"Thistle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where there would soon be an abundance of red berries such as his mother liked. At beech-nut gathering, in the season, he admitted no superior. As for the habits of the yellow-birds, particularly at the season when they were feeding upon thistle-seed and made a golden cloud amid the white one as they drifted with the down, well, he was the only one who really knew anything about it! Who but he could take the odd-shaped pod of the wild fleur-de-lis, the common flag, and, winding it up in the flag's own long, narrow leaf, holding one ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... relates its history to him. A golden gardener-beetle trots along the path. Rose-beetles pass, in snoring flight, on every hand, the gold and emerald of their elytra gleaming; now and again one of them alights for a moment on the flowering head of a thistle; he seizes it carefully with the tips of his nervous, pointed fingers, seems to caress it, speaks to it, and then suddenly restores it ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... then another, and another. As they neared, the color seemed the least wonderful detail of the picture. For it changed in effect from a column of glittering wings to a column of girl-faces, a column that floated light as thistle-down, a column that divided, ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... difficulty.—These valuable insects are liable to various disorders, both from the food they eat, from foreign enemies, and from one another. If they have fed greedily on the blossoms of the milk thistle or the elm, it will render them incapable of working, and the hive will be stained with filth. The best cure in this case is pounded pomegranate seed, moistened with sweet wine; or raisins mixed with wine or ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... the light of common sense into a dim happy world where all things came and went or were transformed in obedience to his unexpressed will. Whether the sun were curtained by leafage or by silken folds he did not know—only this: that she was coming towards him, borne lightly as a ball of thistle-down. He perceived the colour of her hair, and eyes, and hands, and of the pale dress she wore; but her presence seemed revealed to him through the exaltation of some sense latent or non-existent in him in his waking moods. His delight was of the understanding, ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... cross between a split-saw and a bull-thistle to umpire this muster?" shouted the foreman of the Ancients, to the amazement of ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... poverty, partly no doubt from consideration, they seemed to be much forgotten. The family was like an old thistle-head, withering on its wintry stalk, alone in a wind-swept field. All the summer through not a single visitor, friend or stranger, had slept in the house. A fresh face was more of a wonder to Cosmo than to desert-haunting Abraham. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... general rule the mainsprings of character develop early, and the man is very much as the child has made him. The sowing then, brings forth a harvest afterwards. They tell us, that two natives of Scotland settled in the far West, and that each took with him a memorial of his fatherland—one the thistle, the national emblem, the other the honey-bee. Rather different sowing that! For while the dwellers on the Pacific coast have to keep up a continual fight with the thistle, the honey of that region is now largely exported, and is worth its millions. A little time ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... while the grasshopper sang out shrill In the grass beneath the blanching thistle, And the afternoon air, with a tender thrill, Harked to the ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... since) the now universal potato was unknown, but which were stored with gigantic plants of KALE or colewort, encircled with groves of nettles, and exhibited here and there a huge hemlock, or the national thistle, overshadowing a quarter of the petty enclosure. The broken ground on which the village was built had never been levelled; so that these enclosures presented declivities of every degree, here rising like terraces, there sinking like tan-pits. The dry-stone walls which ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... observation an entire day, were seen to convey to their young no less than forty grubs an hour, an average exceeding three thousand in the course of a week. Moreover, even in the autumn he does not confine himself to grain, but feeds on various seeds, such as the dandelion, the sow-thistle, and the groundsel; all of which plants are classed as weeds. It has been known, also, to chase and devour the common white butterfly, whose caterpillars make ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... Can make thee stoop thy royal head, And lay thee prostrate with the dead. In vain colossal England mows, With ponderous strength, the yielding foes; In vain fair Scotia, by her side, With courage flushed and Highland pride, Whirls her keen blade with horrid whistle And lops off heads like tops of thistle; In vain brave Erin, famed afar, The flaming thunderbolt of war, Profuse of life, through blood does wade, To lend her sister kingdom aid: Our conquering thunders vainly roar Terrific round the Gallic shore; Profoundest statesmen vainly scheme— 'Tis all a vain, delusive dream, If ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... you will say, is being pert about politics when you would rather have anything else in a letter from Italy. You have heard of my illness, and will have been sorry for me, I am certain; but with blessings edging me round, I need not catch at a thistle in the hedge to make a 'sorrowful complaignte' of. Our plans have floated round and round, in and out of all the bays and creeks of ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... finding a stray Boche, or encountering a Boche patrol. In front of Essarts the lines were so far apart that there was plenty of room for a small pitched battle, and night after night Lieuts. Pearson, Creed, Poynor, and others visited such familiar haunts as the "Osier Bed," "Thistle Patch," "Lonely Tree," and other well-known places. The first to meet the enemy was Lieut. Pearson, who came upon a small party in the "Thistle Patch," who made off rapidly back to their lines. Our patrol ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... bathe, sith, sithe, both, both, loath, loath, oath, oathes, smith, smithy, breath, of, off, then, yet, liveth or liveth, joth or joth, mouth, mouth, path or path, wrath, wreath, faith or faith, thy, thigh, this, thistle, thou, thousand, thank, they, them, theame, thus, thunder, thine, thin, goal or goal, as afore, motion, crimson, action, Acteon, singed, hanged, changed, shepherd, Shaphat, dishonour, asham'd, bishop, mishap, character, charity, duckherd, blockhead, Dutchess, gather, ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... motion makes one think of the grace of young girls, daintily costumed, in robes with long fluttering sleeves... And old Japanese proverb declares that even a devil is pretty at eighteen: Oni mo jiu-hachi azami no hana: "Even a devil at eighteen, flower-of-the-thistle." ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... spares neither the rose nor the thistle, nor does he forget the solitary blade of grass in the distant waste. He destroys thoroughly and unceasingly. Everywhere we may see how he crushes to dust plants and beasts, men and their works. Even the Egyptian pyramids, that would seem to defy ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... of wild rush-beds and sloughs' squashy traces, Grounds of rough fallows with thistle and weed. Flats and low valleys of kingcups and daisies, Sweetest of subjects are ye for my reed: Ye commons left free in the rude rags of nature, Ye brown heaths beclothed in furze as ye be, My wild eye in rapture adores every ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... first Set mortals on with tools to turn the sod, When now the awful groves 'gan fail to bear Acorns and arbutes, and her wonted food Dodona gave no more. Soon, too, the corn Gat sorrow's increase, that an evil blight Ate up the stalks, and thistle reared his spines An idler in the fields; the crops die down; Upsprings instead a shaggy growth of burrs And caltrops; and amid the corn-fields trim Unfruitful darnel and wild oats have sway. Wherefore, unless thou shalt with ceaseless rake The weeds pursue, with shouting scare ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... feet 9 inch in length; the staff is very plain, but the pommel is ornamented with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. The fleurs-de-lis with which this sceptre was originally adorned have been replaced by golden leaves, bearing the rose, shamrock, and thistle. The cross is variously jewelled, and has in the centre a large ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... of the almost incredible power of multiplication of an animal or plant when taken into a new environment, removed from conditions which held it in check, as the introduction of the mongoose into Jamaica, the rabbit into Australia, the thistle into New South Wales and ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... light, and then escorted the ladies home. But Thumbelina could not sleep that night; so she got out of bed, and plaited a great big blanket of straw, and carried it off, and spread it over the dead bird, and piled upon it thistle-down as soft as cotton-wool, which she had found in the field-mouse's room, so that the poor little ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... away, pulled up an iron-weed growing on the road-side, and fell to whipping a large purple thistle. Her thirst grew; she left the thistle and fell to whipping the rank grass. Then was heard an angry buzz, as the assaulted bees swarmed out of their ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... amusement while unprovided with a partner. The nest of the Hemp-bird is made of cotton, the down of the fern, and other soft materials, woven together with threads and the fibres of bark, and lined with thistle-down, if it be late enough to obtain it, and sometimes with cow's hair. It is commonly placed in the fork of the slender branches of a maple, linden, or poplar, and is fastened to them with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... my Lord of Glandine, Thistle-eaters the stoutest gave way, Outdone in their own special line By the forty-ass ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... hills o' the cromlech and cairn, Where blossoms the thistle by hillocks o' fern; There Freedom in triumph an altar has made For holiest rites in the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... how am I so far Out of that minute? Must I go Still like the thistle-ball, no bar, Onward, whenever light winds blow, Fixed by no ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... fell, and rolled into hollows rich in mulcted earth; parachutes, buoyed on thistle silk, sailed from distant jungle plants; every swirl of breeze brought spores of lichens and moss, and even the retreating water unwittingly aided, having transported hither and dropped a cargo of living things, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... dandelion, thistle, and other triumphant strugglers for survival, the milkweed sends its offspring adrift on the winds to found fresh colonies afar. Children delight in making pompons for their hats by removing the silky seed-tufts from pods before they burst, and winding them, one by one, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... little white thistle moon Blown over the cold crags and fens: A little white thistle moon Blown across the ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... of glossy green leaves, which the moisture of the night had ornamented with shimmering edges of crystal beads. She found the phantom of the night before browsing among flowers behind the cottage, and very kindly disposed to make her acquaintance. As he had a thistle blossom sticking out of his mouth, she forthwith named him Thistle. She soon returned to the house with her apron full of vines, and blossoms, and prettily tinted leaves. "See, Tulee," said she, "what a many flowers! I'm going to make haste and dress the table, before Gerald ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... continent; how the so-called wild-oat (Avena sterilis of the Old World) has taken full possession of California; how that cattle and horses, introduced by the Spaniard, have spread as widely and made themselves as much at home on the plains of La Plata as on those of Tartary; and that the cardoon-thistle-seeds, and others they brought with them, have multiplied there into numbers probably much exceeding those extant in their native lands; indeed, when we contemplate our own race, and our particular stock, taking such recent but dominating possession of this New World; when we ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... by the early train, Whirl down with shriek and whistle, 50 And feel the bluff North blow again, And mark the sprouting thistle Set up on waste patch of the lane Its green and ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... But he has the mobility of the poetic nature, and the sad ground-tone is often drowned in the ecstasy of lighter notes. All at once the "bare ruined choirs" are covered with the glad light-green of spring. His genius combined the excellencies of many masters. His "Golden Targe" and "The Thistle and the Rose" are allegorical poems, full of colour, fancy, and music. His "Two Married Women and the Widow" has a good deal of Chaucer's slyness and humour. "The Dance of the Deadly Sins," with its fiery bursts of imaginative energy, its pictures finished at a stroke, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... cut the plant, and carried it into his own house; stripped the leaves off it and cut up the stalk; and there came a thick, white juice out of it, as there comes out of the sow-thistle when it is bruised, except that the juice was more ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... and noxious weed, from the name there given it of Fico del inferno, or the Devil's Fig: it has long been introduced to this country; GERARD, who cultivated it with success, ludicrously attributes its nickname to a different source: "The golden Thistle of Peru, called in the West-Indies, Fique del inferno, a friend of mine brought it unto me from an iland there, called Saint Johns Iland, among other seedes, what reason the inhabitants there have to call it so it is unto me unknown, unless it be bicause of his fruite, which ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 7 - or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... Ambialet, its rocks and ruins on which the wild pinks nodded, and its stone-covered roofs overgrown with white sedum. I was struck by the number of prickly plants on the sandy banks of the Tarn. Those which now made the best show of bloom were the star-thistle centaurea and ononis repens. The appearance of this last was very curious, for in addition to its pink pea-blossoms it seemed to be sprinkled over with little flowers the colour of forget-me-nots. These, however, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... it old man," laughed Gething. At a signal Cuddy flew at it, rose into the air with magnificent strength and landed like thistle-down. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... felt a change in her, from the beginning of their talk. Why had she sent for him? The wildest notions had possessed him, ever since her letter reached him. Yet, now that he saw her, they seemed to float away from him, like thistle-down on ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... friends, of good name, of country—he is even without God in the world. He converses only with the spirits of the departed; with the motionless and silent clouds. The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre on his head; the fox peeps out of the ruined tower; the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale; and the strings of his harp seem, as the hand of age, as the tale of other times, passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! The feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... reflection. "I wonder if she was different from all the other women I've known?" Through her mind there passed swiftly a hundred memories of her childhood. First there came the one vivid recollection of her mother, a flashing, graceful figure, as light as thistle-down, in a skirt of spangled tulle that stood out from her knees. The face Patty could not remember, but the spangles were indelibly impressed on her mind, the spangles and a short silver wand, with a star on the end of it, which that fairy-like figure ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... the fierce young Norman, and, breaking off the conversation, switched savagely at the head of a thistle close at ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... friend," said Pierre gravely; "in the vegetable world I prefer a rose to a thistle; in the moral world, I prefer you to Trecoeur. You were born a gallant fellow; I rejoice at it, and I ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... before us had been one of the great fertile valleys of France, dotted with little grey towns with glowing red roofs. For as we looked it seemed to be "that ominous tract, which all agree hides the Dark Tower!" There it all lay; the "ragged thistle stalk," with its head chopped off; "the dock's harsh swart leaves bruised as to balk all hope of greenness." "As for the grass, it grew scantier than hair in leprosy; thin dry leaves pricked the mud, which underneath looked kneaded up with blood!" It was the self-same ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... The lustre of the season begins to dim, the foliage of the trees and woods to tarnish, the plumage of the birds to fade, and their songs to cease. The hints of approaching fall are on every hand. How suggestive this thistle-down, for instance, which, as I sit by the open window, comes in and brushes softly across my hand! The first snowflake tells of winter not more plainly than this driving down heralds the approach of fall. Come here, my fairy, and tell me whence you come and whither ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... narrow filter flask just large enough to accommodate an ordinary 18 x 2 cm. test-tube. The mouth of the tubular Chamberland candle 15 x 1.5 cm. is closed by a perforated rubber cork into which fits the end of the stem of a thistle headed funnel, whilst immediately below the butt of the funnel is situated a rubber cork to close the mouth of the filter flask. When the apparatus is fixed in position and connected to an exhaust pump, the cultivation ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... tree bring forth good fruit." Here a great spiritual principle was announced. We must consider the nature; nothing less than a change in the nature can change the fruit. A bad heart is just as sure to bring forth bad thoughts and bad deeds as the thistle is to bring forth thorns. And so the good heart is just as sure to yield good deeds as the grape-vine is to yield grapes or the fig-tree is to yield figs. Look at the tree, therefore; the fruit will take ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... eyes at a limb For which she had been such a martyr: The deer in the park, and the colts at grass, And the cows unheeded let it pass; And the ass on the common was such an ass, That he wouldn't have swopp'd The thistle he cropp'd For her Leg, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... voice of the sluggard; I hear him complain, You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again. I passed by his garden, I saw the wild brier, The thorn, and the thistle, grow broader and higher; The clothes that hang on him are turning to rags; And his money he wastes, till he ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... of brags, lies, promises, forged recommendations and letters, boasts of systematic charity, funny scraps of stuff in the form of little disquisitions, advertisements of remedies, hair-oils, cosmetics, liquors, groceries, thistle-killers, anti-bug mixtures, recipes for soap, ink, honey, and the Old Harry only knows what. The fellow gives a list of seventy-one specific diseases for which his Hasheesh Candy is a sure cure, and he adds that ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... the forehead, did not break his neck; but it ought to have done. It cast him clean over backwards out of his own front-door, where he fell down the bank, and was received, all his little short paws scrambling for a hold, by a thistle, and would have told all the world, with a thin, high squeak, what he had sat on, if the squeak had not frozen ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... what she put in his button-hole; a thistle, thorns and all, would have been precious to him if her hands had touched it, and he would have torn his fingers against the prickles with an exquisite ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... desert; you think he never can be made to produce anything. But he shall be supplied, and thus be made to blossom as the rose. Others are dry land of a general character; but there is water enough to make all fruitful: so that instead of the thorn, the myrtle; and instead of the thistle, the fig; and instead of the deadly upas, the ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... by the great weight long before they get so far, or else come to a place where perhaps they float. But I dare say a cannon sometimes comes careering solemnly down, and circling about like a dead leaf or thistle-down; and then the ragged fellows go and play about the cannon and tell themselves all kinds of stories about the fish higher up and their iron houses, and perhaps go inside and sleep, and perhaps dream of it all like ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tenor : tenoro; senco; signifo tent : tendo terrace : teraso. terror : teruro. testify : atesti. text : teksto textile : teksa. thaw : degeli. theatre : teatro. then : tiam, poste, do. thick : dika; densa. thigh : femuro. thing : afero, ajxo, objekto. think : pensi, opinii. thirst : soif'i, -o. thistle : kardo. thorn : dorno. thrash : drasxi; skurgxi, bategi. threaten : minaci. threshold : sojlo. thrill : eksciti. throat : gorgxo, fauxko. throne : trono. throw : jxeti. thrush : turdo. thunder : tondr'i, -o. thus : tiel, tiamaniere; jene thyme : timiano. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... mercy—cates [delicates, good things] and honey, if thou wilt have it so. 'Twas all froth and thistle-down." ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... gardens, with bells large and clear; crimson pinks; the Michaelmas daisy; a plant with a thin, radiated yellow flower, of the character of an aster; a centaurea of a light purple, handsomer than any English one; a thistle in the dryest places, resembling an eryngo, with a thick, bushy top; mulleins, yellow and white; the wild mignonnette, and the white convolvulus; and clematis festooning the bushes, recalled the flowery fields and lanes of England, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... once took him with her when she went to milk the cow; and it being a very windy day, she tied him with a needleful of thread to a thistle, that he might not be blown away. The cow, liking his oak-leaf hat, took him and the thistle up at one mouthful. While the cow chewed the thistle, Tom, terrified at her great teeth, which seemed ready to ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... now stole some such added gloom as this. Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in his Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed — The thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha! What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the meadow is as safe from hungry cattle as though fenced in by barbed wire. A cow must be starving that would care to flavor her luncheon with the needles that the thistle bears. The common skunk cabbage would make a tempting meal for her after a winter of dry feeding, had not Nature given it an odor that disgusts even a spring-time appetite. The milkweed welcomes the bees and flies that help to distribute her ...
— The Romance of Rubber • United States Rubber Company
... All had the same start, many had similar environments. Yet witness the motly products of evolution: Man, ape, elephant, skunk, scorpion, lizard, lark, toad, lobster, louse, flea, amoeba, hookworm, and countless microscopic animals; also, the palm, lily, melon, maize, mushroom, thistle, cactus, microscopic bacilli, etc. All developed from one germ, all in some way related. Mark well the difference in size between the elephant, louse, and microscopic hookworm, and the difference in intellect between ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... thou shalt eat bread,' indicate that the inherent nature of it is one of calamity; and that the ground, cursed for our sake, casts also some shadow of degradation into our contest with its thorn and its thistle; so that all nations have held their days honourable, or 'holy,' and constituted them 'holydays' or 'holidays,' by making them days of rest; and the promise, which, among all our distant hopes, seems to cast the chief brightness over death, is that blessing of the dead who die in the Lord, that ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... a purple sea-thistle close to his head. It poised there with fanning wings, so languid, so ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... named strode into the roughly-furnished kitchen-like room, looking as unlike a clergyman and a lawyer as could be imagined, for both were dressed in well-worn garments, half farmer, half back wood settler, the one with a thistle staff or spud in his hand, the other shouldering a double gun, which, following the example of his companion, he set up in a corner in company with the spud and a couple of fishing rods and a landing-net, before going to the broad ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... drowsily sweet. Here he enshrined her, his dearest saint, his idol, the light of his eye; Her kisses rested upon his lips as brushes a butterfly. The weight of her arms around his neck was light as the thistle down; And sweetly she studied to win his smile, and gently she mocked his frown. And when at the close of the dusty day his clangorous toil was done, She hastened to meet him down the way all lit ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... heart out; you'd always get what you wanted somehow, and you wouldn't wait for it either; and I'm just the same. I'm not built for giving up, and enduring, and sacrificing. I'm naturally just a tuft of thistle-down, Mark; but living beside Waitstill all these years I've grown ashamed to be so light, blowing about hither and thither. I kept looking at her and borrowing some of her strength, just enough to make me worthy to be her sister. Waitstill is like ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cushions, and quilts—be it enacted, that no person or persons whatsoever shall make (to the intent to sell, or offer to be sold) any feather-bed, bolster, or pillow, except the same be stuffed with dry-pulled feathers, or clean down only, without mixing of scalded feathers, fen-down, thistle-down; sand, lime, gravel, unlawful or corrupt stuff, hair, or any other, upon pain of forfeiture,' &c. One would like to know what 'unlawful or corrupt stuff' is, and whether the corruptness be physical through putridity, or ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... battlements, Newstead, [2] the hollow winds whistle: [ii] Thou, the hall of my Fathers, art gone to decay; In thy once smiling garden, the hemlock and thistle Have choak'd up the rose, which ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... of thistle-down, entwined with thistle-leaves," said Zarah.—"I know not a slighter thing than your Buckingham! I saw him at your request—saw him when, as a man, he should have shown himself generous and noble—I stood the proof at your desire, for I laugh at those dangers ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Malcolm, angrily, as he interrupted the intruder—a tall, gaunt figure wrapped in a shepherd's plaid, with the bonnet set upon the grizzled head in that sturdy independence—nay, more than independence—rudeness, rough and thorny as his own thistle, which is the characteristic of the Scotch peasant externally, till you get below the surface ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... or design were vain. There must be courage to reject no less than to gather. A man is at liberty to neglect things that are repugnant to his disposition. He may, if he please, have nothing to do with thistle or thorn, with bramble or brier.... Nevertheless sharp and severe things are yet dear to some souls. Nor should I understand the taste that would reject the wildness of the thorn and holly, or the child-loving labyrinths of the bramble, or wholesome ranges of the downs and warrens fragrant ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... the lofty blue are blown Light vapors white, like thistle-down, That from their softened silver heaps opaque Scatter delicate flake by flake, Upon the wide loom of the heavens weaving Forms of fancies past believing, And, with fantastic show of mute despair, As for some sweet hope hurt beyond repair, Melt ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... richest cream-color, and the wild cucumber pours a shower of white over the green leaves of the sumach or sage. Snap-dragons of blue and white, dandelions that you must look at three or four times to be certain what they are, thistles that are soft and tender with flowers too pretty for the thistle family, orchids that you may try in vain to classify, and sages and mints of which you can barely recognize the genera, with cruciferae, compositae, and what-not, add to the glare ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... thistle-stalk sends up a noble bloom Wid de shape of a flower an' de thought of a plume, But its prickle-y ways turn friendship down; So it stands all alone, in its velvet gown. An' it ain't by its lonesome self in dat— No, it ain't by itself ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... made chemically perfect, as indicated by analysis. It is also believed that those weeds, which naturally grow on the most fertile soils, are the ones most easily destroyed. There are exceptions (of which the Thistle is one), but this is ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... little brother, With eyes that were dark and deep; In the lap of that dim old forest, He lieth in peace asleep: Light as the down of the thistle, Free as the winds that blow, We roved there the beautiful summers, The summers of long ago; But his feet on the hills grew weary, And, one of the autumn eves, I made for my little brother, A bed ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... celebrated Doctor McQ——, who was expected to give us an argumentative sermon that morning, until my argument came floating in at the door like a calm little bit of thistledown, to which our previous conversation had been as the thistle's self. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... The thorn and the thistle harvest that society reaps every year is fearfully great, and the seed from which too large a portion of this harvest comes is its drinking customs. Men of observation and intelligence everywhere give this testimony with one consent. All around us, day and night, year by year, in ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... with lecturers, with sensation-seekers, all of them in advance discounting their hero, and showing in broad light their gigantic stupidity. One of this motley finds in McClellan a Norman chin, the other muscle, the third a brow for laurels (of thistle I hope), another a square, military, heroic frame, another firmness in lips, another an unfathomed depth in the eye, etc., etc. Never I heard in Europe such balderdash. And the ladies—not the women and gentlewomen—are worse than the men in thus stupefying ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... neglected, Though not a creature ill-affected. Along the road a dog and he One master follow'd silently. Their master slept: meanwhile, the ass Applied his nippers to the grass, Much pleased in such a place to stop, Though there no thistle he could crop. He would not be too delicate, Nor spoil a dinner for a plate, Which, but for that, his favourite dish, Were all that ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... specimens caught in the Severn River to the southward of Moreton Bay: on examining the intestines of this fish, they were full of the shells of Limnaea and Cyclas. Large specimens of helix were frequent on the Vervain Plains, but they were only dead shells. The fat-hen (Atriplex) and the sow-thistle (Sonchus) grew abundantly on the reedy flats at the upper end of the creek; Grewia, a prostrate Myoporum, and a bean with yellow blossoms, were frequent all over the valley. Atriplex forms, when young, as we gratefully experienced, an excellent vegetable, as do also ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... character would be Touch-me-not. I believe there's a flower called that—noli me tangere—or some such name. Well, that's Vicky Van. She'd laugh and jest with you, and then if you said anything by way of a personal compliment or flirtatious foolery, she was off and away from your side, like a thistle-down in a summer breeze. She was a witch, a madcap, but she had her own way in everything, and her friends did her ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... deep shade of the cool glossy leaves, through the long warm summer day; to gather the fresh nuts and berries; to drink the pure dews of heaven, all bright and sparkling from the opening flowers; to sleep on soft beds of moss and thistle-down in some hollow branch rocked by the wind as in a cradle. Yet, though this was the happy life led by a family of pretty grey squirrels that had their dwelling in the hoary branch of an old oak-tree that grew on one ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... the root, He clapp'd them underneath the tail Of steed, with pricks as sharp as nail. 845 The angry beast did straight resent The wrong done to his fundament; Began to kick, and fling, and wince, As if h' had been beside his sense, Striving to disengage from thistle, 850 That gall'd him sorely under his tail: Instead of which, he threw the pack Of Squire and baggage from his back; And blund'ring still with smarting rump, He gave the Knight's steed such a thump 855 As made him reel. The Knight did stoop, And sat on further side aslope. ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... pathetically the call note of their days of freedom. It is upon this yearning for liberty and its manifestation that the bird trappers depend to secure more victims. No sooner does the piping call go forth from the golden throats of the little prisoners, than a reply comes from the thistle tops, far down the field. A moment more and the traps are surrounded with the black and yellow beauties. The fact that one of their own kind is within the curious little house which confronts them seems to send all their timidity to the winds and they fairly ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... the nettle stung her, And the thistle's rude embrace Burned her sensitive nature, And scarred ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... the glorious stories of Wales, Scotland and Ireland have been nearly lost in that of mighty England, men have at times, almost forgotten about the leek, the thistle, and the shamrock, which stand for the other three divisions ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... placed a thin layer of asbestos, such as is used for Gooch filters, 1 mm. thick. The tube is then filled with the amalgamated zinc (Note 1) to within 50 mm. of the top, and on the zinc is placed a plug of glass wool. If the top of the tube is not already shaped like the mouth of a thistle-tube (B), a 60 mm. funnel is fitted into the tube with a rubber stopper and the reductor is connected with a suction bottle, F. The bottle D is a safety bottle to prevent contamination of the solution by water from the pump. After ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... Langham exchanged a few commonplaces till the others joined them, and then for a while the attention of everybody in the group was held by the squire's sister. She was very small, as thin and light as thistle-down, ill-dressed, and as communicative as a babbling child. The face and all the features were extraordinarily minute, and moreover, blanched and etherealised by age. She had the elfish look of a little ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... she usually managed with such quiet grace. Zibbie was in one of her very worst tantrums, and when she heard that there was to be company to dinner, seemed in danger of flying into fragments. The thistle, the emblem of her land, was a meek and downy flower compared with this ancient dame. When she took up or laid down any utensil, it was in a way that bade fair to reduce the kitchen to chaos before night. Jeff had "got his back up" also about the hen, and was as stupid and sullen as ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... America Afloat. Shamrock and Thistle; or, Young America in Ireland and Scotland. Red Cross; or, Young America in England and Wales. Dikes and Ditches, or, Young America in Holland and Belgium. Palace and Cottage; or, Young America in France and Switzerland. Down the Rhine; or, Young ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... taste just like baked custard. They lay from twenty to thirty in the large ant-heaps which one constantly meets with in the bush, and which when rifled, in January or February, yield a rich harvest of these eggs. A shrub very much like dogwood, with a lilac flower rather like a large thistle, but with the leaves turned back, was plentiful, and is a valuable product, horses being able to live upon it for many weeks without water, though it does not look especially succulent. We saw beautiful parrots of all colours flying across the ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... of Edwards either," cried Kirkpatrick, once more looking boldly up, and shaking his broad claymore: "My thistle has a point to sting all to death who would pass between this ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... hop-rows, talking at rare intervals about the value of the crops, the drainage of the estate, the village schools, the Primrose League, and the iniquities of Mr. Gladstone, while Oke of Okehurst carefully cut down every tall thistle that caught his eye—I sometimes felt, I say, an intense and impotent desire to enlighten this man about his wife's character. I seemed to understand it so well, and to understand it well seemed to imply such a comfortable acquiescence; and ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... explained the shepherd, "are the Merry-Go-Round Mountains, set close together and surrounded by deep gulfs, so that no one is able to get past them. Beyond the Merry-Go-Round Mountains it is said the Thistle-Eaters and the Herkus live." ...
— The Lost Princess of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... builds a plain nest in the open field, without so much as a bush or thistle or tuft of grass to protect it or mark its site; you may step upon it, or the cattle may tread it into the ground. But the danger from this source, I presume, the bird considers less than that from another. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... after some conference with Charles Sharpe, I have hit on a plan, which, I think, will look very well, if tolerably executed,—namely, to have the lady seated in due form on the top of the lid (which will look handsome, and will be well taken), and to have a thistle wreathed around the sarcophagus and rising above her head, and from the top of the thistle shall proceed the birse. I will bring a drawing with me, and they shall get the cup ready in the mean time. I hope to be at Abbotsford on Monday night, to ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... Tangye's baptismal name was Matthias, and Bideford, in Devon, his native town. But the Touch-me-not, which he had commanded for thirty-five years, happened to carry for figurehead a wooden Highlander holding a thistle close to his chest, and against his thigh a scroll with the motto, Noli Me Tangere, and this being, in popular belief, an effigy of the captain taken in the prime of life, Mr. Tangye cheerfully accepted ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Oisin, that was so brave and so comely, and that could overtake a deer at its greatest speed, and see a thistle thorn on the darkest night, the wife he took was Eibhir of the plaited yellow hair, that was the foreign sweetheart of the High King ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... one pound, and four pounds. The smaller sizes are the ones most often made with mixed goat and sheep milk. The method of curdling without the usual animal rennet is interesting and unusual. The milk is warmed and curdled with vegetable rennet made from the flowers of a local thistle, or cardoon, which is used in two other Portuguese cheeses—Queijo da Cardiga and Queijo da Serra da Estrella—and probably in many others not known beyond their locale. In France la Caillebotte is distinguished for being clabbered with chardonnette, wild artichoke seed. In Portugal, ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... vividness and intensity beyond that of other places. I see it in the yellows of hawkweed, rock-rose, and birds'-foot-trefoil, in the innumerable specks of brilliant colour—blue and white and rose—of milk-wort and squinancy-wort, and in the large flowers of the dwarf thistle, glowing purple in its green setting; and I hear it in every bird-sound, in the trivial songs of yellow-hammer and corn-bunting, and of dunnock and ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... a distinctly expressed aversion, and the very strangeness of the experience was not without attraction for his eager and dominant temperament. What a queer little oddity she was, he thought as he glanced up at the grave old house before turning rapidly away—as light and sensitive as thistle-down, as vivid as flame. He tried to recall her delicately distinguished figure and profound dark eyes, but her charming smile seemed to come between him and her features, and her face was obscured for him in a mysterious radiance. ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... of Israel sent to Amaziah king of Judah, saying, The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in Lebanon, saying, Give thy daughter to my son to wife: and there passed by a wild beast that was in Lebanon, and trode down the thistle. Thou hast indeed smitten ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... reasons than those already presented. In the cages in which various predatory Hymenoptera whose warlike habits I am studying are confined, waiting until I have procured the desired prey—not always an easy proceeding—I have planted a few heads of flowers and a couple of thistle-heads sprinkled with drops of honey, renewed at need. On these my captives feed. In the case of the Philanthus the honeyed flowers, although welcomed, are not indispensable. It is enough if from time to time I place in the cage a few living bees. Half a dozen a day is about the proper allowance. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... the walk to meet her, her tail like a great plume, her soft coat as fluffy as thistle down. Proudly she walked as if ...
— Princess Polly's Gay Winter • Amy Brooks
... broken columns to mark the form of the chapel; but the arch of the west window was complete, and the wreaths of ivy hid its want of tracery, while a red Virginian creeper mantled the wall. All was calm and still, the greensward smooth and carefully mown, not a nettle or thistle visible, but the floriated crosses on the old stone coffin lids showing clearly above the level turf, shaded by a few fine old trees, while the river glided smoothly along under the broad floating water-lily leaves, and on its other side ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... coolness and the gradual approach to the great Alps, which await him at the close of the day. It is about Mulhausen that he begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields broaden into rolling downs, watered by clear and running streams; the green Swiss thistle grows by riverside and cowshed; pines begin to tuft the slopes of gently rising hills; and now the sun has set, the stars come out, first Hesper, then the troop of lesser lights; and he feels—yes, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... up at once, for heaven's sake. The general has come with all his officers. Ah! goodness, you have got a thistle in your moustache." ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol |
