"Nettles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... competing with the stars. Thy love for Laura, pure, unreciprocated; Yet, thou, foolish man, passion dazed and sad, Like many of the greatest of mankind Lie dashed in the vale of disappointment; And flowers of hope, given by woman, Have crowned thy brows with nettles of despair! ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... habit she was acquiring of furrows and worn places, for the aid which she occasionally gave to hostile armies, for the hills which she presented, for the difficulties of her bordering stone walls when troops must be deployed, for the weeds and nettles, thistles, and briars, with which she had a trick of decking her sides, for her length. "You kin march most to Kingdom Come on this here old road!" for the heat of the sun, the chill of the frost, the strength of the blast. In blander moods they caressed her name. "Wish I could see ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... clay-coloured Yellow jacket. "My illustrious consort, the Princess Frutilla, did not behave very nice, and I had to avenge my honour; in fact, I'm open to any offers, however humble. Going at an alarming sacrifice! Come to my box" (and he pointed to a filthy clay cottage, all surrounded by thistles, nettles, and black boggy water), "and I'll talk over ...
— Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia - being the adventures of Prince Prigio's son • Andrew Lang
... poles, at whose feet the beanstalks, twisted and parched, were beginning to climb, the square of cabbages, the four sunflowers in the little circle in the centre of the path; and, close beside her, on the edge of the stream, the patches of grass covered with dog's mercury, the white heads of the nettles against the wall, the washerwomen's boxes, the bottles of lye and the bundle of straw scattered about by the antics of a puppy just out of the water. She gazed and dreamed. She thought of the past, having her future on her knees. With the grass and the trees and the river that ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... thoughtful stranger; so exotic and apart was he—so romantic a grain in a heap of vulgarity—he was as though a striped jasper had crept in among the paving-stones of their marketplace, or a cactus grandiflora shone among the nettles of a ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... hut with only two rotting walls, and a riddled thatch for a roof. And it was worse than no habitation at all, for what might have been a green and lovely vale was made desolate and rank with disused things, rusting among the lumber of bricks and nettles. It was enough to have been there once never to go again. And Hobb had ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... painter that never overcrowds the canvas. I can see on that side of the building, which looks upon a much wilder garden, where peach and plum trees stride over grassy ground adjoining the filbert-grove that dwindles away into the wooded warren, a broad line of tall nettles in the shade against the wall. Hard by, on the line—so it was said—of the filled-up moat, is a row of ancient quinces, with long crooked arms, green, gray, or black with moss and lichen, stretching down to the tall ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... as disconnected as a dictionary. They were so abrupt. Incidents were noted which stimulated my young imagination like stinging-nettles; and then nothing more. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... that hospitality, for with the exception of a group of merry children playing in an orchard and some big caves hollowed out of the foot of the cliff that rises still higher, I saw nothing but a jungle of nettles. This warning should not, however, suggest that Beaumont-le-Roger is a poor place to visit. Not only is it a charming, I may say a fascinating spot to visit, but it is also a place in which to stay, for the ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... am considering of that apple still; It hangs in the mouth yet sorely; I would fain know too Why nettles are not good to eat raw. Come, children, Come, my sweet ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... out as the Wandering Jew, and vilely clad in rags cribbed from the literary dust heap, danced clumsily on the tight rope of paradox. On reading through these lines Rodolphe was as bewildered as a man who sees nettles spring up in a bed in which he thought he had planted roses. He would then tear up the paper, on which he had just scattered this chaplet of absurdities, and trample it under ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... of this lay a mass of fallen masonry, a long line of grass-grown, weed-encumbered stone, which was evidently the ruin of a wall; here and there in the clearing were similar smaller masses. Rank weed, bramblebush, beds of nettles, encumbered the whole place; it was a scene of ruin and desolation. But a mere glance was sufficient to show me that we had come by accident on a ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... her, when in place of the superb building she saw only an appalling ruin—in place of the magnificent trees and rare flowers which surrounded it, only briers and thorns, nettles and thistles, could be seen. Terrified and most desolate, she tried to force her way in the midst of the ruins, to seek some knowledge of her kind friends. A large Toad issued from a pile of stones, advanced before her, ...
— Old French Fairy Tales • Comtesse de Segur
... beheld Lourdes, contaminated by Mammon, turned into a spot of abomination and perdition, transformed into a huge bazaar, where everything was sold, masses and souls alike! He beheld also Abbe Peyramale, dead and slumbering under the ruins of his church, among the nettles which ingratitude had sown there. And he only grew calm again, only tasted the delights of forgetfulness when a last pale, woeful vision had faded from his gaze—a vision of Bernadette upon her knees in a gloomy corner at Nevers, dreaming of her far-away ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... beets, with colewort, with leaves of the vine-tree, with mallows, wool-blade, which is a tail-scarlet, with lettuce, and with spinach leaves. All this did very great good to my leg. Then with mercury, with parsley, with nettles, with comfrey, but that gave me the bloody flux of Lombardy, which I healed by wiping me with my braguette. Then I wiped my tail in the sheets, in the coverlet, in the curtains, with a cushion, with arras hangings, with a green ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... then almost sinking under the weight, he drew the statue into the garden. There was a sunken, dried-up well, within it, into which he lowered the Psyche, threw earth upon it and covered the fresh grave with small sticks and nettles. ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... for July 8th says: "The Land is so good that I cannot give it its due Praise. The undergrowth is Clover, Pea-vine, Cane & Nettles; intermingled with Rich Weed. It's timber is Honey Locust, Black Walnut, Sugar Tree, Hickory, Iron-Wood, Hoop Wood, Mulberry, Ash and Elm and some Oak." And later it dwells on the high limestone cliffs facing the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... stay, after mate had been served and there was a long vacant interval before night, she would go out from the gate to a distance of fifty or sixty yards, where an old log was lying on a piece of waste ground overgrown with nettles, burdock, and redweed, now dead and brown, and sitting on the log, her chin resting on her hand, she would fix her eyes on the dusty road half a mile away, and motionless in that dejected attitude she would remain for about an hour. When you looked closely at her you could see her ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... only alders, elders, and weeds. Everywhere docks thrust up heads through cracks in the fences to catch at the legs or the skirts of passers-by, while masses of nettles squeeze their way under fences to sting little children. Apropos, the latter are all thin and hungry, in the highest degree quarrelsome, and addicted to prolonged lamentation. Also, each spring sees a certain proportion of their number carried off by diphtheria, while scarlatina and ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Rome, occurred to his mind, and so strongly affected his imagination, that he was tempted to leave his desert. But blushing at so base a suggestion of the enemy, he threw himself upon some briers and nettles which grew in the place where he was, and rolled himself a long time in them, till his body was covered with blood. The wounds of his body stifled all inordinate inclinations, and their smart extinguished the flame of concupiscence. This ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... examine the paintings any longer, I walked into a sort of court, or rather garden, which had been decorated with fountains and antique statues. Their fragments still remain amongst weeds and beds of flowers, for every corner of the place is smothered with vegetation. Here nettles grow thick and rampant: there, tuberoses and jessamine cling around mounds of ruins, which during the elegant reign of the Gonzagas led to grottos and subterranean apartments, concealed from vulgar eyes, and sacred to the most refined enjoyments. I gathered a tuberose that sprang from a shell of ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... publishers of the sunbursts of infantile imbecility which dazzle us from the pages of our periodicals. I may seem to speak with some heat, not to say a suspicion of personal spite; and I do admit that it nettles me to hear about so many gifted infants in these days, and remember that I seldom said anything smart when I was a child. I tried it once or twice, but it was not popular. The family were not expecting brilliant remarks from me, and so they snubbed ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... replied the old woman—"it was he who bound her—he who plunged her in the river, he who swam her. But I will pinch and plague him for it, I will strew his couch with nettles, and all wholesome food shall be poison to him. His blood shall be as water, and his flesh shrink from his bones. He shall waste away slowly—slowly—slowly—till he drops like a skeleton into the grave ready digged ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... beneath the pews on the following Saturday, and cleared it out, to the amount (she averred) of two cart-loads. She tossed it, bit by bit, over the west wall of the churchyard, where in time it became a mound, covered high with sting-nettles. If you poke among these nettles with your walking-stick, the odds are that you turn up a scrap of rusty iron. But there exists more explicit testimony to Zeb's wedding within the church—and within ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... most depressing town I have seen as yet. Except on market and fair days, literally nothing is done. The streets are nearly deserted, the houses are tumbling down, gable-ends without side-walls or roofs are seen everywhere, nettles are growing in the old chimney corners, and the splendid ruins of the ancient abbey are the most cheerful feature of the place. A few melancholy men stand about, the picture of despondent wretchedness, a few sad-eyed girls wander about ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... nigh to bursting; and the abundance of water was so great that we even could wash the dust at last from our parched faces and necks and arms; and much like raw beef our skins looked when our washing was ended, and the stinging of them was as though we had been whipped with nettles. It was our intention now to leave the plains and to march along the edge of the foot-hills parallel with the main range, otherwise we should not have ventured thus to wash ourselves. In a region where alkali dust is in the air, washing is to be shunned; for each time that the skin is cleaned ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... of Poulton and Sanders ("Report of the British Association" (Bristol, 1898), London, 1899, pages 906-909.) were made with 600 pupae of Vanessa urticae, the "tortoise-shell butterfly." The pupae were artificially attached to nettles, tree-trunks, fences, walls, and to the ground, some at Oxford, some at St Helens in the Isle of Wight. In the course of a month 93 per cent of the pupae at Oxford were killed, chiefly by small birds, while at St Helens 68 per cent perished. The experiments showed very clearly that ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... of one eye. She is called "Fruma with the little eye." She is a girl without a heart. She once beat the cat with nettles for having run away with a little liver from the board. Afterwards, when she counted the fowls and the livers, it turned out that she had made a mistake. She had thought there were seven fowls, and, ...
— Jewish Children • Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich
... of a parcel, he says, was a red-letter event; the problem of how much to eat at a time, and how much to save out of his rations for the provision of another apology of a meal, was a big one. Boiled nettles and dandelions for dinner and tea on Whit Sunday, 1917, proves what the fare actually was; quarters of eggs were unaccustomed luxuries. "I have picked mouldy crusts off the ground, and prunes off dust-heaps," ...
— The 23rd (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (First Sportsman's) - A Record of its Services in the Great War, 1914-1919 • Fred W. Ward
... to Collier that I know at least one fact about the Goths who took Rome, 'having reduced the citizens to feed on mice and nettles, A.D. 546,' a diet to which many of the hotel proprietors in the imperial ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... thin fellow with a shrivelled mouth, and a back bent two-double. And I heard it on the very hearthstone of the Mayor's cottage, one afternoon, as we sat and smoked in the shadow of the crumbling mud wall, with a square of blue sky for roof, and for carpet a tangle of brambles, nettles, and rank grass. ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of weeds and nettles, Lay a violet, half hidden, Hoping that his glance unbidden Yet might fall upon her petals, Though she lived alone, apart, Hope lay nestling at her heart, But, alas! the cruel awaking Set her little heart a-breaking, For he gathered for ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... on he relit the cigar, forgotten during his meeting with Masterson, and Pluto, who had been on nettles of anxiety to get away from his duties all the evening, seized the opportunity when no one was looking, and followed closely the light of the cigar as it moved along the hedge past the ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... their passage (I vse no hole in the Hiue, but a piece of wood hoal'd to saue the hiue & keep out Mice) shake in your Bees, or the most of them (for all commonly you cannot get) the remainder will follow. Many vse smoke, Nettles, &c. which I vtterly dislike: for Bees loue not to be molested. Ringing in the time of casting is a meere fancie, violent handling of them is simply euill, because Bees of all other creatures, loue cleanlinesse and peace. ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson
... surround it, and which are distinguished from the moorland proper. Native agriculturists say, I believe, that the heather grows to its finest on land which has been turned up by man's labour—like nettles, which grow so wildly in deserted gardens and ruined villages—and that this common land on the edge of the moor bears evidence of having once been cultivated. With the break-up of the feudal system, certainly, at the beginning of the sixteenth ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... of nettles it is very common to meet with small orange tubercles, not much larger than a pin's head, which yield at this stage a profusion of slender linear bodies, produced on delicate branched threads, and ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... or even take it clearly into his head; but nearly all men can understand, and most will be interested in, the facts which bear on daily life. Botanists have discovered some wonderful connection between nettles and figs, which a cowboy who will never see a ripe fig in his life need not be at all troubled about; but it will be interesting to him to know what effect nettles have on hay, and what taste they will give to porridge; and it ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... it and wot it! I have pass'd a wilderness Of most mischievous and miserable distress; Sharp brambles, sharp briars, and terrible scratchers, Bears, wolves, apes, lions, most ravening snatchers, Thorns, thistles, and nettles, most horrible stingers, Ravens, gripes and griphons. O vengeable wringers, Yea through my whole passage such damnable sights, As I cannot but ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... have not landed yet on the dry part of the reef. Let us make for it, taking care meanwhile that we do not get our feet cut by the coral, or stung as by nettles by the coral insects. We shall see that the dry land is made up entirely of coral, ground and broken by the waves, and hurled inland by the storm, sometimes in huge boulders, mostly as fine mud; and that, under the influence of the sun and of the rain, which ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... their faces sank the first line again, so suddenly that an onlooker might have thought that everyone of them had been shot, and as Dennis found himself in a bed of stinging nettles close to the ruins of a cottage, with the corporal and the commandant on either side of him, he caught the distant sound of an English yell away to the left, and knew that the British raid had been well timed, and was acting in concert with ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... of malice, Mr. Fox sought to give general annoyance, by a polite insolence toward the others, which they with difficulty ignored, and a lover-like gallantry toward Edith, which was like nettles to Gus, and nauseating to her; but she did not dare resent it. He could at least torment her a ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... night—largely with his own fair hands—he produced a screen cunningly woven with grasses and weeds which he swore would defy the most lynx-eyed pilot. He even went so far as to place in the centre of it a large bunch of nettles, which he contended gave it an air of insouciance and lightheartedness ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... and Laudanum Will Help.—"Take the juice of common nettles inwardly and mix a little laudanum with the juice and rub the parts outwardly. Cancer has often yielded to this treatment." This remedy will no doubt help an ugly looking ulcer, repeatedly taken for cancer, by the patients themselves and frequently ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... that a few years ago, in the state of Tennessee, "Two human bodies were found in a copperas cave in a surprising state of preservation. They were first wrapped up in a kind of blanket, supposed to have been manufactured of the lint of nettles, afterwards with dressed skins, and then a mat of nearly 60 yards ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes
... even now As mad as the vex'd sea; singing aloud; Crown'd with rank Fumiter and Furrow-weeds, With Burdocks, Hemlock, Nettles, Cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... Hence, we may conclude that, if insects had not been developed on the face of the earth, our plants would not have been decked with beautiful flowers, but would have produced only such poor flowers as we see on our fir, oak, nut and ash trees, on grasses, spinach, docks and nettles, which are all fertilised through the agency of the wind. A similar line of argument holds good with fruits; that a ripe strawberry or cherry is as pleasing to the eye as to the palate—that the gaily-coloured ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... independence and unconcern, as the "monarch of all he surveyed," casting his eye up now and then at the trim of his canvass, but more frequently keeping it on me. Dick began to open his budget of chat, and I found him as full of fun as his mainsail was full of nettles. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... First we had a great meal of lunch-tongue, bread, wine, and stewed pears. Then we carefully took half a dozen bottles of champagne and hid them, together with some other food-stuffs, in the middle of a big bed of nettles. A miscellaneous crowd of cows were wandering round the ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... nettles hid Like a young widow, fresh and fair?" Because 'tis sighing to be rid Of weeds, that ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... state on the wonderful brook, along the bank of which the procession marched. Now let the Reader picture to himself this interminable multitude advancing in the beautiful green woods, all amidst lilies-of-the-valley, violets and buttercups, lettuce-leaves, nettles, and ferns, marching over hill and dale, in a sparkling sunshine, and with a blue sky overhead,—and withal the toil and efforts of the little wights, the creaking of wheels, the cracking of whips, the word of command resounding through the ranks, the music and singing when the path was ...
— The King of Root Valley - and his curious daughter • R. Reinick
... dream of passing through nettles, foretells that she will be offered marriage by different men, and her decision will fill her ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... attempting to catch such a thing,' for he was aware of the extraordinary peculiarities of these singular little creatures. When he came on deck, he looked exactly as if he had been rolled in a bed of nettles, and the steward had to rub him with oil, and give him medicine to reduce the fever caused by the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... it is rather an absence of illusion. Poems (1917), dedicated to Robert Frost, is full of Thomas's fidelity to little things, things as unglorified as the unfreezing of the "rock-like mud," a child's path, a list of quaint-sounding villages, birds' nests uncovered by the autumn wind, dusty nettles—the lines glow with a deep and almost abject reverence for ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... so that, as things go at present, we have all the commonalty, that may be seen whenever we choose, painted properly; but all of lovely and wonderful, which we cannot see but at rare intervals, painted vilely: the castles of the Rhine and Rhone made vignettes of for the annuals; and the nettles and mushrooms, which were prepared by nature eminently for nettle porridge and fish sauce, immortalized by art as reverently as if we were Egyptians, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... nettles after Dixon went away, and it is a question whether he would have felt much easier in his mind if he had known why it was that his cousin was so anxious to find Bud Goble. Rodney did not want to put any more mischief into the man's head; he wanted to take out some he had put there two days before. ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... could see only their heads and shoulders. In a little time longer she could only see the top of the red cap; and then the two little men disappeared altogether, and the ground closed over them, and the white nettles and marsh marigolds waved their heads over the place as ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... which the bran thrice exceeded the quantity of flour, appeased the hunger of the poor; they were gradually reduced to feed on dead horses, dogs, cats, and mice, and eagerly to snatch the grass, and even the nettles, which grew among the ruins of the city. A crowd of spectres, pale and emaciated, their bodies oppressed with disease, and their minds with despair, surrounded the palace of the governor, urged, with unavailing truth, that it was ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... strode away, cutting off the heads of the nettles with his cane as he went; and Madame walked forth into the open space among the graves, where I might have seen her, had I stood up, looking with the absorbed gaze of an artist ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... in the second, they rest in faith; in the third, they shall burn with love. The first saw the shining of the stars; the second sees the whitening of the dawn; the third will behold the glory of the day. The first produced nettles, the second gives roses, the third will be the ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... pickt its bones, Enothea, half drunk, turn'd to me; "and now," said she, "I'll finish the charm that recovers your strength": When drawing out a leathern ensign of Priapus, she dipt it in a medley of oyl, small pepper, and the bruis'd seed of nettles, paulatim coepit inserere ano meo. Hoc crudelissima anus spurgit subinde umore femina mea. Nasturcii sucum cum abrotano miscet perfusisque inguinibus meis viridis urticae fascem comprehendit, omniaque infra ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... to get stung by a nettle do not bathe your hand with cold water; that will only make the pain worse. While you are waiting for the pain to pass off remember that in India there are nettles whose sting causes great pain which lasts for several days. You might be much ...
— Wildflowers of the Farm • Arthur Owens Cooke
... garden of Linnaeus, or the place where it once bore the blossoms and fruits of the world. Nettles were there; the orangeries were gone; the winter garden had disappeared. The place wore a desolate look; the master had departed, leaving little there but the ghost of a ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... attractive, This Volunteer business. But that's not your game. You're actively snubby, or coldly inactive: We pay, and you pooh-pooh! 'Tis always the same. We do not mind giving our time and our money, Or facing March blasts, or the floods of July; But till nettles bear grapes, Sir, or wasps yield us honey, You won't get snubbed men to pay up and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... partly," she said. "And the rest is the wind and the open of the seas we have come across, and the sting of icebergs. Ugh: my face feels like nettles!" ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... working hard," he writes to his mother, "at what some can see at a glance the importance of, while to others we appear following after the glory of discovering lakes, mountains, jenny-nettles, and puddock-stools. In reference to these people I always remember a story told me by the late Dr. Philip with great glee. When a young minister in Aberdeen, he visited an old woman in affliction, and began to talk very fair to her on the duty of resignation, ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... off o' the log, and squeezed myself through the bramble. It war a trail easy enough to find, but mighty hard to foller, I can tell ye. Thar war thistles, and cussed stingin' nettles, and briars as thick as my wrist, with claws upon them as sharp as fish-hooks. I pushed on, howsomever, feelin' quite sartin that sich a well-used track must lead to the bar's den, an' I war safe ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... lay down in it he seemed as if he had grown a hundred times heavier than usual, yet he felt a kind of calm that was quite new to him. But the empress felt as if she was lying on thorns and nettles, and could not close ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... sensations of comfort at finding so delicious a spot in so unexpected a place. I said to the gardener, "I understood Mr. Beckford had planted everything on the Down, but you surely found those apple trees here. They are fifty years old." "We found nothing here but an old quarry and a few nettles. Those apple trees were great trees when we moved them, and moving them stopped their bearing. They blossom in the spring and look pretty, and that is all master cares about." We left this charming enclosure, passing under the archway before ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... externals—parents, social sets or legal tarradiddles. Such things are very slight obstacles. I mean the tremendous obstacles inside you: the mass of your inherited shrinkings and shynesses and delicacy; a whole quickset hedge of brambles and nettles and thistles, behind which your naked soul is hiding in a sort of terror; and you can't do it! I was in that position, because, so far, Rosa had made no reference to her birth except to say that, although Rebecca wasn't her mother, she was as good ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the position it was meant to hold, but everything was twisted from its purpose, like its owner, and degraded and debased. In this homestead of the sluggard, behind the ruined hedge, and sinking away among the ruined grass and the nettles, were the last perishing fragments of certain ricks: which had gradually mildewed and collapsed, until they looked like mounds of rotten honeycomb, or dirty sponge. Tom Tiddler's ground could even show its ruined ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens
... drank, and then a majority of the party sought the boat, gained the ship, and turned in. "Let the toast be dear woman," danced through my brain upon sparkling beams of champagne, and the vibration of the nettles in the clews of my hammock ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... guns at the Pack-Horse-Man? My friends live here. Do the Shawnees hurt the friends of the Pack-Horse-Man? I give you a belt to wash the red paint from your faces. I give you a belt to make the road smooth between the Greenbriar and the Scioto. By this belt the nettles and rocks shall be removed from the road. I will cover the bones of your dead, if any ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... been there since that last day. The path that led from the gate to the door and from there over to the cow house had vanished; grass covered it. The cow-house door had fallen off, and around the doorposts had grown up tall stinging nettles. No trace was to be seen of the foot of ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... I have nothing but crusts and nettles!" he exclaimed, with sudden fierce passion. And with a quick movement of his hand ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding; and lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. Then I saw and considered it well; I looked ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... boors of Vitry unearth him; pounce on him, like hell-hounds: Westward, old Infamy; to Paris, to be judged at the Hotel-de-Ville! His old head, which seventy-four years have bleached, is bare; they have tied an emblematic bundle of grass on his back; a garland of nettles and thistles is round his neck: in this manner; led with ropes; goaded on with curses and menaces, must he, with his old limbs, sprawl forward; the pitiablest, most unpitied ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... so baptised and remodelled, I have mostly met with in the 'broadside' ballads, as they are called; but notwithstanding their fire and pathos, I found so much obscenity and libertinism mingled with their beauties, that I was compelled with a rash hand to pluck the nettles away that choked the healthy growth of the young, fresh, and budding flowers; preserving, as nearly as I could, their ancient simplicity and diction. Others, by local and nameless poets, I have given as I found them. Those ballads, virtually my own, are stated to be so in the notes, and these, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... of nettle-fibre by pioneers in western New York. Levi Beardsley, in his Reminiscences, tells of his mother at the close of the last century, in her frontier home at Richfield Springs, weaving bags and coarse garments from the nettles which grew so rankly everywhere in that vicinity. Deer hair and even cow's hair was collected from the tanners, spun with some wool, and woven into ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... disposes him constantly to encroach upon the rights of others; or, if not to encroach upon their rights, to take advantage of their good nature, to drag them into his service. You might as well walk for pleasure in a grove of thorn-bushes, or seek repose on a bed of nettles, as to look for comfort in the ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... she added a considerable knowledge of hedge and field simples; and on fine days, when no more profitable occupation offered itself, she used to ramble off into the lanes and meadows as far as her legs could carry her. This evening she had returned loaded with nettles, and her first object was to light a candle and see to hang them up in bunches in every available place in her cellar room. It was the perfection of cleanliness; in one corner stood the modest-looking bed, with a check curtain at the head, the whitewashed wall filling up the ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... acres in extent, inclosed by a mossy picket paling, so rickety that the neighbors' sheep sometimes leap through the gaps from the adjacent pastures, and feed among the graves upon the long grass and nettles. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... observed to me, that Brantome calls it L'isle des Chevaux, and that it was probably 'a SAFER stable' than many others in his time. The fort, with an inscription on it, MARIA RE 1564, is strongly built. Dr Johnson examined it with much attention. He stalked like a giant among the luxuriant thistles and nettles. There are three wells in the island; but we could not find one in the fort. There must probably have been one, though now filled up, as a garrison could not subsist without it. But I have dwelt ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... basks, and its warm rays tint The nettles and clover and scented mint, And the crinkled airs, that curl and quiver, Drop their wreaths in the mirroring river,— Under the shaggy magnificent drapery Of many a wild-woven native grapery,— By ivy-bowers, and banks of violets, And golden hillocks, and emerald ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in rambling over this interesting neighbourhood, Mr. Mackenzie made out for me the site of the latter establishment, now in the midst of a dense thicket of nettles, shrubs, and saplings. In this locality the antagonisms of old had full play—not only those of the traders, but of the Indians—and the river exhibited much more life and movement then than at ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... sometimes tried to imagine myself a preacher, but with poor success. The sermon would bother me no little, to make no mention of the other functions. I think I never could get through with a marriage ceremony, and at a christening I'd be on nettles all the while, fearing the baby would cry and thus disturb the solemnity of the occasion and of the preacher. I'd want to take the baby into my own arms and have a romp with him—and so would forget about the baptizing. In casting about for a possible text for this impossible preacher, I have found ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... through level fields, lying waste and desolate with rank, overgrowing weeds. As they approached that historic village, they saw on every hand the cruel marks of war. On either side of the road were roofless and shattered cottages, grown around with nettles and briars. Among these ruins, as they found on a later day, were the old garden flowers, pansies and daisies, bravely trying to hold their own. Among the rank weeds was to be seen the half-hidden debris of broken farm gear. Here and there stood the ruins of what had been a thrifty homestead, ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... went, now running, now falling into a quick walk, then running again, nettles stung their ankles; gooseberry branches tore their swinging hands; willows lashed their faces. But terror calloused, and they knew no hurts. Marylyn stepped on something soft and moving—she only increased her pace. On, on, they sped, stumbling blindly, gasping ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... random to another paragraph. "Lie quietly concealed in the fern and bramble in the gap by the old rowan tree, and you may see, almost every evening during early summer, a pair of lesser whitethroats creeping up and down the nettles and hedge-growth ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... rigid scrutiny can detect in the performance. However kindly he may do this, and however gentle the tones of his voice, still the work is criticism and fault-finding from beginning to end. The boy sits on thorns and nettles while submitting to the operation, and when he takes his marked and corrected manuscript to his seat, he feels mortified and ashamed, ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... was a stick for a crupper, held at the two ends by twists of straw. Hemp will grow in their islands, and therefore ropes may be had. If they wanted hemp, they might make better cordage of rushes, or perhaps of nettles, than of straw. ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... wrings, harrows, torments, tortures, racks, scarifies, crucifies, convulses, agonizes, irritates, provokes, stings, nettles, maltreats, bites, snaps at, assails, badgers, harries, persecutes, those ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... it; and however withered she might be, she was yet heavier than the stoutest country lass. The youth's knees trembled, but when he did not go on, the old woman hit him about the legs with a switch and with stinging-nettles. Groaning continually, he climbed the mountain, and at length reached the old woman's house, when he was just about to drop. When the geese perceived the old woman, they flapped their wings, stretched out their necks, ran to meet her, cackling ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... they were covered with blood, and their legs were stuck full of large pines, with here and there an oak or hemlock, for the fight had been in a forest; so that they had been as much troubled as men would be with thistles, nettles, and pine splinters, which is truly often a great trouble. But this was their least trial, for, as they told their chief, the enemy had well-nigh made Jack Drum's entertainment for them, and led them the devil's dance, ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... stood, in the midst of a small meadow overgrown with nettles, the blackened ruin of a cottage long since destroyed by fire. On the edge of the little sandy lane, perilously near the feet of the passer-by, was its forgotten well, the mouth choked with weeds ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... whimpered softly to her lord. He quieted her, and went to the door in the yard that opened on to the field-path to East Maskells, unbarred it and stepped through. There was a dry ditch on his left, where nettles quivered in the stirring air; and a heavy clump of bushes rose beyond, dark and impenetrable. Mr. Buxton stared straight at these a moment or two, and then out towards East Maskells. There lay his own meadows, and the cattle and horses secure and sleeping. ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... gardens, and behold, these were full of weeds and nettles, the fountains dry, no tree to be seen—a desert. And Shahpesh cried, 'This is indeed of admirable design, O Khipil! Feelest thou not the coolness of the fountains?—their refreshingness? Truly I am grateful to thee! And these flowers, pluck me now a handful, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... long grasses and more than once rolled down a hollow full of nettles and thorns, which stung and scratched my face and hands horribly. I scrambled out, however, almost directly, animated by a fiery instinct of self preservation, and pulling out from my flesh the thorns that hurt me most, I recommenced, ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... taking with him the brothers Wychmann, Reyner, Henry and James Wittecoep, he went with them towards the mountains of Nemel to a place that was foreordained of God, and separated from the multitude; for men were seldom seen to come thither or to pass by, and patches of thorns and nettles grew here and there upon the hills and valleys. So as they went forth the wind beat against them, hut neither rain nor wind could stay the Master from the straight course, and he went on rejoicing and said pleasantly to his companions: "I will ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... Homole's fair champaign, Bring the soft charmer, whosoe'er it be, Unbid to his sweet arms—so, gracious Pan, May ne'er thy ribs and shoulderblades be lashed With squills by young Arcadians, whensoe'er They are scant of supper! But should this my prayer Mislike thee, then on nettles mayest thou sleep, Dinted and sore all over from their claws! Then mayest thou lodge amid Edonian hills By Hebrus, in midwinter; there subsist, The Bear thy neighbour: and, in summer, range With the far AEthiops 'neath the Blemmyan rocks Where ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... Benedict, a sudden gleam of approval on his sinister face, had interposed, addressing the Prior: "Nay, verily! Our excellent Sub-Prioress knows no Milky Way! She is the brier, which hath sharply taught the tender flesh of each. She is the bed of nettles from which the most weary moves on to rest elsewhere. She is the fearsome burning, from which the ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... unwarily leap into it, will find itself trapped in a way from which there is no escape. Then there was the cactus with spikes three inches in length, and the "Come and I'll kiss you," a bush armed with almost equally formidable thorns, and huge nettles, and numerous other vegetable productions, offering impracticable impediments to the progress, not only of human beings, but of every species of animal, with the exception of elephants and rhinoceroses, which might attempt to ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... thicket, Where the level meets the hill, Where the mealy alder-bushes Crowd around the ruined mill, Where the thrushes whistle early, Where the midges love to play, Where the nettles, tall and stinging, Guard the vine-obstructed way, Where the tired brooklet lingers; In a quiet little pool, Mistress Salmo Fontinalis[A] Keeps a ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... had better put the rattletrap thing away, John, and go in and help they. Never wasted money in all my life over such a thing as that before. What be he going to do all the winter? Bide and rust, I 'spose. Can you put un to cut off they nettles along ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... toes out, to give Pen his three hours' reading at Fairoaks, met his pupil, who shot by him like the wind. Smirke's pony shied, as the other thundered past him; the gentle curate went over his head among the stinging-nettles in the hedge. Pen laughed as they met, pointed towards the Baymouth road, and was gone half a mile in that direction before poor ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... (a birthday present) struck five, Gwendolen French sprang out of bed and plunged her face into the clump of nettles which grew outside her lattice window. For some minutes she stood there, breathing in the incense of the day; then dressing quickly she went down into the great oak-beamed kitchen to prepare breakfast for her father and the pigs. As she went about her ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... ever-constant circle to its sources among the far-off lakes of North America. The Gulf Stream fertilises the earth for the benefit of man, and it likewise carries food to regions frequented by the mighty whales. Frequently large shoals of sea-nettles, on which the black whale feeds, have been met with, borne onward towards its haunts in the north. The whale itself, it is believed, could not exist in the warm waters of the stream. Fish, also, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... Basswood at the foot of the lane with whatever we get," said the First War Chief, as he sneaked into the bushes and crawled through the snake fence and among the nettles and manure heaps on the north side of the barnyard till he reached the woodshed adjoining the house. He knew where the men were, and he could guess where his mother was, but he was worried about the Dog. Old Cap might be on the front doorstep, or he might be ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... of Kent had put over him to take care of him in his lunacy, was found by some of Cordelia's train, wandering about the fields near Dover, in a pitiable condition, stark mad and singing aloud to himself, with a crown upon his head which he had made of straw, and nettles, and other wild weeds that he had picked up in the corn-fields. By the advice of the physicians, Cordelia, though earnestly desirous of seeing her father, was prevailed upon to put off the meeting, till, by ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... were eaten. A rat could fetch a high price! In the end the starvation became so appalling that when the French troops made a sortie, the inhabitants would follow them in a crowd out of the gates, and rich and poor, women, children and the old would start collecting grass, nettles, and leaves, which they would then cook with some salt. The Genoese government mowed the grass which grew on the ramparts, which was then cooked in the public squares and distributed to the wretched invalids, ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... tree or dead grey log. Here Jim's pony had bolted at sight of an Indian hawker, in days long gone, and had ended by putting his foot into a hole and turning a somersault, shooting Jim into a well-grown clump of nettles. Here Norah had dropped her whip when riding alone, and her fractious young mare had succeeded in pulling away when she dismounted, and had promptly departed post-haste for home; leaving her wrathful owner to follow as she might. A passing bullock-wagon had given her a lift, and the ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... long since vanished. The population now subsisted on linseed and rape-seed; as these supplies were exhausted they devoured cats, dogs, rats, and mice, and when at last these unclean animals had been all consumed, they boiled the hides of horses and oxen; they ate shoe-leather; they plucked the nettles and grass from the graveyards, and the weeds which grew between the stones of the pavement, that with such food they might still support life a little longer, till the promised succor should arrive. Men, women, and children ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... picture of seven white swans, "Do you remember this?" he asked. "The seven brothers who were changed to swans, and the good sister who wove a coat for each one out of flax she spun from the churchyard nettles? The magic coats gave them back their human forms. Maybe you can use the same idea, and have your prince changed into a ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the Whey is run clean from it, put it into the Vat, and turn it in the Evening, next morning take it out and salt it a little, and turn it twice a day upon a clean Board, and when it is a week old, lay it into some Nettles, and ...
— The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet • Hannah Wolley
... to be connected in any way with the flaunting willow-herb, or fire-weed? But such incongruities are not confined to the "vegetable kingdom." The wood-nettle was growing everywhere; a juicy-looking but coarse weed, resembling our common roadside nettles only in its blossoms. The cattle had found out what I never should have surmised,—having had a taste of its sting,—that it is good for food; there were great patches of it, as likewise of the pale touch-me-not (Impatiens pallida), which had been browsed over by them. It seemed to me ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey |
