"Pruning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blond giant's heart. He kept recurring alternately to the Black Forest and the Thueringian Forest, and Frederick had a mental picture of the magnificent man clipping his privet hedge in front of his cosey cottage, or walking among his rose bushes with a pruning knife in his hand. He could detect that the captain would far rather be living secluded in a sea of green leaves and green pine needles; and he felt convinced that it would have been delicious to him to submerge himself forever in the soft ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... effort he endears to us the defects of his hero's Quixotic qualities, and makes his very deformity contribute to the triumph of his heroic panache. Even such of the poet's prolixities as survive a very careful pruning of the text are made to seem essential to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... the women undertook to care for the vines when the time came, risking their lives rather than sacrifice the next year's vintage. Captain Sweeney of the Foreign Legion told me that when the French soldiers were not firing they amused themselves watching these women pruning and trimming as fatalistically as if guns were not thundering east and west of them, shells singing overhead. For the most part they were safe enough, and nerves had apparently been left out of them; but once in a while the Germans would amuse themselves raking the valley with the guns. ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... readers should get a practical gardener, if possible, to point out those which need trimming, and those to be left alone. Most young people possessing a knife generally commence sundry manoeuvres on the first plant or tree within reach, and generally with very disastrous results. Trimming and pruning of all sorts should, therefore, be only done by practical hands, and then the life of the plant will ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... equal'd kings; From whom, the gods would hardly bear the palm; Like them unawed, content, and calm. His fortune was a little nook of land; And there the Scythian found him, hook in hand, His fruit-trees pruning. Here he cropp'd A barren branch, there slash'd and lopp'd, Correcting Nature everywhere, Who paid with usury his care. 'Pray, why this wasteful havoc, sir?'— So spoke the wondering traveller; 'Can it, I ask, in reason's name, Be wise these harmless trees to maim? Fling down that instrument ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... necessary to introduce. As a precaution, I had some soldiers, about a hundred and fifty, I think, sent to me from New South Wales. That was a step on which I was entitled to congratulate myself. At the pruning hook, in getting in that harvest, they were of vast assistance, and not often have soldiers been ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... the room and down the hall, followed by Mary Anne. The door into the clothes chute was securely bolted, and when I opened it I saw the evidence of the woman's story. A pruning-ladder had been brought from where it had lain against the stable and now stood upright in the clothes shaft, its end resting against the wall between the ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... further would be to depart from the original intention of letting the book speak for itself. To conclude therefore: there is much to wade through, though it is all more or less relevant to the progress of the story: some readers may like one part and some may prefer another; and if the pruning-hook had once been introduced it would have been difficult to decide what to leave and what to take, or whether it would not be better to publish another volume of the things pruned, since it had been determined to publish at all. But if the reader will accomplish the wading ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... of certain exuberances—for Chatterton was precocious in every thing, and many of his fancies want the Bowdler pruning-knife—might be seasonably transferred to some of the penny publications for the benefit of Mr Frost's disciples. A poor man and woman, on their way to the parson's hayfield, complain to each other of their hard lot in being ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... wine; we drank. I showed them my book, and as my pencil needed sharpening the large man lent me his knife for courtesy. When I got it in my hand I saw plainly that it was no knife for stabbing with; it was a pruning-knife, and would have bit the hand that cherished it (as they say of serpents). On the other hand, it would have been a good knife for ripping, and passable at a slash. You must not expect too much of ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... of the house, and ran to the spot where she had seen her husband at work a few moments before. It was not until she had reached the place that she discovered Diego, prone on the ground where he had fallen, near the vines he had been pruning. Juana knelt and threw her arms around his neck, when she saw the arrow from which he had fallen, buried ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... am not sure of his action, whether pruning, or in some way gathering fruit from the full-leaved tree. ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... Bell would be capable of second-hand descriptions only, so I resolved to approach the fountain-head and interrogate Aleck in person. I found the youth in the garden of Fanellan farm, evidently just passing the time by a cursory pruning of berry bushes. He had on his Sunday suit, and was unusually smartened up for a weekday; for it was but natural that neighbors might be expected to drop in for information as to the supernatural manifestations he had experienced, and it was well to be prepared. ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... of that benighted corps, taken as the subject of pruning and cultivating effort, would have occupied, I believed, the faithful labors of a lifetime. Considered as a gloriously rampant mass, the aspect ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... that in his prime, Ere the pruning-knife of Time Cut him down, Not a better man was found By the Crier on his round Through ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... they are afraid of throwing one another out of employment. The head gardener spends his time pointing to the largest cactus, and saying (I suppose in Japanese), "Look at my cactus!" The other two appear to be washing his Sunday shirt for him, instead of pruning or potting out, which is what I pay them for. However, the whole scene is one of great activity, for in the ornamental water in the middle of the garden two fishermen are hard at it, hoping to land something for my breakfast. So far they ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... more than three inches broad, with a sort of shoulder for the foot. The handles are about six feet long and end like a mop-stick, without any crossbar. A slight alteration would turn these tools into pikes, a much more likely operation than the beating of swords into plough-shares and spears into pruning-hooks. Meanwhile the length of the handle keeps the worker from too dangerous proximity to his work. There is a broader pattern of blade, but the handle is always of the same sanitary length. The children of the soil turn it over at ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... away to adorn the town hall, churches, capitals and libraries. Of this collection, (of which no inconsiderable portion, both for number and intrinsic value, came from the neighbouring monastery of Eichstadt,[32]) there has of course been a pruning; and many flowers have been transplanted to Munich. Yet there are graphic treasures in Augsbourg well deserving the diligent search and critical examination of the English Antiquary. The church of the Recollets has an organ which is considered among the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... hemp-seed and corn and watched it pruning its feathers as it glanced warily at its new home and its new mistress. On the following morning, just as day was breaking, the Patin woman distinctly heard a loud, deep, roaring voice calling: "Are you going to get ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... fifteen acres of regal chrysanthemums, roses pink, yellow, white and red, fragile lilies of the valley, carnations and vivid orchids, no two alike, yet all expressions of plant life. Skilled gardeners from England and Germany were busy with these exquisite flower children, watering, pruning and training upon slender cords, that every bud might come to perfect unfolding. The laws of the plant world and the law of each individual flower were well known to them. They knew that all required sunshine and soil, warmth and moisture, but in varying amount. ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... escaped—it was learned, afterward, by hiding in the huge safe where were stored the secret archives of his empire. And when he emerged he was a very penitent war lord, and like the Mikado of Japan he was set to work beating his sword-blades into ploughshares and pruning-hooks. ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... cures of the parishes, why sweep away these fantastic figures who, without any religious character, recruited from the farms, never educated in seminaries, peasants at bottom, in no way priests, capable, when required, to give a helping hand with the pruning knife in the vineyard, or with the pole among the olives, or the sickle among the corn. Alas! they had their weaknesses, and these weaknesses worked their ruin." The salt had lost its savour, wherewith could ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... and walked along the tiny path, bordered by oyster shells, to the red currant bushes beyond, he laid his pruning-knife on the ground, and sat down on an old bench beside a little green table, on which a sparrow was hopping about. On his seventy-fifth birthday he had resigned his profession to take to gardening, and I had heard from no less an authority than the General that "that old fool Theophilus ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... such ardent reformers as Mr Childers, and men of his stamp, cut down their own salaries first, before they set about pruning those of ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... is the life, The grapes for which we feel the pruning knife. Thoughts are but leaves; they fall and feed the ground. The holy seasons, swift and slow, go round; The ministering leaves return, fresh, large, and rife— But fresher, larger, more thoughts to the brain:— Farewell, ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... not think with pity of the unhappy fugitive, obliged thus suddenly to leave his home and all he most loved on earth? If at the time he caused the death, he was working in his vineyard, the pruning-hook must be left to rust on the branch. If he was ploughing with his yoke of oxen, they must be left lowing in the furrow. If he was busied in his harvest-field, the sheaves must be left unbound, and the reapers receive their wages from another's hands. If he was returning home fatigued at ...
— The Cities of Refuge: or, The Name of Jesus - A Sunday book for the young • John Ross Macduff
... monopoly of the oil-trade. Some years afterwards I made a passage with his brother, and learned from him the history of this Yankee enterprise, which had filled two capacious purses, and substituted the harpoon for the pruning-knife, the whale-ship for the olive-orchard, in the very stronghold of the emblem of peace; and now the collier with his pickaxe has driven them both from the field. But the Petit Hotel Montmorenci did not wait for the change. Its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... after which the day was given up to enjoyment. Amongst other things Her Majesty took great interest in her vegetable gardens, and superintended the planting of the different seeds. When vegetables were ready for pulling, from time to time, all the Court ladies were supplied with a kind of small pruning fork and gathered in the crop. Her Majesty seemed to enjoy seeing us work in the fields, and when the fit seized her she would come along and help. In order to encourage us in this work, Her Majesty would give a ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... hazel will be the pruning. Here I should say above all things: "Keep the suckers away." Hazel bushes are naturally inclined to produce a great many suckers, which should be thoroughly removed as soon as they appear; it will stop when the plants grow older. Besides the suckers, all weak and unnecessary wood should be ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... suggested that the trees should be provided by the State, and given to all who were prepared to plant them; that substantial prizes should be awarded to encourage the rapid growth thereof, and that annual prizes should be awarded to the man who would undertake their cultivation and pruning, not from the fruit-yielding point of view, but for facilitating the movement of troops beneath ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... setting cane-poles and trimming the vines to run upon them. Here and there, along the slopes, the rude old plough of the Georgics, dragged by great gray oxen, turns up the rich loam, that "needs only to be tickled to laugh out in flowers and grain." In the olive-orchards, the farmers are carefully pruning away the decayed branches and loosening the soil about their old roots. Here and there, the smoke of distant bonfires, burning heaps of useless stubble, shows against the dreamy purple hills like the pillar of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... holidays, and a suit of the best homespun, in which he adorned himself on week-days. His family consisted of a housekeeper above forty, a niece not quite twenty, and a lad who served him both in the field and at home, who could saddle the horse or handle the pruning-hook. The age of our gentleman bordered upon fifty years: he was of a strong constitution, spare-bodied, of a meagre visage, a very early riser, and a lover of the chase. Some pretend to say that his surname was Quixada ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... his most magisterial air—"if you will kindly manage your own business, which is that of pruning the olive and uprooting the vine, and leave me to manage my establishment as the reversible movement of the age requires, it will be better for the equanimity ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... of caterpillar has infested the tops of my cherry-trees this summer, and during the general's encampment near Mrs. Cobb I happened several times to be mounted on my step-ladder, busy with my pruning-shears, when he was decoying her around her garden—just over the fence—buckled in to suffocation, and with his long epaulettes golden in the sun like tassels of the corn. I was engaged in exterminating this insect on the last day of his sojourn. They were passing almost beneath me on ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... farms and manufacturing hamlets. They may live to see the hoe and the spade take the place of the bow and the tomahawk; the lion and the lamb feeding together; the sword beaten into a plowshare, and the spear into a pruning hook. ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... the use which I now have of language has taken me forty years to attain; and those forty years spent, mostly, in walking through the wilderness of this world's vain words, seeking how they might be pruned into some better strength. And I think it likely that at last I may put in my pruning-hook with effect; for indeed a time must come when English fathers and mothers will wish their children to learn English again, and to speak it for all scholarly purposes; and, if they use, instead, Greek or Latin, to use them only that they may be understood by Greeks or Latins;[2] and ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... reported. I have not tried to alter the easy-going and often colloquial phraseology in which they were uttered from the platform, in the hope that they would seem the more fresh and spontaneous because of their very lack of pruning and recasting. They have been suffered to run their unpremeditated course even at the cost of such repetition and redundancy as the extemporaneous speaker ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... never brought home a nest of young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... were doing astonishingly well to-day, but who could ensure their lasting qualities? Watt shows good judgment in suggesting that Wilkinson, the famous foundryman, should be taken into partnership. He urges his enterprising partner to apply the pruning knife and cut down expenses naively assuring him that "he was practising all the frugality in his power." As Watt's personal expenses then were only ten dollars per week, a smile rises at the prudent ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... with large pruning-knives, or a sort of sickles, with about six or seven inches aperture, which should be pretty strong. It ought to be cut before its wood hardens; and to be green as its leaf, which ought, however, to have a bluish eye or cast. When cut it ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... display of all kinds.... The Greeks hated all monsters. The quaint phrase in the "Odyssey" about the Queen of the Laestrygones—'She was tall as a mountain, and they hated her'—would have seemed to them most reasonable.... To read Greek is to have a perpetual witness to the virtue of pruning—of condensing—a perpetual protest against all that crowds, and swells, and weakens the writer's purpose. To forget this is but to 'confound our skill in covetousness.' We cannot all be writers ... but we all wish ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the bread. I'll light the fire for company for you; You'll not have any other company Till Ed begins to get out on a Sunday To look us over and give us his idea Of what wants pruning, shingling, breaking up. He'll know what he would do if he were we, And all at once. He'll plan for us and plan To help us, but he'll take it out in planning. Well, you can set the table with the loaf. Let's see you find your loaf. I'll light the fire. I like chairs occupying other ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... generation from then, what has happened? The line of the drunkard and of the debauchee, physically as well as morally weakened, is either extinct or on the way towards it. Struma, tubercle, nervous disease, have all lent a hand towards the pruning off of that rotten branch, and the average of the race is thereby improved. I believe from the little that I have seen of life, that it is a law which acts with startling swiftness, that a majority of drunkards never perpetuate their species at all, and that when the curse is hereditary, the second ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... drums and the bugle's wailing Vex the air of our vales-no more; The spear is beaten to hooks of pruning, The share is the sword the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... thirty-two to thirty-six feet apart, while Baldwins, Rhode Island Greenings, and Northern Spies represent the other extreme and will require forty, and sometimes fifty feet of space. The method and thoroughness of pruning influences the size of trees greatly, and hence the distance at which It is necessary ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... and to check all its irregular movements. Learn now, and profit by the experience of others. Hearken to the voice of God addressing you in these words: "The flowers have appeared in our land, the time of pruning is come; the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the vines in flower yield their sweet smell. Arise, my love, and come. Catch us the little foxes that destroy the vines, for our vineyard hath flourished." (Cant. ch. ii. 12, 13, 15). The foxes of which the sacred writer speaks here ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... the grey rocks arise from amid the nodding fern; the silvery shafts of the old birch trees; the knotted trunks of the hoary oak, the grotesque but graceful branches which never shed their honours under the tyrant pruning-hook; the soft green sward; the chequered light and shade; the wild luxuriant weeds; the lichen and the moss—all, all are beautiful alike in the green freshness of spring, or in the sadness and sere of autumn. Their beauty is of that kind which makes the heart full with ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... by a withered old man and his wife, whose golden wedding was spent in the house they had built, and in the garden they had planted when they were bride and groom. His back was permanently bowed with constant weeding and pruning and planting and hoeing, and his hands and face were brown as the soil he cultivated. The "hot-glowing" crimson peonies, seedlings which the wife had sown in her youth, had become great shrubs, fifteen or twenty feet in circumference. The flowering ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... bring the fancy prices. There will be blackberries—Burbank's, he lives at Santa Rosa—Loganberries, Mammoth berries. But don't fool with strawberries. That's a whole occupation in itself. They're not vines, you know. I've examined the orchard. It's a good foundation. We'll settle the pruning and ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... and the villagers on their way to their fields sometimes stopped to cast an inquisitive look over his garden palings. They saw him dressed in a linen jacket, with the glorious ribbon adorning his button-hole, weeding his flower-garden, turning up his walks, pruning his trees, clearing his flowers of caterpillars, watering his borders, with great drops of sweat pouring down, bending over his labour like a negro ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... not from some till they be richly manured: some trees require much visiting, much watering, much labour; and some men give not their fruits but upon importunity: some trees require incision, and pruning, and lopping; some men must be intimidated and syndicated with commissions, before they will deliver the fruits of justice: some trees require the early and the often access of the sun; some men open ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... returned from his brief and clouded holiday to his work in that corner of the great vineyard, so overcrowded with busy husbandmen that they were always plucking up each others' plants, and pruning and repruning each others' vines, till they made a wilderness where there should have been a harvest, he found that his special plot there had suffered much damage. John Nixey, following up the impression he had so successfully made, had spread his story abroad, and found ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... ease and comfort he loves more than all the princes in Christendom, and that valuable member of society is himself, Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat; between his study-chair and his tulip-beds,(38) clipping his apricots and pruning his essays,—the statesman, the ambassador no more; but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where, in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... blurred in silver heat. Silverpowdered olivetrees. Quiet long days: pruning, ripening. Olives are packed in jars, eh? I have a few left from Andrews. Molly spitting them out. Knows the taste of them now. Oranges in tissue paper packed in crates. Citrons too. Wonder is poor Citron still in Saint Kevin's parade. And Mastiansky with the old cither. Pleasant evenings we had ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... sometimes of reinforcements, from Lower Egypt. In the side-streets were many smithies, where lance-heads and knives were being forged by men who had not the most distant belief that such weapons would ever be turned into pruning-hooks. There were also workers in leather, who sewed up passages of the Koran in leathern cases and sold them as amulets to be worn on necks and arms. Elsewhere, hairdressers were busy greasing and powdering ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... forget the good done by insects. They undoubtedly tend by their attacks to prevent an undue growth of vegetation. The pruning done to a tree or herb by certain insects undoubtedly causes a more healthy growth of the branches and leaves, and ultimately a greater production fruit. Again, as pollen-bearers, insects are a most powerful agency in nature. It is undoubtedly the fact that the presence, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... Does the water-lily, rocking in her triple bath of water, air, and light, relish in no wise her own beauty? When the plant in our room turns to the light, closes her blossoms in the dark, responds to our watering or pruning by increase of size or change of shape and bloom, who has the right to say she does not feel, or that she plays a purely passive part? Truly plants can foresee nothing, neither the scythe of the mower, nor the hand extended to pluck their flowers. They can neither run away nor cry out. But this ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... doing nothing, I feed the sparrows with hemp-seed and prune a rose-tree a day. After my pruning, the roses flower magnificently. I am not ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... young companion was anxious to know how charcoal was made. Sumichrast led him close to a recently-felled oak, the small branches of which an Indian was cutting into pieces two or three inches long, by means of an instrument something like an enormous pruning-knife. A little farther, on the open ground, two men were collecting these pieces of wood in circular rows. This pile was already seven feet in circumference, and about the same in height, although it was not half finished. Lucien could easily see this when he approached the Indian who was ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... proposition to change all that. To turn the bird sticks into pruning hooks and the bird baths ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... careless, idle frame, I gazed about on what was made: And idle hands will gather shame, And wand'ring eyes confuse the head: I dropp'd my hoe and pruning-knife, To view the ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... coin;[257] but his great art lies in the application of existing materials, in converting the very disadvantages of the language into beauties,[258] in enriching it with circumlocutions and metaphors, in pruning it of harsh and uncouth expressions, in systematizing the structure of a sentence.[259] This is that copia dicendi which gained Cicero the high testimony of Caesar to his inventive powers,[260] and which, we may add, constitutes him the greatest master of composition that ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... beautiful soft green, and some children dressed in bright dresses, and attended by a governess in sober black, had just begun to play croquet. An elderly lady with a small white dog was walking along one of the graveled paths. An old man was pruning some bushes. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... attention, will afford ample manual occupation, and chaste supplies for the bodily needs. It is intended to adorn the pastures with orchards, and to supersede the labor of cattle by the spade and the pruning-knife. ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... be justly accused with tautology. I must plead guilty to the charge, not having leisure to apply the pruning hook of correction. The misfortune is, that new doctrines must appear in a new dress, by which they wear the garb of novelty, though, with respect to first principles, there is nothing new under the sun; yet the ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... ivy-covered wall that extends around the gardens and shuts out all intruders, I got a glimpse of that man through the heavy iron gate. He was smooth-shaven, slightly drooped, sprinkled with gray and with a scar upon his forehead near the roots of his hair—a little to one side. He was twirling a pruning knife in his left hand and speaking in English to a boy who scampered up to him ahead of four beautiful girls and a very dignified woman moving leisurely over the lawn in the ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... deal of tobacco, without regard to the excellence of the article, leave the plant to its natural growth, which is both scientifically and otherwise objectionable, for it is on a process of thinning and pruning a due diffusion of sap in the leaves depends, and consequently the quality ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... condescending to exchange visits with the obsequious General was a topic fertile in irony. But she did condescend. Lady Camper came to his gate unexpectedly, rang the bell, and was let in like an ordinary visitor. It happened that the General was gardening—not the pretty occupation of pruning—he was digging—and of necessity his coat was off, and he was hot, dusty, unpresentable. From adoring earth as the mother of roses, you may pass into a lady's presence without purification; you cannot (or so the General thought) ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... something very like it—Froissart wrote his chronicles. He picked up nuggets in the way of character—clean gold—and whether he were wandering with his own thoughts or struggling through the medium of this new tongue towards a knowledge of rustic Belgian life, or pruning and digging about his imaginations in his workshop, he was happy as a man ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... apples, apricots, and figs—the two last, however, were frequently destroyed by frost, the spring being generally very cold in the Morvan. As to pears, we had to wait somewhat longer for them, the pear trees requiring strict pruning to preserve the quality of the fruit; but we used to have a small cart-load of them when the year had been favorable. There was nothing my husband liked better than to pick gooseberries, currants, raspberries, cherries, or plums, and eat them ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... happen to know all this? Why, through being under- gardener. Of course he couldn't be under-gardener, and be always about, in the summer time, near the windows on the lawn, a mowing, and sweeping, and weeding, and pruning, and this and that, without getting acquainted with the ways of the family. Even supposing Master Harry hadn't come to him one morning early, and said, "Cobbs, how should you spell Norah, if you was asked?" and then begun cutting it in print all ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... best homespun cloth, which he bestowed on himself for working days. His whole family was a housekeeper something turned of forty, a niece not twenty, and a man that served him in the house and in the field, and could saddle a horse, and handle the pruning hook. The master himself was nigh fifty years of age, of a hale and strong complexion, lean-bodied and thin-faced, an early riser, and a lover of hunting. Some say his surname was Quixada, or Quesada (for authors differ in this particular); however, we may reasonably conjecture ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... said, "and let me go back to my old freedom; let me go look for my past life, and raise myself up from this present death. I was not born to be a governor or to protect islands or cities from the enemies that choose to attack them. Ploughing and digging, vine-dressing and pruning, are more in my way than defending provinces or kingdoms. Saint Peter is very well in Rome: I mean, each of us is best following the trade he was born to. I would rather have my fill of the simplest pot-luck ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... repatriated Jews was a symbol of the religious and ethical decay of the last century. Protestantism of the orthodox type, which essentially was and is nothing more than the substitution of a book for a Pope, the pruning of the tree dogmatical, the lopping off of some of its more reprehensible excrescences, had visibly failed to meet the necessities of "the irresistible maturing of the human mind," to quote an expression of Emerson's. The older Church had ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Latin goddess of plenty. Single parts of her province were taken over by various other divinities, among whom was Pomona (pomorum patrona, "she who cares for fruits"). She is represented as a maiden with fruit in her arms and a pruning-knife in ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... in her old gown—an old thing that her daughter had discarded long ago—pinned up around her, and on her head an old bonnet with a faded poppy hanging from the crown. In such attire she wished to be allowed to trot about to and fro from her greenhouse to her potting-shed, watering, pruning, and syringing her plants. These plants were dearer than all things to her except her children; she seemed, indeed, to treat them as if they were children, and with the sun pouring through the glass ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... Mr. Pulham this morning, and that gave a fillip to my Laziness, which has been intolerable. But I am so taken up with pruning and gardening, quite a new sort of occupation to me. I have gather'd my Jargonels, but my Windsor Pears are backward. The former were of exquisite raciness. I do now sit under my own vine, and contemplate the growth of vegetable nature. I can now understand in what sense they ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... disclosed by one of his own opinions. Corrupted ere yet he had left his home, whilst in age a boy, there is, however, the comfort of reflecting that he outlived his vices. Fox, with a green apron tied around his waist, pruning and nailing up his fruit-trees at St. Ann's Hill, or amusing himself innocently with a few friends, is a pleasing object to remember, even whilst his early career ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... buried columns, the youthful vigor of America is fast covering the wilds of the West with the happiest fruits of human industry." This passage, the censor quietly but severely pointed out, laid down a principle that was unsound, and supported it by facts that were false. A rigid pruning could alone make the work worthy of a license. The consequence was that Cooper carried the manuscript with him to Germany, and it was first published in Dresden, in a land where men were not sensitive to anything that might be said, at ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... saddle. It was agreed, then, that the expenditures for the military and naval establishments should be kept at about $2,500,000—somewhat below the normal appropriation before the recent war-flurry; and that wherever possible expenses should be reduced by careful pruning of the list of employees at the navy yards. Such was the programme of humdrum economy which President Jefferson laid before Congress. After the exciting campaign of 1800, when the public was assured that the forces ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... at the head of a corps of gallant Frenchmen, if circumstances should require this; whether as a major- general, commanding a division of the American army; or whether, after our swords and spears have given place to the ploughshare and pruning- hook, I see you as a private gentleman, a friend and companion, I shall welcome you with all the warmth of friendship to Columbia's shores; and, in the latter case, to my rural cottage, where homely fare and ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... is nothing. There stands a neophite glazing of his face, Pruning his clothes, perfuming of his hair, Against his idol enters; and repeats, Like an unperfect prologue, at third music, His part of speeches, and confederate jests, In passion to himself. Another swears His scene of courtship over; bids, believe him, Twenty times ere ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... speculator and the wretched multitudes of the Abyss. The New Republicans will constitute an informal and open freemasonry. In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible governments, they will be pruning irresponsible property, checking speculators and controlling the abyssward drift, but at that, at an indirect control, at any sort of fiction, the New Republic, from the very nature of its cardinal ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... came flying about the mill, twittering and chirping as if seeking for food on the sill; clinging to the ivy with their tiny, pink claws, looking at her expectantly out of their bright, roving eyes, pruning their feathers. The ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... Not to-day, but to-morrow. Thus the Negro, striving to be the best in the community, the white men, striving to reduce to practice the Golden Rule, may it not come to pass that "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks," and that the country of Lincoln shall thus become the "land of the free and the home of the brave," where all men of all races shall be treated in all departments of life according to ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Parts are often starved and useless, by being planted in a wrong Soil; and how very seldom do these Moral Seeds produce the noble Fruits which might be expected from them, by a Neglect of proper Manuring, necessary Pruning, and an artful Management of our tender Inclinations and first Spring of Life: These obvious Speculations made me at length conclude, that there is a sort of vegetable Principle in the Mind of every Man when he comes into ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... gone on imitating the people about me. They are industriously tilling their fields. I continue cutting my lawn, planting my dahlias, pruning my roses, tying up my flowering peas, and watching my California poppies grow like the weeds ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... without diminishing the force of what has been written. An article or two from the daily paper, and an occasional page from some recent work of fiction will afford further opportunity for profitable practice in pruning. ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... by Barker in London, 1578, and measuring 4-1/2 by 3-1/2 inches, and it belonged to Queen Elizabeth. Inside she has written a note in which she says: 'I walke manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holy Scriptures, where I plucke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eate them by reading, chawe them by musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seat of memorie by gathering them together, so that having tasted thy swetenes I may the less perceive the bitterness of this ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... have always differed with the preachers in politics and war, except the Southern preachers who are now in arms against the invader. I think war is one of the providences of God, and certainly no book chronicles so much fighting as the Bible. It may be to the human race what pruning is to vegetation, a necessary process for the ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... over which he was now passing, he observed, had been planted in winter wheat, and that just beyond, at the edge of the meadow, was the young orchard well grown and badly in need of pruning. The route he had taken soon brought him out into the lane at the foot of the hill, near the cider mill, where he stopped to drink of the cool sap that flowed into a large tin pail, from one of the sugar-maple trees ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... veritable wild apple with no semblance of the original fruit about it but often a delectable, wild tang, a flavor and perfume such as no cultivated variety ever had. No tree gives more beauty to the wildest of New England woods and pastures today than this. Innocent of pruning knife or fertilizer its growth has a rugged picturesqueness about it that makes the well trained tree look pusillanimously conventional beside it. I think the perfume of its blossoms is richer and carries farther ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... Arrowhead; and then of Squat, our youngest cowboy, from whose fair brow the intrepid veterinary, on his last previous visit, had removed a sizable and embarrassing wen with what looked to me like a pair of pruning shears. ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... owned their own homes and the plots of ground they gardened, and I do contend that the watering-can and the spade and the pruning knife are a means of grace. Very many of them made twelve shillings a day, which is three dollars in our good Canadian money, and some of the highest paid made twice as much. And there was work for them every working day and every working hour of ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... Imperator (Emperor) caused himself to be invested with the authority of Censor. This enabled him to revise the list of Senators, and to restore to this body something of its ancient respectability. By judicious pruning he reduced the number to six hundred, and required a property qualification for membership. He placed himself at its head as PRINCEPS (prince), a title which implied that the Emperor was the first citizen, without claiming any rights of royalty, thus lulling any ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... not be displeased at being told every slight circumstance of the manner in which Dr. Johnson contrived to amuse his solitary hours. He sometimes employed himself in chymistry, sometimes in watering and pruning a vine[1207], sometimes in small experiments, at which those who may smile, should recollect that there are moments which admit of being soothed ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... thought it was William. Hadn't Vandy said it was William? What was the blinking use, any old way? And what a day I He'd got a bet with Jonah that the thermometer touched ninety-seven before noon. What did Vandy think? And what on earth was he doing with the pruning-hook? And/or ploughshare on his left front? Oh, a scythe. Of course. Wouldn't he put it down? It made him tired to look at it. And was he reclaiming the lawn? Or only looking for a tennis-ball? Of course, what he really ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... Grace, "that's just dreadful! I hope there will never be a war where such terrible guns will be used—never any more at all; but that very soon, as the Bible says, the people 'shall beat their swords into plough-shares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... will save Israel, I will save the world. Through my holiness the world shall be a Temple. Sin and evil and pain shall pass. Peace shall sit under her fig-tree, and swords shall be turned into pruning-hooks, and gladness and brotherhood shall run through all the earth, even as my Father declared unto Israel by the mouth of his prophet Hosea. Yea, I, even I, will allure her and bring her into the desert, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her vineyards ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... his prime, Ere the pruning-knife of time Cut him down, Not a better man was found By the Crier on ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... a clucking hen among her red-cheeked youngsters. She was holding a loaf against her fat stomach and, with a curved pruning-knife, was cutting off good thick slices which the youngsters snatched away one by one and stuffed into their pockets. Horieneke fetched her basket of knitting and her school-books. She first pulled Fonske's stocking ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... keeping a Malee draws you out, for he compels you to look after him, and if you are to look after him, you must know something about his art, and if you do not know, you must learn. So we Anglo-Indians are gardeners almost to a man, and spend many pure, happy hours with the pruning shears and the budding knife, and this we owe to the Malee. When I say you must look after him, I do not disparage his skill; he is neat handed and knows many things; but his taste is elementary. He has an eye for symmetry, and can take delight in squares and circles and ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... Pruning has been reduced to a minimum, a light thinning out of branches being given as required. Very little attempt has been made to keep filberts to a single stem, but the walnuts have been kept ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... lane behind his father's house. He could hear the cocks crowing in Surrey, and the lowing of the kine. There was a robin singing in a bush under the window, and there was some one in the garden with a pair of pruning-shears. Snip-snip! snip-snip! he heard them going. The light in the east was pink as a peach-bloom and too intense ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... savagely sideways. Great, thick necks hulked forward in impatient jerks; and those dagger-pointed horns, sharper than a pruning hook, promised no boy's sport for our company. The buffalo sees best laterally on the level, and as long as we were quiet we remained undiscovered. At the prospect, some of the hunters grew excitedly profane. Others ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... hunters, one of these dry stalks is a valuable discovery when its diameter matches the size of its would-be inhabitants; and it is also an interesting subject of study to the entomologist who, in the winter, pruning-shears in hand, can gather in the hedgerows a faggot rich in small industrial wonders. Visiting the bramble-bushes has long been one of my favourite pastimes during the enforced leisure of the wintertime; and it ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... said, "Phocion, you seem to be thoughtful." "Yes," replied he, "I am considering how I may shorten what I am going to say to the Athenians." Even Demosthenes himself, who used to despise the rest of the haranguers, when Phocion stood up, was wont to say quietly to those about him, "Here is the pruning-knife of my periods." This however, might refer, perhaps, not so much to his eloquence, as to the influence of his character, since not only a word, but even a nod from a person who is esteemed, is of more force than a thousand arguments or ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... point-blank shot of a noble stag, who is yet too much struck with his majesty of front and of antler to take aim at him. They were those of a fowler, who, levelling his gun at a magnificent eagle, is yet reluctant to use his advantage when he sees the noble sovereign of the birds pruning himself in proud defiance of whatever may be attempted against him. The heart of the Sub-Prior (bigoted as he was) relented, and he doubted if he ought to purchase, by a rigorous discharge of what he deemed his duty, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... pleasantly that the "Millennium" was at hand. With this idea apparently in our minds, we inscribed on the walls of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Scriptural text which tells us that "swords shall be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, neither shall they learn war any more." A significant commentary on the text was found in the fact that many of the exhibits at the "World's Fair" consisted of cannon, rifles, and other lethal instruments of improved method and construction, intended for the wholesale destruction ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... 30 Sweating he walks, while loads of golden grain O'ercharge the shoulders of the seeming swain: Oft o'er his back a crooked scythe is laid, And wreaths of hay his sunburnt temples shade: Oft in his harden'd hand a goad he bears, Like one who late unyoked the sweating steers: Sometimes his pruning-hook corrects the vines, And the loose stragglers to their ranks confines: Now gathering what the bounteous year allows, He pulls ripe apples from the bending boughs: 40 A soldier now, he with his sword appears; A fisher next, his trembling angle bears: Each ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... fellow, you'd be better for a little of the same pruning!" Sherringham retorted; and the young men continued their walk and their gossip, jerking each other this way and that, punching each other here and there, with an amicable roughness consequent on their having, been boys together. Intimacy had reigned of old between the little Sherringhams and ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... proved guilty by the ingenious arrangement invoked by the learned recorder of my spoken word—which render you liable to hanging, slicing, pressing, boiling, roasting, grilling, freezing, vatting, racking, twisting, drawing, compressing, inflating, rending, spiking, gouging, limb-tying, piecemeal-pruning and a variety of less tersely describable discomforts with which the time of this court need not be taken up. The important consideration is, in what order are we to proceed and when, if ever, ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... ploughed and sown, pleasant wooden houses to be built, bees to be sheltered and encouraged, and schools to be erected where song and music were taught. O a truly great man was Hu Gadarn! though a warrior, he preferred the sickle and pruning hook to the sword, and the sound of the song and lute to the hoarse ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... have struck their hostess, for she called an elderly man, evidently her husband, who was pruning vines, and began a catechism as to where her visitors lived. Lorna replied as well as her knowledge of Italian allowed, and at the mention of the Villa Camellia the pair nodded in comprehension. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... and the blue-bloused gendarmes guarding the woods and the fences skirting them. "Nothing is allowed to go to waste in this country," he said. "It looks as though they went over it once a month with a lawn-mower and a pruning-knife. I believe they number the trees as we ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... and the ten to five, and still was undiscovered. Then, when again the Prairie-dog dropped down to seek more fodder, she made a quick dash, and bore him off kicking and squealing. Thus does the angel of the pruning-knife lop off those that are heedless and foolishly indifferent to the advantages ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... black dirt to be delivered immediately. I then bethought myself that I required an outfit of garden tools; so I made my way to the nearest hardware shop and purchased a spade, a hoe, a rake, a wheelbarrow, a watering can, a trowel, and a pruning-knife. I trundled the barrow home, with the other purchases ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... nice regard for the small details were lacking. The walks were cleanly swept; but the box-borders were not so carefully trimmed. The vines and bushes that in former times were cut and tied so evenly, could hardly have felt the keen touch of the pruning-knife for months. ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... "after taking off what you call the rubbish, Mr. Gracelius, and pruning the question down as much as you please, I cannot possibly admit that the Bible anywhere justifies piracy under any circumstances whatsoever, either abstractly or practically. I call upon you for anything in all the Bible that gives the ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... work was better done. From the taskmaster this change became known to the chief head of all the lands, who thereupon had him set to other more important tasks, so that at last he was not only a toiler with pick and spade and pruning knife, but his counsel was sought in everything that concerned the larger works on the land; in forming plantations, in the draining of wet grounds and building of houses and bridges and the making of new roads. And in all these works ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... internal revolution in the tenets of the church, which, in the last generation, gave birth to the neology, now so destructive of the internal peace of the churches. Neology has not come from Deism, for this power assails the outworks of Christianity; while the school of criticism is but a severe pruning knife of internal verbiage. Although the language quoted is harsh, the arguments common-place, which, although true, are now discarded by the educated Freethinker; yet if for no stronger language than this men were imprisoned only ten years ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... been reading," he said, "the words of a certain dreamer of Judea, who, in the olden time, wrote of a day when swords should be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks, and when peace should reign among the nations of the earth. Well, give me an army for a hundred years, good people, and then I may voice the will of the gods that iron be used no more to plough its way in living flesh, but only to turn the furrow and to prune the tree. Meanwhile, ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was when I was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife, have been busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must be on many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as the point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale may be exaggerated, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his walk between the terrace and the drawing-room. He strode with long, even steps, holding his body erect, his chest flung out and his hands in the pockets of his jacket, a blue-drill gardening-jacket, with the point of a pruning-shears and the stem of a pipe sticking out of it. He was tall and broad-shouldered; and his fresh-coloured face seemed young still, in spite of the fringe of white beard in ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... one excelled her in love of the garden and the culture of fruit. She cared not for orests and rivers, but loved the cultivated country, and trees that bear delicious apples. Her right hand bore for its weapon not a javelin, but a pruning-knife. Armed with this, she busied herself at one time to repress the too luxuriant growths, and curtail the branches that straggled out of place; at another, to split the twig and insert therein a graft, making the branch adopt a nursling not its own. She took care, too, that her ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... mention, as you be a stranger,' whispered the carrier to Lackland, 'that Christopher's stories will bear pruning.' ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... pruning it, and re-writing some of the verses," Margaret explained. "He wanted to make it ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... vertically into the ground. A day or two more, and the shell and husk, which, in the last and germinating stage of the nut, are so hard that a knife will scarcely make any impression, spontaneously burst by some force within; and, henceforth, the hardy young plant thrives apace; and needing no culture, pruning, or attention of any sort, rapidly advances to maturity. In four or five years it bears; in twice as many more, it begins to lift its head among the groves, where, waxing strong, it ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... had many qualities as a parent which made him a kind of forcing-house for the development of virtue in those of his own family. He was as guano spread over the roots of the patience of others; as a pruning hook to their selfishness. But he had one great compensating quality as a father. He never for one moment thought that any man, however young, visited the house except for the refreshment and solace of his own society. He never encouraged anyone to come ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... clear that before marriage could be talked of I must at least have gained my diplomas, so that the more work I did during the week the better. The result of this was a goodly sowing of resolutions and very little harvest. In the evenings, Tom and I would sit together—he tirelessly polishing and pruning the tragedy, and I for the most part smoking and giving advice which I am bound to say in duty to the author ("Francesca" having gained some considerable fame since those days) ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the brooks and rivers. The streams, which are often but the beds of torrents dry during the summer, are confined in straight channels by stone walls and embankments; the slopes are broken up and disfigured by terraces; and the trees are kept down by constant pruning and lopping, until half way up the sides of the Appenines, where the limit of cultivation is reached, and thence to the summit is a barren steep of rock, without herbage or soil. The grander features of the landscape, however, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... perturbed," said Mattie Tiffany. Running rose-bushes, just leafing out into their fall greenery, overgrew the pillars beside her. These she fell to pruning with her hands, so that she ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... branches." It is not merely the connection between branch and stem common to all trees; not merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the grape, which made the very heathen look upon it as the sacred and miraculous fruit, the special gift of God; not merely the pruning out of the unfruitful branches, to be burned as firewood—not merely these, but the seeming death of the Vine, shorn of all its beauty, its fruitfulness, of every branch and twig which it had borne the year before, and left unsightly and seemingly ruined, to its winter sleep; ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... ascertained to be the production of a Portuguese in the latter half of the fourteenth century, [2] was first printed in a Spanish version, probably not far from 1490. [3] Its editor, Garci Ordonez de Montalvo, states, in his prologue, that "he corrected it from the ancient originals, pruning it of all superfluous phrases, and substituting others of a more polished and elegant style." [4] How far its character was benefited by this work of purification may be doubted; although it is probable it did not suffer so much by such a process as it would have done in a later and ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... premiss was, "We will accept nothing between the two lids of this Book if our Reason cannot fathom it." Hence, all truth, every book of the Bible, even the sacraments of the church, came in for their share of discussion and pruning. In this respect Rationalism takes rank as one of the most corrupt tendencies of infidelity which appears anywhere upon the page of ecclesiastical history. But do we find its spirit mild and amiable? Some of the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... yet, if he continue in, I cannot but justly hate him for the same. There is a time to be given all things for maturity, and that even your country husband-man can teach, who to a young plant will not put the pruning-knife, because it seems to fear the iron, as not able to admit the scar. No more would I tell a green writer all his faults, lest I should make him grieve and faint, and at last despair; for nothing doth more hurt than to make him so afraid of all things as he can ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... with thick gloves and a pair of pruning-nippers. Minturn threw a spade and pickaxe on his shoulder, and Mr. Banning, whom Sue had warned threateningly "never to be far away," tramped at their side as they went up the lane. Apparently there was no need of such precaution, for the ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... it, as the first and chief element of its glory, the most barbarous of all the rituals of barbarism—the immolation of hecatombs which wail a muling human wail? Is it indeed part of man's strange destiny through the deeps of Time that he one day bow his back to the duty of pruning himself as a garden, so that he run not to a waste wilderness? Shall the physician, the accoucheur, of the time to come be expected, and commanded, to do on the ephod and breast-plate, anoint his head with the oil of gladness, and add to the function of healer the function of Sacrificial ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... brought to prove his real profession are more minute than this. It proves him to have had practical experience in the work, and I think we may safely say that he was no mere 'prentice hand in the use of the pruning knife. ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... gardener, who whistles Verdi as he works. True, he doesn't know the flowers by name, and in his hands a pair of clippers are as fatal as the shears in the hands of Atropos, but he is in the picture. When I see gardeners pruning I realize that that lady of destiny shows wonderful restraint about our threads of fate—the temptation ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane |
