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More "Twig" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by autumnal storms; Ten thousand seeds each pregnant poppy sheds Profusely scatter'd from its waving heads; 350 The countless Aphides, prolific tribe, With greedy trunks the honey'd sap imbibe; Swarm on each leaf with eggs or embryons big, And pendent nations tenant every twig. Amorous with double sex, the snail and worm, Scoop'd in the soil, their cradling caverns form; Heap their white eggs, secure from frost and floods, And crowd their nurseries with uncounted broods. Ere yet with wavy tail the tadpole swims, Breathes with new lungs, or tries his ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... it is nearly done, thrust a twig or wooden skewer into it, down to the bottom. If the stick come out clean and dry, the cake is almost baked. When quite done, it will shrink from she sides of the pan, and cease making a noise. Then withdraw the coals (if ...
— Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, and Sweetmeats • Miss Leslie
... back and forth between a rough tea-table set near the fire and an open cupboard-door in the wall. She was carrying dishes to the table, and now and then stopping to stir something good-smelling which hung over the fire in a pewter pot, with a strong bent twig for ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot
... do hang in zight, To mornen zun an' evenen light, The bird do whissle in the gloom, Avore the thissle out in bloom, But here alwone the tree do leaen. The twig that woonce did whiver there Is now a limb a-wither'd beaere: Zoo I do miss the sheaede above My head, an' ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... feet, and as the hawk rose with its prey in its talons they shot their arrows almost simultaneously. Amuba's arrow struck the hawk between the wings, and the creature fell dead still clutching its prey. Chebron's arrow was equally well aimed, but it struck a twig which deflected its course and it flew wide ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... of divining the intention of his adversary and the state of his moral. His power of drawing inferences, often from seemingly unimportant trifles, was akin to that of the hunter of his native backwoods, to whom the rustle of a twig, the note of a bird, a track upon the sand, speak more clearly than written characters. His estimate of the demoralisation of the Federal army after Bull Run, and of the ease with which Washington might have been captured, was absolutely correct. In the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... a blanket of snow. He hurried across the pond, his dog following. Near the far shore was a bare spot on the ice cut by one of the sleigh-runners. Up in the woods, opposite, was the Moss Trail. Sunlight fell on the hills above him. He halted, looking up at the tree-tops. Twig, branch, and trunk glowed with the fire of diamonds through a lacy necking of hoar frost. Every tree had put on a jacket of ice and become as a fountain of prismatic hues. Here and there a dead pine rose like a spire of crystal; ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... winter-walks, in the orchard or the wood, in the garden or by the rustic wayside. We have seen him, on still winter-days, flitting from tree to tree, with the liveliest motions and in the most engaging attitudes, examining every twig and branch, and winding over and under and in and out among them, and, after a few lively notes, hopping to another tree to pass through the same manoeuvres. Even those who are confined to the house are not excluded from a sight of these birds; one cannot open a window, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... suddenness. The only one of these which remains in general use is shoot: for sprout is now only appropriated to the young growth from cabbage-stalks; and spring is heard no more save in sprig, which is evidently a corruption of it, and which now denotes a small slip or twig as we say, sprigs of laurel, bay, thyme, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... zero weather that week, but bright and clear, with spicules of frost glistening on every twig; and I recollect how sharply the tree trunks snapped—those frost snaps which ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... had devoured the trees on either side of the beavers' pool. On all sides of us the bigger trees were still in flames, and from everywhere thick white smoke was rising, and over all the mountain-side, right down to the water's edge, there was not one green leaf or twig. Everything was black. The brushwood was completely gone. The trees were no more than bare trunks, some of them still partially wreathed in flames. The whole earth was black, and from every side rose columns and jets and streams of smoke. It seemed incredible ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... adjustment of the index, another outshooting of vibratory force, a rapid up and down motion of the index to include a certain range of vibrations, and the crow itself was gone—vanished in empty space! There was the bare twig on which a moment before it had stood. Behind, in the sky, was the white cloud against which its black form had been sharply outlined, but there was no ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... captin," he said admiringly; "don't tell me. I could twig that directly I see you. Ho, what's the use o' trying to come it over a poor 'ard-working ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... index of such a stride toward the ultimate pacification of mankind as was never made before. But it was the work done in the years 1783-89 that created a federal nation capable of enduring the storm and stress of the years 1861-65. It was in the earlier crisis that the pliant twig was bent; and as it was bent, so has it grown; until it has become indeed a goodly and a ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... lips to cling upon her own. A ray of sunlight pierced the leaves to shine Where her half-opened bodice let be shown Her white throat fluttering to his soft caress, Half-gasping with her gladness. And her pledge She whispers, melting with delight. A twig Snaps in the hornbeam hedge. A cackling laugh tears through the quietness. Eunice starts up in terrible distress. "My God! What's that?" Her ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... assistance it might have fared badly with the plucky Northamptons. As it was, the Boers finally withdrew with some loss. On December 10th we were delayed for some time at Enslin by an accident and I had a careful look at the position held by our men in this minor engagement. There was scarcely a twig or leaf in the orchard which was not torn by shrapnel and Mauser bullets. The walls of the house were chipped and pierced in every direction, and one corner of the earthwork had been carried off by a shell. Yet in the two companies there were only eight casualties! ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... eastern end of the ridge for no other reason than apparently that course was the one the savage had the least reason to take. He advanced hurriedly because every moment was precious. Not a crushed blade of grass, a brushed leaf, an overturned pebble nor a snapped twig did he find. He saw that he was getting near to the side of the ridge where the Delaware's trail had abruptly ended. Ah! what was there? A twisted bit of fern, with the drops of dew brushed off. Bending beside the fern, Wetzel examined the grass; it was not crushed. A small plant ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... I have never seen one in the Islands as late as November. Both in the Vale and on the Cliffs in the higher part of the Island the Stonechat is very common, and the gay little bird, with its bright plumage and sprightly manner, may be seen on the top of every furze bush, or on a conspicuous twig in a hedge in the wilder parts of the Island, but is not so common in the inland and more cultivated parts, being less frequently seen on the hedges by the roadside than it is here, Somersetshire, or in many counties in England. In Alderney it is quite as common as in Guernsey, and I ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... King ought to punish Madame de Montespan, and, instead of censuring her, he wishes to make her a duchess! . . . Let him make her a princess, even a highness, if he likes; he has all the power in his hands. I am only a twig; he is ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... and the moon was bright, They had been roused from the haunted ground, By the yelp and bay of the fairy hound; They had heard the tiny bugle-horn, They had heard the twang of the maize-silk string, When the vine-twig bows were tightly drawn, And the nettle shaft through air was borne, Feathered with down of the hum-bird's wing. And now they deemed the courier-ouphe, Some hunter sprite of the elfin ground; And they watched till they saw him mount the roof That canopies the world around; Then ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... on a marsh eating raspberries. When he glanced up, a big black bear stood beside him. Robber Father broke off an osier twig and struck the bear on the nose. "Keep to your own ground, you!" he said; "this is my turf." Then the huge bear turned around and lumbered off ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... tree or Mountain ash, is used by the Scottish peasantry with the same view; and a small twig of it is sewed up in the cow's tail, to preserve the animal and its produce from the ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... and, as a consequence, several persons may ultimately have proprietary interest in one house. In such a case the ground space is divided, often resulting in many twig-separated patches, as ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... this starry night, a twilit avenue with two side aisles of pitch darkness. Here and there stone benches were disposed between the trunks. There was not a breath of wind; a heavy atmosphere of perfume hung about the alleys; and every leaf stood stock-still upon its twig. Hither, after vainly knocking at an inn or two, the Berthelinis came at length to pass the night. After an amiable contention, Leon insisted on giving his coat to Elvira, and they sat down together on the first bench in silence. Leon made a cigarette, which he smoked to an end, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... madame. She listened and listened: to the stir of the leaves, to the dim murmur of running water, to the sighs of the night wind, to the crackling of a dry twig when Anne turned uneasily in her sleep. She listened and listened, but the sound she ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... men circling placidly round and round the rink. One bubble cloud rose and slowly swallowed up the sun. Suddenly I heard a sharp crack like the breaking of a twig. "What's that?" I said, stepping forward on to the balcony. "It sounded like ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... there was a series of crackling sounds, with a sharp rain of small broken branches falling on the bridge; a creeper with a great rustle snapped on the head of a boat davit, and a long, luxuriant green twig actually whipped in and out of the open port, leaving behind a few torn leaves that remained suddenly at rest on Mr. Massy's blanket. Then, the ship sheering out in the stream, the light began to return but did not augment beyond a subdued clearness: ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... five miles off; he postponed it. He wrote a line in pencil, put a boy upon his black mare, and hurried him off to the rendezvous, while he stayed and entered with strange alacrity into this affair. "Stay," cried he, "if he is an old hand he will twig the officer." ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... me, bearing brands of resined hemp, kindled from Carver's lamp. The foremost of them set his torch to the rick within a yard of me, the smoke concealing me from him. I struck him with a backhanded blow on the elbow as he bent it, and I heard the bone of his arm break as clearly as ever I heard a twig snap. With a roar of pain, he fell on the ground, and his torch dropped there and singed him. The other man stood amazed at this, not having yet gained sight of me, till I caught his fire-brand from his hand, and struck it into his countenance. ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... reptiles. With protruding and telescopic eyes, that move at will in the most opposite directions, with an ungainly head, a cold, dry, strange-looking skin, and a prehensile tail, the creature slowly steals along a branch or twig, scarcely distinguishable from the substance along which it moves, and scarcely seeming to move at all, until it has come within reach of its prey. Then suddenly, with a motion rapid as that of the most ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... about the surface of the still pools like gigantic frog-broods. There were on the ridges warrior trees burning in the vindictiveness of a long forgotten cause—a blaze of crimson scimitar thorns from root to topmost twig; and down again in the cool hollows were lady-bushes making twilight of the green gloom with their cloudy ivory blossoms and filling the shadows with such a heavy scent that head and heart reeled with fatal pleasure as one pushed ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... that he could not hear the pounding of our hearts. We grew quite stiff in our cramped positions, but feared to shift a limb and waited for three-quarters of an hour before we dared to worm our way cautiously in the other direction. The snap of a twig was like that of a rifle on the stillness of ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... Tobias and the Angel there by a painter whose name I most ungratefully forget. I saw a man yesterday carrying fishes in the market, each strung through the gills on a twig of myrtle: that is how Tobias ought to carry his fish: when a native custom suggests old paintings, how charming it ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... CIGAR CASE BEARER winters in its case attached to a twig. When the buds begin to open in the spring it moves to them, carrying its case with it, and begins to feed on the young and tender buds. By the time the leaves are well open, it has fed a good deal on the tender buds and young ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... one—must Rabelais's lighter talk have had, as he lounged—so the story goes—in his dressing-gown upon the public place, picking up quaint stories from the cattle-drivers off the Cevennes, and the villagers who came in to sell their olives and their grapes, their vinegar and their vine-twig faggots, as they do unto this day. To him may be owing much of the sound respect for natural science, and much, too, of the contempt for the superstition around them, which is notable in that group of great naturalists who were boys in ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... rustling in the bushes at one side of the garden, and the sound of a breaking twig, and, seizing a hoe which stood by the door, he sprang toward the point ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... also, but although I have the keenest sight, it was quite impossible to see anything except the ragged patches of moonshine between the great black shadows of the trees. My ears are as quick as my eyes, and once or twice I thought that I heard a twig crack; but you know how many sounds there are in a forest at night, and how difficult it is even to say what direction they ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... twenty or thirty hours at a stretch. All outdoor work or exercise was impossible. The outpost was nearly always shrouded in dense mist. Insect pests abounded. Scorpions and snakes invaded the buildings. Outside, from every blade of grass, every leaf and twig, a thin and hungry leech waved its worm-like, yellow-striped body in the air, seeming to scent any approaching man or beast on which it could fasten and gorge itself fat with blood. Certainly a small station on the face of the Himalayas is not a desirable ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... get it, drink water twenty times a day, while others will not perhaps drink more than once or twice during the same time. I have found a very effectual preventive to thirst by drinking a large quantity of water before breakfast, and, on feeling thirsty on the march, chewing a small green twig or leaf. ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... by what are termed layers. To do this, nothing more is necessary than to select a shoot, as near the root as possible, and having partially divided it with a knife, make an upward slit in it, and then placing a bit of twig between the divided parts, press it down to the ground, burying the joint beneath the surface of the soil. To plant from cuttings, some care is necessary as regards green-house plants, but nothing is easier than to rear ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... you come in to the Chief," the man admonished her, with good-humored severity. "Have you not learned that babbling turns to ill, you sprouting twig? And waste no more time upon the road, either. Yonder is your shortest way, up that lane between the barley. When you come to a burned barn, do you turn to the left and ride straight toward the woods; it ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... skins, which were peculiarly fine, were cleansed and prepared by the armourer, who happened also to understand the trade of a currier. Two of them were hung up to dry, when it came into the brains of Tom Twig and Dicky Esse to clothe themselves in the skins, and in high glee they came prancing about the deck, baa-ing away, imitating two frolicsome lambs, with a tolerable amount of accuracy. They afforded much amusement to us, their messmates, and not a little to the men who ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... a mocking tone. "We don't allow any weak creature such as you are to stay under our shelter. Go away!" he said angrily, and, taking a dry twig, he threw it at ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... raise his own bow. Nor did he seem to take aim but let the arrow fly. And the arrow carried the twig and leaf ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... phenomenon. It is much more natural to attribute it to the cessation of vegetation, and the want of nourishment which the leaves experience at that season, when the course of the sap is interrupted. The vessels of the leaf contract, dry up, and soon after, that organ is detached from the twig on which it had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... fast at the bare idea that she could scarcely run. She stumbled, too, over a piece of twig which lay across her path, and falling somewhat heavily scraped her forehead. She had no time to think of the pain then. Rising as quickly as possible, she passed along the familiar road. How weary it was! How tedious! Would it never, ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... tree, and as involving a blank space that wants occupation; but the portions left are not made discordant or disagreeable. They are absolutely and in themselves as valuable as they can be, every stem is a perfect stem, and every twig a graceful twig, or at least as perfect and as graceful as they were before the removal of the rest. But if we try the same experiment on the imaginative painter's work, and break off the merest stem or twig ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... as the old gentleman, who represented Isidro, opened his mouth only to drule betel-juice, it was Isidro who, in Isidro's voice, answered the questions. In his role as Third Assistant he stood with legs akimbo before the pupil, a bamboo twig in his hand; as Isidro the pupil, he plumped down quickly upon the bench before responding. The sole function of the senile old man seemed that of representing the pupil while the question was being ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... of the stock to bear upon a young lateral or tip bud, which is much easier to start than dormant buds used either as buds or grafts. A short twig about an inch and a half in length is taken with some of the bark of the small branch from which it starts, and both twig and bark at its base are put in a bark slit like an ordinary shield bud and tied closely with a waxed band, although if ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... uncertain. As the noises within died down she relapsed from her tense pose and showed her face to Vaucher in the light of the lamp. It was Madame Bertin. She did not see him where he waited, and all of a sudden her self-possession snapped like a twig you break in your fingers. She was weeping, leaning against the wall, weeping desolately, in an abandonment of humiliation and impotence. But Vaucher was not moved when he told ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... excavators stopped to refresh themselves by nibbling at some succulent roots. While they were thus occupied, and apparently absorbed, from somewhere up the slope among the birch-trees came the faint sound of a snapping twig. In half a second the beavers had vanished noiselessly under water, down the canal, leaving but a swirl of muddy foam to ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... could hardly breathe, so great was their unnamed fear. During that time no other movements could be noted. Then Clee suddenly pointed to a bush only five yards away. Half a dozen leaf-tipped branches were bending slowly in their direction—and then a sharp crack, as of a broken twig, came to them ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... present with which I buy thee," and then he handed the present to her parents. Upon his head he wore a tuft of feathers, and in his hand a bow, emblematic of authority and protection. The bride held in one hand a green twig of the laurel-tree, and in the other an ear of corn—the twig indicated she would preserve her fame ever fair and sweet as the laurel leaf; the corn was to represent her capacity to grow it and prepare it for his food, and to fulfil all the duties of a faithful wife. These ceremonies ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... then wore a sword as a part of his dress. He is now contented with a regular stand-up fight, and exhibits a fist like a knuckle-bone of mutton—hard, coarse, and of certain magnitude. The bludgeon hammer-headed whip, or a vulgar twig, succeeds the clouded and amber-headed cane; and instead of the snuff-box being rare, and an article of parade, to exhibit a beauty's miniature bestowed in love, or that of a crowned head, given for military or diplomatic services, all ranks take snuff out of cheap and vulgar ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... watched his protege narrowly as they took their places against the forward rail of the ferry-deck, and the boat stood out into the crashing water traffic of North River. What Samson saw must be absolutely bewildering. Ears attuned to hear a breaking twig must ache to this hoarse shrieking of whistles. To the west, in the evening's fading color, the sky-line of lower Manhattan bit the sky with its serried line ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... placed in the graves; and I have even seen a confession of the faith written on paper and placed on a twig before the face of the dead. At the appointed seasons— especially at the great Feast of Sacrifice—offerings are brought to the grave. The family party passes through the cemetery, the women bearing baskets of bread and bottles of water, the men turning the head to the right and to the left ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner
... us that Jeremiah was to plant and build up. Here he planted, and here he did build. He planted and built a throne, a college, and a religion. Turn to Ezekiel, chapter xvi., and read the famous riddle. Tea Tephi is the tender twig that was cropped off from the high cedar, King Zedekiah, and planted among the merchants by great waters on the mountain of Israel. She was the tender one that was to take root downward. To Jeremiah, the Lord said, "Verily it shall be well with thy remnant." ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... silver glister of the ripples far out, shimmering in the full glare of the sun. The breeze, exquisitely fragrant, would blow fresh and free from the dense forests. The mockingbird, a feathered miracle to the Highlander, would sway on a twig above them and sing jubilantly the whole day through and deep into the night. The distant mountains would show-softly blue on the horizon till the sun was going down, when they would assume a translucent jewel-like lustre, amethystine and splendid. ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the grasses were already springing, so quick is the all but tropical growth of the country. They might be safe, perhaps, for eight-and-forty hours. Fire would run only when the ground was absolutely dry, and when every twig or leaf was a combustible. But during those eight-and-forty hours there might be comparative ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... horseman—this latter feature accentuated by his high-heeled boots and by the short canvas cowboy coat that reached only to his cartridge-belt. His features she could not well make out, for the fire was little more than a bed of coals, and he fed it, Indian-like, with a twig or two at ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... let us ne'er forget the firm and earnest mind Which bore him swiftly onward in his course; How from a slender twig he built a bridge O'er which he safely hastened to the work Which youthful hope and courage planned. Think how the circle of his love embraced His children and his children's children, all, His highest joy ...
— The Pedler of Dust Sticks • Eliza Lee Follen
... runaway waterfall leaping over boulders, like the topmost bamboo twig rustling in the ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... crept. Dick could see him picking his way like a dancer, so that he might step on no branch or twig which would break and give him away. Now he was almost at the side of the house. Dick saw him lean forward and cautiously peer ...
— The Boy Ranchers on Roaring River - or Diamond X and the Chinese Smugglers • Willard F. Baker
... ahead, Teganouan," he said, "and you, too, if you will, Father Claude. Choose an easy trail if you can, and be careful that no twig flies back." ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... watch; it was six o'clock, and thus wanted two hours to daybreak. Hurriedly I left the inn and went out again. A rimy frost had come upon every twig and bush and tree, and in the light of the moon the ice crystals sparkled as though the spirits had scattered myriads of precious stones everywhere. But I thought not of this. I made my way toward the spot from which ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... garden at Thornton Chase was perfect in its artificiality. It sloped down towards Richmond Park in a series of stately terraces with box-hedge borders trimmed so evenly that not a twig or leaf offended against the canons of symmetry. They were groomed like a racehorse. Centred in a square of barbered lawn was a fountain where Neptune drove his chariot of sea-horses. The Apollo Belvedere, the Capitoline ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... with a twig in his hand, got it ablaze, and lighted his cigarette. He did not look at Billy Louise until he had taken a whiff or two. Then he stared at her for a full minute, and ended by flipping the charred twig playfully into her lap, and laughing ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... saying that they were now approaching the haunts of the wondrous bird; and consequently the doctor crept on behind him without so much as crushing a twig. ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... night, this silence, bathed in moonlight. The cold was intense: below the bench where Pierre's homestead lay, there rose from the twisted, rapid river, a cloud of steam, above which the hoar-frosted tops of cottonwood trees were perfectly distinct, trunk, branch, and twig, against a sky the color of iris petals. The stars flared brilliantly, hardly dimmed by the full moon, and over the vast surface of the snow minute crystals kept up a steady shining of their own. The range of sharp, wind-scraped mountains, uplifted fourteen thousand feet, rode ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... wings about them one day, and a dazzlingly beautiful little bird thrust his long, delicate bill among the flowers; and while he held himself there in the air without touching his tiny feet to twig or stem, but only by the swift fanning of long, green-tinted wings, I offered him my best flowers for his breakfast, and bowed my great leaves as a welcome to him. The dear little thing had been here before, while yet the sticky brown buds which wrap up my leaves had not burst open to the ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... offered his son in sacrifice to obtain a victory over some pirates. The bodies were buried in groves, which thence were regarded as very sacred. One, called Odin's grove, near the temple of Upsal, was sacred in every twig and leaf. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... engineering feat. The birds inspect the branches many times before they make a decision. When they have decided on the site, the mother bird brings her first string or vegetable fiber and attaches it to a twig by winding it around and around many times, leaving one or both ends hanging free. I have nests where these foundation strings are wound around a twig a dozen times. In her blind windings and tuckings and loopings the bird occasionally ties a substantial knot, but it is never the result ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... be in class. But he'll know if you mention our names. Say we sent you, and that you won the new boys' race. Do you twig?" ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... then congratulate Solomon upon the agreement between the views of you two. However, I twig your intent: he means a wicked sinner; and of all forms of folly there is none so great as wicked sinning. For goodness is, in the end, more conducive to personal happiness—which is the sole ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... hope of return. The ant at last met one of his companions, who was also carrying a burden. They stopped, took counsel for an instant, bringing their antennae together, and started for the hillock. The second ant then left his burden, and both together then seized a twig and introduced its end beneath the first load which had been abandoned because of its weight. By acting on the free extremity of the twig they were able to use it exactly as a lever, and succeeded almost without trouble ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... blazin' idiots in Christendom is climbin' over me wantin' to know what I'll lay this and what I'll lay that. They're like a lot of blasted mosquitos. A rounder comes up an' makes a bet; if it's small p'r'aps I don't twig his mug at all, just grabs the dough an' calls his number. He may be Rockefeller, or a tough from the Bowery, it don't make no difference to me; all I want is his goods an' his number, see? But a bettor of the right sort slips in an' taps me for odds to a thousand. Nat'rally I'm interested, because ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... turbans and burnouse. Each of them offered a present of some kind. One of them brought a beautiful pair of Barbary pheasants, another a young wild pig in a crate; others, quaint arms, and one had a chameleon of a rare species, which he carried on the twig of a tree. An address of welcome to Morocco was read by one of their number and then they asked Paul he would not kindly walk on the water in the daylight for them as the soldiers had seen him do when he landed, so that all the people ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... for November," Pamela remarked as they took the road by Tweedside. "Look at that beech tree against the blue sky, every black twig silhouetted. ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... ventured out again, trembling at every bush I passed, and thinking each twig that touched me a savage. The next day I concealed myself in the same manner, and at night travelled forward, keeping off the main road, used by the Indians, as much as possible, which made my journey far longer, and more painful than I ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... quickly, the game was up. Now, therefore, taking a last hurried look at his dictionary, the German flew after the lady, crying out in a voice of despair—'Madam, since your husband, your most respected husband, have hopped de twig'——This was his sheet-anchor; and, as this also came home, of course the poor man was totally wrecked. It turned out that the dictionary he had used (Arnold's, we think,)—a work of a hundred years back, and, from mere ignorance, giving slang translations from Tom Brown, L'Estrange, and other ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... 5. In the above preparation after the test described, soak a hazel twig, fashioned in the shape of a fork. On meeting a child hold the fork with the V downwards in front of its face, and if the child exhibits violence and signs of terror, and falls down, the ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... person in the world whom I wished most earnestly to avoid. She was standing on the edge of the cliff, her hands behind her, gazing seawards, and though I stopped short at the sight of her, and for a moment entertained wild thoughts of flight, it was not possible for me to carry them out. A dry twig snapped beneath my feet, and, turning quickly round, she had seen me. She came forward at once, and for some reason or other I knew that she was glad. She smiled upon ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... only had a straw or a reed!" thought the boy; but there was hardly a twig of the sage-brush to be seen, and he shook ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... haunched his horse as the certain coil sank in the Grizzly's hock, and checked the Monarch with a heavy jar. Uttering one great snort of rage, he turned; his huge jaws crossed the rope, back nearly to his ears it went, and he ground it as a dog might grind a twig, so the straining ...
— Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac • Ernest Thompson Seton
... stepped softly, as if he feared to alarm somebody or something. The moss beneath his feet gave no sound. Not even a twig snapped. Without knowing that he did so, Hodge imitated ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... was for the shubbery, his next across the little park to the wood beyond. He did not feel the wind of his running on his bare skin. He did not feel the hunger that had made him so unable to bear the lash. On and on he ran, fancying ever he heard the cruel Angus behind him. If a dry twig snapped, he thought it was the crack of the whip; and a small wind that rose suddenly in the top of a pine, seemed the hiss with which it was about to descend upon him. He ran and ran, but still there seemed nothing between him and his persecutors. He felt no safety. ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... at no great distance, with its hiss, its snap of sound, and sometimes rifle-shots like the crack of a ball on a cricket bat broke through the thickets. They separated, spreading like beaters in a long line: "Soon," Trenchard told me, "I was quite alone. I could hear sometimes the breaking of a twig or a stumbling footfall but I might have been alone at the end of the world. It was obvious that the regimental sanitars had been there before us because there were many new roughly made graves. There were letters ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... family do I belong? To a large family called Flycatchers. Because some Kings are tyrants I suppose, they call me the Tyrant Flycatcher. Look for me next summer on top of a wire fence or dead twig of a tree, and watch me, every few minutes, dash into the air, seize a passing insect, and then fly back to the same ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... be seen or heard. At the feet of Karkapaha lay a tremendous bow, larger than any warrior ever yet used, a sheaf of arrows of proportionate size, and a spear of a weight which no Maha could wield. Karkapaha drew the bow as an Indian boy bends a willow twig, and the spear seemed in his hand but a reed or a feather. The shrill war-whoop burst unconsciously from his lips, and his nostrils seemed dilated with the fire and impatience of a newly-awakened courage. The heart of the fond Indian ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... birches had faded utterly, the stately beeches resembled dim ghosts of trees and only the spruces retained, imperfectly, their shape and form. Thurston was country bred, and, lifting high his feet to clear bramble trailer and fallen twig, he walked by feeling instead of sight. The beck moaned a little more loudly, and there was a heavy astringent odor of damp earth and decaying leaves. When beast and bird were still again it seemed as if Nature, worn out by the productive effort ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... shortly tell what happened a long time after.—that this Jokul fell in with King Olaf's men in the island of Gotland, and the king ordered him to be taken out to be beheaded. A willow twig accordingly was plaited in with his hair, and a man held him fast by it. Jokul sat down upon a bank, and a man swung the axe to execute him; but Jokul hearing the sound, raised his head, and the blow struck him in the head, and made a dreadful wound. ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... found himself confronted by three gullies, which came down and met at that one point. He said he didn't know, but Elam, after looking around a little, started up one with as much confidence as though he had seen Tom when he came out. After some questioning from Tom he showed him a little twig, not larger than a needle, which he had brushed off in his hurried flight after he had thrown down his gun; and a short distance farther on he found the weapon, which Tom, in his excitement, had tossed clear across the creek. Tom was surprised ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... lion, was hungry and very savage. For two days he had not eaten and now he hunted in the ugliest of humors. No more did Numa roar forth a rumbling challenge to the world but rather he moved silent and grim, stepping softly that no cracking twig might betray his presence to the keen-eared ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a trained roping horse, stood, blown and panting, his feet braced, keeping the rope taut while Farrel dismounted and casually strolled back to the tree. He broke off a small twig and waited, while the hounds, belling lustily, came nosing across the meadow. Kay rode up, as the dogs, catching sight of the helpless cat, quickened their speed to close in; she heard Farrel shout to them and saw him lay about him with the twig, beating the eager animals back ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... business for the day was over, our plans for the morrow laid, our messages received, our messengers despatched, and those who had been conspirators and now bade fair to be saviours were sleeping. Sleep seemed to fold the world; each bough and twig was silent in repose; the spectral moonlight itself slept as it bathed the air. I alone wandered and waked. With me there were too many cares for rest; work kept me on the alert; to court slumber at once was not easy after the nervous tension of duty. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... series of cascades, and there is a mighty roar of waters. For many yards I have for a companion a little wren, that flies from twig to twig through the well-nigh naked hedge along the wayside, now hidden behind a bramble's crimson-spotted leaf, now mingled with a tracery of twigs and thorns. I can almost believe it to be the same wren that kept up with me years ago in English lanes, and since then has travelled with me so ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... consider the adding to any tugong bula they may pass a sacred duty, the omission of which will meet with supernatural punishment, and so, however pressed for time a Dyak may be, he stops to throw on the pile some small branch or twig. ...
— Children of Borneo • Edwin Herbert Gomes
... deal in that," commented Haigh, blinking at the shabby black steamer thoughtfully. "You'd better pop down below in case he has ventured his little self on deck, and should happen to twig you. But still it's best to be on the safe side." He chose a cigar, lighted it and puffed for a minute, and then took it out of his mouth and grinned at the glowing end. "Look here. The fellow doesn't ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite. These alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... out over the lake, I was the only one to see a little commotion in the water, half hidden by the near branches, as of some tiny swimmer struggling to reach the shore. Rushing to its rescue in the canoe, I found a yellow-rumped warbler, quite exhausted, clinging to a twig that hung down into the water. I brought the drenched and helpless thing to camp, and, putting it into a basket, hung it up to dry. An hour or two afterward I heard it fluttering in its prison, and cautiously lifted the lid to get a better glimpse of the lucky captive, when it darted ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... Observation 23. A twig submerged in a ditch was scraped. Gemiasma verdans found abundantly with many other things, which if rehearsed would cloud ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... winds of misfortune, shew all your tyranny! Twist and split bark and twig, And break the tree of hope in two Stem and leaves are struck by this hail and thunder, The root remains till storm and rain have ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... of the woods a gentle wind was blowing, laden with the scent of earth and hidden flowers. Dewdrops twinkled in the grass and hung glistening from every leaf and twig, and beyond all was the ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... Twig bought a fine bow and arrow, And what did he shoot? why, a poor little sparrow, Oh, fie, little Tom, with your fine bow and arrow, How cruel to shoot at a poor ...
— The Little Mother Goose • Anonymous
... ses the dark man, shaking his 'cad; "if they was all as fly as you, I might as well put the shutters up. How did you twig I was ...
— Sailor's Knots (Entire Collection) • W.W. Jacobs
... trees begin to bud and blossom, the sap rises and works its way up into every bough and branch and twig of the tree. Sap is a liquid which flows through the tree much in the same way that blood flows through our veins, and the sap is the life-giving element of the tree, just as the blood ...
— The Great Round World And What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 22, April 8, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... wooden bench. There was a warm, still silence. Not a twig moved. A joy so infinite ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... We found also an incredible number of butterflies, so that for the space of three or four acres the air was so crowded with them, that millions were to be seen in every direction, at the same time that every branch and twig was covered with others that were not upon the wing. We found here also a small fish of a singular kind; it was about the size of a minnow, and had two very strong breast fins; we found it in places that were quite dry, where we supposed it might have been left by the tide; but it ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... White Canyon. Seeing the white man's appreciation of this form of wind and water erosion, Jim told of a greater bridge known only to himself and one other Indian, located on the north side of the Navajo Mountain, in the Paiute Indian reservation. Bending a twig of willow in rainbow-shape, with its ends stuck in the ground, Jim showed ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... all the men followed. Not a leaf rustled beneath their tread. Not a twig broke as they crept up the side of the deep ravine and looked out at ...
— The Later Cave-Men • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... in spite of the rough ground. Then, knowing we were drawing nearer the Senecas, we began to slip from tree to tree. The Indians did this like phantoms, and the French troops imitated. Three hundred men went through the forest, and sometimes a twig cracked. There was no other sound. We went for some time. We heard owls hoot around us, and knew they might be watch cries. Still we went on. We went till I felt the ground rise steadily under my groping feet. The Seneca stronghold was on an eminence. I gave the signal to ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... thirteen short-styled plants under the net, which were not fertilised, produced twelve capsules, containing on an average 5.6 seeds. As some of these capsules were very fine, and as five were borne on one twig, I suspect that some minute insect had accidentally got under the net and had brought pollen from the other form to the flowers which produced this little group of capsules. The one uncovered short-styled plant which grew close to the uncovered long-styled ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... of the Convicts on board the Stanislaus hulk, Woolwich, 18 May 1797.] on behalf of the sovereign whose clemency they enjoyed. Broken on the wheel of naval discipline, they "did very well in deep water." Nearer land they were given, like the jailbirds they were, to "hopping the twig." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 2733—Capt. Young, 21 ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... to call forth an expression of amazement and admiration. This statement admits of an easy illustration: for example, from some water containing aquatic plants, collected from a pond on Clapham Common, I select a small twig, to which are attached a few delicate flakes, apparently of slime or jelly; some minute fibres, standing erect here and there on the twig, are also dimly visible to the naked eye. This twig, with a drop or two ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... was soberly walking down the path looking spindly in every way: long, thin legs and a long thin body that were for all the world like a stick. Probably you have seen the Walking Stick many times and thought him just a twig. If you hadn't been in such a hurry you might have seen something interesting. Each time he picked up a leg, he seemed to wave it in the air before he put it down again. That was, I suppose, because ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... verbally reproached by a member of the household, one saw his head droop and his eyes cloud. Jan would wag his tail while being scolded, even vehemently, and five minutes later would require a second call, and in a sharp tone, before turning aside from an interesting scent or a twig in ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... short December day was drawing to its close. The wind had gone down, but the snow was now falling in large, thick flakes. The evening twilight crept into the room. Antkowa was sitting in front of the fire; she broke off twig after twig of the dry firewood, and carelessly threw them upon ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... was high, and by his shadow Beltane judged it the noon hour; very hot and very still it was, for the wind had died and leaf and twig hung motionless as though asleep. And presently as he went, a sound stole upon the stillness, a sound soft and beyond all things pleasant to hear, the murmurous ripple of running water near by. Going aside into the green therefore, Beltane came unto ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... grapes like the fabled fruit of Canaan in the Old Testament, a single bunch of which required two men to bear it, drooped heavily from twining vines, while from many a bough and twig swung golden, crimson, and cream-colored fruit, which fairly made ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... heart within him fluttered, Trembled like the leaves above him, Like the birch-leaf palpitated, As the deer came down the pathway. Then, upon one knee uprising, 210 Hiawatha aimed an arrow; Scarce a twig moved with his motion, Scarce a leaf was stirred or rustled, But the wary roebuck started, Stamped with all his hoofs together, 215 Listened with one foot uplifted, Leaped as if to meet the arrow; Ah! the singing, fatal arrow; Like a wasp ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... agony. And then, while we counted out the last seconds of the half, came a snap like that of a whip's lash, and the bowl of Richter's pipe lay smouldering on the grass. The noble had cut the stem as clean as it were sapling twig, and there stood Richter with the piece still clenched in his teeth, his eyes ablaze, and his cheek running blood. He pushed the surgeon away when he came forward with his needles. The Count was smiling as he put up his sword, his friends crowding around him, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... I may be peculiar. School-committee-men who spell Jerusalem with a G, drill-sergeants who believe in black-boards and visible numerators, statistical fellows who judge of the future fate of the republic by the average attendance at the "Primaries," may not agree with me in my idea of bending the twig. I do believe, that, if Dame Nature herself should apply for a school, some of these wise Dogberries would report her "unqualyfide." I will not murder my pretty pet. So she be gentle, kindly, and loving, what care I if at sixteen years of age she cannot paint the baptism of John upon velvet, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... at the Cape, Lucknow might have fallen, before there were forces to relieve it. That would have lit, for our rule in India, a bonfire in which Bombay would only have been a crackling twig. ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... from the tree to obtain even a single glance at the foe; for he knew how accurate is the aim of some of these Southern woodsmen. He had nothing to guide him but the rustling of the dried branches beneath his tread, or the occasional snapping of a twig under ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... hurled his furious words. He was more angry in that moment than he had ever been in his life. The force of his anger carried him along as a twig borne on a racing current. Till that instant he had forgotten that he carried his riding-whip. The sudden remembrance of it flashed like a streak of lightning ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... of glittering with the sunshine on the wet drops, and things smelling good, like they do after rain—leaves, and grass, and good earth. I tell you it made a fellow feel as if the whole world was his brother. And when Mr. Rob. lit on that twig and swelled his red breast as if he knew the whole thing was his, and began to let them notes out, calling for his lady friend to come and go halves with him, I just had to laugh and speak to him, and that was when ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... for the best part of an hour. Then she got up, and according to her daily custom walked a certain number of times round the garden. Her mind was so full that she did not as usual observe every twig, almost every leaf, as she passed. Nor, now that she was alone, was that religious bias, which had so much to do with her daily life, very strong within her. There was no taint of hypocrisy in her character; ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... visible symbols in keeping the conscience alive. People were set before the public gaze, in the stocks, whipped in public at the whipping-post, and imprisoned in the pillory. Malefactors had their ears cropped; scolding women had to wear a forked twig on the tongue; other criminals to carry a halter constantly around the neck. But that this was only a hellish device, after all; that the inflictors of such punishment were arrogating too much to themselves, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... prowled softly, to avoid disturbing the little box-house. She had the guilty conscience of the prowler that sent her heart into her mouth at the crackling of a twig under her feet. She found herself listening, holding her breath in a small panic. No sound of wakened sleepers, but there must be no ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... of a thorn thicket two cock-pheasants were having a difference, and were enthusiastically settling that difference in the approved method of game-cocks. He lingered to see which might win, but a misstep and a sudden crack of a dry twig startled them, and they withdrew like two stately but indignant old gentlemen who had been subjected to ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... bandied about between the singing, and louder laughed the friars, for they were lusty men with beards that curled like the wool of black rams; but loudest of all laughed the Tinker, and he sang more sweetly than any of the rest. His bag and his hammer hung upon a twig of the oak tree, and near by leaned his good stout cudgel, as thick as his wrist and ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... our own, and for whose correctness we would stake our hump, we learn that James Burke, the honoured member of the P.R., was seen to walk home on the night of Tuesday last with three fresh herrings on a twig. After supper, he consoled himself with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... patiently things that many English are in the dark about, both because of the censorship and because of the prevailing superstition that the English resent being told—he stabbing and sweeping at the dust with a broken twig and making little heaps and dents by way of illustration,—I sitting silent, brushing away ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... up his stand in a tree, and explore its branches till he has caught every worm. He sits on a twig, and with a peculiar swaying movement of his head examines the surrounding foliage. When he discovers his prey, he leaps upon ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... cycle of German and Northern poetry, awoke little by little in my memory and laid claim upon my sympathy. It is a poetry of bracing quality, and acts upon one like a moral tonic. Strange charm of imagination! A twig of pine-wood and a few spider-webs are enough to make countries, epochs, and nations live ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with the which, well-pleased and confident, He traversed the open sea; now he beholds it In eminent jeopardy among the coast-rocks, And hurries to preserve his wares. As light As the free bird from the hospitable twig Where it had nested he flies off from me: No human tie is snapped betwixt us two. Yea, he deserves to find himself deceived Who seeks a heart in the unthinking man. Like shadows on a stream, the forms of life Impress their characters on the smooth forehead, Naught sinks into the bosom's silent ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Giant; General Thumb, the Dwarf; Princess Zozo, the Serpent Charmer; Maggie, the Circassian Girl; and the rest of the side-show employees enter the tent. Then he removed his Number Eight mustache and put it in his pocket, and balanced his mirror against a twig. Mr. Gubb was changing ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... and closed the door—in the instant when he lost sight of her—his disinclination to be associated with the private theatricals revived. At the foot of the house-steps he stopped again; plucked a twig from a plant near him; broke it in his hand; and looked about him uneasily, on this side and on that. The path to the left led back to his father's cottage—the way of escape lay open. Why ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... offered: "Mother Tulasi, be thou propitious. If I gather thee with care, be merciful unto me. O Tulasi, mother of the world, I beseech thee." This plant is worshipped as a deity,—the wife of Vishnu, whom the breaking of even a little twig grieves and torments,—and "the pious Hindus invoke the divine herb for the protection of every part of the body, for life and for death, and in every action of life; but above all, in its capacity of ensuring ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... regal, and doomed to wings. Did gems turn to flowers, flowers to feathers, in that long-past dynasty of the Humming-Birds? It is strange to come upon his tiny nest, in some gray and tangled swamp, with this brilliant atom perched disconsolately near it, upon some mossy twig; it is like visiting Cinderella among her ashes. And from Humming-Bird to Eagle, the daily existence of every bird is a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... twig submerged in a ditch was scraped. Gemiasma verdans found abundantly with many other things, which if rehearsed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... Mallock; we must wait awhile. I have even talked to Jeffreys, and he says the same. We must lime more birds before we pull our twig down. Now, if you could lay your hand ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... well the particular nest she was seeking, made one bound for her with her rake, and with such a scream as certainly to scare little Black-and-white out of at least one of the nine lives to which she is supposed to be entitled. But pussy was too swift and swiftly scrambled to the very topmost twig that would hold her weight, while Tattine danced about in helpless rage on the grass beneath the tree. "Tattine is having a fit," thought little Black-and-white, scared half to death and quite ready to have a little fit of her own, to judge from her wild ...
— Tattine • Ruth Ogden
... me, Lady Elza. And you've made me realize that I—Tarrano—have almost lowered myself to admit this Jac Hallen my rival." He laughed harshly. "Not so! A rival? Pah! He shall live if you wish it—live close by you and me—as an insect might live on a twig by the rim of the eagle's nest.... Enough!... I was asking you, Georg Brende, of this ultimatum. Should I yield to it?" He had suppressed his other emotions; he was amusing himself with ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... for the day was over, our plans for the morrow laid, our messages received, our messengers despatched, and those who had been conspirators and now bade fair to be saviours were sleeping. Sleep seemed to fold the world; each bough and twig was silent in repose; the spectral moonlight itself slept as it bathed the air. I alone wandered and waked. With me there were too many cares for rest; work kept me on the alert; to court slumber at once was not easy after the nervous tension of duty. I was torn, too, with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... mummy-like form, its body adorned with golden and silvery spots. Hence the word chrysalis (Fig. 14, b), from the Greek, meaning golden, while the Latin word pupa, meaning a baby or doll, is indicative of its youth. In this state it hangs suspended to a twig or other object; while the silk worm, and others of its kind, previous to moulting, or casting their skins, spin a silken cocoon, which ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... (who comes—we know— Unheard, unknown of all below;) Above that dark and desolate wave, The reflex of the eternal grave— Gigantic birds with flaming eyes Sweep upward, onward through the skies, Or stalk, without a wish to fly, Where the reposing lilies lie; While, stirring neither twig nor grass, Among the trees, in silence, pass Titanic animals whose race Existed, but has left no trace Of name, or size, or shape, or hue— Whom ancient Adam ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... confronted by three gullies, which came down and met at that one point. He said he didn't know, but Elam, after looking around a little, started up one with as much confidence as though he had seen Tom when he came out. After some questioning from Tom he showed him a little twig, not larger than a needle, which he had brushed off in his hurried flight after he had thrown down his gun; and a short distance farther on he found the weapon, which Tom, in his excitement, had tossed clear across the creek. ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... his bench and craned after her. He did not hear a pebble roll on the stony beach or a twig ...
— The Cobbler In The Devil's Kitchen - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... November," Pamela remarked as they took the road by Tweedside. "Look at that beech tree against the blue sky, every black twig silhouetted. Trees ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... once come to the office a blind man with a knotted twig and a piece of string which he wound round the twig according to some cypher of his own. He could, after the lapse of days or hours, repeat the sentence which he had reeled up. He had reduced the alphabet to eleven primitive ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... blessed twig, to save his soul; and there's the madness written on him;" Stephen roared as loud as any of them. "And me to see him riding in the ring there, and knowing what the gentleman had sworn to do if he came across the hunt; and feeling that he was in the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it be in one of the classrooms, Eric; not up here, lest we have another incursion of the 'Rosebuds.' I shall have to cut preparation, but that don't matter. It's Harley's night, and old Stupid will never twig." ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek— There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, 50 Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the 29th better news came. "I didn't stir out yesterday, but sat and thought all day; not writing a line; not so much as the cross of a t or dot of an i. I imaged forth a good deal of Barnaby by keeping my mind steadily upon him; and am happy to say I have gone to work this morning in good twig, strong hope, and cheerful spirits. Last night I was unutterably and impossible-to-form-an-idea-of-ably miserable. . . . By-the-by, don't engage yourself otherwise than to me for Sunday week, because it's my birthday. I have no doubt we shall have got over our troubles here by that time, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... garden, and throughout all nature there came that inexplicable, indefinite, soft pulsation of new life and new love which we call the spring. Tiny buds, rosy and shining with sap, began to gleam like rough jewels on every twig and tree—a colony of rooks which had abode in the elms surrounding Weircombe Church, started to make great ado about their housekeeping, and kept up as much jabber as though they were inaugurating an Irish night ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... ask something more of me. Don't you see it would be just selfishness. Mary mightn't mind"—her forehead puckered—"Mary always was self-indulgent, and if Martha didn't watch her—" She threw the stripped twig away impetuously. "I am not going to get married, I'm not. I don't see why men always tag love in. Just as soon as I get to be real friends with a man and like him just—just as he is, he turns round and spoils it! Why can't they let ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... evolutions, and anon leaping above the surface, and displaying their brilliant sides in the rays of the setting sun. When we had watched for some moments their happy gambols, Mr. C. turned around and broke a twig from a bush that stood behind us; "there is a bush," said he, "which has committed many a murder." On requesting him to explain, he said, that the root of it was a most deadly poison, and that the slave women used to make a decoction of it and give to their ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... learned that not a sentinel was on duty. The great gate opposite the river, studded with brass nails, was securely bolted, but not a cannon {158} had been loaded. The bushrangers then cast aside all clothing that would hamper, and, pistol in hand, advanced silent and stealthy as wild-cats. Not a twig crunched beneath the moccasin tread. The water lay like glass, and the fort slept silent as death. Hastily each raider had knelt for the blessing of the priest. Pistols had been recharged. Iberville bade his wild Indians not to forget that ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... would find a broken twig that had given way under pressure. Then again it would be a stone overturned that caught their eye. And a little later the proof of their reasoning was shown in a clear imprint of the foot in ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... flycatcher chose a small twig under one of the boughs of the apple tree, where it perched for hours, darting out when a fly or other insect buzzed by; but always returning to the little twig as if it were home. In the shade of the thick-leaved boughs, the friendly cows sought shelter, patiently ...
— The Little Brown Hen Hears the Song of the Nightingale & The Golden Harvest • Jasmine Stone Van Dresser
... kitten, Fanny, dart like lightning from her hiding-place in the garden, where she had long lain in ambush, and fasten her sharp claws in the back of a poor little ground-bird, which had been hopping from twig to twig, chirping and twittering very cheerfully. The little bird fluttered, gasped, and uttered wailing cries, as it ineffectually labored to free itself from the power of its captor, until Emma and Anna, ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... down upon them, without the shade of a twig overhead; and the water that a little while before had sung of death rippled with its old musical joy, and about them the birds sang, and very near to them a pair of mating red-squirrels chattered and played in a mountain-ash tree. And Nada's hair brightened in the sun, and began to ripple into ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... is bent upon a twig, but wise men dread a bandit,"— Which I know was very clever; but ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... my seat and stole on feet which seemed to stir every leaf and twig to loud complaint toward the captive pair. Tense, motionless, with burning eyes, they waited. There was a movement from Captain Magnus; he yawned, turned and muttered. I stood stricken, my heart beating with loud thumps against my ribs. But the ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... keeping the conscience alive. People were set before the public gaze, in the stocks, whipped in public at the whipping-post, and imprisoned in the pillory. Malefactors had their ears cropped; scolding women had to wear a forked twig on the tongue; other criminals to carry a halter constantly around the neck. But that this was only a hellish device, after all; that the inflictors of such punishment were arrogating too much to themselves, and shared the office of the fiend; that, moreover, this compulsion ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... in a mocking tone. "We don't allow any weak creature such as you are to stay under our shelter. Go away!" he said angrily, and, taking a dry twig, he threw ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... eyes of the Apaches had trailed the fugitives, and now with bounding feet they followed the sign, Tonio foremost, his mount discarded. Afoot, like his fellows, and bending low, pointing every now and then to half turned pebble, to broken twig or bruised weed, he drove ever eagerly forward, the stolid bearing of the Indian giving way with each successive minute to unusual, though repressed excitement. Thrice he signalled to Stannard and pointed to the crushed and beaten sand—to toe or heel or sole marks to which the Caucasian ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... indeed, have lost the trail, had it not been for Uncas; we took the path, however, that led into the wilderness; for we judged, and judged rightly, that the savages would hold that course with their prisoners. But when we had followed it for many miles, without finding a single twig broken, as I had advised, my mind misgave me; especially as all the footsteps had the prints ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... square-shouldered, big-breasted, good-natured specimen of the genus homo, a giant in physical strength, and were I a wolf, I would prefer letting him alone to any man in these parts. When he gets just the least grain "shiny" (and he never gets beyond that), and his oar goes a little wrong, or a twig brushes him ungently, or his seat gets a little hard, he will express his sense of its improper deportment by incontinently damning its eyes, and so forth, as if it were a sentient thing, and understood all his profane denunciations; ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... blazing with dark gold, passing into orange, and that to red; and on nearing it find it tiled all over with the flowers of a creeper, {118b} arranged in flat rows of spreading brushes, some foot or two long, and holding each hundreds of flowers, growing on one side only of the twig, and turning their multitudinous golden and orange stamens upright to the sun. There—I cannot describe it. It must be seen first afar off, and then close, to understand the vagaries of splendour in which Nature indulges here. And yet the Norantea, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... running up the tree trunks; tanagers, ant-thrushes, hummingbirds, fly-catchers, and barbets flitting about the leaves and lower branches. The bustling crowd loses no time, and although moving in concert, each bird is occupied, on its own account, in searching bark or leaf or twig; the barbets visit every clayey nest of termites on the trees which lie in the line of march. In a few minutes the host is gone, and the forest path remains deserted and silent as before. I became, in course of time, so accustomed ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... view by heavy morning-glory vines in bloom, still dripping with dew. We saw a great many specimens of what I was told was the "long palm;" it looked to me like a kind of brake or fern, with drooping branches twenty feet in length. There were trees with hardly a leaf; but each branch and twig crowned with orange-yellow blossoms. Again we would see a tree covered with feathery, purple flowers. Along some parts of the way, was a profusion of "Indian shot," so called, I suppose, because the seeds are black, hard, and ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... foundation of many superstitions, chief among which have been some connected with epilepsy. Blochwick[108] tells us how to prepare an amulet from an elder growing on a sallow. "In the month of October, a little before the full moon, you pluck a twig of the elder, and cut the cane that is betwixt two of its knees, or knots, in nine pieces, and these pieces being bound in a piece of linen, be in a thread, so hung about the neck, that they touch the spoon of the heart, or the sword-formed cartilage; and that they may ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... thicket, burying himself deep, and was careful not to break a twig or brush a leaf which to the unerring eyes of those who followed could mark where he was. Hidden well, but yet lying where he could see, he turned his gaze back to the bird. It was now pouring out an unbroken volume of song as it swayed on a twig, like a leaf shaken in the wind. Its ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... path. Near the place where the street divided a bush waved its bare twigs in the wind. The snow which had settled upon it early in the day had been blown away by the freshening wind, and just as Muller neared the bush he saw something white fluttering from one twig. It was a handkerchief, which had probably hung heavy and lifeless when he had passed that way before. Now when the wind held it out straight, he saw it at once. He loosened it carefully from the thorny twigs. A delicate and rather unusual perfume wafted ...
— The Case of The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... glass," said Jarvis Barrow. "Ae gowden floor and ae river named of Life, passing the greatness of Orinoco or Amazon. And the tree of life for the healing of the nations. And a' the trees that ever leafed or flowered, ta'en together, but ae withered twig to that!" ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... intermingled with these waved the lofty and slender branches of the wild cherry, the berries of which, now ripe, and sweet as drops of honey, and black as polished jet, offered a delicious repast to clouds of little birds, that hopped chirruping from twig to twig: and lastly, I may mention a fine arbutus, which in its turn presented a tempting collation to the notice of many a hungry bullfinch. The soft turf around was strewed with the shining black and bright red berries, which ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... bread-and-milk too. Sun-birds visit the pomegranate flowers, and eat insects therein too, as well as nectar. The young whydah birds crouch closely together at night for heat. They look like a woolly ball on a branch. By day they engage in pairing and coaxing each other. They come to the same twig every night. Like children, they try and lift heavy weights of feathers above ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... the fresh-fallen snow was unbroken, and every crystal-coated branch and twig of the great trees upon it gleamed in the moonlight as though made of glass. In the distance the river between its low hills seemed a shining, winding path of silver, and over it the moon hung white and clear and passionless. The mystery of silence, the majesty of things eternal, brooded ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... bade him eat. But the little tailor was much too weak to hold the tree; and when the giant let it go, it sprang back again, and the tailor was hurried into the air with it. When he had fallen down again without injury, the giant said, "What is this? Hast thou not strength enough to hold the weak twig?" "There is no lack of strength," answered the little tailor. "Dost thou think that could be anything to a man who has struck down seven at one blow? I leapt over the tree because the huntsmen are shooting down there in the thicket. Jump as I did, if thou ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the Mounted Troopers' horses told me so (my word! the Troopers' horses are jolly fellows!) Well, these black trackers went in front of each party just like dogs, with their heads to the ground, and they turned over every leaf and twig, and said if a Human, a horse or a kangaroo had broken it or been that way. They found your track fast enough, but one evening it came to an end quite suddenly, and weren't they all surprised! I heard from a Trooper's horse—(such a nice horse he was!)—that the trackers ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... cried Constance, as the machine swung past white posts into a wooded drive, which curved and curved again, losing and finding glimpses of the sea. No buds were out, but each twig bulged with nobbins of new life; and the ground, brown still, had the swept and garnished look which the March winds leave behind for the tempting of Spring. Persephone had not risen, but the earth listened for her step, and the air held ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... blood started from my fingers, and with one eye over my shoulder for savages, I watched at the same time, and sent a bullet whistling whenever I saw a limb or a twig move; for I kept a gun always at hand, and an Indian appearing then within range would have been taken as a declaration of war. As it was, however, my own blood was all that was spilt—and from the ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... it?" I asked, somewhat surprised. I stepped back from the path, and Wilson stooped down awkwardly, and picked a twig from a low bush that grew by the fence. "Well," he began, drawing a long breath, "I've been thinking it over, and I've made up my mind to tell you. I expect I ought to have done it before, but my orders was ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... as they are mostly flat. If they are small, several may be taken, or a little twig. If the under side of the leaf is very different from the upper, or is remarkable for its hairs, or for any reason, one leaf should be placed with the under side upward. Care should be taken to do the pasting neatly, so that the sheet will look pretty, and the parts ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... is. But what is that green plant up there? It looks as if the oak tree were all dead except that one sprig of green. Strange that it should keep only one twig alive." ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... fighting. Looking up, they could see the combatants, like black comets in collision. Our witch, who had good sight, saw that the enemy broomstick was upper-most, and that the writhing Harold was being shaken like a mouse. Their bristles were interlocked. One twig floated down between the witches, and our witch recognised it as coming from her poor Harold's mane. As, for this purpose, she brought her eyes to her immediate surroundings, it seemed to her suddenly that the sky was growing larger, and then she realised that this was because ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... to you, it isn't proper,' said she, as sweet as honey. He tried to climb over the hedge, but it seemed to grow higher and higher. Then he tried to push through, but it grew thicker and thicker, and he was in despair. So he patiently broke twig after twig till he had made a little hole through which he peeped, saying imploringly, 'Let me in! Let me in!' But the pretty princess did not seem to understand, for she picked her roses quietly, and left him to fight his way in. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... withered body of this old man seemed to grow always more motionless, except for his hands. Resting on his thighs, his twig-like hands remained forever awake, their thin contorted fingers crawling vaguely about like the legs of 8 ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... with you, so you do not dupe us!" Ursus and Taurus also, Bull and Bear, Were eager in the game to take a share. Said Vulpus to the assembled quadrupeds, "Company Boards, like ships, need figureheads, Wooden but ornamental! Eh? You twig? Sweet are the uses of—the Guinea Pig! Dull, but respectable and decorative, That tribe, to whom credulity is native. They'll sit around our Board in solemn row, And never, never 'want to know, you know,' Beyond convenient limits. Their proud presence Will fill our flock with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... his wife's face; not a new sight, and one which had been presented to him gradually enough, but which was now always giving him a fresh shock. It was a lovely tranquil winter's day; every branch and every twig of the trees and shrubs were glittering with drops of the sun-melted hoarfrost; a robin was perched on a holly-bush, piping cheerily; but the blinds were down, and out of Mrs. Hamley's windows nothing of all this was to be seen. There was even ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... tendency does not produce the series of movements all by itself, but, as was explained in speaking of tendencies in general, cooeperates with sensory stimuli in producing them. Clearly enough, the nest-building bird, {111} picking up a twig, is reacting to that twig. He does not peck at random, as if driven by a mere blind impulsion to peck. He reacts to twigs, to the crotch in the tree, to the half-built nest. Only, he would not react to these stimuli unless the nesting fit ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... at the sight of the eucalyptus trees, two hundred feet high, with tough bark five inches thick. The trunks, measuring twenty feet round, and furrowed with foamy streaks of an odorous resin, rose one hundred and fifty feet above the soil. Not a branch, not a twig, not a stray shoot, not even a knot, spoilt the regularity of their outline. They could not have come out smoother from the hands of a turner. They stood like pillars all molded exactly alike, and could be counted by hundreds. At an ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... her twig broom raised and dripping, and scanned him eagerly. "Is it anything about the ship that came yesterday? I heard among the women that it is the war-vessel of Eric's kinsman, Thorkel Farserk, just come back from ravaging the Irish coast. Is his wife going to make ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... world, was a sort of sport to Harold, and he strode on, making his goal the highest point of the moor, whence, if it cleared a little, he would be able to see to a vast distance. He was curious, too, to look down into the railway cutting. This was a sort of twig from a branch of the main line, chiefly due to Lord Erymanth, who, after fighting off the railway from all points adjacent to his estate, had found it so inconvenient to be without a station within reasonable distance, that a single line had at last been made from Mycening for ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... friend; and when I had read that portion of your letter which describes the scene in the conservatory, I seemed to see it all.' I was speaking with my eyes upon the ripples of the little stream at our feet, into which, from time to time, I tossed a leaf or twig from ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... could sniff a thousand woodsy odors. Spears of sunlight made bright blobs on the brown grass; and every littlest bush and shrub wore a shimmering halo, as you see the blessed ones backgrounded in old pictures. There was a bird twittering somewhere; occasionally a twig snapped with a quick, secret sharpness; and once a thin brown rabbit took to his heels, right ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... up a twig that opportunely dropped at his feet, and getting out his knife to whittle it, "I suppose they were the first agnostics, and we who don't so much deny the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... here's your principality. Call out my prime minister, Pat Moore. I sent him across the bog to meet us at Moriarty's. Here he is, and Moriarty along with him to welcome you. Patrick, give Prince Harry possession—with sod and twig. Here's the kay from my own hand, and I give you joy. Nay, don't deny me the pleasure—I've a right to it. No wrong to my daughter, if that's what you are thinking of—a clear improvement of my own,—and she will have enough ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... hundred feet in diameter, and full a hundred and thirty feet high. It had no appearance of a tree, for neither trunk nor branches were visible. It seemed a mountain of whitish-green scales, fringed with long silvery moss, that hung like innumerable beards from every bough and twig. Nothing could better convey the idea of immense and incalculable age than the hoary beard and venerable appearance of this monarch of the woods. Spanish moss of a silvery grey covered the whole mass of wood and foliage, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... you an ample supply of bait. When carefully keeping behind the overhanging shore brush and exercising caution not to knock brush or clod into the stream, an hour's mediocre effort is rewarded by a dozen bass of uniform size, weighing about a pound each. Should you make an unusual noise, break a twig or cause the sandy bank to cave and ripple the water, you must pass on to the next pool ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... said he, "has puzzled half the doctors on the Pacific Slope. It's as good as new, and as limber as a hickory twig." ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... had scarcely spoken her first line before fear fled to the winds. Her own personality fell from her like a mantle. She was Oonah, the bewitching little Irish maiden, on her way from Dublin to make her home with her grandmother in the country. In her hand she held the "twig of thorn," which, having been plucked on the first day of spring, had thrown her under the spell of the fairies. Around her shoulders she wore the peasant's cape with its quaint, becoming hood, and as she threw it off there was a smothered exclamation from the audience, ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... The dealers were arranging their commodities, consisting chiefly of vegetables, the great bulk of which seemed to be cabbages. Later in the forenoon there was a much greater variety of merchandise: basket-work, both for fancy and use; twig-brooms, beehives, oranges, rustic attire; all sorts of things, in short, that are commonly sold at a rural fair. I heard the lowing of cattle, too, and the bleating of sheep, and found that there was a market for cows, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... that so long as Lobelalatutu lives and continues to govern this people we are reasonably safe. But if he should happen to be deposed, and murdered, the new king will most probably sacrifice us both to his fetish as a sort of thank-offering for his success. Twig?" ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... mouth of the cavern was completely closed. The water running over spread to both sides on the moss. The top fagots were perfectly dry; then Dr. Weber, supplying himself with a torch, himself lit the fire. The flames ran from twig to twig with an angry crackling, and soon leaped toward the sky, chasing clouds ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... be killed. So he went to the sty, made a little hole in the wall, and told the boy to put his finger through it. The lad knew what he wanted; so instead of putting out his finger he poked out a little peeled alder twig. The giant cut the twig, and the red sap ran out. Then he thought the boy must be yet very lean since his flesh was so hard, so he caused a greater supply of milk and nuts to be given ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... with awe and admiration as the "Wolf that never Sleeps." Silent in his movements, with eyes that can detect and distinguish suspicious objects where the ordinary man sees nothing at all, with ears as quick as a hare's to catch the swish of grass or the cracking of a twig, he goes alone in and out of the mountains where the savages who have marked him down are asleep by the side of their assegais, or repeating stories of the dreadful Wolf over their bivouac fires. This is the life which has most attractions for Baden-Powell, and ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... mythical dwellers of the mountains. Such is the effect produced by terror on the people's imagination, that frequently in their imagination they feel the actual touch of the spirits. Probably, if there is any physical touch in those cases, it is only a leaf or a twig falling from a tree. Still, when that occurs a regular fight ensues, the men continuing to fire stones at their imaginary foes, until in their mental vision they see them disappear and fade away in the air. Others not ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... bourgeois daisy; the pale-faced anemone, earliest to wake and earliest to sleep; the blue bird's-eye in small family groups; the blatant dandelion already a head and shoulders taller than any neighbor. Every twig in the old garden bore its new load of buds that were soft as kittens' paws; and up the wrinkled trunks of ancient trees young ivy leaves chased each ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... movement Young Matt did not know. But certainly it was not in his mind to harm Ollie. He was acting upon the impulse of the moment; an impulse to get nearer and to study unobserved the person of his rival. So he stalked him with all the instinct of a creature of the woods. Not a twig snapped, not a leaf rustled, as from bush to fallen log, from tree trunk to rock, he crept, always in the black ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... few instants. He was within. She hesitated. Should she go forward, or should she go back? At length she went forward, and, finding in the hedge the gap which Clayhanger had made, forced her way through it. Her skirt was torn by an obstinate twig. Quite calmly she bent down and with her fingers examined the rent; it was not important. She was now in the garden of the Clayhangers, and he whom she sought was moving somewhere in the house. "Supposing I do ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... fire, and his great body quivered with excitement. His companions, too, were intensely stirred. The slashers were against King George, and that was all-sufficient. Like weird spectres they moved through the night. Not a word did they speak, and not a twig snapped as their moccasined feet pressed the ground. Never did a girl have a more determined and thoroughly-trained body of men speeding forth on her behalf than did Jean Sterling that night in the heart of ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... good. Except for a few pencil scrawls done in sheer absent-mindedness and hastily destroyed, this was the first sketch he had made since the death of Henry Leek. But it was very good. "No mistake who's done that!" he murmured; and added: "That's the devil of it. Any expert would twig it in a minute. There's only one man that could have done it. I shall have to do something worse than that!" He shut up the box and with a bang as an amative couple came into sight. He need not have done so, for the couple vanished instantly ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... now. Tearing a loose shred from his tattered trousers, he soaked it in a little puddle, then stuffed it in his mouth. He clasped his jack-knife in one fist and a twig in the other. He drew up his belt. He took that precious hat off and stuffed it in his pocket, campaign buttons and all. Ah, no, he did not throw it away. He ripped off another rag and tied it fast around his neck and he bound his scarf around his forehead. He knew ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... upon its polished surface. There was a fire on the hearth, and on the mantel stood some gilded vases and a glass case of wax-flowers, also a stuffed canary under a glass shade, pathetic on his little twig. Doctor Gordon pointed to the flowers and the canary. "Poor old man lost his wife, when he had been married two years," he said. "She and the baby both died. That was before I came here. Damned if I wouldn't have pulled them through. That was her bird, and she made those ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... in the night, but at sunrise, the storm ceased. Miss Evelina had gone to sleep, lulled into a sense of security by the icy fingers tapping at her cobwebbed window pane. She awoke in a transfigured world. Every branch and twig was encased in crystal, upon which the sun was dazzling. Jewels, poised in midair, twinkled with the colours of the rainbow. On the tip of the cypress at the gate was a ruby, a sapphire gleamed from the rose-bush, and everywhere were ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... not, Mascari? Fool! in what age of the world, even if the Madmen of France succeed in their chimeras, will the iron of law not bend itself, like an osier twig, to the strong hand of power and gold? But look not so pale, Mascari; I have foreplanned all things. The day that she leaves this palace, she will leave it for France, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... were angry with them. A rook carried a stick to the tops of the tall trees, and the women drew their cloaks about them. The train passed across the vista, and the women wondered how long it would take Jack to walk from the station. Then another rook stooped to the edge of the plantation, gathered a twig, and carried it away. The wind was rough; it caught the evergreens underneath and blew them out like umbrellas; the grass had not yet begun to grow, and the grey sea harmonised with the grey-green land. The women waited on the windy lawn, their skirts ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... interested herself about, she accomplished with a finish and spirit that distinguished her performance as a title on a reputation distinguishes common clay. She threw over it the faithful ardor which is akin to miracle: the simplest twig in her hand budded; her dewdrops were filled with all the colors of the rainbow, because with her the sun always shone. She writes a description of our happy first Christmas in England, in which are these passages: "We had no St. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... tree to be desecrated?" "Has the idolater broken off dry bark, or green boughs; has he taken from it a staff, or a twig, or even a leaf—it is desecrated." "Has he trimmed it for the sake of the tree?" "It is forbidden." "Has he trimmed it, but not for the sake of the ...
— Hebrew Literature
... Philip for what remained of the contents." I inquired for the eldest; and she had scarcely time to tell me that he was driving a couple of geese home from the meadow, when he ran up, and handed Philip an osier-twig. I talked a little longer with the woman, and found that she was the daughter of the schoolmaster, and that her husband was gone on a journey into Switzerland for some money a relation had left him. "They wanted to cheat him," she said, "and would ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... catbird, the Northern mocker, lit in a tree over Tom's head, and trilled out her imitations of her neighbors in a rapture of enjoyment; then a shrill jay swept down, a flash of blue flame, and stopped on a twig almost within the boy's reach, cocked his head to one side and eyed the strangers with a consuming curiosity; a gray squirrel and a big fellow of the "fox" kind came skurrying along, sitting up at intervals to inspect and chatter at the boys, for the wild ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... proceedings with true robin-like impudence. They have never probably seen a fire before, and are rather puzzled by it. I heard of one which first lighted on the embers, which were covered with ashes; finding this unpleasant, he hopped on to a burning twig; this was worse, so the third time he lighted on a red-hot coal; whereat, much disgusted, he took himself off, I hope escaping with nothing but a blistered toe. They frequently come into my hut. I watched ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... which they live, a similarity which often gives them protection against persecution! The best known examples of this, in our regions, are the spinning caterpillars, which in a state of rest look strikingly like a twig of a tree or a shrub on which {101} they live. In other regions there is a multitude of the most striking freaks of nature of this kind—for instance, butterflies and other insects, which at rest look like the leaves of plants under which they live; butterflies living among ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... near the house; and from this he broke a twig, which he planted in the ground, saying: "This twig shall become a tree, and shall bring forth fruit year by year ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... wide blankets and quilts and put Red Chief between us. We weren't afraid he'd run away. He kept us awake for three hours, jumping up and reaching for his rifle and screeching: "Hist! pard," in mine and Bill's ears, as the fancied crackle of a twig or the rustle of a leaf revealed to his young imagination the stealthy approach of the outlaw band. At last, I fell into a troubled sleep, and dreamed that I had been kidnapped and chained to a tree by a ferocious ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... although, strictly speaking, the Navajo has no shuttle. If the figure to be woven is a long stripe, or one where the weft must be passed through 6 inches or more of the shed at one time, the yarn is wound on a slender twig or splinter, or shoved through on the end of such a piece of wood; but where the pattern is intricate, and the weft passes at each turn through only a few inches of the shed, the yarn is wound into small skeins or balls and shoved through ...
— Navajo weavers • Washington Matthews
... contrabands, now for the first time, very likely, receiving wages for their labor judging by the spirit they throw into their work, are putting the finishing touches on the ditch and parapet. Outside yonder a squad of men is tearing in pieces a twig hut which workmen have built for their tools. And so the final work of preparation goes on with great spirit, and is soon completed. There are still no signs of the approach of the enemy except what we observe ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... like us, a casual way-farer, and yet the suddenness of his appearance, the intentness of his watch, both had their effect upon me. I moved a few yards towards him, with what object I perhaps scarcely knew. A dry twig snapped beneath my feet. He became suddenly aware of my approach. Then, indeed, my suspicions took definite shape, for without a moment's hesitation the man turned and strode ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... May is observed by the Notts juveniles not only by wearing the usual piece of oak-twig, but each young loyalist is armed with a nettle, as coarse as can be procured, with which instrument of torture are coerced those unfortunates who are unprovided with "royal oak," as it is called. Some who are unable to procure it endeavour to avoid ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... each commanded one of the runways indicated. How light it was, though the sun was hidden! Every branch and twig beamed in the sun like a lamp. A downy woodpecker below me kept up a great fuss and clatter,—all for my benefit, I suspected. All about me were great, soft mounds, where the rocks lay buried. It was a cemetery of drift boulders. There! that is the hound. Does his voice come across the valley ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... the case of the red coral of commerce. A minute polype, fixed to the rocky bottom of the deep sea, grows up into a branched trunk. The end of every branch and twig is terminated by a polype; and all the polypes are connected together by a fleshy substance, traversed by innumerable canals which place each polype in communication with every other, and carry nourishment to the substance of the supporting stem. It is a sort of natural ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... world, failing to perceive its connection with the branch or limb, and tree, and its unity in being with every other leaf on the tree. After a bit the unfolding consciousness of the leaf enables it to perceive the stem that connects it with the twig. Then it begins to realize certain relationships, and feels its vital connection with the twig and the few other leaves attached to the same twig. Later on, it unfolds sufficiently to perceive that certain other ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... winters in its case attached to a twig. When the buds begin to open in the spring it moves to them, carrying its case with it, and begins to feed on the young and tender buds. By the time the leaves are well open, it has fed a good deal on the tender buds and young leaves and is ready to make a new and ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... Queen. Yellow Bellflower. Maiden's Blush. White Pippin. Keswick Codlin. American Golden Russet. Fall Wine. Herfordshire Pearmain. Rambo. White Pearmain. Belmont. Wine Sap. Fall Pippin. Rawle's Janet. Fameuse. Red Canada. Jonathan. Willow Twig. ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... he caught the ledge to the left, strained up, and, holding thus, reached out with his right. The hand closed about the cluster, and the twig was broken. Grayson gave a great shout then. He turned his head as though to drop them, and, that far away, I heard the sibilant whir of rattles. I saw a snake's crest within a yard of his face, and, my God! I saw Grayson loose his left hand to guard it! The snake struck at ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... to Liverpool in the steamer, I became acquainted with a charming young lady, who proved to be a second-cousin of my father's. She belongs to the aristocratic branch of our family. Every family tree has an aristocratic branch, or bough, or little twig at least, I believe. She was a Todworth; and having always heard my other relations mention with immense pride and respect the Todworths,—as if it was one of the solid satisfactions of life to be able to speak of 'my uncle Todworth,' or 'my cousins the Todworths,'—I was prepared to appreciate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... slippery by the moss, and Lynde followed on in silence, hardly able to realize the success of the ruse which had come so near being a failure. His companion was equally preoccupied. Once she stopped for Lynde to detach her dress from a grasping twig, and once to pluck one of those pallid waxen flowers which sometimes dauntlessly find a footing even among the snowdrifts of the higher Alps. The air was full of the resinous breath of the pines, whose boughs, meeting and interlacing overhead, formed an arabesqued roof, through the openings of ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... allowing no bushes to rustle as they passed. Willet led the line, and Tayoga brought up the rear. Grosvenor was just behind Robert. He, too, was now able to bring down his feet in soundless fashion, and to avoid every stick or twig that might break with a crack beneath his weight. While he was aware of the perils before them, his heart beat high. He felt that he was making further progress, and that he was becoming a worthy ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Ride your ways, Ellan- gowan! Our bairns are hanging at our weary backs; look that your braw cradle at home be the fairer spread up. Not that I am wishing ill to little Harry, God forbid! So ride your way, for these are the last words ye'll ever hear Meg Merrilies speak, and this is the last twig that I'll ever cut in the bonny woods ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... let me measure you. My, but you have grown tall, and keep slim, so there will be less for stays to do. 'As the twig is bent,' you know," laughing and showing her even teeth, of which she was very proud. "And a fine figure is a great advantage. Your hands are not ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... allow half a pound of sugar, and a pint of wine. Cover the dish, with a large sheet of brown paper tied on; set it in a moderate oven, and let them bake till tender all through which you may ascertain by sticking a broom twig through them. They will he done in about an hour, or they may probably require more time; but you must not let them remain long enough in the oven, to break or fall to pieces. When cool, put them up in a stone jar. In cold weather they ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... of his snoring, which kept them awake, Thor thrice dealt him fearful blows with his hammer. These strokes, instead of annihilating the monster, merely evoked sleepy comments to the effect that a leaf, a bit of bark, or a twig from a bird's nest overhead had fallen upon his face. Early on the morrow, Skrymir left Thor and his companions, pointing out the shortest road to Utgard-loki's castle, which was built of great ice blocks, with huge glittering ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... at my watch; it was six o'clock, and thus wanted two hours to daybreak. Hurriedly I left the inn and went out again. A rimy frost had come upon every twig and bush and tree, and in the light of the moon the ice crystals sparkled as though the spirits had scattered myriads of precious stones everywhere. But I thought not of this. I made my way toward the spot from which I thought I had heard the sound ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... wild rwose now do hang in zight, To mornen zun an' evenen light, The bird do whissle in the gloom, Avore the thissle out in bloom, But here alwone the tree do leaen. The twig that woonce did whiver there Is now a limb a-wither'd beaere: Zoo I do miss the sheaede above My head, an' me'th ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... was not successful. When within a few feet of the summit, the adventurer grasped at a twig too slenderly rooted to sustain his weight. It gave way in his hand, and he fell backward down the precipice. His head struck against the less perpendicular part of the rock, whence the body rolled heavily down to the detached fragment, of which mention has heretofore been made. There was ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the bright round smooth pebble, by the gaily fluttering bit of paper, by the smooth bit of board, by the rectangular block, by the brilliant quaint leaf. Look at the child that can scarcely keep himself erect, that can walk only with the greatest care—he sees a twig, a bit of straw; painfully he secures it, and like the bird carries it to his nest. See him again, laboriously stooping and slowly going forward on the ground, under the eaves of the roof (the deep eaves of the Thuringian peasant house). ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... think it was, dear old Patricia miss?" persisted Bones, and interrupted her ingenious speculation in his usual aggravating manner: "The sound of a footstep breakin' a twig a ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... wood was of wonderful toughness, and Gourlay had been known to bet that no man could break the handle of his stick by a single grip over the crook and under it. Yet now, as he saw his bargain whisked away from him and listened to Wilson's jibe, the thing snapped in his grip like a rotten twig. He stared down at the broken pieces for a while, as if wondering how they came there, then dashed them on the ground while Wilson stood smiling by. And then he strode—with a look on his face that made ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... country of the Weezee, of whose curious customs they had an opportunity of seeing more. Both sexes are inveterate smokers. They quickly manufacture their pipes of a lump of clay and a green twig, from which they extract the pith. They all grow tobacco, the leaves of which they twist up into a thick rope like a hay-band, and then coil it into a flattened spiral, shaped like a target. They are very fond of dancing. A long strip of bark or cow-skin is laid on the ground, and the Weezee ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... monotonous!" he exclaimed, still speaking French. Then rapidly recovering his consciousness as the full horror of the situation began to break on his mind, he went on muttering audibly: "Have they really hopped the twig? Bah! Fudge! what has not been able to knock the life out of one little Frenchman can't have killed two Americans! They're all right! But first and foremost, let ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... him try again. After a weary hour the son turned to Rikiu: "Father, there is nothing more to be done. The steps have been washed for the third time, the stone lanterns and the trees are well sprinkled with water, moss and lichens are shining with a fresh verdure; not a twig, not a leaf have I left on the ground." "Young fool," chided the tea-master, "that is not the way a garden path should be swept." Saying this, Rikiu stepped into the garden, shook a tree and scattered over the garden gold and crimson leaves, ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... The twig is so easily bended, I have banished the rule of the rod; I have taught them the goodness of Knowledge, They have taught me the goodness of God. My heart is a dungeon of darkness, Where I shut them from breaking a rule; My frown ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... judging from the many reports sent us by our youthful correspondents. Crocuses have pushed upward to the spring sunshine, and rose bushes are beginning to send out tender green shoots. "Pussies" have been reported by C. H. W., Mary M. R., Joe Ward, and many others; and Louis C. Vogt sends a twig of these pretty downy tokens of spring, which he accompanies with a very neatly printed letter. It is now time to begin to watch for violets and ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the pan and teeth of the trap, thinking to hide it; but it not only smells of the hand, but withers up and turns brown, and acts as a warning to that wary creature. It is a better plan if any dead leaves are lying near to turn them over and over with the end of a twig till they fall on the trap, that is if they are dry: if wet (unless actually raining at the time), should one chance to be left with the drier under surface uppermost, the rat may pause on the brink. Now that the remotest chance of leaving a scent was avoided the wire became ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... altered the appearance of the country and given me a new scene. The invisible air, as if charged with colour, has spread another tone broadly over the landscape. Omitting no detail, it has worked out afresh every little bough of the scattered hawthorn bushes, and made each twig distinct. It is ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... the orchard or the wood, in the garden or by the rustic wayside. We have seen him, on still winter-days, flitting from tree to tree, with the liveliest motions and in the most engaging attitudes, examining every twig and branch, and winding over and under and in and out among them, and, after a few lively notes, hopping to another tree to pass through the same manoeuvres. Even those who are confined to the house are not excluded from a sight of these birds; one cannot open a window, on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... no doubt," said the palliard, who was incomparably the shabbiest rascal in the corps. "Though a needy mizzler mysel, I likes to see a cove vot's vel dressed. Jist twig his swell kickseys and pipes;[31] if they ain't the thing, I'm done. Lame Harry can't dance better nor he—no, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the next day might bring forth. I wanted to sleep and rest, so as to rise refreshed when the doctor called me two hours after midnight, when I was to relieve guard; but sleep would not come, and I lay fidgeting about, wondering how it was possible that such a small twig could set up so much irritation ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite. These alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you walked ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... regularity, seemed awful, and the deep low sigh uttered by Breezy sounded quite startling; but there was nothing else—no sound of the powerful cats coming cautiously round, winding in and out among the rocks and bushes, and not a twig was stirred. ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... burned. In the narrow crack between the oven and the wall rested always a birch rod, which was often referred to at critical moments. A new rod, with brightly coloured feathers attached to the tip of every twig, appeared regularly on Shrove Tuesday and tended slightly to spoil that otherwise glorious day, when large cross buns stuffed with a mixture of crushed almond and sugar were served in hot milk for ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... appears dimly to fore-shadow the office of the evil archer Loki, who in the Scandinavian mythology shoots Balder with a mistletoe twig. The language closely resembles ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... dark patches on the log; the color was as concealing, here in its natural surroundings, as is the color of our common wood-frog among the dead leaves of our woods. When I stirred it up it jumped to a small twig, catching hold with the disks of its finger-tips, and balancing itself with unexpected ease for so big a creature, and then hopped to the ground and again stood motionless. Evidently it trusted for safety to escaping observation. We saw some monkeys ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... dry ditch with laborious care. They advanced no single inch without first taking care to move aside any twig the snapping ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... known by its two tall trees, and that nearest the sea, when viewed from the east, appears surmounted by what resemble the "Kangaroo's Head:" they are cones of regular shape, covered to the topmost twig with the lightest green Flagellaria. The "bush" now becomes beautiful, rolling in bulging masses of verdure to the very edge of the clear brown stream. As in the rivers of Guinea, the llianas form fibrous ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Siege of Leyden, 1574. J. William Beekman, the President of the Holland Society, said: "Gentlemen, we will now proceed to the next regular toast. It is of interest to all: 'New York, the child of New Amsterdam—Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.' I call upon Mr. Frank R. Lawrence, President of the Lotos Club, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... He leaves his retreat before sunrise to feed on the insects over the water; he returns to it as soon as the sun's rays cause a glare of light, is sedentary all day long, and comes out again for a short tune after sunset. He builds his nest on a twig over the water in the unfrequented creeks: ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... used at other times for the protection of the strawberry beds) they were enabled, under shelter themselves, to shake the branches of the big tree which overshadowed the swing and the position of the enemy. Every twig and branch was, of course, laden with snow, and masses fell in rapid succession upon the heads of the defenders. This was annoying at first, but at a word from Sir Toady, Sweetheart and he seized their intrenching tools, calling out: "Thank you—thank ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... worth looking at. He lay rigid, like a dried twig, with his eyes shut tight, and his mouth shut tight, and his hands clenched tighter still. It really seemed as if this time Mr. Snawdor was going to make good his old-time threat ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... In regard to connection of this "sign-language" and Indian "pictography," Mr. McRae has told me the following: Whenever an Indian breaks up his camp, and wishes to leave behind him information in what direction and how far he is going, he plants into the ground near the fire a twig or stick, and breaks it so that it forms an acute angle, planting the other end in the ground also in the direction in which he intends to camp the following evening. The following would very well give the appearance of this little ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... "Twig the yellow beggar, will you, Gib?" said McGuffey; "one eye half open for all the world like he was winkin' at ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... to believe that fifty years ago this spot was the end of the Petersburg world. But at that epoch the Nevsky was decorated with rows of fine large trees, which have now disappeared to the last twig. The Fontanka River, or canal, over which we stand, offers the best of the many illustrations of the manner in which Peter the Great, with his ardent love of water and Dutch ways, and his worthy successors have turned natural disadvantages ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... hither, open hence, Scarce a bramble weaves a fence, Where the strawberry runs red, With white star-flower overhead; Cumbered by dry twig and cone, Shredded husks of seedlings flown, Mine of mole and spotted flint: Of dire wizardry no hint, Save mayhap the print that shows Hasty outward-tripping toes, Heels to terror on the mould. These, the woods of Westermain, Are as others to behold, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "Say," he drawled, when he had lighted it with a twig from the fire, "what the hell did you whallop me in the jaw for? I seen it comin' but I couldn't dodge, an' when she hit—it seemed like I was all tucked away in my little crib, an' somewhere, sweet ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... and which the visitor might have hunted for a year. Every good librarian, every private book-owner, who has grown into his library, finds he has a bunch of nerves going to every bookcase, a branch to every shelf, and a twig to every book. These nerves get very sensitive in old librarians, sometimes, and they do not like to have a volume meddled with any more than they would like to have their naked eyes handled. They come to feel at last that the books of a great collection are a part, not merely of their own property, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... contrast between the two Visions—the blossoming twig and the boiling caldron brewing tempests from the North. Unrelated as these seem, they symbolise together Jeremiah's prophesying throughout. For in fact this was all blossom and storm, beauty and terror, tender yearning and thunders ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... them, makes a picture that is brilliant in the extreme, when you consider the relative values of the colors composing it. Then you will discover that the charm is not confined to the color of the fruit, but to the delicate tracery of branch and twig, as well. ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... the lash of Sim's whip to his collar that he might not go too fast for them, told him to find Theodora. Instantly he pulled away through the brushwood, giving a little yelp now and then as the stiff remnant of some broken twig or ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... a lady of charm and beauty in the vicinity who went by the name of Mrs. Bo. They said she had gone well to hounds in her youth, but I had never observed her jump a twig. She often joined us when Peter and I were changing horses and once or twice had ridden home with us. Peter did not appear to like her much, but I was too busy to notice this one way or the other. One ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... no one to warn her of the dangers abroad, so when she came to the railroad track she just settled upon it, with no more fear than if it were a twig. An ugly brown worm that had been sunning himself on a ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... ultimately becoming professional stage dancers. They know the emoluments. They know that one daughter on the dancing stage is worth ten in the parlor—financially. They know, too, that old adage "as the twig is bent," and the rest of it, so they start their twigs straight and in fertile soil with faith that in this way their child's future is well and happily provided for. A knowledge of stage dancing is a life insurance policy that ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... could now here and there make out, by the aid of his light, a broken twig, trampled ferns and down-crushed grass. Once he distinguished a blood-stain on a limb—fresh blood, not coagulated. A groan burst from between his ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... hurried to say, 'the solitude has grown intolerable. I know what that means, I have lived so long in the eternal stillness sometimes that the first patter of a rain on the leaves came like the tramp of an army, and the snapping of a twig rang ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... off three twigs of the pine. Just snapped them in two with nervous fingers. Here are pieces lying on the ground. Now, a man does that sort of thing almost unconsciously. He will not reach up for the twig or down for it, but he breaks it because it presents itself to him at the corner of his eye. This man was six feet in height or more and built very powerfully. I think I know him! Yes, I'm sure I know him! Nor is it at all strange that ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... here and there its scarlet tinge. It was very still, yet all alive with woodsy sounds. Now a belated cicada swung his rattle as if in a fright, next a bull-frog, with hoarse kerchug! took a header for his evening bath. Once, later on, when the shadows were falling, a sleepy thrush settled upon a twig near by, and sang his good-night in sweetest tones. About this time he heard a farm-boy calling anxiously through the neighboring wood for the lost Sukey of the herd, and at times a dusty rumble announced a wagon jolting homeward over the unseen ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... which has been guided by no critical faculty, and which doesn't know where to stop. I try to admire it; and I end in pitying the poor artist. Look at that leafless felled tree in the middle distance. Every little twig, on the smallest branch, is conscientiously painted—and the result is like a colored photograph. You don't look at a landscape as a series of separate parts; you don't discover every twig on a tree; ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... are (as yet) dirt under my feet; my problem is architectural, creative - to get this stuff jointed and moving. If I can do that, I will trouble you for style; anybody might write it, and it would be splendid; well-engineered, the masses right, the blooming thing travelling - twig? ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... third vetch, which clothe themselves in a segmented rod in turn. While on the other hand the fine sand-like grain of this snap-dragon needs storing in a capsule—such a quaint one it is (whether most like a bird or a mouse sitting on a twig is hard to say)—but it is a perfectly adapted treasure-bag for the delicate things, and when they are ripe the two eyes open, and the wind shakes the seed out by them! Each one lays itself out for ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... just about to despair, and had almost made up her mind to turn back, when the golden note rose again and she stopped, entranced. There, over her head and not five feet away, swaying perilously on a slender twig, balanced the little songster, pouring out his ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... gently and monotonously on the bar. The wind of evening in the poplars sounded like some sad, weird, old rune—some broken dream of old memories. A slender shapely young aspen rose up before them against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky, which brought out every leaf and twig in dark, tremulous, ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... occasional crackle as a rotten twig or branch snapped beneath the hoofs. Slender trees slid athwart the moonlight, closed on one another, and opened out, and still, though the snow was scanty and in places swept away, Grant and a big ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... covered with green water weeds, I rapturously took in picture after picture. I still remember the man with bare body, engaged in a belated toilet on the edge of the tank, cleaning his teeth with the chewed end of a twig. Suddenly my elders became aware of my presence behind them. "Get away, get away, go back at once!" they scolded. They were scandalised. My feet were bare, I had no scarf or upper-robe over my tunic, I was not ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... the train, the men of the evening shift, just come on, were swarming about the end of the overhang like ants upon the tip of a broken twig,—alert-eyed, quick-handed, cool-brained "Sons of Martha," who, balanced unconcernedly in mid-air on narrow stringers, clenched fast the rivets in Death's steel harness. During the lulls between ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... mysterious, impalpable portion of his own substance, and hence he seeks to embody it in some object, which thus becomes consecrated. The baho, which is inserted in the roof of the kiva, is a piece of willow twig about six inches long, stripped of its bark and painted. From it hang four small feathers suspended by short cotton strings tied at equal distances along the twig. In order to obtain recognition ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... twigs a bit here and there, and then, as she rose to depart, she looked me suddenly in the face and stopped, as much as to say, "Well, well! here's a pretty go! A man spying upon me!" I wondered whether she would throw up the work, but in another minute she was back again with another twig. The nest, I should have said, was about four feet from the ground, and perhaps twenty feet from the cottage. Four days later, I found her sitting upon it. She flew off as I came up, and I pushed into the scrub far ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... A twig crackled under a tread, and the next moment a man came out of the bushes at the left, and without a word took the bridle of the old horse from her fingers and vaulted into the saddle. The hand that rested a moment on the cantle as he rose grasped a "navy six." He was dressed in dull ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... dark, and he had not taken over a score of steps when he floundered into a hollow filled with water and mud. He leaped across this, to find himself in a split of the cliff, where the bushes were unusually high and thick. Here the rain hung heavily from every twig and soon soaked ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... we had to creep on all fours through the brushwood with the greatest caution; for gorillas are sharp-sighted, and they have a remarkably acute sense of hearing, so that sometimes the breaking of a dry twig under one's foot is sufficient ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... of Malvern Hill Remember every thing; But sap the twig will fill: Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... of the woods deepened into a stillness so profound that a dead leaf, fluttering from its twig and rustling to the ground, made her ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... lord, you will recall to mind that night We found the Prince in slumber deeply sunk Down in the garden 'neath the plantain trees. He dreamed, it seemed, of victories on the morrow, And in his hand he held a laurel-twig, As if to test his heart's sincerity. You took the wreath away, and smilingly Twined round the leaves the necklace that you wore, And to the lady, to your noble niece, Both wreath and necklace, intertwining, gave. At such a wondrous sight, the Prince, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a blank sort of way Brother Soulsby take out a penknife, and lop an offending twig from a rose-bush against the fence, something occurred to him. There was a curious exception to that rule of Alice's isolation. She had made at least one friend. Levi Gorringe seemed to like ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... Should she go forward, or should she go back? At length she went forward, and, finding in the hedge the gap which Clayhanger had made, forced her way through it. Her skirt was torn by an obstinate twig. Quite calmly she bent down and with her fingers examined the rent; it was not important. She was now in the garden of the Clayhangers, and he whom she sought was moving somewhere in the house. "Supposing I do meet him," she thought, "what shall I say to him?" She did not know what she ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... sage. Still Bannister waited. A less experienced plainsman would have blazed away and exposed his own position. But not this young man with the steel-wire nerves. Silent as the coming of dusk, no breaking twig or displaced brush betrayed his ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... rich in design, and independent in its individuality. Counterpoint, said a critic in the London Musical News, shows the student how to make a harmonic phrase like a well-shaped tree, of which every bough, twig and leaf secures for itself the greatest independence, the fullest measure of light and air. Composer, interpreter and listener may all profit ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... ahead of us, as sure as you live. Oh, look! That little twig jumped up into place right before my very eyes. Don't you see what that means, Maurice? He passed along here only a minute or so ahead of us. That twig didn't have time enough to get back to its position up to now. Phew! Perhaps he's laying for ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... The clouds of steam rising into the cold air from the surface of the warmer water were tinged with gold by the newly-risen sun. A heavy frost rested on the spruces and balsams that fringed the banks of the river, and as the sunlight struck one twig after another, it covered them with millions of points like diamonds. Many cakes of ice were floating in the river, showing that its navigation would soon be closed ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... hitherto attempted to fathom it. Utilizing his wide range of zoological and anatomical knowledge, he constructed a hypothetical tree of descent—or, if you prefer, ascent—from the root in a protozoon to the topmost twig or most recent offshoot, man. From that day till this Haeckel's persistent labors have been directed towards the perfection of that ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... "preferment" as he calls it, and a cure of souls at Margate. Rather rough on the dear old mater—bless her, always—She so liked the Hindhead country. But if you run up against Praddy you might let him know and he might get into touch with Vavasour Williams's people—twig?—F.G. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... animal that knows death is near, he wandered restlessly hither and thither, to look for some quiet spot. The courtyard only irritated him, so he walked down to the river where yellow leaves were floating, and threw a dry twig into the stream. For a long time he watched the eddying circles on the water as the floating leaves danced. He turned back and went towards the house, stopping to look at the ruined flower-beds where the last red blossoms yet lingered. Then ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... we could follow with greatest safety. M'Iver seemingly stopped to listen, or made up his mind to deviate to the side after a little; for I soon found myself running alone, and two or three men—to judge by their cries—keeping as close on me as they could by the sound of my plunging among twig and bracken. At last, by striking to an angle down a field that suddenly rolled down beside me, I found soft carpeting for my feet, and put an increasing distance between us. With no relaxation to my step, however, I kept running till I seemed a good way clear of Dalness policies, ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... the day was clear and fine, a perfect example of early spring, with silvery pearls showing on the tips of the red-twig osiers, and pussy-willows gleaming gray along the margins of swampy places. Sylvia and Judith felt themselves one with this upward surge of new life. They ran to school together, laughing aloud for no reason, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... self-consciousness, and all his attitudes are free and unstudied. The favorite position of the deer—his fore-feet in the shallow margin of the lake, among the lily-pads, his antlers thrown back and his nose in the air at the moment he hears the stealthy breaking of a twig in the forest—is still spirited and graceful, and wholly unaffected by the pictures of him which the artists have put ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... couldn't because his back was so stiff. "Now I am an old man and I shall never see another summer. Good-bye." And Fuzzy Caterpillar rolled himself up in a gray blanket and hung himself on the end of a dried twig. "This is the last of me," he said once more as the dried little grub he now was rattled ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... twisting a twig in his fingers. "Oh yes, certainly. You've been a great comfort to him. You saved his life probably, and he really is a fine man in spite ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... power of sound. Nature is alive with music. In the fields, in the air, sound is a token of life. On high, bare, or snow-covered mountains the sense of oppression comes in great part from the absence of sound. But stand in spring under a broad, sapful Norway maple, leafless as yet, its every twig and spray clad in tender green flowerets, and listen to the musical murmur of bees above you, full of life and promise, a heavenly harmony from unseen choristers. Here is a symbol of the creative energy, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... bred, and although his progress was slower than the Texan's had been, he crept along as silently as one of the redskins themselves. Not a mesquite twig snapped under his body; not a pebble rattled. It seemed to take him hours to reach the hill which Kid Wolf had pointed out to him. As he did so, the moonlight again became so bright that it made the landscape nearly as white as day. For ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... no twig, no bough nor branch, therefore, The Saracens cut from that sacred spring; But yet the Christians spared ne'er the more The trees to earth with cutting steel to bring: Thither went Ismen old with tresses hoar, When night on all this earth spread forth her ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... is here, or none that hinders thought. The redbreast warbles still, but is content With slender notes, and more than half suppress'd. Pleas'd with his solitude, and flitting light From spray to spray, where'er he rests he shakes From many a twig the pendent drop of ice, That tinkle in the wither'd leaves below. Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft, Charms more than silence. Meditation here May think down hours to moments. Here the heart May give a useful lesson ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... Shu[u]zen spoke—"'A twig broken on the flowering branch of plum, and the whole is to be cut off.' Such the words of Kuro[u] Hangwan Yoshitsune. Kiku, you are a vile, treacherous woman; undeserving of Heaven's favour and the kindness shown by Shu[u]zen. Now you lie—with ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... across the pond, his dog following. Near the far shore was a bare spot on the ice cut by one of the sleigh-runners. Up in the woods, opposite, was the Moss Trail. Sunlight fell on the hills above him. He halted, looking up at the tree-tops. Twig, branch, and trunk glowed with the fire of diamonds through a lacy necking of hoar frost. Every tree had put on a jacket of ice and become as a fountain of prismatic hues. Here and there a dead pine rose like a spire of crystal; domes of ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... observed cases in only four genera, though we have vainly observed the cotyledons of many others. The genus cassia seems to be pre-eminent in this respect: thus, the cotyledons of C. tora, when extended horizontally, were both lightly tapped with a very thin twig for 3 m. and in the course of a few minutes they formed together an angle of 90o, so that each had risen 45o. A single cotyledon of another seedling was tapped in a like manner for 1 m., and it rose 27o in 9 m.; and after eight additional minutes it had risen 10o more; the opposite cotyledon, which ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... while we counted out the last seconds of the half, came a snap like that of a whip's lash, and the bowl of Richter's pipe lay smouldering on the grass. The noble had cut the stem as clean as it were sapling twig, and there stood Richter with the piece still clenched in his teeth, his eyes ablaze, and his cheek running blood. He pushed the surgeon away when he came forward with his needles. The Count was smiling as he put up his sword, his friends crowding around him, when Ebhardt cried out that his man ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sign of wit within. And as ill neighbours in the night Pull down an alehouse bush for spite; The laurel so, by poets worn, Is by the teeth of Envy torn; Envy, a canker-worm, which tears Those sacred leaves that lightning spares. And now, t'exemplify this moral: Tom having earn'd a twig of laurel, (Which, measured on his head, was found Not long enough to reach half round, But, like a girl's cockade, was tied, A trophy, on his temple-side,) Paddy repined to see him wear This badge of honour in his hair; And, thinking this cockade of wit Would his own temples better ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... more criticism, about Spenser &c. I think I could say something about him myself—but Lord bless me—these "merchants and their spicy drugs" which are so harmonious to sing of, they lime-twig up my poor soul and body, till I shall forget I ever thought myself a bit of a genius! I can't even put a few thoughts on paper for a newspaper. I "engross," when I should pen a paragraph. Confusion blast all ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... contributed to the moulding of our country and our people, as we find them at the present day. But again, as in geology, so here, we find few traces in our own immediate neighbourhood of the earlier links in this series—the people who preceded the historic Britons. On Twig Moor, near Brigg, in the north of the county, a tract of ground very similar to our own Moor, many flint implements have been found. On an excursion of our “Naturalists’ Union” to that tract, one of the party found ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... said, and raised her to the saddle—if I may say raised, for no bird ever hopped more lightly from one twig to another than she sprung from the ground ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... the Doctor seated in it, slowly ascending the winding steps of the Table. Reaching the flat top at last, it halted and the Doctor stepped out upon the flowery carpet. So still and perfect was the silence that even at that distance above I distinctly heard a twig ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... Rigwoodie, tough. Rigwiddie is the rope crossing the back of a horse yoked in a cart; rig, back, and withy, a twig. Applied to anything strong-backed. {82c} Rise, "cherries in the rise," cherries on the twig. First English, hris, a twig, or thin branch. The old practice of selling cherries upon shoots cut from the tree ended in their ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... and dreary time for Hester, alone in the room where she had spent so many happy hours. She sat in a window, looking out upon the leafless trees and the cold gloomy old statue in the midst of them. Frost was upon every twig. A thin sad fog filled the comfortless air. There might be warm happy homes many, but such no more belonged to her world! The fire was burning cheerfully behind her, but her eyes were fixed on the dreary square. She was hardly thinking—only ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... the pathway, Flecked with leafy light and shadow. 205 And his heart within him fluttered, Trembled like the leaves above him, Like the birch-leaf palpitated, As the deer came down the pathway. Then, upon one knee uprising, 210 Hiawatha aimed an arrow; Scarce a twig moved with his motion, Scarce a leaf was stirred or rustled, But the wary roebuck started, Stamped with all his hoofs together, 215 Listened with one foot uplifted, Leaped as if to meet the arrow; Ah! the singing, fatal arrow; Like a wasp ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... He felt a tingling in his cheeks, his eyes were chill with momentary tears; he would have liked to move quite noiselessly, to steal along in secret. A cross gust of wind blew suddenly on him; he almost shuddered, and his heart stood still; a drowsy beetle fell off a twig and dropped with a thud on the path; Bersenyev uttered a subdued 'Ah!' and again stopped. But he began to think of Elena, and all these passing sensations vanished at once; there remained only the ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... on her broomstick. As she thought about it she became very enthusiastic, and getting upon her broom she went galloping about the house and back. When she got through performing in this outrageous manner—which fairly froze Gretel's blood in her veins—the old witch tickled Haensel with a birch-twig till ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... and landed beside Amy on the stump while Betty and Mollie stepped to one side out of the reptile's path. Then, almost miraculously—or so Betty thought when she looked back upon it afterward—her eye fell upon a forked twig lying at her feet. ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... that it was an Indian, and that he was watching us. I noticed his tracks some distance back, and also noticed that just before we reached this point they turned abruptly into the underbrush. As we stood looking down that hole, I heard a twig snap, and knew he was close at hand. I thought I might surprise him, but, as I said, he was too quick for me, and I only caught a flying glimpse of him ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... to do so Accustomed to the faded gallantries Alexander's exuberant discretion All Italy was in his hands All fellow-worms together Allow her to seek a profit from his misfortune Anatomical study of what has ceased to exist Artillery At length the twig was becoming the tree Auction sales of judicial ermine Being the true religion, proved by so many testimonies Beneficent and charitable purposes (War) Bomb-shells were not often used although known for a century Burning of Servetus at Geneva ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the army. While riding in the country, he would often put his horse into a gallop, and with a pistol in each hand, never fail to cut off, in passing, the heads of the ducks or chickens which he took as his target. He could cut off a small twig from a tree at twenty-five paces; and I have even heard it said (I am far from guaranteeing the truth of this) that on one occasion, with the consent of the party whose imprudence thus put his life in peril, he cut half in two the stem of a clay pipe, hardly ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... a time I should wonder what event of the day would be woven into a dream; as I performed certain acts I found myself wondering, will this appear tonight, and how? One Sunday I walked across lots to church and on the way picked a twig of balm of Gilead poplar keeping it with me through service for its fragrance. That night I dream that I am in a pasture looking for fertile fronds of the cinnamon fern which I fail to find. I see cows and am afraid.—This based on reality of a few days before.—At length by a stone I ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... with a fair young armorer's aid, Fixing it on her rounded arm, A mimic shield with pride displayed; Then, springing towards a grove that spread Its canopy of foliage near, Plucked off a lance-like twig, and said, "To arms, to arms!" while o'er her head She waved the light ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... be snatched, same as a build-in' craw will pick sprigs o' green wood for her nest an' leave the dead twig to rot. Here I be, rotten an' coffin-ripe any time this two year, yet I'm passed awver for that braave young youth. An' how is it wi' you, Mr. Tregenza? I s'pose the Lard do look to His awn ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... of the index, another outshooting of vibratory force, a rapid up and down motion of the index to include a certain range of vibrations, and the crow itself was gone—vanished in empty space! There was the bare twig on which a moment before it had stood. Behind, in the sky, was the white cloud against which its black form had been sharply outlined, but there was ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... often five nights out of the seven on duty in the cold and wet, the French had five nights out of seven in bed. This gave them far greater time to forage for fuel, which was principally obtained by digging up the roots of the vines and brushwood—every twig above the surface having long since been cleared away—to dig deep holes under their tents, to dry their clothes and to ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... one of those hand-electric torches, did you, Jack?" he exclaimed. "Well, a flashlight never had a better chance to make itself useful than right now. It's going to be a picnic from here on. I can see every little twig and blade of grass; and as for our trail, a fellow could follow it with one eye shut. Thank goodness! our troubles for the day are ended; unless it comes on to rain cats and dogs ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... too," said Cooney, "so soft, and even, and small, and warm, that it's playin' the very devil. Nothin' could stand it. Why it ud make a rotten twig grow if it was put into ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... was a mere twig on the Trans-Mississippi branch; and when the fall of Vicksburg severed the branch from the tree the twig ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... the back door and crept along the shadows of the hill. Beneath his foot a dry twig snapped. It was enough. He fled panic-stricken, pursued by all the demons of hell his fears could evoke. A deadly, unnerving terror clutched at his throat. The pounding blood seemed ready to burst the veins at ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... big Yale man stepped softly, as if he feared to alarm somebody or something. The moss beneath his feet gave no sound. Not even a twig snapped. Without knowing that he did so, Hodge ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... her flying visit to town. It was a pleasant room, with book-cases all round it filled with green glass in a lattice of brass-work. The books were hidden by the glass, but it reflected every movement of a bird or a twig or a cloud outside like green waters. The ceiling was domed like a sky and painted in sunny Italian scenery. It was not dull in the book-room on ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... Harry Hazelton declared dolefully. "We drew lots on the other side. Greg drew the shortest twig, so he had to stay at the camp. I got the next shortest twig, so my ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... Ten thousand seeds each pregnant poppy sheds Profusely scatter'd from its waving heads; 350 The countless Aphides, prolific tribe, With greedy trunks the honey'd sap imbibe; Swarm on each leaf with eggs or embryons big, And pendent nations tenant every twig. Amorous with double sex, the snail and worm, Scoop'd in the soil, their cradling caverns form; Heap their white eggs, secure from frost and floods, And crowd their nurseries with uncounted broods. Ere yet with wavy tail the tadpole swims, Breathes with ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... now with joy. The shiftless one had not been taken nor slain, and doubtless none of the others either, or they would have referred to it. But he waited to hear more, and not a dead leaf nor a twig stirred in the thicket, he was ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of Westmoreland; he was one of the first of his day and his class to recognize that there was a future in trade, so, breaking his own little twig from the family tree, he went south to Wark and entered a ship-owning firm. In thirty years' time he died, the owner of one of the biggest trades in England, having married the daughter of his chief. My father was twenty-four and ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... cock, and examining every thicket of bushes to see if it concealed an enemy, we made but slow progress. Yet trusting more to the dog than to ourselves, we at length came in sight of the scene of our former exploits. All was quiet and still in the vicinity. Not a twig moved, unless displaced by a gaudy-colored parrot, too lazy, under the withering influence of ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... a little leaf was heard to cry and sigh, as leaves often do, when a gentle wind is blowing. And the twig said, "What is ...
— McGuffey's Second Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... three weeks, more and more wrinkled by abstinence, the little Spider never relaxes her position. Then comes the hatching. The youngsters stretch a few threads in swing-like curves from twig to twig. The tiny rope-dancers practise for some days in the sun; then they disperse, each ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek— There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. Hush, beating heart of Christabel! Jesu, Maria, shield her well! She folded her arms beneath her cloak, And stole to the other side of the oak. What sees she there? There she sees a damsel bright, Drest in a silken robe of white, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... should prefer a more generous explanation) that he recognizes the tendency of these hardened forms to stiffen her joints and fetter her ankles, in the race and rivalry of improvement. I hated to see so much as a twig of ivy wrenched away from an old wall in England. Yet change is at work, even in such a village as Whitnash. At a subsequent visit, looking more critically at the irregular circle of dwellings that surround the yew-tree and confront the church, I perceived ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... slavery, when that sovereignty is denied to the same people while in a territory, is a piece of transparent hypocrisy. Does not any sensible man know that prohibition of domestic slavery in a territory, is essentially prohibition of it in a State to be formed of that territory? As the twig is bent by Congress in the territory, so will the tree be inclined in the State. If slavery does not exist in a State at its organization, it will never exist there, unless forced there by the Federal government under the Breckinridge construction ...
— The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery - Delivered at Fort Wayne, Ind., October 30th 1860 • Joseph Ketchum Edgerton
... somniferous school of literature. The profound depth of the minister's repose was the more remarkable, inasmuch as he was one of those persons whose sleep, ordinarily, is as light, as fitful, and as easily scared away, as a small bird hopping on a twig. To such an unwonted remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into itself, that he stirred not in his chair, when old Roger Chillingworth, without any extraordinary precaution, came into the room. The physician advanced directly in front of his patient, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Roman strenae were originally twigs, Christmas gifts in sixteenth-century Germany showed a connection with the twigs or rods of St. Martin and St. Nicholas. The presents were tied together in a bundle, and a twig was added to them.{65} This was regarded by the pedagogic mind of the period not as a lucky twig but as a rod in the sinister sense. In some Protestant sermons of the latter half of the century there are curious ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... my eyes as dazzled by the crown as yours were by the robes? Why did we leave the green hills of Osia? What destiny writes, fate must unfold. And oh, the dreams I had of being great! I am fifty-eight and you are seventy. And look; I am a broken twig, and you tower above me like an ancient oak, and as strong." To the chancellor he said: ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... the county. From association with her Phil and Martin had developed an equal interest in outdoors. The Landis boy often came running into the Reist yard calling for Amanda and exclaiming excitedly, "I found a bird's nest! It's an oriole this time, the dandiest thing way out on the end of a tiny twig. ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... Aisi, so that so long as they stayed there they might, perhaps, get supplies of provisions with tolerable regularity. "But if you're over the water, my lad," said the old fellow with the can, picking his teeth with a twig, "and have got to get your victuals by ship; by George, you may have to eat grass, or ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... this"—Havelock made a clumsy stage-gesture of aversion from Chantry, the villain. "And for an instant he thought she was afraid of a Jersey cow that had come up to take part in the discussion. So he threw a twig ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... species between 18th and 30th May. Builds near the tops of moderate-sized trees in open districts, making a very shallow nest of thin elastic grasses sparingly used and without lining. The nest is placed on some horizontal branch against some upright twig, or at some horizontal fork. It is nearly round and has a diameter of about 6 inches. They lay three or four eggs of a sordid vernal green ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... I twig," said Ben, going forwards and then down the main hatchway, slipping off the cover ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... branches and the old woman's bent back jogged in time with it She never once spoke or looked around at us. "It isn't the noise we make that'll give us away," I said at last; and just then the old woman turned her head and pointed silently with the osier-twig she used as a whip. Just ahead of us lay a heap of ruins: the wreck, apparently, of a great chateau and its dependencies. "Lermont!" Rechamp exclaimed, turning white. He made a motion to jump out and then dropped back into the seat. "What's the use?" ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... Goodie She trots betimes Over the meadows To Farmer Grimes. And never was queen With jewelry rich As those same hedges From twig to ditch; Like Dutchmen's coffers, Fruit, thorn, and flower - They shone like William And Mary's bower. And be sure Old Goodie Went back to Weep, So tired with her basket ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... so that each commanded one of the runways indicated. How light it was, though the sun was hidden! Every branch and twig beamed in the sun like a lamp. A downy woodpecker below me kept up a great fuss and clatter,—all for my benefit, I suspected. All about me were great, soft mounds, where the rocks lay buried. It was a cemetery of drift ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... Bolshevism, he declared, was within our gates. He had been out to collect Christmas decorations in his own private fenced spinney, and confound it if some scoundrels hadn't been and gone and stripped his pet holly-tree of every twig! Anarchy was yapping at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... after, as Rosy lay up in a tree, waiting for the sun to rise, she heard a great buzzing close by, and saw a fly caught in a cobweb that went from one twig to another. The big spider was trying to spin him all up, and the poor fly was struggling to get away before his legs and wings ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... him. "And we certainly couldn't find ourselves surrounded by a prettier scene, with every twig covered with snow." ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... developed, and very solitary footprint at which Robinson Crusoe is wont to stare in nursery picture-books. No; it was a print which was totally invisible to ordinary eyes, and revealed itself to these children of the woods in the form of a turned leaf and a cracked twig. Such as it was, it revealed a track which the three children followed up until they found Tom Brixton—or his body—lying on the ground ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... the two men coming toward him. They were outlined against the radiance from the motor-cars. Cautiously he stepped toward the south, hoping that they would pass him in the darkness, but he dared not move rapidly, lest a stumble or the breaking of a twig betray him. ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... it is almost summer," said Rap, as they walked down a narrow lane toward the river. There were bushes lining the path on each side, and from the singing you would think that every bush had a bird on each twig. In fact, there were so many birds in sight that Nat did not know which to ask about first, and so kept looking instead ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... Peter-bird's mind and soul with heavenly learning, how much she learned herself! Love poured from her, through voice and lips and eyes, and in return she drank it in thirstily from the little creature who sat there at her knee, a twig growing just as her bending hand inclined it; all the buds of his nature opening out in the mother-sunshine that surrounded him. Eleven thirty came all too soon. Then before long the kettle would begin to sing, the potatoes to bubble in the saucepan, ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... adding to any tugong bula they may pass a sacred duty, the omission of which will meet with supernatural punishment, and so, however pressed for time a Dyak may be, he stops to throw on the pile some small branch or twig. ...
— Children of Borneo • Edwin Herbert Gomes
... herbs, and flowers, might be able to rise with him, that they too might see this splendour, and experience this joy. The great majestic oak was not quite happy in his happiness, while he had not them all, great and little, about him; and this feeling of yearning trembled through his every twig, through his every leaf, warmly and fervently ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... thing. I couldn't even find a broken twig in any of the little clumps of outgrowing trees. There wasn't a sign of the sand having been disturbed anywhere down the face of the cliff, and I shouldn't think a human being had been on that beach during our lifetimes. I have had my night's ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... graves to hew the sprout away; But there comes a coal-black rider upon a coal-black horse, And he strives to save the new-born tree and drive the foe afar: Long they fight till the New Year's dawn—until black knight yields, And the foeman hews away the twig, and rides into the dawn, But there will come a time,'tis said, when the white knight must yield, And the twig will grow and its leaves will blow until the trunk is great: So great that a proud war horse 'neath its lower branch may go. And when the branch ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... nearly done, thrust a twig or wooden skewer into it, down to the bottom. If the stick come out clean and dry, the cake is almost baked. When quite done, it will shrink from she sides of the pan, and cease making a noise. Then withdraw the coals (if baked in a dutch oven), take off the ...
— Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, and Sweetmeats • Miss Leslie
... fearful joy" by surreptitious visits to the mill stream, and when, with a little hazel rod, length of whipcord, and rude hooks whipped to twisted horsehair, we would hurry home to breakfast with a dozen roach strung through the gills upon a twig of osier. They were all ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... scabbard, and sheathed themselves in it cleverly. But when they came down, there was need of taking care lest they happened to touch the head, feet, or other parts of the body. For they fell with the point downwards, and in they stuck, or slit the continuum of some member, or lopped it off like a twig; either of which generally was enough to have killed a man, though he were a hundred years old, and worth as many thousand ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... place where he had cut his hazel-twig. There he did as the master of black-arts had told him; he poured the yellow water over the stump of hazel from which he had cut his staff. Then everything happened just as the other had said: first there ...
— Pepper & Salt - or, Seasoning for Young Folk • Howard Pyle
... varied outlines of the clumpy foliage began to assume or imitate—say rather SUGGEST other shapes than their own. A light wind began to blow; it set the boughs of a neighbour tree rocking, and all their branches aswing, every twig and every leaf blending its individual motion with the sway of its branch and the rock of its bough. Among its leafy shapes was a pack of wolves that struggled to break from a wizard's leash: greyhounds would not have strained ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... of the heart for a higher condition on earth, the unfulfilled promises of Christian progress, are the auspicious auguries of this happy future. As early voyagers over untried realms of waste, we have already observed the signs of land. The green twig and fresh red berry have floated by our bark; the odors of the shore fan our faces; nay, we may seem to descry the distant gleam of light, and hear from the more earnest observers, as Columbus heard, after midnight, from the mast-head of the Pinta, the joyful ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... BEARER winters in its case attached to a twig. When the buds begin to open in the spring it moves to them, carrying its case with it, and begins to feed on the young and tender buds. By the time the leaves are well open, it has fed a good deal on the tender buds and young leaves ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... young man, moody and abstracted, still looked on ahead, some of his senses seemed yet on guard. His head turned at the slightest sound of the forest life that came to him. If a twig cracked, he heard it. If a green nut cut by some early squirrel clattered softly on the leaves, that ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... little," and she pointed to a cobweb stretching from a dead twig to a weed. Hansei looked and slowly ...
— Child Stories from the Masters - Being a Few Modest Interpretations of Some Phases of the - Master Works Done in a Child Way • Maud Menefee
... hastened by an hour, from the gathering of their white darkness. In the morning, all the landscape was transfigured. The snow had ceased to fall; but the whole earth, houses, fields, and fences, ponds and streams, were changed to whiteness. But most wonderful looked the trees—every bough and every twig thickened, and bent earthward with its own individual load of the fairy ghost-birds. Each retained the semblance of its own form, wonderfully, magically altered by its thick garment of radiant whiteness, shining gloriously in the sunlight. It was the shroud of dead nature; but a shroud that seemed ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... every outflung limb and from every tiniest twig hung plumes and festoons and stalactites of gray moss. For perhaps a hundred years the moss had been growing thus on the giant oak, first in little bunches and trailers that were scarce noticeable and which affected ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... us, splendid fellows, all eyes and ears, who could detect the slightest indication of an enemy's presence far or near, whether it were the broken twig at one's feet or the sudden rising of a bird in the distance, kept us well informed of all transpiring on every side. For a hundred miles we marched through the Arab chieftain's land without any of ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... never be trusted. Accidents happen so quickly that it is over before we know it and the terrible damage is done. Sometimes the trigger will catch on a coat button or a twig, and, bang! an unexpected discharge takes place and if you were careless just for an instant, it may cost some one his life. Especial care must be taken in loading and unloading a gun. It is at this time that a gun is most ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... with your hands—when the heavy clouds blanket the earth so closely that the terrible thunders seem to shake the earth in its orbit, with the deep-toned diapason of their melody—when the lightening bugs flutter from twig to twig, revealing their lanterned wings—when the human heart beats with a conscious thump in anticipation of something awful—when those who are out alone whistle to give themselves courage—when the zigzag openings rent ...
— The Woman with a Stone Heart - A Romance of the Philippine War • Oscar William Coursey
... mirror to the twig on an alder trunk and ransacked her store of finery. It yielded up a new red merino bodice, and the occasion was great enough to warrant breaking into her reserve of hairpins. Then she experimented with ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... cottage garden, and throughout all nature there came that inexplicable, indefinite, soft pulsation of new life and new love which we call the spring. Tiny buds, rosy and shining with sap, began to gleam like rough jewels on every twig and tree—a colony of rooks which had abode in the elms surrounding Weircombe Church, started to make great ado about their housekeeping, and kept up as much jabber as though they were inaugurating an Irish night in the House of Commons,—and, over a more or less tranquil sea, the gulls poised ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... extremities close together, and the intermediate part of the body rises like an arch, giving it the appearance of measuring the distance it performs. It is said to possess great muscular powers, for it will attach its posterior feet to the twig of a tree, and erect the rest of its body in a vertical ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... could say as he picked up a few freshly fallen leaves and a twig or two. "He's good at climbing anyway." He examined one of the leaves carefully with his flashlight. "Squint around," he said to Roy, "and see if you can find where he stuck his staff ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... lovely-looking bird as far as the tints of the plumage went; but his short hooked beak, with a tuft of feathers each side, and forward curved crest, gave him a droll aspect which delighted Jem, as the bird came and sat upon a twig, shrieking and chattering at them in a state of ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... mentioned the other day. It is a perfect piece of architecture, far superior to the huts made in this country. The only apparent deficiency is, that it seems to hang on nothing, or is suspended sometimes on a slender straw, at other times on a thin twig. The nest is built of straw inside and outside, but the inside is of a finer straw. I have not seen the bird who is the architect of this wonderful piece of mechanism. I observed two species of parasitical plants, one of which has a slender trunk, and has its root in the earth; and the other, ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... dared to take possession of it. The matter was finally adjusted by the opportune intervention of a neighbor who stood in high repute for wisdom. At his suggestion, they should each plant side by side a twig or sprout of some tree or herb, and he to whose plant God gave growth should be the owner of the farm. This advice was accepted; for God, both thought, was a safer arbiter than man. One of the brothers, Arne, chose a fern (Ormgrass), and the other, Ulf, a sweet-brier. ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... through the air to the ground. So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be. It's when I'm weary of considerations, And life is too much like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs Broken across it, and one eye is weeping From a twig's having lashed across it open. I'd like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth's the right ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... and whizzled behind him all over the cart. The dwarfs tumbled down from every twig, bough, spoke, and felloe, and vanished in one large pointed flame, that could be seen for a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... A dead twig snapped, and, startled by the sound, the girl began to rise; but, giving him one quick, sharp look, dropped her eyes to her ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... now passed away; the sorrowful leave-takings of old friends, who felt as if they were losing the last link with their beloved minister in the departure of his family; the sad farewell looks at all the well-known home objects, the flower-beds, the gravel walks, the shrubs and trees, every twig of which had such a familiar look. Many a time it seemed as if it must be only a sad dream, that all these things were about to pass from her daily life into a vision of memory. Happily it was winter. Had it been in the fair flush of summer, ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... be thou propitious. If I gather thee with care, be merciful unto me. O Tulasi, mother of the world, I beseech thee." This plant is worshipped as a deity,—the wife of Vishnu, whom the breaking of even a little twig grieves and torments,—and "the pious Hindus invoke the divine herb for the protection of every part of the body, for life and for death, and in every action of life; but above all, in its capacity ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... more of me. Don't you see it would be just selfishness. Mary mightn't mind"—her forehead puckered—"Mary always was self-indulgent, and if Martha didn't watch her—" She threw the stripped twig away impetuously. "I am not going to get married, I'm not. I don't see why men always tag love in. Just as soon as I get to be real friends with a man and like him just—just as he is, he turns round and spoils it! Why can't they ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... "As the twig is bent, the tree's inclined." As mortal mind is directed, it acts for a season. Some students leave my instructions before they are quite free from [20] the bias of their first impressions, whether those be cor- rect or incorrect. Such ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... master's horse to place them in his belt, and he gave him orders to let all the king's horses get before him, and as he should overtake one horse after the other, to take one of the twigs and strike the horse with it over the crupper, and then let that twig fall; and after that to take another twig, and do in like manner to every one of the horses, as he should overtake them, enjoining the horseman strictly to watch when his own horse should stumble, and to throw down his cap on the spot. All these things did the youth fulfil, giving a blow ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... no signal could possibly have passed from him to her. He said nothing, though, and she-still sweeping, with her back toward him—passed by the cage, and stooped to scratch at some hard-caked dirt or other close to the rubbish hole where the Hindoo waited. Still scratching, still working with her twig broom, still with her back toward the rubbish hole, she approached until the ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... whom they might have issu'd. In amaze Fast bound I stood. He, as it seem'd, believ'd, That I had thought so many voices came From some amid those thickets close conceal'd, And thus his speech resum'd: "If thou lop off A single twig from one of those ill plants, The thought thou hast conceiv'd ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... stole away into the woods while his mother was sleeping. And when he went he took great pains not to disturb her. He was careful not to step on a single twig. For young as he was, he knew that the sound of a breaking twig was enough to rouse his mother instantly out of the deepest sleep. And he made sure that he didn't set his little feet on any stones. For he knew that at the merest click of a hoof ...
— The Tale of Nimble Deer - Sleepy-Time Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... old, white bearded fellows, in turbans and burnouse. Each of them offered a present of some kind. One of them brought a beautiful pair of Barbary pheasants, another a young wild pig in a crate; others, quaint arms, and one had a chameleon of a rare species, which he carried on the twig of a tree. An address of welcome to Morocco was read by one of their number and then they asked Paul he would not kindly walk on the water in the daylight for them as the soldiers had seen him do when he landed, so that all the ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... was now got to a little copse-thicket at some distance from the ruins, where he affected busily to search for such a wand as would suit the purpose of his mystery: and after cutting and examining, and rejecting several, he at length provided himself with a small twig of hazel terminating in a forked end, which he pronounced to possess the virtue proper for the experiment that he was about to exhibit. Holding the forked ends of the wand, each between a finger and thumb, and thus keeping the rod upright, he proceeded to pace the ruined ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Wamba, "that silken bonnet keeps out no steel blade!" So trenchant was the Templar's weapon, that it shore asunder, as it had been a willow-twig, the tough and plaited handle of the mace, which the ill-fated Saxon reared to parry the blow, and, descending on his head, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... held out his arm. "I left my right hand on the field of battle. It was in the fight round Conde. A young Huguenot—for he was smooth faced, and but a youth—shred it off with a sweeping backhanded blow, as if it had been a twig. So there is no more wolf hunting for me; but even if I had my right hand back again, I should not care for any more such rough sport ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... or peeled in prime twig—Stripped to the skin in good order. The expressions are well known, and frequently in use, among the sporting characters and lovers of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... did not sleep in the tower: that would have been inconvenient in Maulfry's view. They had a little outhouse not ten paces from it, and slept there. Thither went Isoult, jumping at every snapt twig; the door yielded easily, but which bed should she try? Nanno, she knew, snored, for Vincent had once made her laugh by recounting his troubles under the spell of it. Well, the left-hand bed was undoubtedly Nanno's at that rate; ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... nothing but spring even in the mysterious countries governed by the Grail King, by the Fairy Morgana, by Queen Proserpine, by Prester John; nay, in the new Jerusalem, in the kingdom of Heaven itself, nothing but spring; till one longs for a bare twig, for a yellow leaf, for a frozen gutter, as for a draught of water in the desert. The green fields and meadows enamelled with painted flowers, how one detests them! how one would rejoice to see them well sprinkled with frost or burnt up to brown in the dry days! the birds, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Havock among their Enemies as among their Friends. Those who have little or no Faith in the Abilities of a Quack will apply themselves to him, either because he is willing to sell Health at a reasonable Profit, or because the Patient, like a drowning Man, catches at every Twig, and hopes for Relief from the most Ignorant, when the most able Physicians give him none. Though Impudence and many Words are as necessary to these Itinerary Galens as a laced Hat or a Merry Andrew, yet they would turn very little to the Advantage ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... such dense woods, and so still, and so piney and fragrant. The stems of the trees are trim and straight, and in many places all the ground is hidden for miles under a thick cushion of moss of a vivid green color, with not a decayed or ragged spot in its surface, and not a fallen leaf or twig to mar its immaculate tidiness. A rich cathedral gloom pervades the pillared aisles; so the stray flecks of sunlight that strike a trunk here and a bough yonder are strongly accented, and when they strike the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... said in a discouraged whisper, after a twig had burst under his foot with a report like the shot of a pistol. "You travel like a spook, ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... away, and that the bushes grew thick and long! And well for them, too, that it was night! The warriors looked keenly on every side as they passed, apparently seeking out the last little leaf and twig; but, acute as were their eyes, they did not see the boys in the bushes. And perhaps it was well for some of them that they did not find what they sought, as the wilderness furnished no more formidable antagonist ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... none of them had mentioned, because they were not sure enough that it would. A brown thrush, catching the unusual atmosphere of the orchard that morning, selected the tallest twig of an apple tree and showed that orchard what real ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... of wood that had been left behind, Ross snatched a small twig, poking it at the coal after he had rubbed it into a brush on the rough rock. He watched, all one ache ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... adventures as is his Majesty's prime minister of navigation Why do I see you, here, a visitor from a royal cruiser, when I thought you were playing the mock pirate? and how came that harum-scarum twig of nobility in possession of so goodly a company, as well as of ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... fete on this ground in July, which assembles all the elite of Russian society. The spacious gardens are by night illuminated with almost inconceivable splendor. The whole forest blazes with innumerable torches, and every leaf, twig and drop of spray twinkles with colored lights. Here is that famous artificial tree which has so often been described. It is so constructed with root, trunk and branch, leaf and bud as to deceive the most practiced eye. Its shade, with an inviting seat placed beneath it, lures the loiterer, ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... the room. Returning after a minute or two, he remarked, "Go ahead till we're stopped," and seated himself on the corner of the desk with the light inconsequence of a bird on a twig. Thorpe unbuttoned his overcoat, laid aside his ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... about eleven o'clock. We spread down some wide blankets and quilts and put Red Chief between us. We weren't afraid he'd run away. He kept us awake for three hours, jumping up and reaching for his rifle and screeching: "Hist! pard," in mine and Bill's ears, as the fancied crackle of a twig or the rustle of a leaf revealed to his young imagination the stealthy approach of the outlaw band. At last, I fell into a troubled sleep, and dreamed that I had been kidnapped and chained to a tree by a ferocious ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... of the ball. As, however, nothing delighted the old man like bowling the wicket down with a shooting ball, he would sacrifice the other chances to the glory of that achievement. Many a time have I seen our General twig this prejudice in the old man when matched against us, and chuckle at it. But I believe it was almost the only mistake he ever made, professional or even moral, for he was a most ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... flee, terrified but uncertain. As the noises within died down she relapsed from her tense pose and showed her face to Vaucher in the light of the lamp. It was Madame Bertin. She did not see him where he waited, and all of a sudden her self-possession snapped like a twig you break in your fingers. She was weeping, leaning against the wall, weeping desolately, in an abandonment of humiliation and impotence. But Vaucher was not moved when he told me ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... lots and auguries, they are addicted beyond all other nations. Their method of divining by lots is exceeding simple. From a tree which bears fruit they cut a twig, and divide it into two small pieces. These they distinguish by so many several marks, and throw them at random and without order upon a white garment. Then the Priest of the community, if for the public the lots are consulted, or the father of a family if about a private concern, ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... looked out. The sun stood opposite to me, pale, watery, without beams; but the whole firmament around me seemed to burn; a glow of fire passed over all things. Before me stood a tall aspen, whose leaves trembled and crackled, whilst sparks of fire darted forth from them. Upon one twig of the tree sate a huge black bird, looking on me with a fiery glance, and singing hoarsely and tunelessly, while the tempest and flame rioted around him. I heard the voices of my adopted mother and sisters anxiously ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... illustrated by supposing a person, under circumstances forbidding the use of the voice, seeking to call attention to a particular bird on a tree, and failing to do so by mere indication. Descriptive signs are resorted to, perhaps suggesting the bill and wings of the bird, its manner of clinging to the twig with its feet, its size by seeming to hold it between the hands, its color by pointing to objects of the same hue; perhaps by the action of shooting into a tree, picking up the supposed fallen game, and plucking feathers. These are continued until understood, and if one sign ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... the family for order. Quietly she takes on herself what all others refuse or overlook. What the unwary disarrange she silently rectifies. Everybody in her sphere breathes easy, feels free; and the driest twig begins in her sunshine to put out buds and blossoms. So quiet are her operations and movements that none sees that it is she who holds all things in harmony; only, alas, when she is gone, how many things suddenly appear disordered, inharmonious, neglected! All ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... homeward departure on the previous night—for the braves deemed it best to keep the knowledge of their military operations from the women—the girl crept away to the lake again and rowed to the accustomed place, but while waiting for the quail call a twig dropped on the water beside her. With a quick instinct that civilization has spoiled she realized this to be a warning, and remaining perfectly still, she allowed her boat to drift toward shore, presently ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... Mind the tailor makes his clothes big enough, for as soon as he gets to sea he'll grow like a twig." ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... out of the back door and crept along the shadows of the hill. Beneath his foot a dry twig snapped. It was enough. He fled panic-stricken, pursued by all the demons of hell his fears could evoke. A deadly, unnerving terror clutched at his throat. The pounding blood seemed ready to burst the veins ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... carried a stick to the tops of the tall trees, and the women drew their cloaks about them. The train passed across the vista, and the women wondered how long it would take Jack to walk from the station. Then another rook stooped to the edge of the plantation, gathered a twig, and carried it away. The wind was rough; it caught the evergreens underneath and blew them out like umbrellas; the grass had not yet begun to grow, and the grey sea harmonised with the grey-green land. The women waited on the windy lawn, their skirts blown ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... mother's hands, one by one;—"that is what Mr. Raleigh calls them. When may I see the snow? You shall wrap me in eider, that I may be like all the boughs and branches. How buoyant the earth must be, when every twig becomes a feather!" And she moved toward Mr. Raleigh, singing, "Oh, would I had wings ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... the cradle to the grave, our thoughts and feelings take their colour from you! O! AEgiochus, the birch has often proved thou art still a thunderer; and, although thy twanging bow murmur no longer through the avenging air, many an apple twig still vindicates thy ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... looked up, and saw that the entrails were dried, and yielded a harmonious sound every time the wind gently impelled them against the branches. Charmed at the singularity of the adventure, he took them down, and after binding them to the two ends of his walking-stick, touched them with a small twig, by which he discovered that the sound was much improved. When he got home he fastened the staff to another piece of wood, which was hollow, and by the addition of a bow, strung with part of his own beard, converted it to a complete instrument. ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... opposite the river, studded with brass nails, was securely bolted, but not a cannon {158} had been loaded. The bushrangers then cast aside all clothing that would hamper, and, pistol in hand, advanced silent and stealthy as wild-cats. Not a twig crunched beneath the moccasin tread. The water lay like glass, and the fort slept silent as death. Hastily each raider had knelt for the blessing of the priest. Pistols had been recharged. Iberville bade his wild Indians not to forget that the Sovereign Council ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... stream, and showed the other streams which came into the Green river which I saw at once was exactly correct. Then he laid some small stones on each side of the cross mark, and making a small hoop of a willow twig, he rolled it in the mark he had made across the river, then flourished his stick as if he were driving oxen. Thus he represented the emigrant road. He traced the branches off to the north where the soldiers had gone, and the road to California, which the emigrants took, ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... let it be in one of the classrooms, Eric; not up here, lest we have another incursion of the 'Rosebuds.' I shall have to cut preparation, but that don't matter. It's Harley's night, and old Stupid will never twig." ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... care nor toil; Nor weaves it painfully An everlasting nest; Through the long night on the twig it slumbers; When rises the red sun, To the voice of God listens birdie, And it starts ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... same time curses the man in memory of whom it is. The Dyaks consider the adding to any tugong bula they may pass a sacred duty, the omission of which will meet with supernatural punishment, and so, however pressed for time a Dyak may be, he stops to throw on the pile some small branch or twig. ...
— Children of Borneo • Edwin Herbert Gomes
... unfinished by him. The whole conception, the charpente, the contours of even the landscape are attributable to Bellini. His are the carefully-defined, naked tree-trunks to the right, with above in the branches a pheasant, and on a twig, in the immediate foreground of the picture, a woodpecker; his is the rocky formation of the foreground with its small pebbles.[34] Even the tall, beetling crag, crowned with a castle sunset-lit—so confidently identified with the rock of Cadore ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... Moon Emerging, hath awaken'd earth and sky With one sensation, and those wakeful Birds Have all burst forth in choral minstrelsy, At if one quick and sudden Gale had swept An hundred airy harps! And she hath watch'd Many a Nightingale perch giddily On blosmy twig still swinging from the breeze, And to that motion tune his wanton song, Like tipsy Joy that reels ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... contradicted in stating that a ball will penetrate their scales. It is absurd, however, to hold the opinion that the scales will turn a ball—that is to say, stop the ball (as we know that a common twig will of course turn it from its ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... &c. 204; small part; morsel, particle &c. (smallness) 32; installment, dividend; share &c. (allotment) 786. debris, odds and ends, oddments, detritus; excerpta[obs3]; member, limb, lobe, lobule, arm, wing, scion, branch, bough, joint, link, offshoot, ramification, twig, bush, spray, sprig; runner; leaf, leaflet; stump; component part &c. 56; sarmentum[obs3]. compartment; department &c. (class) 75; county &c. (region) 181. V. part, divide, break &c. (disjoin) 44; partition ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... distance from the cavern, though he was not unmindful that he was liable to miss them altogether. However, he had gone less than a hundred yards when he detected the signs of some one coming immediately in front. It was his ear which heard a crackling of a twig, so close that he had barely time to leap aside and conceal himself from view when the figure of Worrell, closely followed by Captain Bagley, came up a sort of path toward the open space from which Ned had fled in such haste. The youth barely ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... beating! How ears were straining underneath that now blazing roof! Louder, fiercer soared the flames; furious became the snapping of sun-baked branch and twig; stifling and ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... ain't no softy, neither, bet your buttons. That don't pay, For you're 'bliged to keep yer eyes peeled and to twig the time o' day; But I've got a mash on flowers; they are better than four 'arf, Them red blazers in my winder; so let NOCKY 'ave ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... was high before she became aware that she was very hot and tired and hungry. Her shoes were soaking wet, her skirts and stockings splashed with mud; one shoulder was being sunburned where a twig had caught and ripped her white flannel waist; and Seth's red silk handkerchief around her neck was scarcely a deeper ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... recreation and sport. In our ramblings along shady streets, through grassy parks, over wooded valleys, and in mountain wildernesses we find that much more than formerly we are asking ourselves what are these trees, what are the leaf, flower, twig, wood and habit characteristics which distinguish them from other trees; how large do they grow; under what conditions of soil and climate do they thrive best; what are their enemies and how can they be overcome; what is their value for wood and other useful products; ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... to go to 'a show' I guess I'd better take you myself, after all," he whispered. "You'll find a hot-water bag in your bed, and hot lemonade in the thermos bottle on the little table beside it. I put a small 'stick' in it—oh, just a twig! And I've kept the kitchen fire up. The water in the tank's almost boiling, if you happen to ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... and all the men followed. Not a leaf rustled beneath their tread. Not a twig broke as they crept up the side of the deep ravine and looked out at ...
— The Later Cave-Men • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... ran along, hiding behind trees and bushes, and stepping softly so that no broken twig could ...
— Two Indian Children of Long Ago • Frances Taylor
... passes for miles. Near by are quarries of Breccia marble—a conglomerate of cemented variegated pebbles—out of which were cut the rich pillars in the House of Representatives at Washington. The Monocacy is crossed, near whose bank lies the bucolic old Maryland town of Frederick, to attain which a twig of the road wanders off for the few necessary miles. Soon the piquant charms of Potomac scenery are at hand, the mountains are marching upon us, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... all our pleasant winter-walks, in the orchard or the wood, in the garden or by the rustic wayside. We have seen him, on still winter-days, flitting from tree to tree, with the liveliest motions and in the most engaging attitudes, examining every twig and branch, and winding over and under and in and out among them, and, after a few lively notes, hopping to another tree to pass through the same manoeuvres. Even those who are confined to the house are not excluded from a sight of these birds; one cannot open a window, on a bright winter's morning, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... where the current turns, the quiet waters were lapping about a ledge of rock. Between that ledge and himself a tangle of bushes clutched the steep bank. He looked straight into the tangle, just plain twig and brown leaf, giving place as he stared, for two still black human eyes looking balefully at him as a snake at its prey. Lloyd Fenneben could not withdraw his gaze. The two eyes—no other human token visible—just ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... sustenance of their families; for we saw few of them doing any thing in the houses; whereas the women were occupied in manufacturing their flaxen or woollen garments, and in preparing the sardines for drying; which they also carry up from the beach in twig-baskets, after the men have brought them in their canoes. The women are also sent in the small canoes to gather muscles, and other shell-fish, and perhaps on some other occasions; for they manage these with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... the bed. Doctor Castleton stood near the doorway, and I quickly moved to his side. The old woman had vanished. Peters poured forth yell on yell, such as I had never conceived it possible for a human throat to utter. He grasped a strong oak-pole, and broke it as I might have broken a dry twig. I afterward placed the longer fragment of this pole with each of its extremities on a large stone, the two about four feet apart; and lifting into the air a rock weighing a hundred or more pounds, dropped it on the middle of the ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... with bushes of a year's growth see how the silvery dust lies on every seared leaf and twig, deposited in such infinite and luxurious forms as by their very variety atone for the absence of color. Observe the tiny tracks of mice around every stem, and the triangular tracks of the rabbit. A pure elastic heaven hangs over all, as if the ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... laurel twig among your flowers, Baroness?" said he. "Excellent! for Fame herself is not a goddess more suited to distribute favours. Do I not in you Madame, see again Daphne, the friend of Apollo, who turned into that tree?" and, ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... face of the offender; if they are pleased, they lift the candidate off his legs, and send him away with a hearty slap on the shoulder. Some of the shorter, when they are bent to mischief, dip a twig in the gutter, and drag it across our polished boots: on the contrary, when they are inclined to be gentle and generous, they leap boisterously upon our knees, and kiss us with bread-and-butter ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... splash, only the passing shadow of the silent canoe, took my fly readily, and in the early morning I was sure of a fairly good catch. If fished for from the bridge, they will lie there, and never move a fin; the current is weak, and if scared away by a stone or twig, they will return in a second or two, almost to the same spot. I fancy the first one I caught was not a regular "bridge bass," but was one swimming up stream at the edge of the weeds in search of his breakfast. Now if any of my fishing friends think they can catch these bridge bass, I will guarantee ...
— Black Bass - Where to catch them in quantity within an hour's ride from New York • Charles Barker Bradford
... of the British column was destroyed, and the three crept back toward Gage's regulars, but the fire of the enemy was now spreading along both flanks of the column to its full length. Robert remembered the warning words of St. Luc. Every twig and leaf in the forest was spouting death. Gage's regulars, raked by a terrible fire, and in danger of complete destruction, were compelled to retreat upon the main body, and, to their infinite mortification, abandon two cannon, ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... carried it still toward a clump of gnarled trees which appeared to him like the faces of long-lost friends. It seemed to him that in all the half century since he looked upon them, neither branch nor twig had altered. So had they been on that sad day when the last of the padres had brought him hither and shown them to him. Beneath their roots lay the secret ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... little flycatcher chose a small twig under one of the boughs of the apple tree, where it perched for hours, darting out when a fly or other insect buzzed by; but always returning to the little twig as if it were home. In the shade of the thick-leaved boughs, the friendly cows sought shelter, patiently ...
— The Little Brown Hen Hears the Song of the Nightingale & The Golden Harvest • Jasmine Stone Van Dresser
... keenest sight, it was quite impossible to see anything except the ragged patches of moonshine between the great black shadows of the trees. My ears are as quick as my eyes, and once or twice I thought that I heard a twig crack; but you know how many sounds there are in a forest at night, and how difficult it is even to say ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Mlle. Fould exhibited "La Chatouilleuse"—Tickling—and "Nasturtiums." The first shows a young woman seated, wearing a decollete gown, while a mischievous companion steals up behind and tickles her neck with a twig. It is less attractive than ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... I went along the causeway and out into the wood, where the outposts stood listening for any crack of a twig which might betray a German footstep. I was startled when I came suddenly upon two men, almost invisible, against the tree-trunks. There they stood, motionless, with their rifles ready, peering through ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... dead, blasted by lightning, or injured by the attacks of animals at its base, it does not therefore lose all its beauty; for it becomes immediately covered with a peculiar gray lichen of great length and luxuriance; occupying every branch and twig of the dead tree, and clothing it, as it were, with a second but a new kind of foliage. This lichen will sometimes hang down from the branches in strings of weeping vegetation to the length of five feet and more. You may sometimes ride under ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... different species in the midst of which they live, a similarity which often gives them protection against persecution! The best known examples of this, in our regions, are the spinning caterpillars, which in a state of rest look strikingly like a twig of a tree or a shrub on which {101} they live. In other regions there is a multitude of the most striking freaks of nature of this kind—for instance, butterflies and other insects, which at rest look like the leaves of plants under which they live; butterflies living among other ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... exhausted, its tail dragged, the mouth foamed, and the tongue hung out, while it still moved on as if drawn by an unseen cord. I followed, going very close to it, but it took no notice of me. Sometimes it dug its claws into the ground or seized a twig or stalk with its teeth, and it would then remain resting for a few moments till the twig gave away, when it would roll over many times on the ground, loudly yelping, but still dragged onwards. Presently I saw in the direction we were going a huge serpent, ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... through. Problems of style are (as yet) dirt under my feet; my problem is architectural, creative—to get this stuff jointed and moving. If I can do that, I will trouble you for style; anybody might write it, and it would be splendid; well-engineered, the masses right, the blooming thing travelling—twig? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in a mighty battle between a colony of red ants which seemed to be attacking a colony of big black ants that had in some way infringed on some international agreement, or overstepped the color-line. Pete picked up a twig and hastily scraped up a sand barricade, to protect the red ants, who, despite their valor, seemed to be getting the worst of it. Black ants scurried to the top of the barricade to be grappled by the tiny red ants, who fought valiantly. Pete saw a red ant meet one of the enemy who was twice ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... there in plenty; for every limb was covered with pendent cactuses, gorgeous orchises, and wild pines; and while one-half the tree was clothed in rich foliage, the other half, utterly leafless, bore on every twig brilliant yellow flowers, around which humming-birds whirred all day long. Parrots peeped in and out of every cranny, while, within the airy woodland, brilliant lizards basked like living gems upon the bark, gaudy finches flitted ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... be a little island in the mist—the faint, faint, ethereal dew-mist—where nobody walked. You could hear them—a rustle here, a squeak there, a thud somewhere else, a displaced leaf, a cracked twig—this only once—a drumming, a patter, a sniff, a snuffle, a sigh; but they all passed by on the other side, so to say, and gave the silver tabby room to think. Apparently cats are not considered good company in the wild; lonely creatures, they are ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... spirit of the Lord will revive the grass, trampled down by the hoofs of war horses. Soon the bruised root shall redden into the rose and the fluted stem climb into the tree. And think you if God's winds can transform a spray and twig into a trunk fit for foundation of house or mast of ship, that eternal arms can not equip with strength the ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... market-day. The dealers were arranging their commodities, consisting chiefly of vegetables, the great bulk of which seemed to be cabbages. Later in the forenoon there was a much greater variety of merchandise: basket-work, both for fancy and use; twig-brooms, beehives, oranges, rustic attire; all sorts of things, in short, that are commonly sold at a rural fair. I heard the lowing of cattle, too, and the bleating of sheep, and found that there was a market for cows, oxen, and pigs, in another part of the town. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... the title of "Odes and Miscellaneous Poems, by a Student of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh," Edinburgh, 1790, 4to. These lucubrations, which attracted no share of public attention, were followed by "The Guinea Note, a Poem, by Timothy Twig, Esquire," Edinburgh, 1797, 4to. His next work is entitled, "An Introduction to the History of Poetry in Scotland, with Illustrations by David Allan," Edinburgh, 1798, 4to. This work, though written in a rambling style, contains a small proportion of useful materials very unskilfully ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... recurrence to old habits of wood-life, so dear to him, filled with such pleasant sensations of joyous unrest, that until near the coming dawn he was disinclined to sleep, and when he did, the first note of an old robin from the topmost twig of a giant old maple awoke him fresh to the labor and enjoyment of another resplendent day. And so the days followed each other, and the spring deepened. Myriads of flower-beds shot up through the dead leaves, and opened out their frail and wondrously tinted ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... villanous misdeeds; but, please God, they will get weak and old whilst I shall grow in strength and power, and shall be, in my turn, avenged according to my desire." He was hardly twenty, when, one day, one of his barons seeing him gnawing, with an air of abstraction and dreaminess, a little green twig, said to his neighbors, "If any one could tell me what the king is thinking of, I would give him my best horse." Another of those present boldly asked the King. "I am thinking," answered Philip, "of a certain matter, and that ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a great deal of talk in the village. The I-told-you-so people were quite delighted. Old Mother Horn "always knew that boys couldn't be managed without switching. Didn't the Bible or somebody say: 'Just as the twig is bent the boy's inclined?' And if you don't bend your twig, what'll become ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... going down the road toward the Byers place four nights out of the seven. He had a quick, light step at variance with his sturdy build, and very different from the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He had a habit of carrying in his hand a little twig or switch cut from a tree. This he would twirl blithely as he walked along. The switch and the twirl represented just so much energy and animal spirits. He never so much as flicked a dandelion head ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... reached up to a shelf, showing an arm like a brown twig, and took down a glass bottle covered with red and green lines. He removed the stopper, made Domini take off her glove, touched her bare hand with the stopper, then with his forefinger gently rubbed the drop of perfume which had settled on her skin ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... attention to a fresh caribou track in the hard earth. It was scarcely distinguishable, and I had to look very closely to make it out. Then he showed me other signs that I could make nothing of at all—a freshly turned pebble or broken twig. These, he said, were fresh deer signs. A caribou had passed toward the larger lake ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... coals of fire, and his great body quivered with excitement. His companions, too, were intensely stirred. The slashers were against King George, and that was all-sufficient. Like weird spectres they moved through the night. Not a word did they speak, and not a twig snapped as their moccasined feet pressed the ground. Never did a girl have a more determined and thoroughly-trained body of men speeding forth on her behalf than did Jean Sterling that night in the heart of the great ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... sound in response unless a dry twig may have cracked, but Conny paced slowly along until Doll's quick feet brought her ...
— Harper's Young People, October 5, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... without a wrinkle. As soon as each sail was hauled up and the bunt made, the jigger was bent on to the slack of the buntlines, and the bunt triced up, on deck. The mate then took his place between the knightheads to "twig" the fore, on the windlass to twig the main, and at the foot of the mainmast, for the mizen; and if anything was wrong,—too much bunt on one side, clews too taught or too slack, or any sail abaft the yard,—the whole must be dropped again. When all was right, the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... attraction which is neither entirely sexual nor mental. Something other than these, something as yet uncharted by psychology, is the determining factor. It may be that the universal, strange chemistry of nature, planning granite and twig, ant and onion, is also ordering us more imperatively and more secretly than ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... into the patio. Never a twig stirred now; all was as quiet as the sleeping fountain, as silent and mystery-filled as the desert itself. Had Roderick Norton seen more than she? Did he know who had been out there? Was here the beginning of some further sinister outgrowth of the lawlessness ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... as those which were lost. The new jaw, or leg, is a newt's, and never by any accident more like that of a frog. What is true of the newt is true of every animal and of every plant; the acorn tends to build itself up again into a woodland giant such as that from whose twig it fell; the spore of the humblest lichen reproduces the green or brown incrustation which gave it birth; and at the other end of the scale of life, the child that resembled neither the paternal nor the maternal side of the house would be regarded ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... been forgotten, and only a secret Klan had power in the land. She did not dare, brave as she was, to ride alone outside of the little village. She did not really think she would be harmed, yet she trembled when the night came, and every crackling twig sent her heart into her mouth in fear lest the chivalric masqueraders should come to fulfil their vague threats against herself. But her heart bled for the people she had served, and whom she saw bowed down under the burden of a ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... let or give. I called you prince—Prince of the Black Islands—and here's your principality. Call out my prime minister, Pat Moore. I sent him across the bog to meet us at Moriarty's. Here he is, and Moriarty along with him to welcome you. Patrick, give Prince Harry possession—with sod and twig. Here's the kay from my own hand, and I give you joy. Nay, don't deny me the pleasure—I've a right to it. No wrong to my daughter, if that's what you are thinking of—a clear improvement of my own,—and she will have enough without it. Besides, her betrothed White Connal is a fat ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... foremost comes the primrose, and cowslips—Heaven's keys as we call them—open the gates to all the other children of the Spring. "Come forth, come forth!" the returning birds shout from out the bushes, and silver-grey catkins sprout on every twig. Beech leaves burst off their sharp, brown sheaths and open to the light, as soft as taffety and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... even find a broken twig in any of the little clumps of outgrowing trees. There wasn't a sign of the sand having been disturbed anywhere down the face of the cliff, and I shouldn't think a human being had been on that beach during our lifetimes. I have had my ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wind had fallen, and absolute silence reigned under the great trees. The snapping of the smallest twig, a footstep on the dry leaves, the gliding of a body amongst the grass, would have been heard without difficulty. All was quiet. Besides, Top, lying on the grass, his head stretched out on his paws, gave no ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... and the tender shoots and leaves of trees. They walk among the thick underbrush, carrying their horns adroitly to prevent their catching in the branches, and they step so well, and aim so true, that you'll scarcely hear a twig fall as ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... colour, and the shrub is sooner or later destined to a chief place amongst our ornamental flowering shrubs. P. japonica Maulei (syn Cydonia Maulei), from Japan (1874), is a rare shrub as yet, small of growth, and with every twig festooned with the brightest of orange-scarlet flowers. It is quite hardy, and succeeds well under treatment that ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... threading his way among the camp-fires until he came to one where sat an old man. A young woman was kneading with skilful fingers the tired muscles of his legs. He raised a sightless face and listened intently as Negore's foot crackled a dead twig. ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... valuable present to me. My gardener showed it to me and said, "This is what they call a Clematis," evidently disbelieving it. So I put a little twig to the peduncle, and the next day my gardener said, "You see it is a Clematis, for it feels." That's the way we make ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... and a reference which they are surprised to find they remember and which the visitor might have hunted for a year. Every good librarian, every private book-owner, who has grown into his library, finds he has a bunch of nerves going to every bookcase, a branch to every shelf, and a twig to every book. These nerves get very sensitive in old librarians, sometimes, and they do not like to have a volume meddled with any more than they would like to have their naked eyes handled. They come to feel at last that the books of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that crossed the path was a very little bird. It hopped down from a twig, it jerked its head about, it pecked at something on the ground, and then flew up into a tree. Kate would not have shot it on any account, for she knew it was not good to eat; but she could not help wondering how people ever did ...
— What Might Have Been Expected • Frank R. Stockton
... is an organic whole. The individual man is more intimately united to every other man, and to all past and coming generations, than the leaf which flutters on the twig of a great tree is connected with the tree itself, and with every other leaf that swells its foliage, or with the seed which was ages ago planted in the soil, and from which the noble plant has issued. That organic unity of the Church, springing ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... dark among the serried tree-trunks. The slender birches had faded utterly, the stately beeches resembled dim ghosts of trees and only the spruces retained, imperfectly, their shape and form. Thurston was country bred, and, lifting high his feet to clear bramble trailer and fallen twig, he walked by feeling instead of sight. The beck moaned a little more loudly, and there was a heavy astringent odor of damp earth and decaying leaves. When beast and bird were still again it seemed as if Nature, worn out by the productive effort of summer, were sinking under ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... best part of an hour. Then she got up, and according to her daily custom walked a certain number of times round the garden. Her mind was so full that she did not as usual observe every twig, almost every leaf, as she passed. Nor, now that she was alone, was that religious bias, which had so much to do with her daily life, very strong within her. There was no taint of hypocrisy in her character; but yet, with the force of human ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... to tie it up, thou understandest not how it is to be repaired. The essieu is left on the spot, as the load is too heavy for the horses. Thy courage has evaporated. Thou beginnest to run. The heaven is cloudless. Thou art thirsty; the enemy is behind thee; a trembling seizes thee; a twig of thorny acacia worries thee; thou thrustest it aside; the horse is scratched till at length thou ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... depart, she looked me suddenly in the face and stopped, as much as to say, "Well, well! here's a pretty go! A man spying upon me!" I wondered whether she would throw up the work, but in another minute she was back again with another twig. The nest, I should have said, was about four feet from the ground, and perhaps twenty feet from the cottage. Four days later, I found her sitting upon it. She flew off as I came up, and I pushed into the scrub far enough to thrust my hand into ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... watch the white traffic of the clouds across the summer sky. The roots of an antique oak peep upon the flood as in the golden days of Arden. Apple blossoms fall upon the water like the snow of a more kindly winter. A gay leaf puts out upon the channel like a painted galleon for far adventure. A twig sails off freighted with my drowsy thoughts. A branch of a willow dips in the stream and writes an endless trail of words in the running water. In these evil days when the whole fair world is trenched and bruised with war, ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... distant falls surrounded by a growth in which every twig scintillated with the frost lavished by the river's vapor. She never noticed the great circular pool with its deep banks, or the wonderful view, far across country, of mountains washed in pale blues and lavenders, of the sun-flooded bright expanse of open ground, partly fenced in with axe-hewn ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... Derby, and seven on the Leger, the best part of my year's income, indeed; and I just want to hire two or three horses for the season, with the option of buying, if I like; and if you supply me well, I may be the means of bringing grist to your mill; you twig, eh?' ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... think much of that insurance idee," the old man said. "I can't remember that it helped the revenue men sech a great deal. The only insurance I ever had was a quick ear, an' even now, I c'n hear a twig snap near a quarter of a mile away. An' that used to be good insurance in the ol' days when, if yo' weren't gunnin' for somebody, thar was ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... trees went into their winter's sleep in most excellent condition and the twigs are hard to the top buds. Signs on twig terminals indicate a large crop of nuts for the fall of 1944. Thus I hope to be able to have on display for the convention-to-be a most interesting show. Besides nuts of all the hardy varieties I always have a real big show of hardy and tropical water lilies and lotus, a complete ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... lightly round and round. But it was strange—so strange as to cause the White Hawk to pause and gaze long and fixedly upon the ground—there was no path which led to this flowery circle. There was not even a crushed leaf nor a broken twig, nor the least trace of a footstep, approaching or retiring, to be found. He thought he would hide himself and lie in wait to discover, if he could, what ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... the monkey in a mocking tone. "We don't allow any weak creature such as you are to stay under our shelter. Go away!" he said angrily, and, taking a dry twig, he threw it at the ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... the clue which Gipsies leave behind them on the road they go, that other Gipsies who travel in it may know they have gone before. It may be a piece of string, a thread of wool, a twig, or in the dust the ancient cross of the Romany, which preceded the Christian cross and belonged to the Assyrian or Phoenician world. The invocation that no patrins shall mark the road of a Romany is to make him an outcast, and for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... substituted itself for the handful of fruits and nuts gathered without labour; the stalled ox and a world of trouble for the dinner of herbs and leisure therewith. Are we so far removed thereby above our little brother, who, having swallowed his simple, succulent worm, mounts a neighbouring twig and with easy digestion carols thanks to God? The square brick box about which we move, hampered at every step by wooden lumber, decked with many rags and strips of coloured paper, cumbered with odds and ends of melted flint and moulded clay, has replaced the cheap, convenient cave. ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... flank'd by five brave sons (such is polygamy, That she spawns warriors by the score, where none Are prosecuted for that false crime bigamy), He never would believe the city won While courage clung but to a single twig.—Am I Describing Priam's, Peleus', or Jove's son? Neither—but a good, plain, old, temperate man, Who fought with his five children in ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... was himself now. Tearing a loose shred from his tattered trousers, he soaked it in a little puddle, then stuffed it in his mouth. He clasped his jack-knife in one fist and a twig in the other. He drew up his belt. He took that precious hat off and stuffed it in his pocket, campaign buttons and all. Ah, no, he did not throw it away. He ripped off another rag and tied it fast around his neck and he bound his scarf around his forehead. ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... after a time I should wonder what event of the day would be woven into a dream; as I performed certain acts I found myself wondering, will this appear tonight, and how? One Sunday I walked across lots to church and on the way picked a twig of balm of Gilead poplar keeping it with me through service for its fragrance. That night I dream that I am in a pasture looking for fertile fronds of the cinnamon fern which I fail to find. I see cows and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... gate, and was put in a litter, carried, doubtless by the mulatto and the coachman, he understood, as he heard the gravel grate beneath their feet, why they took such minute precautions. He would have been able, had he been free, or if he had walked, to pluck a twig of laurel, to observe the nature of the soil which clung to his boots; whereas, transported, so to speak, ethereally into an inaccessible mansion, his good fortune must remain what it had been hitherto, a dream. But it is man's despair ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... flowers. First and foremost comes the primrose, and cowslips—Heaven's keys as we call them—open the gates to all the other children of the Spring. "Come forth, come forth!" the returning birds shout from out the bushes, and silver-grey catkins sprout on every twig. Beech leaves burst off their sharp, brown sheaths and open to the light, as soft as taffety and as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... screen them. We came at last to the Willoughby house, a sizable colonial residence set up on a hill. It was dark, except for one dim light in an upper story. In the shadow of the hedge, Craig silently vaulted the low fence and slipped up the terraces, as noiselessly as an Indian, scarcely crackling a twig or rustling a dead leaf on the ground. He paused as he came to a wing on the right of ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... a grove of magnificent beeches, their large silvery boles rising majestically like columns into a lofty vaulting of branches, covered above with tender green foliage. Here and there the shade beneath was broken by the gilding of a ray of sunshine on a lower twig, or on a white trunk, but the floor of the vast arcades was almost entirely of the russet brown of the fallen leaves, save where a fern or holly bush made a spot of green. At the foot of the slope lay ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... were pleasantly spent in catching the flies, and trying to make them kindle a green twig or two. "It's a lie to call them fire-flies when there isn't a fire in them," Nan said, throwing one unhappy insect away with scorn, though it shone its best, and obligingly walked up and down the twigs to please the innocent ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... blossom-bells' king, A waif of the sun-beams on quivering wing! O prince of the fairies, O pygmy of fire, Will nothing those brave little wings of yours tire? You follow the flowers from southern lands sunny, You pry amid petals all summer for honey! Now rest on a twig, tiny flowerland sprite, Your dear little lady sits near in delight; In a wee felted basket she lovingly huddles— Two dots of white eggs to her warm breast she cuddles! Whiz-z! whiff! off to your flowers! Buzz mid the perfume ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... Said Pug: "they copy me and you, And clumsily. I'd like to see Them jump from forest-tree to tree; I'd like to see them, on a twig, Perform a slip-slap or a rig; And yet it pleasant is to know The ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... fruit of concentrated thought allied to a wide knowledge of war, of divining the intention of his adversary and the state of his moral. His power of drawing inferences, often from seemingly unimportant trifles, was akin to that of the hunter of his native backwoods, to whom the rustle of a twig, the note of a bird, a track upon the sand, speak more clearly than written characters. His estimate of the demoralisation of the Federal army after Bull Run, and of the ease with which Washington might have been captured, was absolutely ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... on a barberry twig, And turned at the crank of a thingum-a-jig. Needles for hornets, nippers for ants, For the bumblebee baby a new pair of pants, For the grizzled old gopher a hat and a wig, The beetle ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... forms Profusely scatter'd by autumnal storms; Ten thousand seeds each pregnant poppy sheds Profusely scatter'd from its waving heads; 350 The countless Aphides, prolific tribe, With greedy trunks the honey'd sap imbibe; Swarm on each leaf with eggs or embryons big, And pendent nations tenant every twig. Amorous with double sex, the snail and worm, Scoop'd in the soil, their cradling caverns form; Heap their white eggs, secure from frost and floods, And crowd their nurseries with uncounted broods. Ere yet with wavy tail the tadpole swims, Breathes with new lungs, or tries his ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... idea!" commented young Bawdrey. "I twig. He'll get chummy with you of course, and you can lead him on and adroitly 'pump' him regarding her, and where she keeps her keys and things like that. That's the idea, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... having had the least trouble in training them? If you gather one of those loose branches, you will see that it has no tendril of any kind, or other apparent means of support; but this, like all others of the clematideae or clematis tribe, possesses a power of twisting the leaf-stalk round a wire, twig, or anything else that comes in its way, so as to tie the plant to the support with as firm a knot as could be made with a piece of string; and after thus encircling the wire, it returns the leaf to its former ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... happens in the case of the red coral of commerce. A minute polype, fixed to the rocky bottom of the deep sea, grows up into a branched trunk. The end of every branch and twig is terminated by a polype; and all the polypes are connected together by a fleshy substance, traversed by innumerable canals which place each polype in communication with every other, and carry nourishment ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... bronze is beginning to occur. The stone hatchets and hammers are skilfully pierced, and wooden or horn implements are often found. The vases are of various shapes, all provided with handles, and are covered with ornaments, some made with the fingers of the potter, others with the help of a twig or some fine string. On the other hand, there are no hatchets of foreign rock; commerce and intercourse with people at a distance had ceased, or at least become rarer. The tools are fixed into handles of stag horn, which are found in every stage of manufacture. The personal property ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... been directed. Mrs Reichardt had thrown a heavy stone into the water among the sharks, the loud splash of which had driven them away. Before they again made their appearance, I had caught a firm hold of the twig, and flung myself up into a position of ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... bodies lay beneath, and once more he shuddered violently. But the world was full of beauty that morning. The sun was a vast sheet of gold, giving a luminous tint to the snow, and two clusters of trees, covered to the last bough and twig with snow, were a delicate tracery of white, shot at times by the sun with a pale yellow glow like that of a rose. On the horizon a faint misty smoke, the color of silver, was rising, and he knew that it came from the ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... faces, and then flew like the wind, and left them screaming and shouting far behind. The strength of a giant comes upon me when I think of it. There—see how this iron bar bends beneath my furious wrench. I could snap it like a twig, only there are long galleries here with many doors—I don't think I could find my way along them; and even if I could, I know there are iron gates below which they keep locked and barred. They know what a clever madman I have ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... happened that none of them had mentioned, because they were not sure enough that it would. A brown thrush, catching the unusual atmosphere of the orchard that morning, selected the tallest twig of an apple tree and showed that ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... in other stories.] Then at last having found the track, he went in hot haste after Mr. Rabbit. And both ran hard, till, night coming on, Rabbit, to protect himself, had only just time to trample down the snow a little, and stick up a spruce twig on end and sit on it. But when Wild Cat came up he found there a fine wigwam, and put his head in. All that he saw was an old man of very grave and dignified appearance, whose hair was gray, and whose majestic ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... find them at the present day. But again, as in geology, so here, we find few traces in our own immediate neighbourhood of the earlier links in this series—the people who preceded the historic Britons. On Twig Moor, near Brigg, in the north of the county, a tract of ground very similar to our own Moor, many flint implements have been found. On an excursion of our “Naturalists’ Union” to that tract, one of the party found “a handful” of stone ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... slipped through the undergrowth, and Robert, a skillful young woodsman also, came after with such care and lightness of foot that neither made a twig or leaf rustle. Tayoga always followed the traces. The deer had nibbled tender young shoots, but he had not remained long in one place. The forest was such an abundant garden to him that, fastidious as an epicure, he required the most delicate food ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... rescuers might stumble upon them! Always she started at each unexpected shadow along the trail. Always she thrilled at a wisp of smokelike cloud beyond the canon edge. Always she felt a quiver of certainty at sudden break of twig or fall of stone. But the days passed and ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... were these words uttered when Assunta was heard running up the stairs; and the next moment she rapped. Being ordered to come in, she entered with a willow twig in her hand, from the middle of which willow twig (for she held the two ends together) hung a fish, shining ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... are drenched with moonlight and every leafs awake; The little beads of dew sit white on every twig and blade; A thousand stars are scattered thick beneath the forest lake; We pass—with only laughter for ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... along, hiding behind trees and bushes, and stepping softly so that no broken twig could tell of ...
— Two Indian Children of Long Ago • Frances Taylor
... measured by a rule on the level lands; and of the skill with which on the hilly ground Orlando and Rinaldo moved so skillfully, turning in so small a space, answering to every inflection of his voice, taking such care not to break a twig of the fruit trees, or bend a shoot of the vines, or graze a ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... slice, scale; lamina &c. 204; small part; morsel, particle &c. (smallness) 32; installment, dividend; share &c. (allotment) 786. debris, odds and ends, oddments, detritus; excerpta[obs3]; member, limb, lobe, lobule, arm, wing, scion, branch, bough, joint, link, offshoot, ramification, twig, bush, spray, sprig; runner; leaf, leaflet; stump; component part &c. 56; sarmentum[obs3]. compartment; department &c. (class) 75; county &c. (region) 181. V. part, divide, break &c. (disjoin) 44; partition &c. (apportion) 786. Adj. fractional, fragmentary; sectional, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... drive them, the carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic rending his flesh, and the glutton lashed by the rain. We break the withered branches from the tree in the grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonous twig bleeds with red blood before us, and cries aloud with bitter cries. Out of a horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of flame the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the torture of that bed becomes ours for a moment. Through the dim purple air fly those who ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... give me, then, But one small twig from shrub or tree; And bid my home remember me Until ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... eternity. Gradually, as his soul was enriched with spiritual knowledge, he saw the whole world forming one vast symmetrical expression of God's power and love. Life became a divine gift for every moment and sensation of which, were it even the sight of a single leaf hanging on the twig of a tree, his soul should praise and thank the Giver. The world for all its solid substance and complexity no longer existed for his soul save as a theorem of divine power and love and universality. So entire and unquestionable was this sense ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... He is not in the least a creature of moods. You step out of your door some bright morning, and there he is among the shrubs, flitting from twig to twig; now hanging head down from the very tip to look into a terminal bud; now winding upward about a branch, looking industriously into every bud and crevice. An insect must hide well to escape those bright eyes. He is helping ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... Bill. The thought of revenge on Mr. Harley, and a physical conquest of Dorothy the beautiful, grew and broadened and extended itself like some plant of evil in Storri's heart. It worked itself out into leaf and twig and bud of sinful detail until the execution thereof seemed the thing feasible; with that the face of Storri began to wear a look of ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... an annual fete on this ground in July, which assembles all the elite of Russian society. The spacious gardens are by night illuminated with almost inconceivable splendor. The whole forest blazes with innumerable torches, and every leaf, twig and drop of spray twinkles with colored lights. Here is that famous artificial tree which has so often been described. It is so constructed with root, trunk and branch, leaf and bud as to deceive the most practiced eye. Its shade, with an inviting seat placed beneath it, lures ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... spot where the head of Fallen Leaf Lake lies, he turned to reassure himself. Away off the Evil One was advancing. A new terror filled his soul. In his hand there remained of his magic branch only one little twig with ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... farther astray—swayed alternately by the spirit of the stoic and the spirit of the little child. But little Poosk was made of sterling stuff, and the two spirits had a hard battle in him for the mastery that wintry afternoon. His chase of the rabbit was brought to an abrupt conclusion by a twig which caught one of his snow-shoes, tripped him up, and sent him headlong into the snow. When snow averages four feet in depth it affords great scope for ineffectual floundering. The snow-shoes kept his feet near the surface, and the depth ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... involving a blank space that wants occupation; but the portions left are not made discordant or disagreeable. They are absolutely and in themselves as valuable as they can be, every stem is a perfect stem, and every twig a graceful twig, or at least as perfect and as graceful as they were before the removal of the rest. But if we try the same experiment on the imaginative painter's work, and break off the merest stem or twig of it, it all goes to pieces like a Prince Rupert's ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... his assistance. According to all laws, human and divine, the King ought to punish Madame de Montespan, and, instead of censuring her, he wishes to make her a duchess! . . . Let him make her a princess, even a highness, if he likes; he has all the power in his hands. I am only a twig; he is an oak. ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... is—the misdirected hard work, which has been guided by no critical faculty, and which doesn't know where to stop. I try to admire it; and I end in pitying the poor artist. Look at that leafless felled tree in the middle distance. Every little twig, on the smallest branch, is conscientiously painted—and the result is like a colored photograph. You don't look at a landscape as a series of separate parts; you don't discover every twig on a tree; you see the whole ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... which, his mother, taken suddenly on the harvest-field, had borne Zisca): a weird object, gate of Heaven and of Orcus to the superstitious populations about. At midnight on the Hallow-Eve, dark smiths would repair thither, to cut a twig of the Zisca Oak: twig of it put, at the right moment, under your stithy, insures good luck, lends pith to arm and heart, which is already good luck. So that a Bishop of those parts, being of some culture, had to cut it down, above ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... two kinds of buds on the twig of the bearing apple-tree,—the leaf-buds (sending forth leaves only), and the flower-buds (bearing both leaves and flowers). And if we wish to analyze more closely, we discover two kinds of leaf-buds,—those that send forth a rapidly growing shoot ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... Mac were beckoning to me fiercely and pointing to the green balsam top. I gripped my rifle and started to creep toward them. A little twig, about as thick as the tip of a fishing rod, cracked under my knee. There was a terrible crash behind the balsam, a plunging through the underbrush and a rattling among the branches, a lumbering gallop up the hill through ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... realize once more how good life was, and plunge forthwith upon his still sleeping brothers and sisters, tumbling them triumphantly into the midst of a new romp before they knew whether they were on their heads or their heels. A twig, a leaf, or a stone would be endowed with the attributes of some cunning and fierce quarry, to be stalked, run down, and finally torn in sunder with marvellous heroism, with reckless, noisy valour. The sun shone warm and sweetly over all, there beside the immemorial Sussex Downs; life ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... only the dropping of a twig," she whispered, after a long holding of the breath. But they went into the house and ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... grin, they shrug, They bow, they snarl, they scratch, they hug; And, just as chance or whim provoke them, They either bite their friends, or stroke them. There have I seen some active prig, To show his parts, bestride a twig: Lord! how the chatt'ring tribe admire! Not that he's wiser, but he's higher: All long to try the vent'rous thing, (For power is but to have one's swing). From side to side he springs, he spurns, And bangs his foes and friends by turns. Thus ...
— English Satires • Various
... cried Gerald, who was not so far gone as to be unable to speak; "and mighty glad I am to see you—only, as you love us, get us some grub, or we shall be after hopping the twig." ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... on a leaf or a twig, to a neighboring thicket, from which the horse and dog were not visible. He then lay down in the bushy top of a fallen pine, and without the assistance of any "call," such as hunters generally make use of, uttered the low, cautious cry of the wild turkey. ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... a tree, never forgets itself. Cheat it of its root, and the stem remains faithful. The minutest twig, put out to nurse upon the arm of a foreign mother, feels the thrill of the great primal law in its filmiest fibre, and breathes in every expression of its life its fidelity. If you will walk with me into the garden, I will show you a mountain-ash in full bloom; but on the ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... but this is curiosity, needlesse, and danger with remouing, and drought,) and cut away all his twigs saue one, the most principall, which in setting you must leaue aboue the earth, burying his trunk in the crust of the earth for his root. It matters not much what part of the bough the twig growes out of. If it grow out of or neere the roote end, some say such an Apple will haue no coare nor kirnell. Or if it please the Plantor, he may let his bough be crooked, and leaue out his top end, one foote or somewhat more, wherein will be good grafting, if either you ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson
... he hurled his furious words. He was more angry in that moment than he had ever been in his life. The force of his anger carried him along as a twig borne on a racing current. Till that instant he had forgotten that he carried his riding-whip. The sudden remembrance of it flashed like a streak of lightning through ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... Locke, and the young couple drove to their new home, the old mansion. Grandfather Locke went away in the same yellow-bottomed chaise a week after, and returned in a few days with a tall lady of fifty by his side—"Marm Tamor," a twig of the Morgeson tree, being his third cousin, whom he had married. This marriage was Grandfather Locke's last mistake. He was then near eighty, but lived long enough to fulfill his promises to father. The next year I was born, and four years after, my sister Veronica. Grandfather Locke named us, ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... sconce, Nor bite the lip, as angry wenches will, Nor hast thou pleasure to be crosse in talke: But thou with mildnesse entertain'st thy wooers, With gentle conference, soft, and affable. Why does the world report that Kate doth limpe? Oh sland'rous world: Kate like the hazle twig Is straight, and slender, and as browne in hue As hazle nuts, and sweeter then the kernels: Oh let me see thee walke: ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... range and peak. The trees on the slopes stood out like lacework, but far down in the valley the light seemed to shimmer like waves on a sea of silver mist. It was all inexpressibly cold, and of a loneliness that was uncanny. Nothing stirred, not a twig, not a blade of grass. It seemed to Dick that if even a leaf fell on the far side of the mountain he could hear it. It was a great, primeval world, voiceless and unpeopled, brooding in ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... of a twig aroused Brady out of a dead sleep, and as he opened his eyes, he saw that it was broad daylight and that at twenty paces from him stood a huge lion. As the man sprang to his feet, his rifle ready in his ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was a Chilcote of Westmoreland; he was one of the first of his day and his class to recognize that there was a future in trade, so, breaking his own little twig from the family tree, he went south to Wark and entered a ship-owning firm. In thirty years' time he died, the owner of one of the biggest trades in England, having married the daughter of his chief. My father was twenty-four and still ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... asked that whatever he might touch should be changed into GOLD. Bacchus consented, though sorry that he had not made a better choice. Midas went his way, rejoicing in his newly acquired power, which he hastened to put to the test. He could scarce believe his eyes when he found that a twig of an oak, which he plucked from the branch, became gold in his hand. He took up a stone it changed to gold. He touched a sod it did the same. He took an apple from the tree you would have thought he had robbed the garden of the Hesperides. His joy knew no bounds, and ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... talk have had, as he lounged—so the story goes—in his dressing-gown upon the public place, picking up quaint stories from the cattle-drivers off the Cevennes, and the villagers who came in to sell their olives and their grapes, their vinegar and their vine-twig faggots, as they do unto this day. To him may be owing much of the sound respect for natural science, and much, too, of the contempt for the superstition around them, which is notable in that group ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... literature. The profound depth of the minister's repose was the more remarkable, inasmuch as he was one of those persons whose sleep ordinarily is as light as fitful, and as easily scared away, as a small bird hopping on a twig. To such an unwonted remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into itself that he stirred not in his chair when old Roger Chillingworth, without any extraordinary precaution, came into the room. The physician advanced directly in front of ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... promptly accepted it, named pistols at ten paces as the weapons, and at seven o'clock on the morning of July 11, 1804, the two men faced each other on the heights of Weehawken, overlooking New York bay. Both fired at the word; Burr's bullet passed through Hamilton's body; Hamilton's cut a twig above Burr's head. Hamilton died next day, and Burr, his political career at an end, buried himself ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... to say that after you've heard me." She had leaned forward, her arms on her knees, her eyes on the flames which leaped from dry twig to dry twig of the burning logs and on the shower of sparks which every minute or ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... myself as is your own dear Emerald Land, And that is why the Green Isle's case I've learned to understand. 'Tis the most disthressful country, yours, that ever yet was seen; But I'll right ye. Twig my glasses, dear! I'm ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... still dripping with dew. We saw a great many specimens of what I was told was the "long palm;" it looked to me like a kind of brake or fern, with drooping branches twenty feet in length. There were trees with hardly a leaf; but each branch and twig crowned with orange-yellow blossoms. Again we would see a tree covered with feathery, purple flowers. Along some parts of the way, was a profusion of "Indian shot," so called, I suppose, because the seeds are black, ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... he was conscious of assistance from his ears he knew he was approaching a great gathering of men. He was picking his way as carefully as he knew how, but he was no woodsman; now and then a twig snapped and his ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... closed the door—in the instant when he lost sight of her—his disinclination to be associated with the private theatricals revived. At the foot of the house-steps he stopped again; plucked a twig from a plant near him; broke it in his hand; and looked about him uneasily, on this side and on that. The path to the left led back to his father's cottage—the way of escape lay open. Why ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... our subjeck. With our resunt grate triumps on the Mississippi, the Father of Waters (and them is waters no Father need feel 'shamed of—twig the wittikism?) and the cheerin' look of things in other places, I reckon we shan't want any Muslum of Harts. And what upon airth do the people of Concord, N.H., want a Muslum of Harts for? Hain't you got the State House now? & what more ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 2 • Charles Farrar Browne
... stairs, no surveillance by the watching Thomas, no distant clanging of the Chapel bell. How strange they all seemed, looking back from this safe harbour. The aunts, the Warlocks, Thurston, Mr. Crashaw, Caroline—all of them. There the imagination set fire to every twig—here the imagination was not needed, because everything ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... fired, and the ball struck with a slight noise the bark of a beech tree, a step or two to the left of and above his adversary, while a small twig fell rattling from overhead. Kahle's unsteady hand had given his pistol a slight upward turn, so that he ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... every branch in the valley," he said, "every twig, every leaf, every shadow. There is some ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... through the sweet-smelling spruce woods where every branch carried a cloth of white, and the only sound heard was the swish of a blanket of snow as it fell to the ground from the wide webs of green, or a twig snapped under the load it bore. Peace brooded in the silent and comforting forest, and Jim and Arrowhead, the Indian ever ahead, swung along, mile after mile, on their snow-shoes, emerging at last upon the ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... the contrary, you decide to ultimately mount your specimen in a case or a shade, you had better provide yourself with some wire of a suitable strength, and some tow, which latter you will proceed to wrap round the wire to within a couple of inches of one end—forming, in fact, an artificial twig, which you may bend to any shape, riveting the unbound end through a piece of wood of sufficient weight to balance the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... angle. From the bottom of one of the heel prints a crushed leaf was slowly rising back towards its original position, telling him how new the trail was; and as if this were not enough for his trained mind he heard a twig snap sharply as he glanced along the line of prints. It sounded very close, and he dropped instantly to one knee and thought quickly. Why had the other left so plain a trail, why had he reached up ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... when it was done, and I think that I must have been senseless for a long time. When I came to I found that it was still bleeding, so I tied one end of my handkerchief very tightly round the wrist and braced it up with a twig." ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... head alertly. A twig crackled under a tread, and the next moment a man came out of the bushes at the left, and without a word took the bridle of the old horse from her fingers and vaulted into the saddle. The hand that rested a moment on the cantle as he rose grasped a "navy six." He was dressed in dull ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... Pour into the dish some port wine. To a dozen large pears you may allow half a pound of sugar, and a pint of wine. Cover the dish, with a large sheet of brown paper tied on; set it in a moderate oven, and let them bake till tender all through which you may ascertain by sticking a broom twig through them. They will he done in about an hour, or they may probably require more time; but you must not let them remain long enough in the oven, to break or fall to pieces. When cool, put them up in a stone jar. In cold weather they will ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... "Je twig—I tumble!" answered Milsom. "And a very pretty scheme it is, too, Jack—does you proud, old man; it ought to work like a charm. Now, before the Spanish Johnnies come aboard, I'll just hunt up Macintyre, and post him upon his share of the work, while you go and explain matters ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... away, leaving the silence more intense, while all the time the air grew colder. All at once a dead branch snapped sharply. Estein looked round keenly, but in the dusk of the pine stems his eye could pick out nothing. For a minute everything was still, and then a twig cracked again. This time he could see plainly a man come from behind a tree and stand in the outskirts of the wood. For a minute they stood looking at each other. The man, so far as he could discern in the waning light, wore the native skin coat and cap, and seemed to hold ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... you browse your way through the forest, nipping here and there a rosy leaf of young winter-green, a fragrant emerald tip of balsam-fir, a twig of spicy birch, if by chance you pluck the leaves of Wood-Magic and eat them, you will not know what you have done, but the enchantment of the tree-land will enter your heart and the charm of the wildwood will flow ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... to stay for dinner to-day," she said later, when the tangled mass of the Devoniensis had been separated, shoot from shoot, and pegged out to the last healthy-looking twig, and the two men stood, flushed but safe, on the pathway beside her. She stole a confidential little glance at Cai. "For I understand from Captain Hocken that you prefer to make your excuses separately. I have already ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... active in daily perambulating the woods, to make himself acquainted with the environs, seeking, at the same time, the best places of finding wood and timber, for the purposes of his command, brought me a twig of the Sorbus Americana, a new species of tree to him, in the American forest, of which he asked me the name. This tree is found in occasional groups extensively in the region of the upper Lake latitudes, where it is called the mountain ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... but moderately, versed in the secular arts of twig-liming, such flashes would have acted as an effective warning and deterrent. Not so upon Theresa. She barely noticed them, as blindly heroic, she pounded along leading her piteous forlorn hope. Her chance—her unique chance, in nowise to be missed—and, still more, those obscure hungers, fed by ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... gently by tickling his nose with a twig of wild honeysuckle. He said 'Bother the flies!' twice, and then opened ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... seemed awful, and the deep low sigh uttered by Breezy sounded quite startling; but there was nothing else—no sound of the powerful cats coming cautiously round, winding in and out among the rocks and bushes, and not a twig was stirred. ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... itself without props or stakes. It much resembles ivy, and in like manner creeps up and embraces such trees as it grows near. This tree, or bush rather, throws out numerous branches of two or three spans long, having leaves like those of the Syrian apple, but somewhat thicker. On every twig there hang six clusters about the size of dates, and of the colour of unripe grapes, but thicker together. These are gathered in October, while still inclining to green, and are spread out on mats in the sun to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... very shy owners of a nest I had found, when the lonely mosquito came as far as the rim of my shade hat, and hovered there, evidently meditating an attack—a mosquito hesitating! I could not stir a hand, or even shake my leafy twig; but it did not require such violent measures; a light puff of breath this side or that was enough to discourage the gentle creature, and in all the hours I sat there it never once came any nearer. The race increased, however, ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... saw what the strange thing was which was coming towards them. It was Bold Walter of Buccleuch and his men, and each of them had stuck a branch of witch's hazel in his basnet, for 'tis said that a twig of hazel protects its wearer from the arts of magic, and they had no mind to be bewitched by the Lord ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... of the 'resurrection' of this superstition in our own country. It has, in fact, never died, and there is scarcely a part of the country where a 'diviner' has not tried his—or her, for it is often a woman—skill with the 'twig' from time to time. These attempts have seldom been known beyond the immediate locality and the limited circle of those interested in them, and it is only of late years, since folklore became more of a scientific and general study, that the incidents have been ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... bears the title of "Odes and Miscellaneous Poems, by a Student of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh," Edinburgh, 1790, 4to. These lucubrations, which attracted no share of public attention, were followed by "The Guinea Note, a Poem, by Timothy Twig, Esquire," Edinburgh, 1797, 4to. His next work is entitled, "An Introduction to the History of Poetry in Scotland, with Illustrations by David Allan," Edinburgh, 1798, 4to. This work, though written in a rambling style, contains a small proportion of useful materials very unskilfully digested. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... ash-tree shed Are thinly spread In the road, like little black fish, inlaid, As if they played. What hangs from the myriad branches down there So hard and bare Is twelve yellow apples lovely to see On one crab-tree. And on each twig of every tree in the dell Uncountable Crystals both dark and bright of ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... varieties of apples exhibited were: For early apples—Yellow Transparent, Red June, Benoni, Wealthy, Duchess, Maiden Blush. For fall or early winter—Grimes Golden and Jonathan. Winter varieties—Wine Sap, Willow Twig, Rome Beauty, Ben Davis. Peaches—Reeves, Elberta, Diamond. ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... falling of a half charred twig, the grating of the poker with which the fire was stirred, the blow of the hammer, the flickering of the candle, the creak of the dog's collar, the round bulging spot of blackness which was the sleeping blackbird, the singing of the cover of the pot, all combined to form a sacred language easier ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... a still cold night of deep winter, a very faint crescent of a new moon was low in the sky, and a thin snowfall, slightly crisped with frost, covered the ground. Nina opened her window and looked out. All was still and quiet without—not a twig moved. She bent her ear to listen, thinking that on the frozen ground a step might perhaps be heard, and it was a relief to her anxiety when she heard nothing. The chill cold air that came in through ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... alive with music. In the fields, in the air, sound is a token of life. On high, bare, or snow-covered mountains the sense of oppression comes in great part from the absence of sound. But stand in spring under a broad, sapful Norway maple, leafless as yet, its every twig and spray clad in tender green flowerets, and listen to the musical murmur of bees above you, full of life and promise, a heavenly harmony from unseen choristers. Here is a symbol of the creative energy, unceasing, unseen, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... shanty, they descried a clean strip of white birch bark, lying conspicuously on the ground, a few feet within the entrance. On picking it up, they were soon enabled to read the following words, traced with the charred end of a twig: ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf—saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon-flies' wings, the strokes of the water-spiders' legs, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... out his supply of food concentrates, saw that he had only three capsules left, and put them away again. For a long time, he sat under the dying tree, chewing on a twig and thinking. There must be some way in which he could overcome, or even utilize, his inherent deadliness to these people. He might find some isolated community, conceal himself near it, invade it at night and infect it, and then, when ...
— Flight From Tomorrow • Henry Beam Piper
... till blood started from my fingers, and with one eye over my shoulder for savages, I watched at the same time, and sent a bullet whistling whenever I saw a limb or a twig move; for I kept a gun always at hand, and an Indian appearing then within range would have been taken as a declaration of war. As it was, however, my own blood was all that was spilt—and from the trifling accident of sometimes ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... biscuit or pemmican. He will go right into the pemmican-bag, when you are but a few paces off, and pilfer, as it were, at the fountain-head. Or if these resources are closed against him, he will sit on a twig, within an inch of your head, and look at you as only a ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... were more or less even-minded again, and almost jolly. I only noticed that there was an undercurrent of what is best described as "jumpiness," and that the merest snapping of a twig, or plop of a fish in the lagoon, was sufficient to make us start and look over our shoulders. Pauses were rare in our talk, and the fire was never for one instant allowed to get low. The wind and rain had ceased, but the dripping of the branches still kept up an excellent imitation ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Paradise!" hummed Amy Raeburn that same Sunday morning as, the last to leave the Manse, she ran after her mother and sisters. The storm of the two previous days had newly brightened the landscape. Every twig and branch shone, and the red and yellow maple leaves, the wine-color of the oak, the burnished copper of the beech, were like jewels ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... the lad stretched out his hand and broke off a twig and put it in his bosom. Then all the trees in the garden ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... shoot, sprout, sprig, spray, twig, tiller, switch, sucker, stolen, offshoot; ramification; division, department, bureau, wing; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... delight I walked softly about the grounds, taking note of every familiar tree and bush and stump. I could have sworn that not a twig, not a blade of grass, had been despoiled or had disappeared in the years that marked my absence. I paused reverently under the old willow tree and affectionately rubbed my legs, for from this tree my parents had cut the instruments of torture for purposes of castigation, and ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... here and there make out, by the aid of his light, a broken twig, trampled ferns and down-crushed grass. Once he distinguished a blood-stain on a limb—fresh blood, not coagulated. A groan burst from between ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... while; mine is the revenge. I will make the stars of the west the sun of the east; and when ye next awake, ye will find the flower of joy upon your cold bed." And the dead took the twig of cypress, the sign of resurrection, into their bony hands, and ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... which the caterpillar moves; it brings the feet of both extremities close together, and the intermediate part of the body rises like an arch, giving it the appearance of measuring the distance it performs. It is said to possess great muscular powers, for it will attach its posterior feet to the twig of a tree, and erect the rest of its body in a vertical position ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... travelled through many lands a long time, and the King's daughter did not know in the least whither they went; but after a long, long time they came to a gold wood. It was so grand, the gold dropped from every twig, and all the trees, and boughs, and flowers, and leaves, were of pure gold. Here, too, the same thing happened as had happened in the silver wood and copper wood. The Bull told the King's daughter she mustn't touch it for anything, ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... breathe, and none could see From whom they might have issu'd. In amaze Fast bound I stood. He, as it seem'd, believ'd, That I had thought so many voices came From some amid those thickets close conceal'd, And thus his speech resum'd: "If thou lop off A single twig from one of those ill plants, The thought thou hast ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... song-priest placed the sacred wands around the rainbow, commencing on the west side of the painting, and repeated a prayer, pointing his finger to the head of each figure. He also placed a small gourd of medicine water in the hands of the rainbow goddess and laid a small cedar twig on the gourd. The invalid upon entering the lodge was handed an Apache basket containing sacred meal, which he sprinkled over the painting and placed the basket near the feet of the rainbow goddesses; the song-priest and choir sang to the accompaniment of the rattle. A short time after the entrance ...
— Ceremonial of Hasjelti Dailjis and Mythical Sand Painting of the - Navajo Indians • James Stevenson
... away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek— There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... of fairy land! The tall elms overhead just bursting into tender vivid leaf, with here and there a hoary oak or a silver-barked beech, every twig swelling with the brown buds, and yet not quite stripped of the tawny foliage of autumn; tall hollies and hawthorn beneath, with their crisp brilliant leaves mixed with the white blossoms of the sloe, and woven together ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... man who had led two horses. The two horses he found hobbled beside the spring, and with them were a tarpaulin-covered pile of provisions, bedding, and utensils, together with packsaddles. A paper impaled on a willow twig near by he pulled down, to find ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... the windows. The ice-storm occurs in midwinter, and usually its enchantments are wrought in the silence and the darkness of the night. A fine drizzling rain falls hour after hour upon the naked twigs and branches of the trees, and as it falls it freezes. In time the trunk and every branch and twig are incased in hard pure ice; so that the tree looks like a skeleton tree made all of glass—glass that is crystal-clear. All along the underside of every branch and twig is a comb of little icicles—the frozen ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... blasted by lightning, or injured by the attacks of animals at its base, it does not therefore lose all its beauty; for it becomes immediately covered with a peculiar gray lichen of great length and luxuriance; occupying every branch and twig of the dead tree, and clothing it, as it were, with a second but a new kind of foliage. This lichen will sometimes hang down from the branches in strings of weeping vegetation to the length of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... gospel over all the world, and the blessed effects it should produce on individuals, families, and nations. It closes with a view of the second coming of Jesus to conquer the last of his enemies, and take possession of the earth as his inheritance. I can only lop off a twig or two from this blessed tree of life, in the hope that the fragrance of the leaves may allure you to take up the Bible, and eat abundantly of its life-giving promises. As I have in the previous chapters abundantly ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... sleeps!" thought Jack; and at last, when a good hour had passed away, he began to wish for the return of the doctor and the men, but there was no rustle of leaves, no sound of breaking strand or twig, everything was perfectly still, and the lad shifted his position a little so as to find a place to rest his back, and as he did so a peculiar sensation came over him. It was as if a mental shadow ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... thing in the world to do the least bit of good," groaned the parson, as he broke a twig off the hedge nervously, snapped it in two, and flung away the fragments: one of them hit the donkey on the nose. If the ass could have spoken Latin he would have said, "Et tu, Brute!" As it was, he hung down his ears, and ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... remembrance of his desperate situation stopped the instinctive movement, and, with grinding teeth, he held it again under the rope. The smell of the burning flesh rose to his nostrils and sickened him. He felt himself turning faint. "I can not stand it!" he groaned and flung away the burning twig. In an instant he realized what he had done, and stooping over he tried to reach it where it blazed upon the ground. But it was too far away. In an agony of hopelessness he seized the rope with his one free hand and ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... plant did hold for the cat the same attraction those stimulants produced in human beings. He carefully broke off a small stem supporting three leaves and presented it to the Salarik, who stared at him and then, snatching the twig, raced from the hydro garden as if pursued ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... to pasture; then it descended into the valley of a stream, bordered with rich bottom-lands. I never saw the orange in a more flourishing state. We passed several orchards of trees thirty feet high, and every bough and twig so completely laden with fruit, that the foliage was hardly to ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... no 'giving up' in that smile of his. 'I'll tell you what I'd do: I'd begin and break it, twig by twig, till I forced my way through, and got out safe ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... too much for him; he had been keeping time with his tail to this declamatory crescendo. With the last effort he cocked it a shade too high, lost his balance, and landed, considerably ruffled, some four feet beneath his own reserved and particular twig. His eye was on me, and I felt it too serious a matter for laughter. He made what was evidently intended for a dignified ascent, choosing, with minute exactness, the steps he had originally employed on my approach. It was a full minute before he broke ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... sometimes attacked by the twig girdler[24] (Fig. 11). This beetle lays eggs in the twigs, which are girdled so as to stop the flow of sap that would normally prevent hatching. The girdled twigs usually become detached from the trees and as a result the nut-bearing ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... fugitives up the ravine, like their dash out of the enclosed corral, was still but a doubtful effort. Neither of them had full confidence of being able eventually to escape. It was like the wounded squirrel clutching at the last tiny twig of a tree, however unable to support it. They were not quite certain that the sloping gorge would give them a path to the upper plain; for Wilder had only a doubtful recollection of what some trapper had told him. But even if it did, the Indians, expert climbers as they were, would ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... bairns are hanging at our weary backs; look that your braw cradle at home be the fairer spread up. Not that I am wishing ill to little Harry, God forbid! So ride your way, for these are the last words ye'll ever hear Meg Merrilies speak, and this is the last twig that I'll ever cut in the bonny ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... Cock Robin sitting on a twig. Cock Robin looked sideways at Lucie with his bright black eye, and he flew over a ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... Seton. The track had again been lost on a hard, stony patch where Chippy had stepped very lightly and carefully. The Wolves had separated, and Billy became an easy prey. He was bending down, carefully examining every twig, every inch of soft soil, when something hit him on the right ear and dropped to the ground. For a moment Billy stared in wonder at the queer rag-ball; then the truth broke upon him—he had been knocked out. He was no longer a pursuer; he ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... had once come to the office a blind man with a knotted twig, and a piece of string which he wound round the twig according to some cipher of his own. He could, after the lapse of days or hours, repeat the sentence which he had reeled up. He had reduced the alphabet to eleven primitive sounds, and tried to teach ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... a chance in a thousand. Never before had he caught MacNair unprepared—and the man's blood would be upon his own head. Drawing the revolver from its holster, he timed his movements to the fraction of a second; and deliberately snapped a twig, MacNair whirled like a flash, and Lapierre fired. His bullet went an inch too high, and when Chloe insisted upon carrying the wounded man to the school, Lapierre could ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... huge rocks have fallen and block the way. Down such a one the two men start. There is a curious plant growing out from the crevices of the rock. A dozen stems will start from one root and grow to the length of eight or ten feet and not throw out a branch or twig, but these stems are thickly covered with leaves. Now and then the two men come to a bunch of dead stems and make a fire to mark for us their ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... pulling up when well out of sight of the boat-house; "we did that rather neat, eh? Hanged if Toddy wasn't smoking like a chimney. Did you twig ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... She paused, with her twig broom raised and dripping, and scanned him eagerly. "Is it anything about the ship that came yesterday? I heard among the women that it is the war-vessel of Eric's kinsman, Thorkel Farserk, just come back ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... animal, but pluck the hair as we do feathers from a chicken), and thrown on to a pile of hot wood-ashes with no further preparation, and are greedily devoured red and bloody, and but barely warm. A lizard or iguana calls for a further exercise of culinary knowledge. First, a crooked twig is forced down the throat and the inside pulled out, which dainty is thrown to any dog or child that happens to be near; the reptile is then placed on hot coals until distended to the utmost limit that the skin will bear without bursting, ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... of the matches, which he transferred to the pocket containing the tobacco. Then, calmly selecting a dry twig from the pile of firewood, thrust the end through a hole in the broken stove, and after much noisy puffing at length succeeded in igniting the tightly tamped ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... "shuttle," although, strictly speaking, the Navajo has no shuttle. If the figure to be woven is a long stripe, or one where the weft must be passed through 6 inches or more of the shed at one time, the yarn is wound on a slender twig or splinter, or shoved through on the end of such a piece of wood; but where the pattern is intricate, and the weft passes at each turn through only a few inches of the shed, the yarn is wound into small skeins or balls and shoved through ...
— Navajo weavers • Washington Matthews
... sir, I assure you that in the little duchy of Nassau—where it is said the grand-duke is unable to exercise his soldiers at target-shooting without obtaining permission to place the target in some neighboring state—I found the garden-walks and public roads so fearfully clean, every leaf and twig being swept up daily, and preserved to manure the duchy, that during a pedestrian tour of three days I was absolutely ashamed to spit any where. There was no possible chance of doing it without expunging a soldier or a policeman, or disfiguring the entire province. ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... protection, when he meets with an enemy, is bluff. He raises his ugly mane, lifts his ungainly shoulders and assumes the look of a Jason, while in reality he is as harmless as a mouse, and the smallest child could drive him away with a twig. His bravery is all pose—a make-believe game—which he plays over and over again with ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... was an immense pleasure to have seen the great creature like that. He was so evidently enraged and baffled by the uproar and dazzled by the floods of lightning that swept down into the deepest recesses of the forest, showing at one second every detail of twig, leaf, branch, and stone round you, and then leaving you in a sort of swirling dark until the next flash came; this, and the great conglomerate roar of the wind, rain and thunder, was enough to bewilder any ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... once or twice during the same time. I have found a very effectual preventive to thirst by drinking a large quantity of water before breakfast, and, on feeling thirsty on the march, chewing a small green twig or leaf. ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... he watched in a blank sort of way Brother Soulsby take out a penknife, and lop an offending twig from a rose-bush against the fence, something occurred to him. There was a curious exception to that rule of Alice's isolation. She had made at least one friend. Levi Gorringe seemed ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... have had great designs of selling scions to orchardists and nurserymen over the whole country. Only a tiny twig, three inches long, is requisite for a scion for grafting into other trees. The Wild Rose Sweeting tree would produce thousands of such scions. Willis, who was a Yankee lad by ancestry, resolved to preserve the secret of the tree at all hazards. He ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... winding in the path, he found himself face to face with an old buffalo-bull, fast asleep, and lying down not ten yards off. To drop on one knee and level his piece was the work of an instant, but unfortunately he snapped a dry twig in doing so. The eyes of the huge brute opened instantly, and he had half risen before the loud report of the gun rang through the thicket. Leaping up, Tom Brown took advantage of the smoke to run back a few yards ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... will have mercy, and not sacrifice. And again, that it is not, nor shall be, in him that wills, nor in him that runs, but in God that sheweth mercy. What hope, help, stay, or relief then is there left for the merit-monger? What twig, or straw, or twined thread is left to be a stay for his soul? This besom will sweep away his cobweb: The house that this spider doth so lean upon, will now be overturned, and he in it to hell fire; for nothing less than ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... works upon the waves, or as the leaf's movements work upon the sap inside the branch. The whole sea and the whole tree are registers of what has happened, and are different for the wave's and the leaf's action having occurred. A grafted twig may modify its stock to the roots:—so our outlived private experiences, impressed on the whole earth-mind as memories, lead the immortal life of ideas there, and become parts of the great system, fully distinguished from ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... person, he felt disinclined to go up to the house and demand to see Miss Chesterton. Yet see her he would—but how? He was frowning over this problem when it was resolved for him quite unexpectedly; roused by the sound of a snapping twig, he glanced up—and Hermione was before him. She was coming down a narrow path that wound amid the leaves, and because she wore no hat, the sunlight, filtering through the branches, made a glory of her hair as she passed. Her head was bowed, and she walked ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... or respectable. In my early childhood—if it may be called so—I was beaten and starved, set to beg, forced to thieve, and never had a kind word said to me or a kind deed done to me. No wonder I grew up a callous, hardened ruffian. As the twig is bent, so will ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... she became much alarmed, for the little child was gone. She sprang up, lighted a twig of the pine tree, and looked about; and, to her amazement, she saw, in the part of the bed to which she stretched her feet, not the beautiful infant, but a great ugly frog. She was so much disgusted with it that she ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... were a few who said, with gleeful certainty, that the elder daughter was a mere twig who could hide within the shadow of her bounteous ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... I painted you in, to every twig and flower, every hill and meadow, every sunrise ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... said nothing, though, and she-still sweeping, with her back toward him—passed by the cage, and stooped to scratch at some hard-caked dirt or other close to the rubbish hole where the Hindoo waited. Still scratching, still working with her twig broom, still with her back toward the rubbish hole, she approached until the darkest ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... me," he thought in his little round head as he tried to wriggle across the road and couldn't because his back was so stiff. "Now I am an old man and I shall never see another summer. Good-bye." And Fuzzy Caterpillar rolled himself up in a gray blanket and hung himself on the end of a dried twig. "This is the last of me," he said once more as the dried little grub he now was rattled around ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... has had its supper, and now it is getting ready to go to sleep here, quite secure and content, never troubling itself what its food will be, or where its lodging on the morrow. Like David, it 'abides under the shadow of the Almighty.' It sits on its little twig content, and lets ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... was clear; then the thigh-deep grass, which is the lip of the bush, was about him, grey, dry as straw, rustling as he thrust through it with the noise of paper being crumpled in the hands. A green parrot, balancing clown-like on a twig, screamed raucously; he glanced up at its dazzle of feathers. Then the wall of the bush itself yielded to his thrusting, let him through, and closed behind his blue-clad back. Africa had received him to ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... roving gaze, the varied outlines of the clumpy foliage began to assume or imitate—say rather SUGGEST other shapes than their own. A light wind began to blow; it set the boughs of a neighbour tree rocking, and all their branches aswing, every twig and every leaf blending its individual motion with the sway of its branch and the rock of its bough. Among its leafy shapes was a pack of wolves that struggled to break from a wizard's leash: greyhounds would not have strained so savagely! I watched them with an interest that grew as the wind ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... Gawain and his ladylove reached the top of a hill, whence they could look across a valley to a gigantic castle, perched on a rock, near which was a pine tree. Orgueilleuse now informed Gawain that the castle belonged to her mortal enemy, Gramoflaus. She bade him bring her a twig of the tree, and conquer the owner of the castle, who would challenge him as soon as he touched it, and promised that if he obeyed her exactly she ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... laughter, then like crying. It dropped closer, rushed headlong past the window, rattled and shook the sash, then dived away into the darkness. Its violence startled them. A deep lull followed instantly, and the little tapping of the twig was heard again. Odd! Just when the Night-Wind seemed furthest off it was all the time quite near. It had not really gone at all; it was hiding against the outside walls. It was watching them, trying to get in. The ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... sacred wands around the rainbow, commencing on the west side of the painting, and repeated a prayer, pointing his finger to the head of each figure. He also placed a small gourd of medicine water in the hands of the rainbow goddess and laid a small cedar twig on the gourd. The invalid upon entering the lodge was handed an Apache basket containing sacred meal, which he sprinkled over the painting and placed the basket near the feet of the rainbow goddesses; the song-priest and choir sang ...
— Ceremonial of Hasjelti Dailjis and Mythical Sand Painting of the - Navajo Indians • James Stevenson
... think it is nearly done, thrust a twig or wooden skewer into it, down to the bottom. If the stick come out clean and dry, the cake is almost baked. When quite done, it will shrink from she sides of the pan, and cease making a noise. Then withdraw the coals (if ...
— Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, and Sweetmeats • Miss Leslie
... winning ways had forced grim old winter to a hasty retreat northward, and now exulted in her unchallenged sway. All the birds on this morning seemed to have come out to help her in her celebration. A red-bird, perched on the tip-top twig of the venerable oak which stood near the church, bathing his crimson feathers in the morning sun, warbled his sweetest notes to his mate in a hawthorn thicket across the field. Rollicking robins were vying with each other ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... flakes, as they fall On bank and brier and broken wall; Over the orchard, waste and brown, All noiselessly they settle down, Tipping the apple-boughs, and each Light quivering twig of plum ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... robins whistled, thief-like, over the cherry-trees; the killdeer, from some high twig, sent forth his sweet clear note; and now and then a pair of wheels rolled softly along the smooth road: the rush of the wind filled up the pauses. Anybody who was down by the Mong might have heard the soft roll of his blue ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... rude resemblance is necessary for the first start," &c.; and a little lower he writes: "Assuming that an insect originally happened to resemble in some degree a dead twig or a decayed leaf, and that it varied slightly in many ways, then all the variations which rendered the insect at all more like any such object, and thus favoured its escape, would be preserved, while ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... well-grown specimen is in April a brilliant picture of vivid colour, and the shrub is sooner or later destined to a chief place amongst our ornamental flowering shrubs. P. japonica Maulei (syn Cydonia Maulei), from Japan (1874), is a rare shrub as yet, small of growth, and with every twig festooned with the brightest of orange-scarlet flowers. It is quite hardy, and succeeds well under treatment that will suit the ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... Joseph and I got out and struck through a willow swamp along a dim path, and by and by came out on the steep bank of a slough or inlet or something, and we followed that bank forever and ever trying to get around the head of that slough. Finally I noticed a twig standing up in the water, and by George it had a distinct and even vigorous quiver to it! I don't know when I have felt so much like a donkey. On an island! I wanted to drown somebody, but I hadn't anybody I could spare. However, after another long tramp we found ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Barnabas fared forth into the world; a morning full of the thousand scents of herb and flower and ripening fruits; a morning glad with the song of birds. And because it was still very early, the dew yet lay heavy, it twinkled in the grass, it sparkled in the hedges, and gemmed every leaf and twig with a flaming pendant. And amidst it all, fresh like the morning and young like the sun, came Barnabas, who, closing the door of the "Coursing Hound" behind him, leapt lightly down the stone steps and, turning his back upon the ancient inn, set off towards that hill, beyond which ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... and hose were few in number, and feeble in act. The landlord himself wandered objectless, eternally taking off his cap to folk for want of thought; and the women, as they passed him in turn, thrust him quietly aside without looking at him, as we remove a live twig ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... return to our subjeck. With our resunt grate triumps on the Mississippi, the Father of Waters (and them is waters no Father need feel 'shamed of—twig the wittikism?) and the cheerin' look of things in other places, I reckon we shan't want any Muslum of Harts. And what upon airth do the people of Concord, N.H., want a Muslum of Harts for? Hain't you got the State House now? & what more ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 2 • Charles Farrar Browne
... one, broke my pot yesterday, whilst he was scrambling with Philip for what remained of the contents." I inquired for the eldest; and she had scarcely time to tell me that he was driving a couple of geese home from the meadow, when he ran up, and handed Philip an osier-twig. I talked a little longer with the woman, and found that she was the daughter of the schoolmaster, and that her husband was gone on a journey into Switzerland for some money a relation had left him. ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... him in his tracks. The next minute, however, he laughed at his fright, for it was merely a mother burro and her baby colt which his steps had routed from their hiding-place and sent flying across the flats for safety. A twig snapping sharply under his feet startled him; what sounded like a warning hiss close by brought his heart into his mouth; and trembling from head to foot he paused by a clump of Spanish bayonets, uncertain what ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... I walked softly about the grounds, taking note of every familiar tree and bush and stump. I could have sworn that not a twig, not a blade of grass, had been despoiled or had disappeared in the years that marked my absence. I paused reverently under the old willow tree and affectionately rubbed my legs, for from this tree my parents had cut the instruments of torture for purposes ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... limb; shoot, sprout, sprig, spray, twig, tiller, switch, sucker, stolen, offshoot; ramification; division, department, bureau, wing; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... asleep, but everything was getting ready for the restoring slumber of evening and night-time. Everything seemed to be saying to man: 'Rest, brother of ours; breathe lightly, and grieve not, thou too, at the sleep close before thee.' I raised my head and saw at the very end of a delicate twig one of those large flies with emerald head, long body, and four transparent wings, which the fanciful French call 'maidens,' while our guileless people has named them 'bucket-yokes.' For a long while, more than an hour, ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... my home, Up in a minaret's retreat: A twig or two, a bit of loam— My winter lodgings ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... charm and beauty in the vicinity who went by the name of Mrs. Bo. They said she had gone well to hounds in her youth, but I had never observed her jump a twig. She often joined us when Peter and I were changing horses and once or twice had ridden home with us. Peter did not appear to like her much, but I was too busy to notice this one way or the other. One day I said to him I thought he was rather ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... "As the twig is bent the tree's inclined;" This must have been a case in kind. "What's in the blood will sometimes show—" 'Round and around the wild ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... saw his head droop and his eyes cloud. Jan would wag his tail while being scolded, even vehemently, and five minutes later would require a second call, and in a sharp tone, before turning aside from an interesting scent or a twig in ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... island home. Then, while the moonlight faded and glowed, other beavers appeared and swam hither and thither; some hauling old barkless poles, others bringing freshly cut poplar branches, and all busily engaged. A twig snapping behind the hunter, he turned his head, and as he caught a vanishing glimpse of a lynx in a tree, he was instantly startled by a tremendous report and a splashing upheaval of water beside his canoe. A beaver had ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... Hall, you were pleased to express a wish that a' would send you up as arthentic a list as a' could conveniently make up of my qualifications for the magistracey. Deed, a'm sore yet, Sir Tomas, and wouldn't it be a good joke, as my friend Dr. Twig says, if the soreness should remain until it is cured by the Komission, which he thinks would wipe out all recollection of the pain and the punishment. And he says, too, that this application of it would be putting it to a most proper and legutimate use; the only ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... explanation. We shall merely introduce and describe some fancy models of kites, which are not often seen. The pattern, fig. 1, which is the figure called a star, is very easily made. The frame consists simply of the strips, or rods of light wood; spruce timber, willow twig's—and interlocked, as shown in the cut; so that each rod shall pass alternately over and under the other rods at each intersection. These rods being lashed together at the points, the whole frame is covered with white or yellow paper, and the ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... unaware of the existence of Eve, asserted himself in Rupert. He picked up his cap and stick without a word, and turned towards the door. There, however, he was confronted by Mrs. Carteret, tugging at a line of chairs attached to a plank, like a very small bird with a very large twig. To refuse the aid that she immediately demanded was impossible, and even before the future back row of the sixpennies had been towed to its moorings, he realised that hateful as it would be to stay and join in these distasteful revels, it would be better than ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... been a sharp frost overnight. Every branch and twig, every blade of grass, every crinkle in the road was edged with a white fur of rime. It crackled under his feet. He drank down the cold, clean air like water. His whole body felt cold and clean. He was aware of its strength in the hard tension of his muscles as he walked. His own movement exhilarated ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... day was drawing to its close. The wind had gone down, but the snow was now falling in large, thick flakes. The evening twilight crept into the room. Antkowa was sitting in front of the fire; she broke off twig after twig of the dry firewood, and carelessly threw ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... for a woman who never came. He was older now, and he had ceased to wish that he had not been disappointed. There was the lodge, and around it were the trees, brilliant in the shining greens of June. Every twig sustained its bird, and every blossom its bee. The roadside was not muffled in a garment of dead leaves as it had been then, and the lodge-gate was not open as it always used to be. He paused to look through the bars. The drive was well kept and gravelled; ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... glancing into the deserted shanty, they descried a clean strip of white birch bark, lying conspicuously on the ground, a few feet within the entrance. On picking it up, they were soon enabled to read the following words, traced with the charred end of a twig: ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... his collar that he might not go too fast for them, told him to find Theodora. Instantly he pulled away through the brushwood, giving a little yelp now and then as the stiff remnant of some broken twig or stem hurt ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... was bloomin' clever to twig we was English," he told the others of B Company; "but you wait till the lime-light's on me. I'll ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... his fright, quickly obeyed the caliph's orders. He drew out five or six very large fishes; and the caliph choosing the two biggest, tied them together by the head, with the twig of a tree. "After this," said he to the fisherman, "give me thy clothes, and take mine." The exchange was soon made; and the caliph being dressed like a fisherman, even to his boots and turban, "Take thy nets," ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... back jogged in time with it She never once spoke or looked around at us. "It isn't the noise we make that'll give us away," I said at last; and just then the old woman turned her head and pointed silently with the osier-twig she used as a whip. Just ahead of us lay a heap of ruins: the wreck, apparently, of a great chateau and its dependencies. "Lermont!" Rechamp exclaimed, turning white. He made a motion to jump out and then dropped back into the seat. "What's the use?" he muttered. He leaned forward and ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... came but seldom to our house. His daughter Patience was a great favourite with my mother; and for that matter I did not dislike the child, and would oftentimes pluck her an apple from our trees or cut a whistle for her out of a twig ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... away a dozen paces and stopped in the shadow of the trees, conversing earnestly. I endeavored to keep my eyes off from Le Gaire, and remain cool. It seemed to me I saw every movement of a leaf, every dropping of a twig, yet could scarcely realize the position I was in. I was about to face that man yonder—now carefully loading his weapon—to deliberately fire upon him, and receive in return his fire. I felt as though it were a dream, a nightmare, and yet I was conscious of no fear, of ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... never describe to you the weird beauty of a moonlight night among the pines when the snow is sparkling and gleaming, the deep silence unbroken even by the snapping of a twig. We stood shivering and straining our ears and were about to go back to bed when we heard faintly a long-drawn wail as if all the suffering and sorrow on earth were bound up in that one sound. We couldn't tell which way it came from; it seemed to vibrate through ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... traced the four points of the compass, as he could still determine them by the sunset light, with a large printed W to indicate the west! This boyish contrivance particularly pleased him. If he had only had a pole, a stick, or even a twig, on which to tie his handkerchief and erect it above the clump of mesquite as a signal to the searchers in case they should be overcome by fatigue or sleep, he would have been happy. But the plain was barren of brush or timber; he ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... our hearts. We grew quite stiff in our cramped positions, but feared to shift a limb and waited for three-quarters of an hour before we dared to worm our way cautiously in the other direction. The snap of a twig was like that of a rifle on ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... grit slip grin frog grip slat trot trill stiff slop spot blot prig sled still sniff drip slap slab scan scud twit step spin brag span crab stag glen drag slum stab crag trim skill skim slim glad crop drop snuff skin skip scab snob skull snip bled stun twin dress grab drill skiff from swell drug twig grim snap scum bran stub snag stem plum sped spill prop slam drum gruff snug tress snub smell spell brim ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... it is finished, feathers are stuck in the ground around it, and sacred meal is scattered on parts by some of the assisting singers. Others scatter the meal promiscuously; one of the maskers uses a spruce twig and medicine shell, applying meal to every figure and object in the painting. Then the medicine-men all gather up portions of the sacred meal, putting it in their medicine pouches. The patient soon enters and takes his seat in the centre of the painting. The usual incantations are gone through, ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... they throw a short and spent cigar in the face of the offender; if they are pleased, they lift the candidate off his legs, and send him away with a hearty slap on the shoulder. Some of the shorter, when they are bent to mischief, dip a twig in the gutter, and drag it across our polished boots: on the contrary, when they are inclined to be gentle and generous, they leap boisterously upon our knees, and kiss us with bread-and-butter in their ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of honeylocust is seriously affected by a canker and twig fungus, Thyronectria austro-americana. The disease often kills many twigs and branches and sometimes results in death of the tree. In most areas it causes only slight injury. Bowen S. Crandall and Jesse D. Diller have made a few observations ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... round and round. But it was strange—so strange as to cause the White Hawk to pause and gaze long and fixedly upon the ground—there was no path which led to this flowery circle. There was not even a crushed leaf nor a broken twig, nor the least trace of a footstep, approaching or retiring, to be found. He thought he would hide himself and lie in wait to discover, if he could, ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... mouth, nostrils, and vent to prevent escape of juices into plumage. A small sharpened twig will serve to place the plugs. Slip the bird head first into ...
— Taxidermy • Leon Luther Pray
... the air of a popular song he has heard whistled about the streets, but does not know well enough to reproduce. How he envies the light-hearted robins, whose house-hunting consists merely in a gay flitting from twig to twig. Yet, even in his disturbance and nostalgia of spirit, he comforts himself with the common consolation of his cronies—"Oh, well, one always finds something"—and thus (in the words of good Sir Thomas Browne) ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... had no sooner obtained their liberty, than some were seen hopping on the ground, others darting into the air, or sporting in the trees, from twig to twig, and some flying about the windows, chirping, as though out ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... walk in the yard, and catch the grasshoppers and butterflies. We would talk about the birds and flowers and grass and Jumbo and Pearl. If you liked, we would run and jump and hop and dance, and be very happy. I think you would enjoy hearing the mocking-birds sing. One sits on the twig of a tree, just beneath our window, and he fills the air with his glad songs. But I am afraid you cannot come to Tuscumbia; so I will write to you, and send you a sweet kiss and my love. How is Dick? Daisy is happy, but she would be happy ever if she had a little ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... backs of the striding beasts, and they were afraid; and in their hearts was only gallop, gallop, gallop; there was no thought, nothing but frenzy; no thought of breaking through the wing sides, flimsy as a deep shadow, for behind twig-laced walls were strange demons possessed of the Man-Call, the Kill-Cry. On, on, on! only in front was any opening; there the prairie lay still and smiling. Wedge-like behind their Bull Leader they ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... mighty arms to fondle willow-twig across the shady aisles, and maidenblush rubbed cheeks with Spitzenberg, all reddening in the sun. Under many of the trees the ground was as bare as if fire had devastated it, for the sun never fell ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... forward with a twig in his hand, got it ablaze, and lighted his cigarette. He did not look at Billy Louise until he had taken a whiff or two. Then he stared at her for a full minute, and ended by flipping the charred twig playfully into her lap, and laughing a ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... beside a tiny fire, toasting bread on the end of a beech twig. He held the twig in one hand and an open book in the other. He looked up without changing his position when the tramp came ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... scatter'd by autumnal storms; Ten thousand seeds each pregnant poppy sheds Profusely scatter'd from its waving heads; 350 The countless Aphides, prolific tribe, With greedy trunks the honey'd sap imbibe; Swarm on each leaf with eggs or embryons big, And pendent nations tenant every twig. Amorous with double sex, the snail and worm, Scoop'd in the soil, their cradling caverns form; Heap their white eggs, secure from frost and floods, And crowd their nurseries with uncounted broods. Ere yet with wavy tail the tadpole swims, Breathes with ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... her brother's cold and handsome young face. She put out a hand, plucked a twig from a low drooping bough, and peeling the gummy ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a Naturalist in the Chinese Seas,' 1868, p. 182.) in speaking of the difficulty in collecting certain butterflies in the Malay Archipelago, states that "a dead specimen pinned upon a conspicuous twig will often arrest an insect of the same species in its headlong flight, and bring it down within easy reach of the net, especially if it be of the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... interloper were of small account. The robin went, of course, but returned, and, perching close to the object of interest, leaned over and looked at it as long as she chose, while the owner stood calmly by on a twig and did not interfere. I know he was not afraid of the robin, as later events proved; and it really looked as if the pair deliberately delayed sitting to give the neighborhood a chance to satisfy its curiosity; as if they thus proclaimed to whom it might concern that there was ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... much for him; he had been keeping time with his tail to this declamatory crescendo. With the last effort he cocked it a shade too high, lost his balance, and landed, considerably ruffled, some four feet beneath his own reserved and particular twig. His eye was on me, and I felt it too serious a matter for laughter. He made what was evidently intended for a dignified ascent, choosing, with minute exactness, the steps he had originally employed on my approach. It was a full minute before he broke the silence, and ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... strange, beating hearts and fore-glimmer of beauty and wonder and loveliness, they walked west to the Park, and entered that Crystal Palace. For every branch, every twig, every stone and rail had its pendent ice and icicle, and the strong sun smote the world with flakes of flame. The trees were showers of rainbow-flashing glory; now and then an icicle dropped like a ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... guessed the cause, and returning with the ferocity of a demon who had succeeded in getting his victim into his fangs, hoarsely whispered, "I have given your race this day much, I shall give them this also, surely now the debt is paid," when cutting the hazel twig with his sword, the intrepid youth was dashed from crag to crag until he reached the stream below, a bloody and misshapen mass. Macranuil again commenced his flight, but one of the Mackenzies, who by this time had come up, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... foot of a rising ground, on which grew a grove of magnificent beeches, their large silvery boles rising majestically like columns into a lofty vaulting of branches, covered above with tender green foliage. Here and there the shade beneath was broken by the gilding of a ray of sunshine on a lower twig, or on a white trunk, but the floor of the vast arcades was almost entirely of the russet brown of the fallen leaves, save where a fern or holly bush made a spot of green. At the foot of the slope lay a stretch of pasture ground, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... overcome by its emotion, whilst the little grumbler, silenced, but not convinced, turned sulkily away. It did not relish the kind advice of its true friend, nor did it at all intend to follow it, but still it settled down on its tiny twig so very quietly, that all its relatives firmly believed it had given up its foolish scheme of imaginary happy freedom; but they were mistaken, for a few days after a north wind came quite unexpectedly upon them. It bent the Aspen tree almost to breaking, still the loving ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... that after a time I should wonder what event of the day would be woven into a dream; as I performed certain acts I found myself wondering, will this appear tonight, and how? One Sunday I walked across lots to church and on the way picked a twig of balm of Gilead poplar keeping it with me through service for its fragrance. That night I dream that I am in a pasture looking for fertile fronds of the cinnamon fern which I fail to find. I see cows and am afraid.—This based on reality of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... would come beneath a suspended blossom. Sometimes one of the little creatures would dart off into the air, to catch some insect invisible to the eye; and we could only judge of what it was about by its peculiar movements. As we watched, a tiny bird would perch on a slender twig, and rest there for a few seconds, thus giving us an opportunity of examining its beauties. Ellen could scarcely restrain her delight and admiration at the spectacle; for though we had often seen humming-birds before, we had never beheld them to such advantage. The little creature ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... down from the branches, Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not, And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and twined around it a little moss, And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room, It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, (For I believe lately I think of little ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... many indigenous insects, birds, and quadrupeds, welcomed the apple-tree to these shores. The tent-caterpillar saddled her eggs on the very first twig that was formed, and it has since shared her affections with the wild cherry; and the canker-worm also in a measure abandoned the elm to feed on it. As it grew apace, the bluebird, robin, cherry-bird, king-bird, and many more, came with haste and built their nests ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau
... Rabelais' lighter talk have had, as he lounged—so the story goes—in his dressing-gown upon the public place, picking up quaint stories from the cattle-drivers off the Cevennes, and the villagers who came in to sell their olives and their grapes, their vinegar and their vine-twig faggots, as they do unto this day. To him may be owing much of the sound respect for natural science, and much, too, of the contempt for the superstition around them, which is notable in that group of great naturalists who were ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... speaking of the 'resurrection' of this superstition in our own country. It has, in fact, never died, and there is scarcely a part of the country where a 'diviner' has not tried his—or her, for it is often a woman—skill with the 'twig' from time to time. These attempts have seldom been known beyond the immediate locality and the limited circle of those interested in them, and it is only of late years, since folklore became more of a scientific and general study, that the incidents have been seized ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... perceive its connection with the branch or limb, and tree, and its unity in being with every other leaf on the tree. After a bit the unfolding consciousness of the leaf enables it to perceive the stem that connects it with the twig. Then it begins to realize certain relationships, and feels its vital connection with the twig and the few other leaves attached to the same twig. Later on, it unfolds sufficiently to perceive that certain other leaf-bearing ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Whatever the all-beholding sun could see in those woodland depths we have here,—sketches of the shaggy Pan snatched at unawares in sleep. One may study these pictures till he becomes as familiar as a squirrel with fern and tree-bark and moose-wood and lichen, till he knows every trunk and twig and leaf as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... Cried, "We are with you, so you do not dupe us!" Ursus and Taurus also, Bull and Bear, Were eager in the game to take a share. Said Vulpus to the assembled quadrupeds, "Company Boards, like ships, need figureheads, Wooden but ornamental! Eh? You twig? Sweet are the uses of—the Guinea Pig! Dull, but respectable and decorative, That tribe, to whom credulity is native. They'll sit around our Board in solemn row, And never, never 'want to know, you know,' Beyond convenient ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... Nut trees are sometimes attacked by the twig girdler[24] (Fig. 11). This beetle lays eggs in the twigs, which are girdled so as to stop the flow of sap that would normally prevent hatching. The girdled twigs usually become detached from the trees and as a result the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... of stone hammers in Europe. Solid hammers belong to the earliest period. They are made of longish rolled pebbles; some are shaped a little artificially, and are grooved round to hold the handle, which was a flexible twig bent double and with the two ends tied together, so as to keep the stone head in its place. The hammers of a later period of the "stone age" are shaped more like the iron ones our smiths use at the present day, and they have a hole bored in ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... flowering vine, Drawing his lips to cling upon her own. A ray of sunlight pierced the leaves to shine Where her half-opened bodice let be shown Her white throat fluttering to his soft caress, Half-gasping with her gladness. And her pledge She whispers, melting with delight. A twig Snaps in the hornbeam hedge. A cackling laugh tears through the quietness. Eunice starts up in terrible distress. "My God! What's that?" ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... cicada swung his rattle as if in a fright, next a bull-frog, with hoarse kerchug! took a header for his evening bath. Once, later on, when the shadows were falling, a sleepy thrush settled upon a twig near by, and sang his good-night in sweetest tones. About this time he heard a farm-boy calling anxiously through the neighboring wood for the lost Sukey of the herd, and at times a dusty rumble announced a wagon ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... came into my mind as unconsciously as you broke off that twig just now. If I do not get what I lack, nothing can be accomplished—there can be no explosion! I shall abandon the whole thing and let ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... serving not only to make it easily visible, but also impeding its flight sufficiently to admit of the boy following it. The next was at the top of a large blue gum tree, about three feet in diameter, and sending up a smooth column for fifty feet without a branch or twig. Most people would have given up all thoughts of a honey feed for the day; not so Mr. Larry, whose movements we followed with considerable curiosity. Divesting himself of his clothing, he repaired to an adjoining scrub, and with his tomahawk cut out a piece of lawyer cane ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... first arising therein, in a gospel dispensation; whose benign influences caused the small grain of good seed, sown by the skill of the Great Husbandman, to grow up to a fruitful plant, the tender twig to spread itself into a noble vine, and the little cloud, like a man's hand, to cover the whole hemisphere of the visible church of Scotland, which long ago, as a church and nation, had enlisted themselves under the LORD JESUS CHRIST, ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... drought and heat of the climate are so much greater,' answered Sam Holt; 'and the preponderance of pines, loaded to the end of every leaf and twig with pitch and resin, ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... manifestations are not common among gypsies, but I can remember how one, the wife of black Ben Lee, was thus surprised and affected. How well I recall the time and scene,—by the Thames, in the late twilight, when every tree and twig was violet black against the amber sky, where the birds were chirp-chattering themselves to roost and rest, and the river rippled and murmured a duet with the evening breeze. I was walking homeward to Oatlands when I met the tawny Sinaminta, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... himself up to Aurora's influence. The plenitude and the ardour of her love carried him along; he felt at times like a twig in a torrent, but the sensation was luxurious, and another joy of life was with him. He opened wide arms to it. Once again he saw the world with new eyes, and for having despised and mistrusted it so found it the ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... "I left my right hand on the field of battle. It was in the fight round Conde. A young Huguenot—for he was smooth faced, and but a youth—shred it off with a sweeping backhanded blow, as if it had been a twig. So there is no more wolf hunting for me; but even if I had my right hand back again, I should not care for any more such rough sport ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... some of the reflections which I have here expanded; or I walked along the shore and gazed up the stream, where the whole space above the falls was filled with mellow light. As I sat before the fire on my fir-twig seat, without walls above or around me, I remembered how far on every hand that wilderness stretched, before you came to cleared or cultivated fields, and wondered if any bear or moose was watching the light of my fire; for Nature looked sternly upon me on account ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... been fine; but it wasn't worth mentioning beside Laddie and the Princess, and Robert and Shelley. You should have seen my mother! She rocked like a kingbird on the top twig of the winesap, which was the tallest tree in our orchard, and for once there wasn't a single fly in her ointment, not one, she said so herself, and so did father. As we watched the big ve-hi-ackle, as Leon called it, creep ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... tire one with his garrulity. He is our attendant in all our pleasant winter-walks, in the orchard or the wood, in the garden or by the rustic wayside. We have seen him, on still winter-days, flitting from tree to tree, with the liveliest motions and in the most engaging attitudes, examining every twig and branch, and winding over and under and in and out among them, and, after a few lively notes, hopping to another tree to pass through the same manoeuvres. Even those who are confined to the house are not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
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