churches are generally covered with tin, to prevent conflagration, to which this place was remarkably subject when the houses were covered with thatch or shingle. When the rays of the sun lay on the buildings, they had the appearance of being cased ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... ground once more, apparently engrossed in the fruitless efforts of a red ant on the walk's edge to lug away a dead caterpillar forty times its size. The doctor peered at him almost apologetically from under his grey thatch of eyebrow. The younger man's face still wore that same blank, dazed mask, as though horror had wiped it clean of expression. Again it was Frederik who broke ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... getting very exact in his words. When he was coming into the yard at dinner time, what work did he find Jack at but pulling armfuls of the thatch off the roof, and peeping into the holes he ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... for administering this admonitory lesson, were of the most legitimate character. We must always continue to doubt that humanity required the destruction of towns and hamlets, whose miserable walls of clay and roofs of thatch could give shelter to none but babes and sucklings—women with their young—those who had never offended, and those who could not well offend—the innocent victims to an authority which they never dared oppose. ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... were no shade, no peace, and no turning back, no one day's march made him stronger for the next; and at length, when he came to the low thatch of a negro-cabin, under the shadow of its bananas he sank down in its doorway, red ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... quiet, tolerant smiles; but it meant more to him than almost any kind of an honour could have meant to the prematurely gray man in the howdah. The latter passed on to his estate, and some of the villagers went back to their women and their thatch huts. But still Little Shikara stood motionless—and it wasn't until the thought suddenly came to him that possibly the beaters had already gathered and were telling the story of the kill that with startling suddenness he raced back through the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Macleods of Dare, had been kept intact for him, when the letting of it to a rich Englishman would greatly have helped the failing fortunes of the family; it was not enough that the poor people about, knowing Lady Macleod's wishes, had no thought of keeping a salmon spear hidden in the thatch of their cottages. Salmon and stag could no longer bind him to the place. The young blood stirred. And when he asked her what good things came of being a stay-at-home, what could ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... Woman is to reverence; Thy clear heart, fresh as e'er was forest-flower, Still opens more to me its beauteous dower;— But let praise hush,—Love asks no evidence To prove itself well-placed: we know not whence It gleans the straws that thatch its humble bower: We can but say we found it in the heart, Spring of all sweetest thoughts, arch foe of blame, Sower of flowers in the dusty mart, Pure vestal of the poet's holy flame,— This is enough, and we have done our part If we but keep ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... you get ashore, you will find that most of the stores and houses—the majority of which, it may be remarked, are in a state of acute dilapidation—are of painted wood, with corrugated iron roofs. Here and there, though, you will see a thatched house, its thatch covered with creeping plants, and inhabited by colonies of ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... beyond nearer hills. The latter were green-covered with dense forests whence rose mysterious smokes. Along the shore we saw an occasional cocoanut plantation to the water's edge and native huts and villages of thatch. Canoes of strange models lay drawn up on shelving beaches; queer fish-pounds of brush reached out considerable distances from the coast. The white surf ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... creatures of their interests and sympathies. Of this there cannot be a doubt, however: the chiefs would not have had the land at all, could the clansmen have foreseen the present state of the Highlands—their children in mournful groups going into exile—the faggot of legal myrmidons in the thatch of the feal cabin—the hearths of their loves and their lives the green sheep-walks of ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... draws the backbrand in, The green logs steam and spit; The half-awakened sparrows flit From the riddled thatch; and owls begin To whoo ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... cross much resembling a broken milestone; though the sittings of the municipal council were held in a filthy den with a roughcast wall; though the best houses were such as would now be called hovels; though the best roofs were of thatch; though the best ceilings were of bare rafters; though the best windows were, in bad weather, closed with shutters for want of glass; though the humbler dwellings were mere heaps of turf, in which ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... entertainment, the luau. But in the old times of strict tabu and rigorous etiquette, when the chief had but to lift his hand and the entire population of a district ransacked plain, valley, and mountain to collect the poles, beams, thatch, and cordstuff; when the workers were so numerous that the structure grew and took shape in a day, we may well believe that ambitious and punctilious patrons of the hula, such as La'a, Liloa, or Lono-i-ka-makahiki, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... standing in a group was busy getting out caldrons and rye biscuit, and feeding the horses. A third section scattered through the village arranging quarters for the staff officers, carrying out the French corpses that were in the huts, and dragging away boards, dry wood, and thatch from the roofs, for the campfires, or wattle fences to serve ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... gable of Kerr's dwelling, which was the uppermost of three houses composing the row, gave way, and fell into the raging current. Dr. Brands, who was looking on intently at the time, with a telescope, observed a hand thrust through the thatch of the central house. It worked busily, as if in despair of life; a head soon appeared; and at last Kerr's whole frame emerged on the roof, and he began to exert himself in drawing out his wife and niece. Clinging to one another, they crawled along the roof towards ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... a ruin since I saw it last. The winter's winds had lifted the thatch, and the wall on one side had tumbled in. There was no sign of the old life we lived there. The little window from which the guiding light had shone so often was fallen to pieces. Even the friendly hearth within was filled with earth ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... and ruinous walls, showed Desolation's triumph over Poverty. On some huts the rafters, varnished with soot, were still standing, in whole or in part, like skeletons, and a few, wholly or partially covered with thatch, seemed still inhabited, though scarce habitable; for the smoke of the peat-fires, which prepared the humble meal of the indwellers, stole upwards, not only from the chimneys, its regular vent, but from various other crevices in the roofs. Nature, in the meanwhile, always changing, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... blushing dewdrops falter; The peacock wakes and leaves the cottage thatch; A deer is rising near the hoof-marked altar, And stretching, stands, the day's new ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... of the Hervey Islanders (p. 17 of notes): "The state is conceived of as a long house standing east and west, chiefs from the north and south sides of the island representing left and right; under chiefs the rafters; individuals the leaves of the thatch. These are the counterpart of the actual house (of the gods) in the spirit world." Compare ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... replied; "how clever you are! and that is why there were only three to cut off Master Stickles. And now we shall beat them, I make no doubt, even if they come at all. And I defy them to fire the house: the thatch is too ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... barn was blazing furiously, and the tired men busily engaged wetting the thatch upon the gable end of the farm-house, upon which great flakes of fire kept falling; while others were hard at work dragging the furniture out of the doors and windows, and bearing it to a place of safety, when ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... top-for the house, you must know, was thatched with sods, and a fine crop of grass was growing there. Now their house lay close up against a steep down, and he thought if he laid a plank across to the thatch at the back he'd easily ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... straw-built hovels beneath them, which are variegated with every tinge to be found amongst the browns and yellows, according to the respective periods of their construction. Some of them are enveloped in blue smoke, which oozes through every interstice of the thatch, and spreads itself, like a cloud hovering over these frail habitations, or moves slowly along, like a strata of vapour not far from the ground, as though too heavy to ascend, and loses itself in the thin air, so inspiring to all who have ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... People are better calculated for a Cold than a Hot Climate; they are built low, and in the form of an oblong square. The framing is of wood or small sticks, and the sides and Covering of thatch made of long Grass. The door is generally at one end, and no bigger than to admit of a man to Creep in and out; just within the door is the fire place, and over the door, or on one side, is a small hole to let out the Smoke. These houses are ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... jute, which is transported by the steamers to Calcutta. The danger of an unexpected rise in the river is always provided for, and every village possesses two or more large boats, which are carefully protected from the sun by a roof of mats or thatch, to be in ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... learn that the playhouse was of timber, the exterior of lath and plaster, the roof of thatch; and that it had a yard, galleries, a stage, a tiring-house, heavens, and a flagpole. Thus it differed in no essential way from the playhouses already erected in Shoreditch or subsequently erected on ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... Our bungalow was of the usual type, consisting of cement floor, roof of crossed bamboos and two feet of sun-grass thatch, supported by immense teak posts, hard as iron and bidding defiance to the white ants. The walls were of mats. Tea-gardens usually had a surface of 300 to 1000 acres; some were on comparatively level ground, some on hilly (teelah) land. These ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... distant corners, seemed to dart out viciously towards its feeble enemy. The vast space under the high pitch of the roof was filled with a thick cloud of smoke, whose under-side—level like a ceiling—reflected the light of the swaying dull flame, while at the top it oozed out through the imperfect thatch of dried palm leaves. An indescribable and complicated smell, made up of the exhalation of damp earth below, of the taint of dried fish and of the effluvia of rotting vegetable matter, pervaded the place and caused Lingard to sniff strongly as he strode over, sat on ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... of a hundred pounds for his capture for a long time, but so far without success. One man, whom he suspected rightly or wrongly of intending to betray him, he killed by fastening the door of his cottage and then setting the thatch alight; and the man, his wife, and four children were ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... spread it out; and therefore I have a right to look upon their foul frocks as scandalous and vile; at all events no miner should ever shake hands with 'em, or drink out of the same mug. I am determined too to die a man of honour, as I have grown old, without ever setting foot under their thatch roofs, or on their threshing-floors; I have preserved myself four and fifty years from this disgrace, and heaven will continue to guard me from ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... fortnight passed before the place looked itself again, and even then congealed snow stood doggedly in the streets, while the country roads were like newly ploughed fields after rain. The heat from large fires soon penetrated through roofs of slate and thatch; and it was quite a common thing for a man to be flattened to the ground by a slithering of snow from above just as he opened his door. But it had seldom more than ten feet to fall. Most interesting of all was the novel sensation experienced as Thrums began to assume its familiar aspect, ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... it some new move in this grandmother game; then suddenly he poked his cold black nose in under the tossed thatch of Patricia's brown curls. For Patricia was crying—and doing it quite as earnestly and as thoroughly ...
— Patricia • Emilia Elliott
... fortnight, and this one was edged with a sinister portent. He had his idea now. He had at hand the agency for bringing the scheme to fruition. But yet there remained much of preliminary detail to be worked out. His plan still was like a fine-toothed comb which has seen hard usage in a wiry thatch—there were wide ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... in diameter, and four legs a foot and a half long. The roof was well constructed, the rafters being mortised into the ends of the horizontal beams, and tied to the middle by a perpendicular beam or King-Post. Over the rafters is laid a net-work of rods, to which the thatch is tied. There was no chimney to this house, and only one window made of slender bars of wood, forming square spaces three inches by two, covered by a thin semi-transparent paper defended by the roof, which extends so far beyond ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... is a cavity formed by nature. The water is evidently collected by the broad leaf, and carried down a groove in the stem to the bowl, which holds a quart or more, perhaps, at a time. The traveller's-tree is of great use for other purposes to the natives. With the leaves they thatch their houses; the stems serve to portion off the rooms; and the hard outside bark is beaten flat, and is used for flooring. The green leaves are used to envelop packages, and sometimes a table is covered with them ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... the winter. The savages were of fine figure and of olive complexion. They adorned themselves with an embroidery skilfully interwoven with feathers and beads, and dressed their hair in a variety of braids, like those at Saco. Their dwellings were conical in shape, covered with thatch of rushes and corn-husks, and surrounded by cultivated fields. Each cabin contained one or two beds, a kind of matting, two or three inches in thickness, spread upon a platform on which was a layer of elastic staves, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... uncomfortable and rude as its situation and exterior foreboded. There was no appearance of a floor of any kind; the roof seemed rent in several places; the walls were composed of loose stones and turf, and the thatch of branches of trees. The fire was in the centre, and filled the whole wigwam with smoke, which escaped as much through the door as by means of a circular aperture in the roof. An old Highland sibyl, the only inhabitant of this forlorn mansion, appeared busy in the preparation of some food. ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... And makes contentment and joy agree With the coarsest boarding and bedding: Love, that no golden ties can attach, But nestles under the humblest thatch, And will fly away from an Emperor's match To dance at a ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... beneath the side of the road, the mud walls crooked in every direction; some of them opening in wide cracks, or zigzag fissures, from top to bottom, as if there had just been an earthquake—all the roofs sunk in various places—thatch off, or overgrown with grass—no chimneys, the smoke making its way through a hole in the roof, or rising in clouds from the top of the open door—dunghills before the doors, and green standing puddles—squalid children, ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... convicts. It was to be built of wood, and the roof to be covered in with shingles, made from a species of fir that is found here. The heavy rains also pointed out the necessity of sheltering the detachment, and until barracks could be built, most of them covered their tents with thatch, or erected for themselves temporary clay huts. The barracks were begun early in March; but much difficulty was found in providing proper materials, the timber being in general shakey and rotten. They were to consist of four buildings, each building to be ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... hungry, poor Jack now felt sad, And thought of the home, so safe he once had, Where he'd plenty of food, and clean straw for his bed, And at night, a roof of good thatch o'er his head. He escaped from the field, though he scarcely knew how, And scampered as fast as his strength would allow: In the distance, a town, long and wide he could see; "Ah! ah!" said Jack Swine, "that's the ...
— Surprising Stories about the Mouse and Her Sons, and the Funny Pigs. - With Laughable Colored Engravings • Unknown
... the castle and the defense of it were equally fierce, bloody, and desperate. Again and again the buccaneers assaulted, and again and again they were beaten back. So the morning came, and it seemed as though the pirates had been baffled this time. But just at this juncture the thatch of palm leaves on the roofs of some of the buildings inside the fortifications took fire, a conflagration followed, which caused the explosion of one of the magazines, and in the paralysis of terror that followed, the pirates forced their way into the fortifications, and the castle was won. Most ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... rumple the smooth light thatch of his hair. "Bad boy! Can't wait! And here we are getting married all of a sudden, just like that. Up to the time of this draft business, Jimmie Batch, 'pretty soon' was the only date I could ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... Julius CA|sar's description of the people of Kent, whose civilization he found on a higher level than in the other parts he penetrated. He described them as being little different in their manner of living from the Gauls, whose houses were built of planks and willow-branches, roofed with thatch, and were large and circular ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... after this conversation Paul was awakened by a patter upon their skin and thatch roof. It must have been two or three o'clock in the morning, and he had been sleeping very comfortably. He lay on furs, and the soft side of a buffalo robe was wrapped close about him. He could not remember any time in his life when he felt snugger, and he wanted to go back to sleep, ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to go in Sugbu, where the forces were gathered—who, as they were many, occupied all the houses, even the smallest ones—some soldiers were cleaning their weapons in one near the residence of the Recollect fathers. One fired his arquebus, which, unknown to him, was loaded. It caught in the thatch which formed the roof of that little house; and, as the sun was hot, and the wind the greater brisa, the house quickly caught fire. The father prior, Fray Pedro de San Nicolas, was very much annoyed; and he came out, and with reason rebuked the soldiers, who lost all ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... gray with mourning, the tardy day awoke. With heavy limbs and straining eyes, they stumbled at last into view of the promised haven of thatch. ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... up the farther bank and continued straight on without looking back. The man in the stream watched him. His lips trembled a little, so that the rough thatch of brown hair which covered them was visibly agitated. His tongue even strayed out ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... whenever the necessities of his calling compelled him to remain over night in that neighbourhood. A little hut which he had constructed out of bamboos, with the broad leaves of bananas thrown over it for thatch, served him sufficiently well for this occasional and ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... me not cruelly dead! And I will lead thee straight to my house, That's thatch'd with gold ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... rawboned man with a thatch of thick black hair and small watery eyes. He was dressed, oddly enough, in a pair of tight-fitting trousers of white lawn, a flaming red tunic and ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... bean-rick had suddenly been taken possession of by an immense number of rats, where shortly before not one could have been found. A man going to the rick-yard quite early had seen the roof of the rick black with them; they were apparently drinking the dew hanging in drops on the straws of the thatch. They were so close together, "so thick," as he expressed it, that one was killed by a stone thrown "into the brown" of them. We sent for the thrashing machine a day or two later, and killed over seventy, ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... Proprietors. At Night we got to Bell's-Island, a poor Spot of Land, being about ten Miles round, where liv'd (at that Time) a Bermudian, being employ'd here with a Boy, to look after a Stock of Cattle and Hogs, by the Owner of this Island. One Side of the Roof of his House was thatch'd with Palmeto-leaves, the other open to the Heavens, thousands of Musketoes, and other troublesome Insects, tormenting both Man and Beast inhabiting these Islands. {Palmeto-trees.} The Palmeto-trees, whose Leaves growing ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... see a house, which could have been built only by a white man, or one versed in the ways of civilisation. Not that there was anything very imposing in its architecture; for it was but a wooden structure, the walls of bamboo, and the roof a thatch of the palm called cuberta—so named from the use made of its fronds in covering sheds and houses. But the superior size of this dwelling, far exceeding that of the simple toldos of the Chaco Indians; its ample verandah ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... bore their clusters of tawny and lilac flowers. Beyond, I could see a kitchen garden with the apples in the boughs, and, standing up in the midst of it, a projecting part of the house which, to my amazement, was covered with thatch. ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... the shrine Where Pan below the rock had rites divine: Then tells of Argus' death, his murder'd guest, Whose grave and tomb his innocence attest. Thence, to the steep Tarpeian rock he leads; Now roof'd with gold, then thatch'd with homely reeds. A reverent fear (such superstition reigns Among the rude) ev'n then possess'd the swains. Some god, they knew- what god, they could not tell- Did there amidst the sacred horror dwell. Th' Arcadians thought him Jove; and said they saw The mighty ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... teaching' or not. Why, you will not find one of these children about here, boy or girl, who cannot swim; and every one of them has been used to tumbling about the little forest ponies—there's one of them now! They all of them know how to cook; the bigger lads can mow; many can thatch and do odd jobs at carpentering; or they know how to keep shop. I can tell you ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... descendant Look (thick) as thatch, and (swelling) like a carriage-cover. His stacks will stand like islands and mounds. He will seek for thousands of granaries; He will seek for tens of thousands of carts. The millets, the paddy, and the maize Will awake the joy of the husbandmen; ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... tigers have existed in the interior of Mysore. Man-eaters enter villages. A tiger tearing off the thatch of a hut. ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... explained, however, that there was nought to eat. After eating elsewhere, we made our way back to our lodging-place, a typical Zapotec hut, a single room, with dirt-floor, walls of canes or poles, and thatch of grass. The house contained a hammock and two beds of poles, comforts we had not known for days. I threw myself into the hammock; Ernst lay down upon one of the beds; the man and woman, squatting, were husking corn ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... slow motion under the heat of the tropic sun; and no wonder if some of the cottages have sunk right and left in such a treacherous foundation. A stone or brick house could not stand here; but wood and palm-thatch are both light and tough enough to be safe, let the ground give way as ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... me, and beat out one of my eyes!" On hearing this we shouted out, "Victory! victory! for the Espiritu Santo! Narvaez is dead!" Still we were unable to force our way into the temple, till Martin Lopez, who was very tall, set the thatch on fire, and forced those within to rush down the steps to save themselves from being burnt to death. Sanches Farfan laid hold on Narvaez, whom we carried prisoner to Sandoval, along with several other captive captains, continually ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... stumble and fall; but had the presence of mind, it is said, to turn the omen to his advantage, by calling aloud that he had taken possession of the country. And a soldier, running to a neighbouring cottage, plucked some thatch, which, as if giving seisin of the kingdom, he presented to his general. The joy and alacrity of William and his whole army were so great, that they were nowise discouraged, even when they heard of Harold's great victory ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... talk you deaf," said Bill Saxby, "but there's pith in his old bones and wisdom under yon hoary thatch. Cap'n Bonnet sent him along with me as a rare old hound to ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... word she tripped for the car steps. I gave the fellow one firm look as he stood stupidly scratching his thatch as if to harrow his ideas; and perforce left him. By the cheers he undoubtedly made in the same direction. I was barely in time myself. The train moved as I planted foot upon the steps of the nearest car—the foremost of the two. The train continued; ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... would be quiet and well-behaved for months, till one night, without word or warning, they would rush a police-post, cut the throats of a constable or two, dash through a village, carry away three or four women, and withdraw, in the red glare of burning thatch, driving the cattle and goats before them to their own desolate hills. The Indian Government would become almost tearful on these occasions. First it would say, 'Please be good and we'll forgive you.' The tribe concerned in the latest depredation would collectively put ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... nothing to Jones, nor was the subsidiary fact that one of the inmates, a quiet mannered clergyman, with a taste for arson, had taken advantage of the confusion and was patiently and sedulously at work, firing the thatch of the summer house in six different places, with a long ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... cabin, consisted only of two rooms, both on the ground, and both without flooring or ceiling; the black rafters on which the thatch was lying was above, and the uneven soil below; still this place of entertainment was not like the cabins of the very poor: the rooms were both long, and as they ran lengthways down the street, each was the full breadth ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... flags. It looked very easy to throw a line with a worm on it towards the shore, and then draw it back, but the chub showed such little eagerness to be caught by me that I generally preferred to steer and watch my companion pulling them out as he stood in the prow, his face nearly hidden under the thatch of his straw hat. When the fish were in a biting humour, he had one on his hook every time he ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... back by the way we came, and then knew that we could in no way take the boat to Poole. The gale was raging at its highest, and thatch was flying from the exposed roofs. It would be dead against us; and the sea was white with foam, even in the haven. So we must go by road, and that was a long way. But we must get back to Odda, for he should be in Wareham before ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... the frame with bark and then thatch it, which will render the shelter better able to withstand a storm, or you may omit the bark, using only the thatch as a covering. Put on very thick, this should make ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... not enough to be fierce and foremost in the battle, Macumazahn. He who would sleep safe and of whom, when he dies, folk will say 'He has eaten' (i.e., he has lived out his life), must do more than this. He must guard his tongue and even his thoughts! he must listen to the stirring of rats in the thatch and look for snakes in the grass; he must trust few, and least of all those who sleep upon his bosom. But those who have the Lion's blood in them or who are prone to charge like a buffalo, often neglect these matters and therefore in the end they ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... houses of the settlers were doubtless of logs, one story high, "daubed" with clay. A common form was eighteen feet square, with seven feet stud, stone fireplaces, with catted chimney, and a hip-roof covered with thatch. These structures generally gave way in a few years to large frame houses, covered with "clo'boards" and shingles, having fireplace and chimney of brick, which was laid in clay mortar, except the part above the roof, where lime was used. Of these ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... the chapel, Father Phil intended delivering an address to his flock from the altar, urging them to the necessity of bestirring themselves in the repairs of the chapel, which was in a very dilapidated condition, and at one end let in the rain through its worn-out thatch. A subscription was necessary; and to raise this among a very impoverished people was no easy matter. The weather happened to be unfavourable, which was most favourable to Father Phil's purpose, for the rain dropped its arguments through the roof upon the kneeling people ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... monkeys, where it presumably has to do with arboreal habits. For, when sitting in trees, the orang, as observed by Mr. Wallace, places its hands above its head with its elbows pointing downwards: the disposition of hair on the arms and fore-arms then has the effect of thatch in turning the rain. Again, I find that in all species of apes, monkeys, and baboons which I have examined (and they have been numerous), the hair on the backs of the hands and feet is continued as far as the first row of phalanges; but becomes scanty, or disappears altogether, on the ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... threw his leather cap to the keystone of the archway, caught it again and set it upon his thatch of hair, having the solemnity of one who performs ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... which kept his mind from a high tension was shown again in the heavy fall of his feet and the forward slump of his head. His hands dangled aimlessly at his sides, as though in need of occupation. A ragged thatch of blond hair covered his head and it was sunburned to ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... and fight; An' it's betther to have a naygur's hue Than a liver that's wake an' white; Though Sambo's black as the ace o' spades His finger a thrigger can pull, An' his eye runs sthraight on the barrel sight From under its thatch o' wool. So hear me all, boys, darlins! Don't think I'm tippen' you chaff, The right to be kilt I'll divide wid him, An' ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... separately, he will simply twist backwards every second sword and plait them all into a mat two feet wide, eight or ten feet long, and firmly bounded and held together on one side by the unbreakable backbone. This is a "jaolee," lighter than slates, or tiles, and more handy than any form of thatch. You have just to arrange your "jaolees" neatly on your bamboo frame, each overlapping the one below it, then tie them securely in their places with coir rope and your roof is made for ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... fell to work on the miserable cabin of a poor peasant, smashing the closet doors, tearing the thatch from the roof. Some officers, who came up on a run, threatened them with their revolvers ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... found. Besides the upper lip's strange variation, Corrected from mutation to mutation; As 'twere from tithing unto tithing sent, Pride gives to Pride continuall punishment. Some (spite their teeth) like thatch'd eves downeward grows, And some growes upwards in despite their nose. Some their mustatioes of such length doe keepe, That very well they may a maunger sweepe: Which in Beere, Ale, or Wine, they drinking plunge, And sucke the liquor up, as 'twere a Spunge; But 'tis a Slovens beastly ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... houses, built of mud, whitewashed, and principally covered with thatch or palm-leaves; a few built of stone or wood, with verandas, doors, and shutters painted a bright green, standing in the middle of a small orchard of orange-trees in flower. But there were two ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... sat down and wiped the back of his neck with his handkerchief. He was bearded almost to the eyes, and his bushy brows stood out in a thatch. As he bent his gaze upon Mr. Anthony it was like some gentle creature peering ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... breeze died away from our vicinity to the isles. The billows rolled listlessly by, as if conscious that their long task was nigh done; while gleamed the white reef, like the trail of a great fish in a calm. But as yet, no sign of paddle or canoe; no distant smoke; no shining thatch. Bravo! good comrades, we've discovered some new constellation in ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... drawn close to the shore. When the last man had stepped on board, at a given signal the boatmen jumped into the water and waded to the bank. They had contrived to secrete burning charcoal in the thatch of most of the boats; this soon blazed up, and as the flames rose and the dry wood crackled, the troops in ambush on the shore opened fire. Officers and men tried in vain to push off the boats; three only floated, and of these two drifted to the opposite side, where sepoys were waiting to murder ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... tho' she does not reign. She's but a ward, at what late age she'll gain Her freedom and her kingdom, it were best To risk no surmise rash. E'en now she's drest Sometimes in skins. Give her ground-nuts and grain, Cattle and thatch'd hut, then she'll not complain, She's ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... by and heard, with as much impatience as he cared to show before guests whose rank was precious to the man who had still weakness enough to be ashamed that his father's brave and famous life had first been cradled under the thatch roof of ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... long, low building, with a narrow paving in front from end to end, of stones cast up by the plough. Its walls, but one story high, rough-cast and white-washed, shone dim in the twilight. Under a thick projecting thatch the door stood wide open, and from the kitchen, whose door was also open, came the light of a peat-fire and a fish-oil-lamp. Throughout the summer Steenie was seldom in the house an hour of the twenty-four, and now he hesitated to ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... the departed. While a Tagbanua corpse is above ground it is liable to be eaten by a vampire called the balbal that lives on Mindanao, has the form of a man with wings and great claws, tears open the thatch of houses and consumes bodies by means of a long tongue, which it thrusts through the opening in the roof. These Tagbanuas do not believe in a heaven in the skies, because, they say, you could not get up there. When a man dies he enters a cave that leads into the ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... our walks round Combray, and for that reason was reserved for days of uncertain weather, it followed that the climate of Meseglise shewed an unduly high rainfall, and we would never lose sight of the fringe of Roussainville wood, so that we could, at any moment, run for shelter beneath its dense thatch of leaves. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... paper, few being able to afford white; in some places they were stopped with straw or hay. Another mark of our riches, are the signs at the several inns upon the road, viz. In some, a staff stuck in the thatch, with a turf at the end of it; a staff in a dunghill with a white rag wrapped about the head; a pole, where they can afford it, with a besom at the top; an oatmeal cake on a board at the window; and, at the principal inns of the road, I have observed the signs taken ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... look, as he slouched listlessly in the saddle, it was almost impossible to think of him as a matured man. The receding chin, and coarse, loosely opened mouth, the pale, lifeless eyes set too closely together under a low forehead, with a ragged thatch of dead, mouse-colored hair, and a furtive, sneaking, lost-dog expression, proclaimed him the outcast ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... an elongated St. Andrew's cross; but nobody can tell for certain who built them, or why. They are all alike; each, built of cob, circular, whitewashed, having pointed windows and a conical roof of thatch with a wooden cross on the apex. When I was a boy these thatched roofs used to be pointed out to me as masterpieces; and they still endure. But the race of skilled thatchers, once the peculiar pride of Gantick, has come to an end. What time has eaten modern and clumsy ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... by the smoking jacket and the slippers and the uncovered thatch of jet-black hair, that this man must be Holman Sommers; when he saw Elfigo Apodaca there, seated and talking earnestly with him, as he could tell by the gestures with which they elaborated their speech; ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... peer and watch Through the deep shade, a mouldering dwelling find, No light within—the thin door shakes—the thatch O'er the green walls ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... at these things, {and} while they were bewailing the fate of their {fellow countrymen}, that old cottage of {theirs}, {too} little for even two owners, was changed into a temple. Columns took the place of forked stakes, the thatch grew yellow, and the earth was covered with marble; the doors appeared carved, and the roof to be of gold. Then, the son of Saturn uttered such words as these with benign lips: 'Tell us, good old man, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... during the herring season, an occasional fish-curer comes the way, rarely bait at the Gardenstone inn; and in the little low-browed room, with its windows in the thatch, into which, as her best, the land-lady ushered me, I certainly found nothing to identify the locale with that chosen by the literary lawyer for his open library. But, according to Ferguson, though "learning was scant, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... sense, was Nikky, but tall and straight, with a thatch of bright hair not unlike that of the Crown Prince, and as unruly. Tall and straight, and occasionally truculent, with a narrow rapier scar on his left cheek to tell the story of wild student days, and with two clear young eyes that had looked out humorously at the world until lately. But Nikky ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... The former thatch of half-curly and indeterminately yellowish fuzz had changed to a rough tawny coat, wavy and unbelievably heavy, stippled at the ends with glossy black. There was a strange depth and repose and Soul in the dark eyes—yes, and a keen ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... is of the rudest description. It is usually built of undressed stone, with a cement of clay or turf. Over the rafters is laid a covering of pones, divots, or flaas,* and above this again a thatch of straw, bound down with ropes of heather, weighted at the ends with stones, as a protection against the high winds which are so prevalent. Chimneys and windows are rarely to be seen. One or more holes in the roof permit the escape of the smoke, and at the same ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... profusion. The wild roses of June were like the high notes of a violin, and there was clover, and mown hay. In the southeast the clouds were banking, but still the moon rose high, and the cottage was clear as in daylight, clearer even in the mind's eye—the whitewashed walls, the thatch like silver, the swallows' nests beneath the eaves. The hard round sea-cobbles beneath his feet were clear and individual, and to where he sat in the haggard came a girl's song ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... boots in the porch, and we got our gardening tools and we went down to the white cottage. It is a nice cottage, with a thatched roof, like in the drawing copies you get at girls' schools, and you do the thatch—if you can—with a B.B. pencil. If you cannot, you just leave it. It looks just as well, somehow, when it is mounted ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... expended the very utmost of its fury; trees were torn up by the roots, the thatch was blown off the outhouses, chimneys fell, windows were blown in, and, as Dinah, terrified by the uproar and destruction racing round her, stood holding her uncanny child in her arms, through the roof and ceiling came crashing a monstrous thunderbolt, surrounded by flames, and ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... is a turnpike-gate called Hendy gate. This gate was kept by an old woman upwards of seventy years of age, who has received frequent notices that if she did not leave the gate, her house should be burnt down. About three o'clock on Sunday morning, a party of ruffians set fire to the thatch of the toll-house. The old woman, on being awakened, ran into the road and to a neighbouring cottage within twenty yards of the toll-house, shouting to the people who lived in it, 'For God's sake to come out and help her ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... of darkness, that a few feet from the lantern still encompassed them, gave no indication of their progress, until their feet actually trod the rude planks and thatch that formed the roof of their habitation; for their cabin half burrowed in the mountain, and half clung, like a swallow's nest, to the side of the deep declivity that terminated the northern limit of the summit. Had it not been for the windlass of a shaft, ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... in proportion. His great arms hung down until the monstrous hands almost touched the knees. His skin was quite dark, almost negroid; and a thick, close mat of curly black hair covered his huge head like a thatch. His face was muscular, ligamentous; with great bars, ridges and whelks of flesh, especially about the jaws and on the forehead. But the eyes fascinated me. They were the eyes of a wild beast, deep-set, sullen and glaring; they seemed to shine like those of the cat-tribe, with a luminosity of their ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... attribute of the lady's appearance has still to be mentioned. She always wore a slouch hat, which from motives of propriety she called her bonnet, which gave her a singular appearance, as though it had been put on to thatch her entirely from the weather. It was made generally of black straw, and was round, equal at all points of the circle, and was fastened with broad brown ribbons. It was supposed in the neighborhood to be ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... storms of rage Tempestuous in the soul engage, Or when the spirits, weak and low, Are sunk in deep distress and woe, With strict propriety we hear Description stealing on the ear, 70 And put off feeling half an hour To thatch a cot, or paint a flower; But in these serious works, design'd To mend the morals of mankind, We must for ever be disgraced With all the nicer sons of Taste, If once, the shadow to pursue, We let ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... wed. The cards are dealt, Our frolic games are o'er; I've laughed, and fooled, and loved. I've felt— As I shall feel no more! Yon little thatch is where she lives, Yon spire is where she met me;— I think that if she quite forgives, She cannot quite ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... than turn and die of the seeing. The night was dark—no moon and many clouds. Not a sound came from the close. The cattle, the horses, the pigs, the cocks and hens, the very cats and rats seemed asleep. There was not a rustle in the thatch, a creak in the couples. It was well, for the slightest noise would have brought his heart into his mouth, and he would have been in great danger of scaring the household, and for ever disgracing himself, with a shriek. Yet he longed to hear something stir. Oh! for ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... of her cottage. The grandmother first heard the cries of the villagers: "Fire them, let them both burn together." Franconnette rushed to the door and pleaded for mercy. "Go back," cried the crowd, "you must both roast together." They set fire to the rick outside and then proceeded to fire the thatch of the cottage. "Hold, hold!" cried a stern voice, and Pascal rushed in amongst them. "Cowards! would you murder two defenceless women? Tigers that you are, would you fire and ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... time he stretched out one hand in a feeble way, to find that he was touching straw, and that beneath the straw there were boards. But there was straw everywhere; even the ceiling seemed to be straw, coarse straw, till he realised that it was reed thatch, and by degrees that he must be in the upper part of a stable—the loft, for he could smell hay; and as he satisfied himself that he was right so far, he discovered something more—that there were horses somewhere below, for there ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... weather-stained with years — (O Child in Me, I wonder why you stay.) Its windows are bedimmed with rain of tears, The walls have lost their rose, its thatch is gray. One after one its guests depart, So dull a host is my old heart. (O Child in Me, ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... showing the date of 1666, was a long way ahead of the first log cabins erected by the Pilgrims—farther than most of us realize, accustomed as we are to glass instead of oiled paper in windows; to shingles, and not thatch for roofs. It is fitting that this ancient and charming dwelling should be associated with one of the most romantic, most striking, names in the Plymouth Colony. There are few more picturesque personalities in our early history than Myles Standish. Small in stature, fiery in spirit, ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... bronzed a little by sun and wind. There was the same healthy bronze upon his face, Clarissa perceived, when he took off his hat, and hung it up above him; rather a handsome face, with a long straight nose, dark blue eyes with thick brown eyebrows, a well cut mouth and chin, and a thick thatch of crisp dark brown hair waving round a broad, intelligent-looking forehead. The firm, full upper lip was half-hidden by a carefully trained moustache; and in his dress and bearing the stranger had altogether a military air: one could fancy him a cavalry soldier. That bare muscular ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... rotund little man of forty-five, smooth-shaven, somewhat sandy in complexion, with twinkling eyes that were friendly, and a light thatch of pinkish hair which was noticeably thinning on the top of his head. There was a general air of cheerfulness and content about him and his mouth, that was inclined to twitch at the corners, seemed continually on the point ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... the south-west side. Just underneath the window was the pigstye. Outside nothing had been done to the house for years. It was not brick built, and here and there the laths and timber were bare, and the thatch had almost gone. Houses were very scarce on the farms in that part, and landlords would not build. The labourers consequently were driven into Abchurch, and had to walk, many of them, a couple of miles each way ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... a house and a holly-hedge. The house was the sexton's, who, apprehending the stramash to proceed from a resurrectionary surgeon mistaken in his latitude, thrust out a long duck-gun from a window in the thatch, and swore to blow out our brains if we did not instantly surrender ourselves, and deliver up the corpse. It was in vain to cry out our name, which he knew as well as his own. He was deaf to reason, and would not withdraw his patterero till ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... towards me, walking erect, and gravely held out a long and bony paw for me to shake. Then, as if satisfied that she had done all that hospitality demanded of her, she walked to the further end of the thatch verandah and stood there looking off into the forest, from which there came a few minutes later the most unearthly and yet most human cry I ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... the quarrel described above, Princess Rich Gem arrived from the castle of the ocean Kami, and built a parturition hut on the seashore, she being about to bring forth a child. Before the thatch of cormorants' feathers could be completed, the pains of labour overtook her, and she entered the hut, conjuring her husband not to spy upon her privacy, since, in order to be safely delivered, she must assume a shape appropriate to her native land. He, however, suffered his ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... now rich corn land and meadow, intersected by green hedgerows and dotted with villages and pleasant country seats, would appear as moors overgrown with furze, or fens abandoned to wild ducks. We should see straggling huts built of wood and covered with thatch, where we now see manufacturing towns and seaports renowned to the farthest ends of the world. The capital itself would shrink to dimensions not much exceeding those of its present suburb on the south of the Thames. Not less strange to us would be the garb and manners of the people, the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... hills to the west. Since the scourge of war had passed over Palestine, there were scores of such hovels, vacant and abandoned to the bats and the small wild life about the countryside, and the boy doubted seriously if the thatch that covered it were still whole. But he attracted the attention of a pair of robust young Galileans on the way to the Passover, and, by their help, carried the wounded man to shelter in this hut. Urge, the sheep-dog, rushed the sheep out of the sedge and hurried them after his ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... fruit-trees. It had, I was told, been planted only three years ago by Hiraman and Motiram, and I sent for them, knowing that they would be pleased to have their good work noticed by any European gentleman. The trees are now covered with cones of thatch to shelter them from the frost. The merchants came, evidently much pleased, and I had a good deal ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... established under thatch, and with sliding lights before it, the Admiral's favorite Munich glass, mounted by an old ship's carpenter (who had followed the fortunes of his captain) on a stand which would have puzzled anybody but the maker, with ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... peeping up into it, "whoop" re-echoed from the stables! At last, as Annie was gazing up and round as if she even thought it as well to look right into the sky for Papa, she suddenly beheld the two merriest eyes in the world, on the roof of the summer-house itself. He had been lying there on the thatch, watching at his ease all the wanderings of the seekers, and uttering those ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wandered about the neighborhood with insatiable interest; sometimes, and often, lying on a hill-side and gazing at the gray tower of the church; sometimes coming into the village clustered round that same church, and looking at the old timber and plaster houses, the same, except that the thatch had probably been often renewed, that they used to be in his ancestor's days. In those old cottages still dwelt the families, the ———s, the Prices, the Hopnorts, the Copleys, that had dwelt there when America was a scattered progeny of infant colonies; and in the churchyard were the graves of ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of S. Iago hath fourescore houses which are great and well contriued. The most part haue their walls made of bords, and are couered with thatch; it hath some houses builded with lime and stone, and couered with tiles. (M603) It hath great Orchards and many trees in them, differing from those of Spaine: there be figgetrees which beare figges as big as ones fist, yellow within, and of small taste; ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... name was Thatch. He was called Blackbeard because he wore a long black beard that covered his face. This made him look frightful in that day, when other men shaved their faces smooth. He divided his beard into locks, and twisted each lock, ...
— Stories of American Life and Adventure • Edward Eggleston
... his roof of thatch, Smoked thoughtfully and slow; The Slaver's thumb was on the latch, He seemed in haste ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... turn-out," she said, "to the turn-out that's to be the morrow. It's more goes to the like, I'm thinking, than comes back again. He's taken the pike with him that lay in the thatch over our bed this year and more. But the will of the ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... and while the slow isicle hangs At the stifle thatch, and Winter's frosty pangs Benumme the year, blithe as of old let us Mid noise and war, of peace and mirth discusse. This portion thou wert born for. Why should we Vex at the time's ridiculous miserie? An age that thus hath fooled itself, and will, Spite of thy teeth and mine, persist so still. Let's ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... next to Henry, the greatest forest runner of the five, a marvel of skill, endurance and perception, with a mighty heart beating beneath his deerskins, and an intellect of wonderful native power, reasoning and drawing deductions under his thatch ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... beauty. Sometimes the shrine consists only of a rude altar, situated amid a grove of trees; but, even in the case of large temples with a complete group of buildings, the architecture is extremely plain, the material employed being unornamented white wood with a thatch of chamaecyparis. The entrance to the temple grounds is always through gateways, called Torii; these are made sometimes of stone, but more properly of wood, and consist of two unpainted tree-trunks, with another on the top and a horizontal beam beneath. Near the entrance are commonly found stone ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... one side a meadow, on the other a green. My farm consisted of about twenty acres of excellent land. Nothing could exceed the neatness of my little enclosures, the elms and hedgerows appearing with inexpressible beauty. My house consisted of but one story, and was covered with [v]thatch, which gave it an air of great snugness; the walls on the inside were nicely whitewashed, and my daughters undertook to adorn them with pictures of their own designing. Though the same room served us for parlor and kitchen, that only made it the warmer. Besides, as it was ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... of suspicion at her from under the black thatch of brows that met above his nose and were as ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... emotion had taken away her colour, and tears were thick on her cheek. She sat a little while by the table to recover herself, still thinking, and remembered that again last night she had dreamed the same dream about fire in the thatch. Somehow there seemed to be an alarm in the night, and they ran out of doors and found the corner of the roof on fire, over the window with the wire network instead of glass. It ran up from the corner towards the chimney, where the roof was mossy by the ridge. There ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... of the eighteenth century, a hardy family lived frugally and simply on a few, fertile Norman acres. Their home was but a hut of stone and clay and thatch. It was surrounded by a carefully attended vineyard and fruit trees which, in the springtime, made the spot most beautiful. On this May day the passerby would have stopped that he might carry away this scene of perfect pastoral charm. The blossoming vines almost ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... made them kiss it. We then entered the house, which covered a piece of ground 327 feet long, and forty-two feet broad. It consisted of a roof, thatched with palm leaves, and raised upon thirty-nine pillars on each side, and fourteen in the middle. The ridge of the thatch, on the inside, was thirty feet high, and the sides of the house, to the edge of the roof, were twelve feet high; all below the roof being open. As soon as we entered the house, she made us sit down, and then calling four young girls, she assisted ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... meeting-house in Dorchester, a very unpretentious structure of logs and thatch, was completed in 1631, and no free-holder was allowed to plant his domicile farther than the distance of half a mile from it, without special permission of the fathers of the town. It stood near the intersection of the present Pleasant and Cottage ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... dressed with the hammer, and having the windows and doors decorated with huge heavy architraves, or lintels, as they are called, of hewn stone, and its roof covered with broad grey flags, instead of slates, thatch, or tiles. A jargonelle pear-tree at one end of the cottage, a rivulet and flower-plot of a rood in extent in front, and a kitchen-garden behind; a paddock for a cow, and a small field, cultivated ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... being one compacted mass of stones, are often formed by two exterior surfaces of stone, filled up with earth in the middle, which makes them very warm. The roof is generally bad. They are thatched, sometimes with straw, sometimes with heath, sometimes with fern. The thatch is secured by ropes of straw, or of heath; and, to fix the ropes, there is a stone tied to the end of each. These stones hang round the bottom of the roof, and make it look like a lady's hair in papers; but I should think that, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... as you lift the latch, little ones are meeting you, Soon as you're 'neath the thatch, kindly looks are greeting you; Scarcely have you time to be holding out the fist to them— Down by the fireside you're sitting in the midst ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... since I saw it last. The winter's winds had lifted the thatch, and the wall on one side had tumbled in. There was no sign of the old life we lived there. The little window from which the guiding light had shone so often was fallen to pieces. Even the friendly hearth within was filled with ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... constructed have never exhibited any tendency to depart from the primitive simplicity so strongly enjoined by their founder; and, down to the present time, the homes of the Buddhist priesthood are modest and humble structures generally reared of mud and thatch, with no pretension to external beauty and no attempt at ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... and Mahometans, both natives and foreigners who meet there—especially the Chinese, who have observed this condition—it is very annoying that they should see it served so inadequately and covered with wood and thatch—poor, dilapidated, and without provision. And because it is very just, and in accord with my will and desire, that the above-mentioned church be built and served with all possible propriety, you shall, as soon as you arrive at the said islands, especially further the building and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... mossy thatch, and the meadows so green, Are covered all over with white; The snowdrop and crocus no more can be seen, The thick snow has covered ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... Jack now felt sad, And thought of the home, so safe he once had, Where he'd plenty of food, and clean straw for his bed, And at night, a roof of good thatch o'er his head. He escaped from the field, though he scarcely knew how, And scampered as fast as his strength would allow: In the distance, a town, long and wide he could see; "Ah! ah!" said Jack Swine, ...
— Surprising Stories about the Mouse and Her Sons, and the Funny Pigs. - With Laughable Colored Engravings • Unknown
... a long, almost incoherent missive must suffice. Even Cranston's lips twitched under the heavy thatch of his moustache as he listened. Even we, who like Mrs. Cranston, must admit it wasn't quite kind in her, no matter how natural, to read it afterward to Agatha Loomis, who, although declining to read, did not quite decline to hear at ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... relations with them. He found their deserted wigwams and the embers of their fires, but could not catch sight of a single native. A few days after this, two of the pilgrims, who were abroad gathering thatch, did not return, and great anxiety was felt for them. Four or five men the next day set out in search for them. After wandering about all day unsuccessfully through the pathless forest, they returned at ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... and undergrowth around had to be cleared; the huts, of which there were six, had to be cleaned out, fitted up with new parchment in the windows—for there was no glass in those days—and new thatch on the roofs, besides being generally repaired; additional huts had to be built for the people, pens for the sheep, and stabling for the cattle, all of which implied felling and squaring timber, while the smaller ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... back kitchen sloped down quite low. It was made of thatch and it had moss on it, and house-leeks and stonecrop and wallflowers, and even a clump of purple flag-flowers, at the ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... another hardy creeper. As soon as this tenement was vacated, and the Laird's intention of inhabiting it known, the ancient tenants of the family all manifested their affection by using their several crafts in repairing the cottage, and setting the house to rights,—one mended the thatch, another repaired the wood-work, a third white-washed the walls, another mended the paling, and old Shanty did any little job in his way which might ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... the Animallai Hills where thirty-five years ago there modestly nestled on the ridge beside the river only Forest Ranger Theobold's bungalow, built of mud and covered with grass thatch and bamboo rats, there is now a regular hill station lighted by electricity, a modern sanatorium high up on the bluff, a club, golf links, and other modern improvements. In my day there were exactly four guns on the Animallais. Now there are probably one hundred; ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... of the great storm in the spring of '97, the year that we had two great storms. This was the first one, and I remember it very well, because I found in the morning that it had lifted the thatch of my pigsty into the widow's garden as clean as a boy's kite. When I looked over the hedge, widow—Tom Lamport's widow that was—was prodding for her nasturtiums with a daisy-grubber. After I had watched ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... suppose, then, this centre surrounded with less than one hundred stragling huts, without order, which we will dignify with the name of houses; built of timber, the interfaces wattled with sticks, and plaistered with mud, covered with thatch, boards or sods; none of them higher than the ground story. The meaner sort only one room, which served for three uses, shop, kitchen, and lodging room; the door for two, it admitted the people and the light. The better sort two rooms, and some three, for work, for the kitchen, and for ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... of the lane it stands, Where the sumac grows in a crimson thatch, Down where the sweet wild berry patch, Holds out a lure for eager hands. Down at the end of the lane, who knows The ghosts that sit at the well-scarred seats, When the moon is dark, and the gray sky meets With the dawn time light, and ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... be done!—and then, faith, sure enough, As the pig was desaiced, 'twas high time to be off. So we gothered up all the poor duds we could catch, Lock the owld cabin-door, put the kay in the thatch, Then tuk laave of each other's sweet lips in the dark, And set off, like the Chrishtians turned out of the Ark; The six childher with you, my dear Judy, ochone! And poor I wid myself, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the blushing dewdrops falter; The peacock wakes and leaves the cottage thatch; A deer is rising near the hoof-marked altar, And stretching, stands, the ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... it was as bad. Time, which had dealt so kindly with Vandon itself, had taken the straggling village in hand too. Nothing could be more picturesque than the crazy black-and-white houses, with lichen on their broken-in thatch, and the plaster peeling off from between the irregular beams of black wood; nothing ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... ye bear to draw your latest breath Where all that's wretched paves the way for death? Such is that room which one rude beam divides, And naked rafters form the sloping sides; Where the vile bands that bind the thatch are seen, And lath and mud are all that lie between; Save one dull pane, that, coarsely patch'd, gives way To the rude tempest, yet excludes the day: Here, on a matted flock, with dust o'erspread, The drooping wretch reclines his ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... about here, boy or girl, who cannot swim; and every one of them has been used to tumbling about the little forest ponies—there's one of them now! They all of them know how to cook; the bigger lads can mow; many can thatch and do odd jobs at carpentering; or they know how to keep shop. I can tell you they know ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... round it on the inside. A number of respectable merchants and tradesmen reside in this town, where they are better protected than in any other town in Oude. It contains a population of between twenty and thirty thousand persons. They put thatch over the mud walls during the rains to preserve them. The fortifications and dwelling-houses together are said to have cost the family above ten lacs of rupees. There are some fourteen old guns in the fort. Though it would be difficult to shell a garrison out ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... milkmaids click the latch, And rarely smells the new-mown hay, And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch Twice or thrice his roundelay, Twice or thrice his roundelay; Alone and warming his five wits, The white owl in ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... is beyond the sea That I have never seen, But Johnny says he'll take me there, And I shall be a queen. He'll build for me a palace there, Its roof will be of thatch, And it will have a little ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... the fire came to our two houses, which were at that time very unfit for such danger, especially one to which the fire came within three yards, so that the jambs of the windows were so hot one could hardly lay their hand upon them, yet did not its old dry thatch take fire, to the great admiration of all who were there of many nations. All the villains of the place gathered round our house, so that we durst take no rest, lest they should set it on fire. Some of them even were so impudent in the evening ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... the saddle, it was almost impossible to think of him as a matured man. The receding chin, and coarse, loosely opened mouth, the pale, lifeless eyes set too closely together under a low forehead, with a ragged thatch of dead, mouse-colored hair, and a furtive, sneaking, lost-dog expression, proclaimed him the ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... twelve feet of the ground, and from the ground upwards a stone wall was raised, as perpendicular as was found practicable, towards these overhang-wattles, this wall being roughly "pointed" with sand and clay and lime. Now into and upon the roof was woven and intertwisted a covering of thatch, that defied all winds and weathers, and that made the cottage marvelously cozy,—being renewed year by year, and never allowed to remain in disrepair at any season. But the beauty of the construction was and is its durability, ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... longer one for his purpose, but when he returned, he found the cheese was gone. "A murrain take it!" quoth he. "If I had had this sword, I had had this cheese myself, and now another hath got it!" Also in the smith who took a red-hot iron bar and thrust it into the thatch of his smithy to destroy a colony of wasps, and, of course, burned down the smithy—a story which has done duty in modern days to "point a moral" in the form of a teetotal tract, with a drunken smith in place of the ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... forehead, when suddenly there arose a flame as if a house were on fire, but I knew from the position of the blaze (which was only a few hundred yards from where I stood), that there was no house there, or any combustible that would burn, and what perplexed me most was to see pieces of burning thatch and timber sparks fall hissing into the water at my feet. When the fire seemed at its height the firing appeared to weaken, and when the clear sound of a bugle floated out on the midnight air, it suddenly ceased, and I could hear distinctly the sound of cavalry coming ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... then alive, made as much difficulty as possible in getting the door open in order to give Davie time to conceal himself. But he did better than hide in the house. Springing out of bed, he actually broke a hole through the "divets" or turfs of the thatch, and creeping through it, climbed down outside, just as his adversaries, certain of capturing their prize, were mounting the ladder which led to his bed-chamber. When the exciseman saw the empty bed he ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... mellow fruitfulness! Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... pattern of neatness. The furniture, though simple, was pretty and well made, with snowy white curtains to the windows and beds, and green blinds to keep out the glare of that hot clime. The verandah ran completely round the house, and a thick thatch of leaves formed a roof which effectually prevented the sun's rays from penetrating below. In front was a pretty flower-garden, and in the rear a well-stocked kitchen garden, producing in perfection all the native vegetables, fruits, and roots, as well as many from Europe. The islanders ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... deal of information though by no means all he sought. He found out that he had been taken desperately ill, that he had been summarily removed from his lodging place because of the owner's superstitious dread of contagion into the miserable little thatch roofed hut in which he had nearly died thanks to the mal-practice of the rascally, drunken doctor and the ignorant half-breed nurse. He learned how Alan Massey had suddenly appeared and taken things in his own hands, discovered that in a nutshell the fact was ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... fairyland—the silver flood of the harbor motionless as glass, the wooded meadows dank with bloom, the air odorous of woodland smells, the blue hills rimming round the sky, and against the woods of the north shore the chapel spire and thatch roofs and slab walls of the little fort, the one oasis of life in a wilderness. {38} As the sails rattled down and the anchor dropped, not a soul appeared from the fort. The gates were bolted fast. The Jonas ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... treacherously shifting under the thatch of his heavy brows; he was like an old rat seeking for any hole of refuge. "Well—maybe I might. Anyhow, I'll go on—with ye. Kin I sit up? I 'm ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... started, stared, snatched off his straw hat, and gave his head a vicious rub, before having another good look back at the thatch-roofed summer-house of a place. ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... admittance. He was a tall, powerful man, tawny- bearded and deep-chested, clad in a loose-fitting suit of tweed, cut for comfort rather than elegance. As he stood in the shimmering sunlight, I took in every feature of his face. The large, fleshy nose; the steady blue eyes, with their thick thatch of overhanging brows; the broad forehead, all knitted and lined with furrows, which were strangely at variance with his youthful bearing. In spite of his weather-stained felt hat, and the coloured handkerchief slung round his muscular brown neck, I could see ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I missed a detail or two. I couldn't make out if it was the pink thatch of Yohness that gave him away, or whether Uncle could tell an American just by the feel of his neck. But the old boy ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... himself on the stream-side, and he stayed and looked from side to side, and lo! on the other side of the stream a little house that looked familiar to him as a yeoman's dwelling in the builded lands, and the thatch thereon shone under the moon and its windows were yellow with candle-light; and so homely it seemed to him, that he thrust his sword into the sheath and lightly crossed the brook, and came to the door and laid his hand upon the latch and lifted it and shoved the door, ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... depression of spirits at the dark and sombre aspect of the scene. In the first place, he finds himself in a canoe, so small that he is forced to lay quietly in the very centre of the stern portion, in order to prevent it upsetting. The palm leaf thatch (or toldo, as it is termed on the river) over his portion of the boat, shuts out much of the view, while his baggage, piled carefully amidships, and covered with oil cloths, encerrados as they are termed, is ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... vested in the hands of trustees, and settled absolutely to her own use. She could not anticipate her income nor make away with it, which Mr. Carnegie said was a very good thing. Beyond that remark, and a generous reminder that her old nest under the thatch was ready for her whenever she liked to return and take possession, nothing was said in the letters from Beechhurst about her grandfather's will or her new vicissitude. She had some difficulty in writing to announce her latest change to Harry Musgrave, but he wrote back promptly ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... still retains its rustic simplicity. Multitudes of visitors from all parts of the world yearly visit this relic of Old Shanklin. Pretty thatched cottages can be seen in many parts of the Island, but nowhere is there such a combination, there being three different styles of roof in thatch, the setting in a background of trees completing the illusion of the country. In the angle where the figures stand is the rustic fountain on which hangs the shield with the verse written by the poet Longfellow when staying at Hollier's ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... have a little cottage, a white house with green shutters, and though a thatched roof is the best all the year round, I would be grand enough to have, not those gloomy slates, but tiles, because they look brighter and more cheerful than thatch, and the houses in my own country are always roofed with them, and so they would recall to me something of the happy days of my youth. For my courtyard I would have a poultry-yard, and for my stables a cowshed for the sake of the milk which I love. My garden should be ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... meadow, so he'd just get her up on the house top-for the house, you must know, was thatched with sods, and a fine crop of grass was growing there. Now their house lay close up against a steep down, and he thought if he laid a plank across to the thatch at the back he'd easily get the ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... the way we came, and then knew that we could in no way take the boat to Poole. The gale was raging at its highest, and thatch was flying from the exposed roofs. It would be dead against us; and the sea was white with foam, even in the haven. So we must go by road, and that was a long way. But we must get back to Odda, for he should ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... have done well, if he liked. The present that you left in my father's hands, to buy him a boat when he was old enough to start as a fisherman on his own account, would have made a man of him, but it is hidden somewhere in the thatch of his father's cottage. When my father first went to the war, he handed it over to Larry, as he could not say what might happen before his return. Larry was at first delighted with the thought that some day he should have a boat of his own, and a boat, too, larger than any on the shore; but ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... half-sisters. I knew on which side of the hut it was her custom to lie, and where her head would be. So I lay down on my side and gently, very gently, began to bore a hole in the grass covering of the hut. It took a long while, for the thatch was thick, but at last I was nearly through it. Then I stopped, for it came into my mind that Baleka might have changed her place, and that I might wake the wrong girl. I almost gave it over, thinking that I would fly alone, when suddenly I heard a ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... they permitted to go to their huts during rain; and even had this privilege been granted, many of those miserable habitations were in so dilapidated a condition, that they would afford little or no protection. Negro huts are built of logs, covered with boards or thatch, having no flooring, and but one apartment, serving all the purposes of sleeping, cooking, &c. Some are furnished with a temporary loft. I have seen a whole family herded together in a loft ten ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and fences, and houses. How many of them bit the dust I know not, but others always supplied the places of those who fell. Hundreds of balls whistled by our ears and flattened themselves on the stone walls; the plaster was broken from the walls, and the thatch hung from the rafters, and as I turned for the twentieth time to fire, my musket dropped from my hand; I stooped to lift it, but I fell too: I had received a shot in the left shoulder and the blood ran like ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... where the forces were gathered—who, as they were many, occupied all the houses, even the smallest ones—some soldiers were cleaning their weapons in one near the residence of the Recollect fathers. One fired his arquebus, which, unknown to him, was loaded. It caught in the thatch which formed the roof of that little house; and, as the sun was hot, and the wind the greater brisa, the house quickly caught fire. The father prior, Fray Pedro de San Nicolas, was very much annoyed; and he came out, and with reason rebuked ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... led the remainder of his force through an orchard divided from the south end of the house by a narrow lane, over which a barn abutted. Its high blank wall had been loopholed on both floors and was quite unassailable, but its roof was of thatch. And as he studied it, keeping his men in cover, a happy inspiration occurred to him. He sent back to the camp for an oil-can and a parcel of cotton wadding, and by three o'clock had opened a brisk fire of flaming bullets on the thatch. Within ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... clay, and one or two of stone, which were more like cottages. Hardly one had a window two feet square, and many of their windows had no glass. In almost all of them the only chimney was little more than a hole in the middle of the thatch. This rendered the absence of glass in the windows not so objectionable; for, left without ordered path to its outlet, the smoke preferred a circuitous route, and lingered by the way, filling the air. Peat-smoke, however, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... his wife did not come when he called, und he knocked at her bedroom door und dot was shut tight-locked. Den he looked at me, und his face was white. I broke down der door mit my shoulder, und der thatch of der roof was torn into a great hole, und der sun came in upon der floor. Haf you ever seen paper in der waste- basket, or cards at whist on der table scattered? Dere was no wife dot could be seen. I tell you dere was noddings ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... been afraid of being ridiculous, I would have followed her. But I fancied that the apparition of a man in a red and yellow bath-robe, with an unkempt thatch of hair, walking up to her and assuring her that he would protect her would probably put her into hysterics. I had done that once before, when burglars had tried to break into the house, and had startled the parlor maid into bed for a week. So I tried to assure myself that I had imagined ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of charcoal near the well in the centre of the court. The bit of blazing tinder, which he nursed carefully between his hands, threw its light up into his face and showed it in relief against the darkness, sombre, strongly marked, with a thatch of black bushy hair. Hito, recognizing him, scowled ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... living with it was a real enchantment; but I pondered most the kind of house that would be provided for the General Commanding the District, how many the dining-room would seat, and whether it would have a roof of thatch or of corrugated iron—I prayed against corrugated iron. I confess these my preoccupations. I was forty, and at forty the practical considerations of life hold their own even against domes of marble, world-renowned, and set about with gardens where the bulbul sings to the rose. ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... stout leather hat, and ran down the street. Out came all the population, black, white, and brown, awfully excited, for it was blowing a furious north-wester, right up the town, and the fire was at the bottom; and as every house is thatched with a dry brown thatch, we might all have to turn out and see the place in ashes in less than an hour. Luckily, it was put out directly. It is supposed to have been set on fire by a Hottentot girl, who has done the same thing once before, on being scolded. There is no water but what runs down the ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... object, the reason, of that hidden road. A small hut crushed into the side of the sheer cliff. A dugout of logs, and thatch, and mud plaster. A hut with one fronting door, and a parchment window; a hut such as might have belonged to some old-time trapper, who had found it necessary to set his home somewhere secure from ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... school, one hot day, in the Illinois September. Our crowd had gone down to the pond back of the school-house, and two of us were paddling around on a raft made of sawmill slabs. One of the two—who always had more dare-deviltry than sense under his skull thatch—was silly enough to 'rock the boat,' and it went to pieces. You couldn't swim, Howard, but if you hadn't forgotten that trifling handicap and wallowed in to pull poor Billy Mimms ashore, I ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... forgotten now—for, across the ravine beneath him, he sees a cottage. The same, the very same it is, save that the thatch has been renewed! A humble shepherd's cottage, only a but and a ben, built long ago by thrifty hands—but he first learned to ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... mile or more from Claxton. He remembered having his attention attracted to the place by the curious nature of the building, which was constructed out of the remnants of a Norwegian barque stranded some years before. The thatch which covered it and the windows and door cut in the sides gave it a curiously hybrid appearance, and made it an object of interest to sightseers in those parts. Sampson was the owner of a fair-sized fishing-boat, which he worked with his eldest son, and which was said ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the village of Shalmovo. The sun is already kissing the earth on the horizon; it has turned crimson and will soon disappear. In Semyon's pothouse, which has lately changed its name and become a restaurant—a title quite out of keeping with the wretched little hut with its thatch torn off its roof, and its couple of dingy windows—two peasant sportsmen are sitting. One of them is called Filimon Slyunka; he is an old man of sixty, formerly a house-serf, belonging to the Counts Zavalin, by trade a carpenter. He has at one time been employed in a nail factory, has ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... sanitary. The English cottage has a rheumatic floor of beaten earth or tile; its rooms are few and small, and very dark; the water-supply is scanty and most inconvenient; its chimney smokes; mice and rats find secure refuge in the thatch; the masses of clinging vines make it damp and earwiggy; but what a lovely bit it is in the landscape!—the neutral tints, the patches of color, the picturesque outlines, the pitch and curved border of its roof, the yellow ricks in the background, the little garden gorgeous with marigolds, wallflowers, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... world. And by a strange old pathway they came to the land they sought, through a wind blowing up the pathway sheer from space with a kind of metallic taste from the roving stars. Even so they came to the windy house of thatch where dwells the Old Man Who Looks After Fairyland sitting by parlour windows that look away from the world. He made them welcome in his star-ward parlour, telling them tales of Space, and when they named to him their perilous quest he said it would be a charity to kill ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... hath fourescore houses which are great and well contriued. The most part haue their walls made of bords, and are couered with thatch; it hath some houses builded with lime and stone, and couered with tiles. (M603) It hath great Orchards and many trees in them, differing from those of Spaine: there be figgetrees which beare figges as big as ones fist, yellow within, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... white mountain village of K——, in Cardiganshire, were all retired to rest, it being ten o'clock. No—a single light twinkled from under eaves of thick and mossy thatch, in one cottage apart, and neater than the rest, that skirted the steep street, (as the salmon fishers, its chief inhabitants, were pleased to call it,) being, indeed, the rock, thinly covered with the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... not been cleaned for seven years. He tried to do it, and worked till noon, but the filth was as bad as ever. Then the Giant's youngest daughter came, and bid him sleep, and she cleaned out the stable, so that a golden apple would run from end to end of it. Next day the Giant set him to thatch the byre with birds' down, and he had to go out on the moors to catch the birds; but at midday, he had caught only two blackbirds, and then the Giant's youngest daughter came again, and bid him sleep, and then she caught ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... and Ned saw that his suspicions were correct, and that they were regarded by their captors as gods. Further proof was given of this when they were escorted to a large shed, composed of a roof of thatch supported on four upright posts, which stood in ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... gathered the sense of the words, ere, leaping from his horse, he bounded up the stairs, through the smoke, amid flakes of burning thatch falling from the roof, groped in the dense clouds of smoke for the senseless weight, and holding the shoulders while Malcolm held the feet, they sped down the stair, and rested not till they had laid him under a chestnut tree, out of reach of the crash of ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ten 'Tonio stood before them, not counting the thatch of his matted black hair, bound with white cotton turban. Five feet ten in height, but so gaunt and wiry that the ribs and bones seemed breaking through the tawny skin, that in flank and waist and the long sweep of his sinewy, fleshless legs, ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... near to the village with quick and joyful steps. He saw the smoke curling through the roof, and the thatch where green plants had thickly sprouted. He heard the children shouting and calling, and from a window that he passed came the twang of the koto, and everything seemed to cry a welcome for his return. Yet suddenly he felt a pang at ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... as the elder. The one was studying men, the other books. George was absorbing impressions of the things around him: of the quaint old Norfolk town, its "clean but narrow streets branching out from thy modest market-place, with thine old-fashioned houses, with here and there a roof of venerable thatch"; of that exquisite old gentlewoman Lady Fenn, {9b} as she passed to and from her mansion upon some errand of bounty or of mercy, "leaning on her gold-headed cane, whilst the sleek old footman walked at a respectful distance ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... the moment, had its own tale of hardihood to tell; there was a something that recalled the open sea, written in either countenance; courage and endurance; faith and self-reliance; the compass and the rudder; speaking plainly out under each little thatch of white hair. And indeed, as we found out afterwards, those young countenances told the truth; those fisher-boys were Red-Cap's only boat-crew. In all weathers, in all seasons, by night and by day, the three were together, the parent ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... male. And yet nature had played them this scurvy trick. The young heart in the old shell. Grown-up boys with a foot in the grave. Dependent upon mind and address alone to win a woman's regard, while the woman dreamed of the man with a thick thatch over his brains and the responsive magnetism of her own years. Poor old fighting-cocks! What a jade nature was . . . or was it merely the tyranny of an Idea, carefully inculcated at the nativity of the social group, with other arbitrary laws, in behalf of the race? The fetish of ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and fifty wide, and ten feet high, from ground to eaves; but from the eaves to the comb of the mighty roof was as much as forty feet, or maybe even more. This roof was of ancient mud-colored straw thatch a foot thick, and was covered all over, except in a few trifling spots, with a thriving and luxurious growth of green vegetation, mainly moss. The mossless spots were places where repairs had been made by the insertion of bright new masses of yellow straw. The ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... extemporaneous lanai such as is used to shelter that al fresco entertainment, the luau. But in the old times of strict tabu and rigorous etiquette, when the chief had but to lift his hand and the entire population of a district ransacked plain, valley, and mountain to collect the poles, beams, thatch, and cordstuff; when the workers were so numerous that the structure grew and took shape in a day, we may well believe that ambitious and punctilious patrons of the hula, such as La'a, Liloa, or Lono-i-ka-makahiki, did not allow the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... rafts, sometimes on flat boats, worked by ropes, were exciting and picturesque. For rustic interiors along the road side, there were the huts of the working people, rough trellises of tree-trunks interwoven with branches; green as arbors while fresh, a coarse thatch when dry. There was always a large open space in front, sheltered by the projecting thatch of the house, and furnished sometimes with a rough table and benches. Here would be the women at their work, or the children ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... the point of whirling away. But when darkness came, even the roof settled into quiet. For the drifts that had been piling up gradually to the north and west of the shack, sealing the windows and the door, had risen to the grassy eaves and overflowed them, and so weighted the thatch. ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... a recess in the wall of the traveling trench, and was open to the sky. There I saw the latest fashion in "oversea" hair cuts. The victims sat on a ration box while the barber mowed great swaths through tangled thatch with a pair of close-cutting clippers. But instead of making a complete job of it, a thick fringe of hair which resembled a misplaced scalping tuft was left for decorative purposes, just above the forehead. The effect was so grotesque that I had to invent an excuse for laughing. ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... "Bell Inn," where the road has crossed a stream, we see the cottage, and, horribile dictu! a row of modern brick-built cottages for background! Long, thatched and creeper-covered, built upon slabs of stone, with timber and plaster above, with tiny windows under the thatch, surrounded by a well-filled and carefully tended garden, the place makes a quick and enduring appeal to the imagination, even though the legends associated with it are, for the most part, legends and nothing more. It is easy to realise the supreme ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... Wife never left it until she was borne forth into the securer refuge of the narrow house that needed none of her care-taking. Upon the low green thatch lies heavily the shadow of a mighty monument that, to the satirist's eye, has a family likeness to the stone pile ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... one feature judge what an expensive Herr. Streets were hung with cloth, carpeted with cloth, no end of draperies and cloth; your oppressed imagination feels as if there was cloth enough, of scarlet and other bright colors, to thatch the Arctic Zone. With illuminations, cannon-salvos, fountains running wine. Friedrich had made two Bishops for the nonce. Two of his natural Church-Superintendents made into Quasi-Bishops, on the Anglican model,—which was always a favorite with him, and a pious wish of his;—but ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... and he knew, according to the rigorous selection he commanded, not having been clipped in the fall, that the shining mohair draping the sides of the least of them, as fine as any human new-born baby's hair and finer, as white as any human albino's thatch and whiter, was longer than the twelve-inch staple, and that the mohair of the best of them would dye any color into twenty-inch switches for women's heads and sell at prices ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... denote the former importance ascribed to the great Altar of Nature, and the power of religion on the social life of the past. Generations of later inhabitants, dwelling in flimsy huts of bamboo and thatch, regarded the mysterious ruins of the Tankahan Prahoe as the work of giants or demons, and the haunted hill as a mysterious resort of evil spirits. In lofty Sindanglaya, the swaying palms of the lowlands yield to glorious tree-ferns, shading road and ravine with ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... appreciative man, and he has made a rule that when any cottage in the village is found to be beyond repair, it shall be replaced by a new house exactly like the original. In consequence, the houses look equally old and equally attractive, with their roofs of grayish thatch, and the second stories leaning protectingly over the lower windows, overgrown ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... fear, were obliged to make into sheaves on the spot and transport to the beach selected for the bivouac. Double rows of these arundos, driven into the sand, formed the partitions of the cabins, for which their interwoven leaves made an appropriate thatch. The green halls with matted vaults were picturesque enough; each peon, seeing how easily they were constructed, chose to have a house for himself; and the Tiger's Beach quickly presented the appearance of a camp disposed in a long straight ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... no answer; his mother looked at the boy's hands and face, all of much the same earthen cast, up to the eaves of his thatch of yellow hair, and said: "You go and wash yourself." At a certain light in his mother's eye, which he caught as he passed into the house with his dog, the boy turned and cut a defiant caper. The oldest son sat down on the bench beside his father, and they all looked ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Boga-panee on the Jheels. The path runs by Mamloo, and down the spur to the Jasper hill (see chapter xxviii): the vegetation all along is very tropical, and pepper, ginger, maize, and Betel palm, are cultivated around small cottages, which are only distinguishable in the forest by their yellow thatch of dry Calamus (Rattan) leaves. From Jasper hill a very steep ridge leads to another, called Lisouplang, which is hardly so high as Mamloo; the rocks are the same sandstone, with fragments of coal, and remains of the ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... in the evening, too tired to put away my packages, had retired to rest at once. My little maid, who was not so fatigued as I was, and slept more lightly, woke me in the night to listen to a noise in the thatch, at the further end of the store; but I was so accustomed to hear the half-starved mules of Cruces munching my thatch, that I listened lazily for a few minutes, and then went unsuspiciously into another heavy sleep. I do not know how long it was before I was again awoke by the child's ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... in flower o'er the thatch, And the swallow sings sweet from her nest in the wall; All trembling with transport he raises the latch, And the voices of loved ones reply ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... between low wooded hills, with a canal passing through it. Old Japanese cottages, dingy, neutral-tinted, with roofs of thatch, very steeply sloping, above their wooden walls and paper shoji. Green patches on all the roof-slopes, some sort of grass; and on the very summits, on the ridges, luxurious growths of yaneshobu, [1] the roof-plant, bearing pretty purple flowers. In the lukewarm air a mingling of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... of natural beauty, and of the evident care bestowed upon the cultivation of the beds, and the training of the climbing plants, we yet felt, we hardly could tell why, but yet we instinctively felt, that the moss-grown thatch, the mouldering paling, the hoary apple trees, in a word, the evidences of decay visible around the place, were but types of the fading ...
— The Widow's Dog • Mary Russell Mitford
... hint. He would pay a visit to Braden Medworth—the coincidence was too striking to be neglected. But first Barthorpe itself—a quaint old-world little market-town, in which some of even the principal houses still wore roofs of thatch, and wherein the old custom of ringing the curfew bell was kept up. He found an old-fashioned hotel in the marketplace, under the shadow of the parish church, and in its oak-panelled dining-room, hung about with portraits of ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... weather was rainy that I could not lie dry. So wet would it be at certain seasons, that I was obliged to cover all within the pale with long poles, in the form of rafters, leaning against the rock, and loaded them with flags and large leaves of trees, resembling a thatch. ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... these Indians are in the depth of poverty, and have no possessions of value. Neither do they inherit anything save a little plot of land which they sow with rice—not to sell, but only for what is necessary for their families. Their houses are built on four posts; their walls are of bamboo and thatch, and are very small. Such was the spoliation committed on a people so poor and wretched that they would say: "Father, I will give the king twenty reals of eight annually, so that they will spare me from repartimientos;" ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... eyes below, they beheld all the country sunk in a lake, only their own house left standing. While they gazed with wonder at the sight, and lamented the fate of their neighbors, that old house of theirs was changed into a temple. Columns took the place of the corner posts, the thatch grew yellow and appeared a gilded roof, the floors became marble, the doors were enriched with carving and ornaments of gold. Then spoke Jupiter in benignant accents: "Excellent old man, and woman worthy of such a husband, speak, tell us your ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... to the west. Nice little cottages they were, each with a small garden behind it. The two that fronted the west were thatched with golden-coloured straw, and the glass in the little windows was almost as blue as the sky. The two that looked to the east had darker thatch and brown glass windows. The first were for Matty and Nelly, the others ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... went on board, the servant of the inn following with a great hamper of wine and provisions. He was glad to see that a bright fire burned on an earthen hearth in the middle of the boat; the smoke finding its way out, partly through a hole cut in the thatch above it, partly by the opening at the fore end of the boat. He brought with him his horse cloth as well as his other belongings. The men, who were clearly in a hurry to be away, pushed the boat off from the shore as soon as ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... very lawn where Alice and her lover had so often loitered hand in hand, a gay party of children and young people were assembled. The cottage had been purchased by an opulent and retired manufacturer. He had raised the low thatched roof another story high—and blue slate had replaced the thatch—and the pretty verandahs overgrown with creepers had been taken down because Mrs. Hobbs thought they gave the rooms a dull look; and the little rustic doorway had been replaced by four Ionic pillars in stucco; and a new dining-room, twenty-two ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes, And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind Like aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes, Stripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak, Blackens afar the half-forgotten creek,— Then leans on me the ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... at this time erected, to the material of which every man, woman, and child contributed something, even if only a stick or a reed of thatch. Some were drafted off to put up the house, and the rest commenced to fight in real earnest, and settle any old grudges with each other. He who got the most wounds was set down for special favours from the god. With the completion of the temple the fighting ended, and that was to suffice ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... as an Indian, for she scorned shade-hats, and oftenest had nothing on her head at all but her own thick thatch of riotous brown hair. ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... long deserted; and their fallen roofs, blackened gables, and ruinous walls, showed Desolation's triumph over Poverty. On some huts the rafters, varnished with soot, were still standing, in whole or in part, like skeletons, and a few, wholly or partially covered with thatch, seemed still inhabited, though scarce habitable; for the smoke of the peat-fires, which prepared the humble meal of the indwellers, stole upwards, not only from the chimneys, its regular vent, but from various other crevices in the roofs. Nature, in the meanwhile, always changing, but ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... camels of the Tuareg who escorted us. Behind, followed the women of the tribe, my mother among them, two by two, the yoke upon their necks. There were not many men. Almost all lay with their throats cut under the ruins of the thatch of Gao beside my father, brave Sonni-Azkia. Once again Gao had been razed by a band of Awellimiden, who had come to massacre the French ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... hanging to his suspenders, He has button'd-up one-half of him in a pair of short knee-enders. Now, Punch, on your oath, did you ever hear the likes o' that? But oh, houly Paul, if you only seen his big cock'd hat, Stuck up on the top of his jazy;—a mighty illegant thatch, With hair like young Deaf Burke's, all rushing up to the scratch, You must have been divarted; and, Jewil, then he wore A thund'ring big Taglioni-cut purple velvet roquelore. And who but Misther Dan cut it fat in all his pride, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Arabs no small amount of trouble to fish them out again. The place was next set on fire in every direction, when the party, each man carrying such booty as he had managed to pick up, left the fort to the destruction awaiting it. The flames spread amid the wooden and thatch-roof buildings, till the surrounding stockades caught fire, and the whole hornets' nest was ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... outside towards the roof; before commencing which, they partially cut the windows out of the walls, putting wood across to support the top. I should have explained that the turf used in building was the upper and coarser part of the peat, which was plentiful in the neighbourhood. The thatch-eaves of the cottage itself projected over the joining of the new roof, so as to protect it from the drip; and David soon put a thick thatch of new straw upon the little building. Second-hand windows were procured at the village, and the holes in the walls cut to their ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... meats before thou makest a feast. If there should follow a thousand swords to carry my bones away, Belike the price of a jackal's meal were more than a thief could pay. They will feed their horse on the standing crop, their men on the garnered grain, The thatch of the byres will serve their fires when all the cattle are slain. But if thou thinkest the price be fair, and thy brethren wait to sup, The hound is kin to the jackal-spawn,—howl, dog, and call them up! And if thou thinkest the price be high, in steer and gear and ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... too, that crowned his head and canted with the wind and flopped about his neck, and would have sailed away down many a mountain brook but for a faithful leather strap that lay buried in the half-moon whiskers and held on for dear life. And from under the rim of this thatch, and half hidden in the matted masses of badly adjusted hair, was a thin, peaked nose, bridged by a pair of big spectacles, and somewhere below these, again, a pitfall of a mouth covered with twigs of hair and an underbrush ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... rotten timber, the remains of a ruined barn. The yard was empty; no trace of farm implements or human labor to be seen. "Which is the inspector's house," inquired Anton, in dismay. The driver looked round, and at last made up his mind that it was a small one-storied building, with straw thatch and ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... tell, in days of yore, A widow somewhat old, and very poor: Deep in a cell her cottage lonely stood, Well thatch'd, and under covert of a wood. This dowager, on whom my tale I found, Since last she laid her husband in the ground, A simple sober life, in patience, led, And had but just enough to buy her bread: But huswifing the little Heaven ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... York people put up when the rains commence are usually dome-shaped, four to six feet high, constructed of an arched framework of flexible sticks, one end of each of which is stuck firmly in the ground, and over this sheets of tea-tree (Melaleuca) bark—and sometimes an additional thatch of grass—are placed until ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... The leaves make the thatch to cover the roofs of the houses, or shelter over their boats. Neatly fastened together with split rattans, they form the walls of the house. From the juice of the tree they make a fermented drink something ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... there were no shade, no peace, and no turning back, no one day's march made him stronger for the next; and at length, when he came to the low thatch of a negro-cabin, under the shadow of its bananas he sank down in its doorway, ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... them by the Blackwater. Some cedars he brought to Cork are to this day growing, according to the local historian, Mr. J. G. MacCarthy, at a place called Tivoli. The four venerable yew-trees, whose branches have grown and intermingled into a sort of summer-house thatch, are pointed out as having sheltered Raleigh when he first smoked tobacco in his Youghal garden. In that garden he also planted tobacco.... A few steps further on, where the town-wall of the thirteenth ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... in the green path, His flowers are lean and dry, His thatch hangs in wisps against The ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... the figure of Mr. Stone, which could be seen, bowed, and utterly still, beside his desk; so, by lifting the spy-hole thatch, one may see a convict in his cell stand gazing at his work, without ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... garden whose paling did not go all the way round, the potato pit being only kept out of the road, that here sets off southward, by a broken dyke of stones and earth. On each side of the slate-coloured door was a window of knotted glass. Ropes were flung over the thatch to keep ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... to see nothing strange in Sam's situation, nor was he in the least curious concerning the gossip of the country. This comforted Sam strangely. Ed was a little, trim, round-headed man, with a cropped thatch of white, and dancing brown eyes. Sixty years had in nowise impaired his vigour. He was an incorrigible ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... and several hundred thriving agricultural villages. Every foot of land which can be seen from the railroad is cultivated by the most careful spade husbandry, and much of it is irrigated for rice. Streams abound, and villages of grey wooden houses with grey thatch, and grey temples with strangely curved roofs, are scattered thickly over the landscape. It is all homelike, liveable, and pretty, the country of an industrious people, for not a weed is to be seen, but no very striking features or peculiarities arrest one at ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... his life, and ran into a grass-thatched hut that stood close by; but the elephant, pulling out his picket pins like a couple of toothpicks, reached the hut in a stride, and, putting his trunk through the thatch as if it had been a sheet of paper, felt round for the man inside and, seizing him, dragged him forth. The people yelled, and some came running with fire-brands to scare him, but before any could reach him Maharaj had knocked one of his great fore-feet against the head of the unfortunate ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... with straw, and practically the cottage is now built, for there are no indoor fittings to speak of. The chimney is placed at the end of the room set apart for day use. There is no ceiling, nothing between the floor and the thatch and rafters, except perhaps at one end, where there is a kind of loft. The floor consists simply of the earth itself rammed down hard, or sometimes of rough pitching-stones, with large interstices between them. The furniture of this room is of the simplest description. ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... only wrecks of the walls, and a few beams and rafters standing up in the air, or lying across each other, without any thatch to cover them. Something must be left inside, however; for Roger was busy with his pitchfork. This something must be valuable, too; for Roger, after carefully feeling the depth, jumped out of the tub, and went on filling it, while he stood in the water. Oliver thought ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... allowed them to travel languidly upwards and along the roof until they rested on the spot directly over his head, where they became fixed, and, at the same time, opened out to a glare, compared to which all his previous glaring was as nothing—for there, in the thatch, looking down upon him, was the angular head of a huge python. The snake was rolled up in a tight coil, and had evidently spent the night within a yard of the professor's head! Being unable to make ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... he had id—but he hadn't an' more was the pity." His entire possessions consisted of the ground we have mentioned, most part of which was so rocky as to be entirely useless—a cow, a couple of pigs, and the "the uld cabin," which consisted of four mud walls, covered with thatch, in which was an opening, "to let in the day-light, an' to let out the smoke." In the interior there was no division, or separate apartment, as the one room contained the cooking materials, and all other necessaries, beside their ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... moss to frame the prints he had brought home uninjured, and which were to be part of the furnishing of their future home; others across the salt meadows for the little red samphire stems to pickle; sails in the float down river and in the creeks, where the tall thatch parted by the prow rustled almost overhead, and the gulls came flying and piping around them: here and there, they two alone, pouring out thought and soul to each other, and every now and then glancing shyly at those days, ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... through an open tract of the forest, full of brush and birches, and where the starlight guided her; and, beyond that again, must thread the columned blackness of a pine grove joining overhead the thatch of its long branches. At that hour the place was breathless; a horror of night like a presence occupied that dungeon of the wood; and she went groping, knocking against the boles - her ear, betweenwhiles, strained to aching and ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for a sheaf-binding reaper, and one of L. 50 for a similar machine. In 1885, at Preston, the competitions were concerned with two-horse, three-horse and four-horse whipple-trees, and packages for conveying fresh butter by rail. In 1886, at Norwich, a prize of L. 25 was awarded for a thatch-making machine. In 1887, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, a prize of L. 200 went to a compound portable agricultural engine, one of L. 100 to a simple portable agricultural engine, and lesser prizes to a weighing-machine for horses and cattle, a weighing-machine for sheep and pigs, potato-raisers ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... snow-white hair and beard attested, he was much older. The thickness of his wrist and the greatness of his fingers made authentic the mighty frame of him hidden under loose dungaree pants and cotton shirt, buttonless, open from midriff to Adam's apple, exposing a chest matted with a thatch of hair as white as that of his head and face. The depth and breadth of that chest, its resilience, and its relaxed and plastic muscles, tokened the knotty strength that still resided in him. Further, no bronze and beat of sun and wind availed to hide the testimony of his skin that he ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... in sight were one-room dwellings of adobe, with an open shed at the back built of four corner posts supporting a thatch roof, on which peppers were still sunning, late as was the season. Here and there between these forlorn huts grew an oleander or an umbrella chinaberry; and there were vines on some of the walls, masking ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... said Garavel, in a choking voice. "So that is where you were when I believed you to be dancing!" He burst forth violently, pounding the table with his clenched fist until the dishes danced, his brilliant black eyes flashing beneath their thatch of white. "But I will not have it, understand! You are betrothed. You have given ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... covered with oiled cotton. Generally they wore the queue tucked into the girdle to keep it out of the way, but occasionally it was put to use, as, for example, if a man's hat was not at hand to ward off the glare of the sun, he would deftly arrange a thatch of leaves over his eyes, binding it firm with his long braid of black hair. On their feet they wore the inevitable straw sandal of these parts. Comfortable for those who know how to wear them, cheap even though not durable ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
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