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More "Backwoods" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... overflows its banks in the spring, the wind from the meadows is laden with a strong scent of musk, and by its freshness advertises me of an unexplored wildness. Those backwoods are not far off then. I am affected by the sight of the cabins of the musk-rat, made of mud and grass, and raised three or four feet along the river, as when I read of the barrows of Asia. The musk-rat is the beaver of the settled States. Their number has even increased within a few years ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... Johnson he lived on the Western border, Where he went to escape from 'law and order,' For Tom was a terrible fellow, was he, He drunk, and he swore, and he fou't[B] like the Old Harry—and Tom he had a wife: Fit partner she was of his backwoods life. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... at once. It would have been an advantage if the Reform of the House of Lords could also have been disposed of in the present Parliament, but it is not one of the questions upon which the welfare of the country will immediately depend. Everyone admits the need for reform; the abolition of the "backwoods-man" must come; but it is the men of most experience in public affairs who regularly attend sittings of the House of Lords, and they contribute even now a valuable element in promoting useful legislation as well as in revising and amending the Bills initiated in another place. ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... us out into the cleared backwoods to visit some of our children. The country was charming; woods and green valleys, with every now and then rich orchards laden with rosy apples; the long Concession roads, forming at times magnificent avenues, in which here and there a maple, which ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... together with costly foreign rugs. The same strange mixture of rudeness and refinement was to be seen everywhere throughout the room. The table standing in the centre of the floor, ready for the evening meal, was made of unplaned boards, rudely put together by the unskilled hands of the backwoods. Yet it was set with the finest china, the rarest glass, and the richest silver that the greatest skill of the old world could supply. The chairs placed around the table were made of unpainted wood from the forest, with seats woven out of the coarse rushes from ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... murder of their leader, but their impulse was checked by a stern command from behind. Glancing in that direction, they saw themselves covered by a long, brown rifle-barrel, held by a white man clad in the leathern costume of the backwoods. At the same time half a dozen laborers who, home-returning from the fields, had noticed that something unusual was taking place, came hurrying to the scene of disturbance. Wisely concluding that ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... There are heaps and heaps of railway sleepers down in the wood heap, and we could pile them up into a hut. It's only what people do out in Canada. Gibbie's always telling us tales of women who emigrate to the backwoods, and build colonies of log-cabins. Ave, you're not going to sleep ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... the poor woman scarcely knew what she was doing; but she had the fighting instinct of all backwoods people, and her first motion was to snatch 30 off the wall, where it lay in a deer's-horn rest, a large horse pistol. With this in hand she ran to meet her children. Some hunter had broken the bear's fore leg with a bullet a few ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... things occurred at a Chicago hotel during the conclave that is so near a fight and yet so ridiculously laughable that you don't know whether you are on foot or a horseback. Of course some of the Knights in attendance were from the backwoods, and while they were well up in all the secret workings of the order, they were awful "new" ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle's, and muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of his life made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any kind, and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... couldn't guess. People who live in the backwoods and miles from a railroad are not apt to be leaders of fashion. Doubtless her hands will be red and her face will be red and her hair will be ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... poor curates, and, when met with, were equally as small; and so it happened, that as the landowners usually resided, like Mr. Honeywood, among their own people, a gentleman would occasionally be as badly off for a neighbour, as though he had been a resident in the backwoods of Canada. This evil, however, was productive of good, in that it ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... out a little packet. There was a certain intonation of his voice which, at first made me think that he was not an American, but in that intonation there was really nothing foreign. He was certainly a stranger, he might be from the backwoods, and both his manner and speech appeared odd to me; but soon I had no doubt about his being my countryman. In fact, there was something in his general appearance which seemed to me ...
— Amos Kilbright; His Adscititious Experiences • Frank R. Stockton
... he said at length, "you're goin' to have a great time at this little backwoods school—you're going ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... "the thing is for all of us to fall into line and forge ahead, Colonel. If we don't, we'll be left behind; and in these times to lag is to take to the backwoods." ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... way, invoked the saints, and cursed his director for his medley of directions many a time, before he stumbled at length on Mr. Boone's house. He was invited to sit down and dine, in the simple backwoods phrase, which is still the passport ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... the fence corner? Ye're a fine lot of jays up here in th' backwoods! Do I know him? Full well I do! An' that shows, ye what honest workin'men has got to come to, these days. Didn't ye see him sittin' there on that castin'? Th' bosses put him there to keep tricks ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... was. There was no one belonging to me, or associated with me in any way, who had literary tastes or ideas, the nearest I can make to it is that my great-grandfather was a circuit writer, a Welshman, known as "Priest" Jones in the backwoods, where his enthusiasm led him ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... the best chances now for intensive cultivation are in New Jersey, in the backwoods of the Middle states now made accessible by cheap ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... beat men I over knew," said Phoebus. "He was a remarkable instance of energy combined with softness of disposition. In my opinion, however, he ought never to have visited Europe: he was made to clear the backwoods, and govern man by the power of his hatchet and the mildness of his words. He was fighting for freedom all his life, yet slavery made and slavery destroyed him. Among all the freaks of Fate nothing is more surprising ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... to explain that I had been in the backwoods for months, and for the last two months in the foreign colony of Louisiana, in the village of St. Louis, where little of the doings of the ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... drawled out with a superior air: "Wal, sonny, you come from the backwoods shore ef you never heerd tell of a ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... part of the country. If we inquire what the world thought of it, we have still more to raise our wonder; for, not to mention the excitement it caused in England, the movement and its party-names were known to the police of Italy and to the backwoods-men of America. And so it proceeded, getting stronger and stronger every year, till it came into collision with the Nation and that Church of the Nation, which it began by professing ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... at the door. He was dressed plainly, and, with his reddish-brown hair and mud-bespattered face, looked like a hard- working countryman just in from the backwoods. ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... since in the backwoods of America. His fate seemed still to follow him, and his good temper appeared immortal—his situation was more peculiar than pleasant. He was seated on a log, three hundred miles from any civilised habitation, smiling blandly at a broken axe (his only one), the half ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... going to Florida—the land of the palms!" announced the manager. "You know I spoke of tentative plans for a drama down there when we were in the backwoods. Now I have everything arranged, and we will leave on a steamer for St. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... when he determined to tell the fresh story of the backwoods and the prairies, found a pattern ready to his hand in the Waverley novels, so Ibsen availed himself of the "well-made play" of Scribe when he wrote the 'League of Youth,' which is his earliest piece in prose presenting contemporary life and character in Norway. There is obvious significance ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... which this country was the scene in the summer of 1848 extended far beyond the shores of Ireland. Away beyond the Atlantic the news from Ireland was watched for with glistening eyes by the exiles who dwelt by the shores of Manhattan or in the backwoods of Canada. Amongst the Irish colony in England the agitation was still greater. Dwelling in the hearts of the monster towns of England, the glow of the furnace lighting up their swarthy faces; toiling on the canals, on the railways, in the steamboats; filling the ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... has to do after getting possession of his lease is to clear the land and get ready for planting. The outlay for this is considerable, and not much unlike clearing up a farm in New England, or in the backwoods of Canada. Then the young plants are set out; after this has been done, the ground must be kept clear of weeds, just as in raising corn or potatoes. It must be frequently stirred, so that the plant can get as much nourishment ...
— Harper's Young People, July 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... lived the Widow Baisley, alone with her son Paddy, a lad under ten years old, and little for his age. One midwinter night she was taken desperately ill, and Paddy, reckless of the terrors of the midnight solitudes, ran wildly to get help. The moon was high and full, and the lifeless backwoods road was a narrow, bright, white thread between the silent black masses of the spruce forest. Now and then, as he remembered afterwards, his ear caught a sound of light feet following him in the dark beyond the roadside. But his plucky ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... Delaware; in 1842, in Boston, Charlestown, Beverly, Florence, Springfield, and other points in Massachusetts, and in Hartford, Connecticut; in 1844, in Cincinnati, Dayton, Zanesville, Springfield, Cleveland, Toledo, and several settlements in the backwoods of Ohio, and also in Richmond, Indiana; in 1845 and '46, I lectured three times in the Legislative Hall in Detroit, and at Ann Arbor and other places in Michigan; and in 1847 and '48, I spoke in Charleston ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... were well-to-do, he swung the cradle in his rye and wheat, rejoicing in the sweep of the knife and the fulness of the swathe. Then, too, there was the driving of the rivers, when the young men ran the logs from the backwoods to the great mills near and far: red-shirted, sashed, knee-booted, with rings in their ears, and wide hats on their heads, and a song in their mouths, breaking a jamb, or steering a crib, or raft, down ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... respectful, appreciative buzz of voices that followed the speech, General Montero raised a pair of heavy, drooping eyelids and rolled his eyes with a sort of uneasy dullness from face to face. The military backwoods hero of the party, though secretly impressed by the sudden novelties and splendours of his position (he had never been on board a ship before, and had hardly ever seen the sea except from a distance), understood ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... A Backwoods Boyhood, in Moores, Abraham Lincoln; Choosing Abe Lincoln Captain, in Schauffler, Lincoln's Birthday; Following the Surveyor's Chain, in Baldwin, Abraham Lincoln; His Good Memory of Names, in Gallaher, Best Lincoln Stories; Lincoln and the ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... to this is, that you cannot give your man as much soil as he has on the prairies or in the Canadian lumber lands. This, no doubt, is true, but the squatter who settles in the Canadian backwoods does not clear his land all at once. He lives on a small portion of it, and goes on digging and delving little by little, until, after many years of Herculean labour, he hews out for himself, and his children after him, a freehold estate. Freehold estates, I admit, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... the latter the next morning at breakfast—"to think that the backwoods of America should have turned us out ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... you have read a deal more than have we who come from the backwoods," said he. "You have studied natural science and much else, still I wonder if any of you can tell me what the stones in ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... BACKWOODS BOY Or, The Parkhurst Treasure Depicts life on a farm of New York State. The mystery of the treasure will fascinate every boy. Jerry is a ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... as if it had been built the day before yesterday. Everything was new and shiny, and we had our supper at a long table with about twenty other people, just like a boardinghouse. Some of their ways reminded me of the backwoods, and I suppose there is nothing more modern than backwoodsism, which naturally hasn't the least alloy of the past. When the people got through with their cups of coffee or tea, mostly the last, two women went around the table, one with a big bowl for us to lean back and empty our slops into, ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... and "barbaric"—something which one might expect from an "uncivilised Goth," a rough backwoods-man who had no respect for the established rules of classical art and who built his "modern horrors" to please his own low tastes without a decent regard for the examples of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... democracy detected in him no taint of the patronizing or supercilious, and if he was new to the backwoods, he paid his arrears of knowledge with the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... village in the backwoods of Michigan or Minnesota, and transport it to a quiet spot by a well sheltered harbor of Lilliputian size. Cover the roofs of some buildings with iron, shingles or boards from other regions. Cover the balance with thatch of long grass, and erect chimneys that just peer above the ridge ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... them was a boy of about nine. In the background was a miserable hovel made of crude lumber and patched windows. This couple and their baby had been discovered by a geological survey outfit living in the backwoods hills. Relief, aid, and help were being rushed, and the legislature was considering ways and means of their schooling. Neither of them could read ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... drafted militia company in guarding Continental stores here [Fort Burd] in 1778." The term "Big Knives" or "Long Knives" may have had reference either to the long knives carried by early white hunters, or the swords worn by backwoods militia officers. See Roosevelt's Winning of the West, I., ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... morning of the 22nd of September, 1827, the Angel of the Lord delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr., an ignorant farmer-youth in a "backwoods" part of New York State, some plates which had "the appearance of gold". As we know from the scriptures, it is the habit of the Angel of the Lord to appear in unexpected places and to make miraculous revelations to men in humble walks of life; so, as ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... located in the middle of a ten-acre lot. It was approached by a straight walk, paved with a mixture of sand and tar, similar to that which the reader may have seen in the Champs Elysees. I do not know whether my backwoods friend or the Parisian pavior was the first inventor of this composition; but I am satisfied the corn-cracker had not stolen it from the stone-cracker. The walk was lined with fruit-bearing shrubs, and directly in front of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... path, and one path only, leads to what all men desire—peace and happiness. One path, and one path only, leads to what all men know they ought to seek—purity and godliness. We are like men in the backwoods, our paths go circling round and round, we have lost our way. 'The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them, for he knoweth not how to come to the city.' Jesus Christ has cut a path through the forest. Tread you in it, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... my eyes and almost fancy I see your home in the backwoods. There are your two sisters running about ...
— Our American Cousin • Tom Taylor
... matter, only she's poky, and doesn't seem to fit in somehow. You would understand if you had seen her the day she came. Mrs. Gray has dressed her up, as you might be sure she would; but then she looked like the backwoods, didn't ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... Womanhood," and other ethical works of the day, that a sister's influence is illimitable, and she felt besides an added weight of responsibility towards her motherless sister and brothers. "I don't know, papa," she said at last, "unless we all take to the backwoods, live in a wigwam, and feast on the fruits of the chase. Edward chafes a good deal under the ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... an apple having a slightly different flavour to what it had in this country. You could always distinguish an American apple by its peculiar piquancy—a sub-acid piquancy, a wild strawberry piquancy, a sort of woodland, forest, backwoods delicacy of its own. And so on, and so on—"talk, talk, talk," ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Not without abundant New Testament antecedents, it naturalized itself at once on our soil as a natural expedient for scattered frontier populations unprovided with settled institutions. By a natural process of evolution, adapting itself to other environments and uses, the backwoods camp-meeting has grown into the "Chautauqua" assembly, which at so many places besides the original center at Chautauqua Lake has grown into an important and most characteristic ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Clark is coming," said the schoolmaster thoughtfully. "It is wonderful what the energy and directing mind of one man can do. That name alone is enough to change the nature of a whole campaign. 'Tis lucky that we have this Caesar of the backwoods to defend us. What is your ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... indicated high cultivation. She had evidently mingled in refined society in this country and in Europe, and it was a strange freak of fortune that had reduced her to a menial condition in the family of a backwoods planter. ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... blood-curdling scenes or nothing startling or sensational in the plot or characters. The story, however, may be regarded as a biting sarcasm on a hypocritical society in which a gang of instructors of dark character at a middle school in a backwoods town plays a prominent part. The hero of the story is made a victim of their annoying intrigues, but finally comes out triumphant by smashing the petty red tapism, knocking down the sham pretentions and by actual use of the fist on the Head ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... family, emigrated from Scotland about the year of 1843, and settled upon a new farm in the backwoods, in the township of R. in Eastern Canada. I can say but little regarding his early life, but have been informed that he was the eldest of quite a large family of sons and daughters; and also that he was a dutiful son as well as a kind and affectionate ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... fall into excessive raptures over the barbarian's kindness. Emboldened by my sympathy, she told me how she had given up, little by little, what she imagined to be the weakness of her early education, until she found that she acquired but little strength in her new experience. How, translated to a backwoods society, she was hated by the women, and called proud and "fine," and how her dear husband lost popularity on that account with his fellows. How, led partly by his roving instincts, and partly from other circumstances, he started with her to California. ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... boundary, bounds, confine, enclave, term, bourn, verge, curbstone^, but, pale, reservation; termination, terminus; stint, frontier, precinct, marches; backwoods. boundary line, landmark; line of demarcation, line of circumvallation^; pillars of Hercules; Rubicon, turning point; ne plus ultra [Lat.]; sluice, floodgate. Adj. definite; conterminate^, conterminable^; terminal, frontier; bordering. Adv. thus far, thus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... rattlesnake of extraordinary size. They experienced inconvenience from musquitoes in a few damp spots, just as they would have done from gnats in England. In their late expeditions in the Illinois, where they led the lives of thorough backwoods-men, if they were so unfortunate as to pitch their tent on the edge of a creek, or near a swamp, and mismanaged their fire, they were teased with musquitoes, as they would have been in the fens of Cambridgeshire: ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... enough to breed yaller fever and could be felt just as easy as cotton velvet! A cross old woman came next, and whose look would have given any reasonable man the double-breasted blues before breakfast; alongside of her was a rale backwoods preacher, with the biggest and ugliest mouth ever got up since the flood. He was flanked by the low comedian of the party, an Indiana Hoosier, 'gwine down to Orleans to get an army contract' to supply the forces ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the sea-board. The Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau fetches his Indian Student not from the outskirts of the settlement, but from the remote backwoods of the State: ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... In the backwoods of Cambodia live two mysterious sovereigns known as the King of the Fire and the King of the Water. Their fame is spread all over the south of the great Indo-Chinese peninsula; but only a faint echo of it has reached the West. Down to a few years ago no European, so far as is known, had ever ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... little corner called New England, which is Yankee land. The English themselves planted it there, two hundred and fifty years ago, and there it remains; it has never spread. But England talks through her nose yet; the Londoner and the backwoods New-Englander pronounce 'know' and 'cow' alike, and then the Briton unconsciously satirizes himself by making fun of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... reason, the only reason, for your coming to me with your impertinent question?" Miss Treville laughed oddly. "Really! Do you know, I have always suspected that the little savage whom he brought from somewhere in the backwoods regarded him as rather more than a guardian, or a brother ... that was the pretty fiction, wasn't it?" she added, with honey coating the ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... young mother, did not complain. She, too, had grown up among the rude scenes of the backwoods. She had never known ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... beyond all earthly scenes. Only those who have learned thus to look beyond the material horizon of our little day have that beautiful inner light which shone in the eyes of Auntie Sue—the teacher of a backwoods school. ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... the right principle," said Stover, assuming a deliberate look; "but crude, very crude, backwoods, primitive, and all that sort ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... a coach, in hope of seeing the scenery, and the day turns out hopelessly rainy, no gentleman in the coach below ever thinks of offering to change seats with her, though it pour torrents. In America, the roughest backwoods steamboat or canal-boat captain always, as a matter of course, considers himself charged with the protection of the ladies. 'Place aux dames' is written in the heart of many a shaggy fellow who could not utter a French word ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... first united efforts of human industry were made. The tongue of arid land was the cradle of those English colonies which were destined one day to become the United States of America. The centre of power still remains here; whilst in the backwoods the true elements of the great people to whom the future control of the continent belongs are gathering ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... "There was a rough backwoods bunch always drifting about Clinch's place in those days. There were fights. And not so many miles from Clinch's there was highway robbery and a ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... festal dances, and funeral dances, and military dances, and "mediatorial" dances, and bacchanalian dances. Queens and lords have swayed to and fro in their gardens; and the rough men of the backwoods in this way have roused up the echo of the forest. There seems to be something in lively and coherent sounds to evoke the movement of hand and foot, whether cultured or uncultured. Men passing the street unconsciously keep ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... the floor, passing her little hand-shuttle through the cotton-woof. Now she sang—and sweetly she sang—some merry air of the American backwoods that had been taught her by her mother; anon some romantic lay of Old Spain—the "Troubadour," perhaps—a fine piece of music, that gives such happy expression to the modern song "Love not." This "Troubadour" was a favourite with Rosita; and when she took up ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... It was herself who walked and moved, yet all the time she seemed to stand aside and let another self think and feel and act. A composite odour of groceries, bacon, tobacco, and cheap clothes met her as she entered the rough, homely shed, which was a typical emporium of the backwoods; but she had no time to analyse the odours, being at once attracted by Katherine, who stood at a tall desk by the window, entering items in a ledger. At the same time Katherine glanced up and saw the visitor entering the door. She flushed at the sight, ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... as much unknown to us as the backwoods. My father alone had been born and bred to village life and habits, for my mother had spent her youth in a succession of seaport towns, frequented by men-of-war. We heard, too, that Chantry House was very secluded, with only a few cottages ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... very fair roads toward the rising sun. I am not long out before meeting with that characteristic feature of a scene on the Western plains, a "prairie schooner;" and meeting prairie schooners will now be a daily incident of my eastward journey. Many of these "pilgrims" come from the backwoods of Missouri and Arkansas, or the rural districts of some other Western State, where the persevering, but at present circumscribed, cycler has not yet had time to penetrate, and the bicycle is therefore to them a wonder to be gazed at and commented on, generally - it must be ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... satisfy our consciences, with single-loading rifles; but along came the inventive Yankee and produced revolvers and repeaters, and Gatling guns, and magazine guns—guns that carried a dozen shots at a time. I didn't wonder at the curiosity exhibited in this direction by a backwoods Virginian we captured one night. The first remark he made was, "I would like to see one of them thar new-fangled weepons of yourn. They tell me, sah, it's a most remarkable eenstrument. They say, sah, it's a kind o' repeatable, which you can load it up enough on Sunday to fiah it ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... the determination to seek his fortune in the then almost unknown Canadian West had been growing upon him, and as it grew he shrank more and more from disclosing his plans to his fiancee. Had she been one of the country girls of the neighbourhood, a daughter of the sturdy backwoods pioneers, bred to hard work in field and barnyard, he would have hesitated less. But she was sprung from gentler stock. It seemed almost profane to think of her in the lonely life of a homesteader on the bleak, unsettled plains—to see her in the monotony and ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... lips, that were continually curving into the sunniest smiles. His voice, deep and musical, instantly attracted attention; and his address, though not without soldierly brusqueness, was sincere and courteous. There was one thing his backwoods detractors could never forgive: he always dressed well; and sometimes wore the military insignia presented to him by different organizations. One of these, a gold circle, inscribed with the legend, NON NOBIS, SED PRO PATRIA, was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... 1742, Robertson was ten years younger than Washington. But this boy's early life was very different from young George Washington's, for little James was born in a backwoods cabin, and his father and mother were too poor to send him to school. So he grew up to manhood without being able to ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... It didn't take a hundred years after Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines, in Haiti, for the blacks to shuck off French civilization and go back to grass huts and human sacrifice—to make another little Central Africa out of it, in the backwoods districts, at any rate. And we—have had a thousand, Beatrice, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... He had a harsh untunable voice, his father's, but harsher, and he spoke the drawling dialect of the backwoods. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... at your feet! The nephew and heir of the great Firm voluntarily surrendering consideration, ease, riches, unbounded luxury for the sake of the heathen—choosing a wigwam instead of a West End palace; parched maize rather than the banquet; the backwoods instead of the luxurious park; the Red Indian rather than the club and the theatre; to be a despised minister rather than a magnate of this great city; nay, or to take his place among the influential ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her say, as if in self-argument. "It wouldn't stand many wearings before it would look a sight. It wouldn't wash—man as you are, Mr. Mostyn, you know it wouldn't wash. I'm going to take it off and try to have some sense. I'm in no position to try to make a show. School-teachers here in the backwoods have no right to excite comment by the gaudy finery they wear. I'm paid by people's taxes. Did you know that? I might find myself out of a job—out of employment, I mean. Some of these crusty old fellows that believe it is wrong to have an organ in church had just as soon as not enter ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... of seventeen he began to earn his own living as a surveyor. It was no light work in those days, for the country where he had most to do was in the backwoods. Many a day he trudged through the forest from dawn to sunset, and lay down at night with nothing but a blanket between him and the stormy sky. But he was faithful and careful, ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... way. Lucy Marsh and I had a long talk over her that night, and we put our heads together to concoct a nice little bit of punishment for her. You know she's horridly shy, and as gauche as if she lived in the backwoods, and we meant to 'send her to Coventry.' We had it all arranged, and a whole lot of girls would have joined us, for it's contrary to the spirit of a place like this to allow girls of the Priscilla Peel type to become ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... hoped that Mr. AUGUSTUS JOHN will be able to accompany Lord BEAVERBROOK to Canada this summer, so that his lordship may gratify his lifelong ambition to be painted by Mr. JOHN, with the primeval backwoods for a setting, in the character of a coureur-des-bois, of the type immortalized by Sir GILBERT PARKER ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... mountains. As mountain people go she was, already, a rich woman, but now dreams of mightier wealth swept through her brain tumultuously. Ah, she would buy happiness for all her friends when she had, later on, unearthed the secret treasures of her backwoods clearing! Maybe she would, sometime, have a ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... society, and never again recovered any real zest for it. He sometimes thought of imitating his grandfather under like circumstances with a difference—he thought of flying, not to London, but to the backwoods of America, or some place where he should never see a white face, and becoming a "wild man," a savage—a personage of whom he always believed himself to share many of the characteristics. Only consideration for his little girls deterred him from such a course. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Rights Democrats. Rising from humble beginnings, he was animated by the most intense dislike of the "slavocracy," as he called the political aristocracy of the South. Like many other American leaders he was proud of his humble origin, but unlike many others he never sloughed off his backwoods crudeness. He continually boasted of himself and vilified the aristocrats, who in return treated him badly. His dislike of them was so marked that Isham G. Harris, a rival politician, remarked that "if Johnson were a snake, ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... hunter and a trapper in the backwoods of New Brunswick, where his instinctive knowledge of the wild kindreds had won him a success which presently sickened him. His heart revolted against the slaughter of the creatures which he found so interesting, and for a time, his occupation gone, he had drifted aimlessly about the settlements. ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... numerous packs of skins. We would then make the best of our way home from our distant hunting-grounds; transporting our spoils, sometimes in canoes along the rivers, sometimes on horseback over land, and our return would often be celebrated by feasting and dancing, in true backwoods style. I have given you some idea of our hunting; let me now give you ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... and they were soon seated in an alehouse, which, as it was very new, and stood in an exposed and solitary station, was less crowded than those nearer to the centre of the port. It was but a shed of timber, much like a block-house in the backwoods of to-day, and was coarsely furnished with a press or two, a number of naked benches, and boards set upon barrels to play the part of tables. In the middle, and besieged by half a hundred violent draughts, a fire of wreck-wood blazed and vomited ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... people, as a hardy woman who could make herself one of them. William, who did not suspect the presence of the dog, grew faintly alarmed, but I persevered till the last man staggered surfeited from the feast. It was my first and, I may add, almost my only triumph as a minister's wife on a backwoods circuit. ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... Almighty, He would hunt this ravening evil that had scathed and torn him so; He would seize it by the vitals; he would crush it day and night; he Would so pursue its footsteps, so return it blow for blow, That Old Brown, Osawatomie Brown, Should be a name to swear by, in backwoods or ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... long-legged, sallow-looking backwoodsman talk of having come lately from Paris, or Mecca, when instead of meaning the capital of La grande nation, or the city of "the holy prophet," he spoke of some town containing a few hundred inhabitants, situated in the backwoods of Kentucky, or amidst the gloomy forests of Indiana. The Americans too speak in prospective, when they talk of great places; no doubt "calculating" that, one day, all the mighty productions of the old world will be surpassed by their ingenuity ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... big, rawboned and serious, is a product of the backwoods and a crack rifle shot. Quick thinking and pluck bring him a scholarship to Clarkville School where he is branded "grind" and "dub" by classmates. How his batting brings them first place in the League and how he secures his appointment to West Point make CRACKER STANTON an up-to-the-minute ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... a queer-looking thing! Her frock comes down to her shoe-tops like an old woman's and that sun-bonnet! Why she must have just come in from the backwoods!" ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... God. In one of these meetings of public thanksgiving Brigham had said from the tabernacle pulpit: "What is the strength of this man Lincoln? It is like a rope of sand. He is as weak as water,—an ignorant, Godless shyster from the backwoods of Illinois. I feel disgraced in having been born under a government that has so little power for truth and right. And now it will be broken in pieces like ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... these dwellers in the backwoods that but a small percentage of tigers are man-eaters, perhaps not five per cent., otherwise village after village would be depopulated; as it is the yearly tale of lives lost ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... backwoods Ohio boy who rose to prominence. Everyday humor of American rustic life permeates ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... again. Do you know why Uncle Grid lived so poor and scrimped and yet left no money? He'd been taking care of a whole family grandfather had beside ours; and paying back some people grandfather did out of a lot of money on a timber deal fifty years ago; and making it up to a little village in the backwoods that grandfather persuaded to bond itself for a railroad that he knew ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... G. A. R. veteran was dying. He had come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods. He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey's readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... was Menehwehna who, with inscrutable face, helped John ashore, suffering the others only to hold the canoe steady. John tried hard to collect his thoughts to face this new situation. He had dreamed of falling among savages in these backwoods; but he had fallen among folk gentle in manner and speech, anxious to show him courtesy; folk to whom (as in an instant he divined) truth and uprightness were dearer than life and judged as delicately as by his own family at home in Devonshire. How came ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Israel was at the beginning of its long training, that not even a divine revelation could produce harvest in seedtime, and that to look for a final and complete deliverance from the 'veil that was spread over all nations,' at this stage, is like expecting a newly reclaimed bit of the backwoods to grow grass as thick and velvety as has carpeted some lawn that has been mown and cared for for a century. Grave condemnation is the due of these short-memoried rebels, who set up their 'abomination' in sight of the fire on Sinai; but that should not prevent our recognising the evidence which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... high-pitched voice of the balmy weather and the sweet profusion of birds and flowers, when there was more like to be a "sweet profusion" of Indians; and I nigh stifled with laughter to see this lumbering, free-voiced forest-runner transformed to a mincing, anxious, backwoods macaroni at the ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... not been for the cross old aunt, Rebecca would still have been at Sunnybrook; and from the standpoint of educational advantages, or indeed advantages of any sort, she might as well have been in the backwoods," returned Adam. ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... overnight here they took a stage, and for a whole day travelled over pleasant roads, through sweet-scented forests of spruce and balsam, broken here by clearings and thrifty farms, until at last the journey ended in the pretty little backwoods settlement of ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... C. Busler, near Collomsville, Lycoming County, have had arms loving pilgrims of note from all over the State to learn the last dying secrets of the Kentucky rifles, which, despite their name, were mostly made in Pennsylvania. Often the backwoods arms enthusiast would insist that the shutters be closed and the smith's work carried on by candle-light, lest a passing hechs cast a glance upon the barrel, which would ever afterward be deprived of the ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... an ornary lot of backwoods fellers, livin' away out here in the mountains and the brush, but God Almighty 'ain't forgot us, all the same. He sent a little youngster once to put a heartful of happiness into men, and He's sent this ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... or drive cattle, or chop down trees in the backwoods," she replied, lifting demure eyebrows. "Oh, Dick, don't be foolish. ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... world thinks," Gillespie said, and he spoke of the small backwoods settlement as if it were some great center of opinion such as in great communities dispenses fame and infamy, and makes its judgments supremely dreaded. "Besides," he faltered, "no one is knowing but ourselves to his coming back. It can seem ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... to acquire information, when he could obtain it at first hand, and hence as they sat beside the fire, watching the rosy flames dance and play at tag, he put many more questions to the backwoods boy concerning the secrets of the profession, and learned various new things that up to this time he ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... of ground from his neighbour, as if that would make them happier. Was that not wise? Which was the wiser, the chief killing human beings, to take from them some few square miles which men had brought into cultivation already, or the monk, leaving the cultivated land, and going out into the backwoods to clear the forest, and till the virgin soil? Which was the child of wisdom, I ask again? And do not tell me that the old monk worked only for fanatical and superstitious ends. It is not so. I know well his fanaticism and his superstition, and the depths of its ignorance ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... his hand into a breast pocket and drew out a little packet. There was a certain intonation of his voice which, at first made me think that he was not an American, but in that intonation there was really nothing foreign. He was certainly a stranger, he might be from the backwoods, and both his manner and speech appeared odd to me; but soon I had no doubt about his being my countryman. In fact, there was something in his general appearance which seemed to ...
— Amos Kilbright; His Adscititious Experiences • Frank R. Stockton
... lived in the country," returned Sam. "If you'd wasted twenty-six years in the backwoods, as I did, you'd know that every minute you spend outside of New ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... unpainted, wooden building, located in the middle of a ten-acre lot. It was approached by a straight walk, paved with a mixture of sand and tar, similar to that which the reader may have seen in the Champs Elysees. I do not know whether my backwoods friend or the Parisian pavior was the first inventor of this composition; but I am satisfied the corn-cracker had not stolen it from the stone-cracker. The walk was lined with fruit-bearing shrubs, and directly in front of the house were ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that, wherever he may be—whether in the backwoods of America, or digging for gold in California, or wandering about the United Kingdom—there is little fear that he will quit his place of safety to dare the dangerous ground of West Lynne. Had I been you, sir, I should have laughed ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... tramped far and wide, to many a backwoods hamlet, looking vainly for a job at any wages. The season was the worst ever known on the river, and before January the shanties were discharging men, so threatening was the outlook for lumbermen, and so glutted with timber the markets of ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... for which he really cared. He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle's, and muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of his life made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any kind, and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong, and who had a limitless fund ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Frank's failure to rescue the papers held by Dick, and alarmed by the latter's letter telling him of young Goodrich's confession, had come into the wild backwoods district to await developments. He was more determined now than ever, to gain possession of the evidence of his crime, and in his heart was a fast-growing desire to silence, once for all, the man whose steady purpose and integrity was such an obstacle in ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... principle," said Stover, assuming a deliberate look; "but crude, very crude, backwoods, primitive, and all that sort ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... is no longer entertained by Eastern people, that going to the West, or the 'Backwoods,' as it was formerly called, is to remove to a heathen land, to a land of ignorance and barbarism, where the people do nothing but rob, and fight, and gouge! Some parts of the West have obtained this character, but most undeservedly, from the Fearons, ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... of the beat men I over knew," said Phoebus. "He was a remarkable instance of energy combined with softness of disposition. In my opinion, however, he ought never to have visited Europe: he was made to clear the backwoods, and govern man by the power of his hatchet and the mildness of his words. He was fighting for freedom all his life, yet slavery made and slavery destroyed him. Among all the freaks of Fate nothing is more ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... affairs of government and society. Are our women unfitter than the far lower negroes, to whom full political equality was conceded in North America? And shall a highly intellectual woman be vested with lesser rights than the rudest, least cultured man,—an ignorant day-laborer of the backwoods of Pomerania, or an ultramontane canalman, for instance, and all because accident let these come into the world as men? The son has greater rights than his mother, from whom, perchance, he derives his best qualities, the very qualities that alone make him ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... words reached the ears of Matheson, and set up a curious train of thought as he drove in his cab to his office in the Rue Laffitte. The words carried him back to a forest-clearing in the backwoods of Ontario, where he and his half-brother had made holiday camp some eighteen years before. They were comparing ambitions—two young men unusually alike in features but very different in temperament and will-power. John Riviere, the elder of the two, was dreaming of fame in the paths ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... the custom of the backwoods people in that section of country to cross the Sacramento on the Yellow Dragon cable. For this service a small toll was charged, which tolls the Yellow Dragon Company applied to ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... an ambitious, backwoods Ohio boy who rose to prominence. Everyday humor of American rustic ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... earning a living. I was not nice or hard to please. I just got down on my knees and begged for work, anything and anywhere. I wrote to Hampton, Tuskegee, and a dozen other places. They politely declined, with many regrets. The trustees of a backwoods Tennessee town considered me, but were eventually afraid. Then, suddenly, Wilberforce offered to let me teach Latin and Greek at $750 ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... And he has no room for me in his trade. And of course I can't begin to study for law or physic now, when my father wants me to earn something. It's all very well to say I'm wrong to go into the Church; but those who say so might as well tell me to go into the backwoods." ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... had committed no "disorders" save that of carrying off the mules and horses of the convents; but when we think of the wild, free, peril-scorning life led in the backwoods of America, of how they recognized no law save their commander's orders, how little used he had been to receive command from any, it will be easily understood how this wild, tanned, quaintly dressed band filled the inhabitants of the towns through which they passed with terror and dismay. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... we had traveled, me and my folks alone, And quick we went to workin' a piece of land of our own; Small was our backwoods quarters, and things looked mighty cheap; But every thing we put in there, we ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... After staying overnight here they took a stage, and for a whole day travelled over pleasant roads, through sweet-scented forests of spruce and balsam, broken here by clearings and thrifty farms, until at last the journey ended in the pretty little backwoods settlement ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... with, and had returned a positive answer that no inquest had been held, or any body found, which could by any possibility be that of the young Englishman. The only alternative appeared to be that he had taken the first opportunity to break all the old ties, and had slipped away to the backwoods or to the States to commence life anew under an altered name. Why he should do this no one professed to know, but that he had done it appeared only too probable from the facts. Hence many a deep growl of righteous anger rose from the brawny smacksmen when Mary ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the green zenith of June when MacPhairrson went away. When he returned, hobbling up with his tiny bundle, the backwoods world was rioting in the scarlet and gold of young October. He was quite cured. He felt singularly well. But a desperate loneliness saddened his home-coming. He knew his cabin would be just as he had left it, there on its steep little foam-ringed ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... publican. My mess consisted of a Colonial, an Irishman, a Hollander, a German, a Boer, and a Jew. It must not be imagined, however, that we were a cosmopolitan crowd, for the remaining hundred and ninety-four were nearly all true Boers, mostly of the backwoods type, extremely conservative, and inclined to be rather condescending in their attitude towards the clean-shaven town-dwellers. The almost universal respect inspired by a beard or a paunch is a poor tribute to ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... rife in the relations of men and women, and of parents and children. It is true that the habits of a community can make such cruelty rare, but these habits, I fear, are only to be produced through the prolonged reign of law. Experience of backwoods communities, mining camps and other such places seems to show that under new conditions men easily revert to a more barbarous attitude and practice. It would seem, therefore, that, while human nature remains as it is, there will be more liberty for all in a community where some ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... Ella Barnwell. Heaven forbid, sweet lady, that it be thou as met with this terrible misfortune!—but ef it be, by the Power that made me, I swar to follow on thy trail; and ef I meet any of thy captors, then, Betsey, I'll just call on you for a backwoods sentiment." ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... served him in the graver experiences of life which followed. His stay in Quebec was short. A study of the ancient citadel and its incomplete fortifications occupied his time. In the summer of 1803 he was stationed at York, a hamlet carved out of the backwoods, sustaining a handful of people, but famous as the gathering-place of many wise men. He found that desertions in Upper Canada had become too frequent. The temptations offered by a long line of frontier easy of access, and the ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... one that might have dazzled him a little, if he had not had a strong counteracting influence in the thought of all he had left in Canada. He found himself, without hesitation or difficulty, but with a suddenness which was like the transformations in a fairy tale, changed from a Backwoods farmer's son into an important member of an old and wealthy family. Only the other day he had been working hard and holding up to himself as the reward of his work, the hope of becoming a successful provincial lawyer; now he was the heir, and all but the actual possessor, of a splendid ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... Harlesden or his wife. I fancy that he supposed me ignorant of the matter, or thought that if I had heard of it, I should never connect the respectable Dr. Black of Harlesden with a poor garreteer in the backwoods of London. He was a strange man, and as we sat together smoking, I often wondered whether he were mad or sane, for I think the wildest dreams of Paracelsus and the Rosicrucians would appear plain and sober fact compared with ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... sometimes a pitiless greed, and always a resistless desire. Yet it was not until the French gave up this region that they could even venture lawlessly into it, and it was not until it fell from Great Britain to the new power of the United States that the borderers began openly to press into the backwoods, singly as hunters and trappers, in families as neighborhoods as the founders of villages and towns. The pioneers felt that they were going to take their own wherever they found it, from the savages who could not and would not use it, and they were right, ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... the night on deck, and during it he talked a good deal about America, and the independent wild life he led in the backwoods and prairies. The conversation made a considerable impression on my mind, and I afterwards was constantly asking myself why I should go back in the ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... him, but he returned my gaze with interest. There was a deal of backwoods justice in his rough reasoning, although its morality was indefensible. It was the law of property expounded a la Lynch. What is very certain is, that in a new country especially, absenteeism ought to be scouted as a crime against the community. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... to Florida—the land of the palms!" announced the manager. "You know I spoke of tentative plans for a drama down there when we were in the backwoods. Now I have everything arranged, and we will leave on a steamer for St. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... man's vices, a philanthropist without a philanthropist's dreams, a christian without pretensions, a ruler without the pride of place or power, an ambitious man without selfishness, and a successful man without vanity. Humble man of the backwoods, boatman, axman, hired laborer, clerk, surveyor, captain, legislator, lawyer, debater, orator, politician, statesman. President, savior of the republic, emancipator of a race, ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... pretty close for the backwoods!" said Ernest Wilton lightly, as he quickened his steps to join Seth Allport, who had hailed out to the two stragglers to "hurry up," for the "lazy lubbers" that they were; the ex-mate of the Susan Jane having awaited with some considerable impatience, for a rather unconscionable ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... then make the best of our way home from our distant hunting-grounds; transporting our spoils, sometimes in canoes along the rivers, sometimes on horseback over land, and our return would often be celebrated by feasting and dancing, in true backwoods style. I have given you some idea of our hunting; let me now give you a sketch ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... off. If the enemy was this barbarian from the backwoods, well and good! His mind was again relieved; he nodded to acquaintances and looked quite cheerful. He had for a moment felt aggrieved that anybody should be grumbling behind his back, but that was now forgotten; it ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... doubtfully. This Captain Fort, who was a friend of Leila's, and who had twice been to see them, puzzled him. He had a frank face, a frank voice, but queer opinions, or so it seemed to, Pierson—little bits of Moslemism, little bits of the backwoods, and the veldt; queer unexpected cynicisms, all sorts of side views on England had lodged in him, and he did not hide them. They came from him like bullets, in that frank voice, and drilled little holes in the listener. Those critical sayings flew so much more poignantly from one who had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... rawboned and serious, is a product of the backwoods and a crack rifle shot. Quick thinking and pluck bring him a scholarship to Clarkville School where he is branded "grind" and "dub" by classmates. How his batting brings them first place in the League and how he secures his appointment to West Point make CRACKER STANTON an up-to-the-minute ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... America there has been no man who started lower and climbed higher than Abraham Lincoln, the backwoods boy. He never "slipped back." He always kept going ahead. He broadened his mind, enlarged his outlook, and led his companions rather than let them lead him. He was jolly company, good-natured, kind-hearted, fond of jokes and stories and a good time generally; but he was the champion ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... process Rudolph of Habsburg is made to stand out as a light shining in the darkness. In Germanic eyes Ottokar's fault was that of being a Slav, successful and of great ability. I cannot agree with the German chronicler's estimate of Rudolph. We are expected to accept him as a modest sort of backwoods peer, the kind that wears flannel next its skin and keeps its small estates unencumbered. We have also a pretty picture in verse of this Rudolph. He is described as meeting a priest carrying the Host, on the bank of a foaming mountain torrent somewhere among the Alps where the ruins of the ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... I am pretty certain, must belong to Mrs. Trollope; I read it, probably, in a tale of hers connected with the backwoods of America, where the absence of such a farewell must unspeakably aggravate the gloom at any rate belonging to a household separation of that eternal character occurring amongst the shadows ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... itself into every part of the country. If we inquire what the world thought of it, we have still more to raise our wonder; for, not to mention the excitement it caused in England, the movement and its party-names were known to the police of Italy and to the backwoods-men of America. And so it proceeded, getting stronger and stronger every year, till it came into collision with the Nation and that Church of the Nation, which it began by professing ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... Paull served a month's duty in a drafted militia company in guarding Continental stores here [Fort Burd] in 1778." The term "Big Knives" or "Long Knives" may have had reference either to the long knives carried by early white hunters, or the swords worn by backwoods militia officers. See Roosevelt's Winning of the ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... teachable by events, and has now spent a year in a very arduous course of education; he has a flexible mind, capable of much expansion, and convertible towards far loftier studies and activities than those of his early life; and if he came to Washington a backwoods humorist, he has already transformed himself into as good a statesman (to speak modestly) as ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... practise law and to edit Le Defricheur, hitherto published at L'Avenir and controlled by Dorion's younger brother Eric, who had recently died. Largely in the hope that the country life would restore his health, he agreed, and late in 1866 left Montreal for the backwoods village. ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... With lazy yawns he slips towards the ground, Then with an idle whistle lifts his load And shambles home along the country road That stretches on, fringed out with stumps and weeds, And finally unto the backwoods leads, Where forests wait with giant trunk and bough The axe of pioneer, the ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... monster of the sea to my backwoods eyes; enough to pluck the heart out of a man. Has either of you ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... coming of the canal put an end to the log cabins, the spinning-wheels, the ox-sleds, the corduroy roads, the miasmatic swamps, the wolves, the bears, the fever, the ague, the blue pill, and all the rude makeshifts and backwoods' evils which to your forefathers and mine were stern reality. These were the days when men wore their coat collars high in the back and small clothes were lengthening into trousers; when veterans of the Revolution still walked the land hale and strong, ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... quarters, and in the midst of a grove of pines, whose soft brown tassels covered the ground all around it, stood the negro meetinghouse. It was built of unhewn logs, its crevices chinked with clay, and was large enough to seat about two hundred persons. Though its exterior resembled a backwoods barn, its interior had a neat and tasteful appearance. Evergreen boughs hid its rough beams and bare shingled roof, and long wreaths of pine leaves hung in graceful festoons from its naked walls and narrow windows. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... but not obliterated, while her conversation indicated high cultivation. She had evidently mingled in refined society in this country and in Europe, and it was a strange freak of fortune that reduced her to a menial condition in the family of a backwoods planter. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... latter the next morning at breakfast—"to think that the backwoods of America should have turned us out such ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... filled him with a new eagerness to observe these wonderful little engineers with other eyes than those of the mere hunter and trapper. In the face of all the Boy's exact details he grew almost deferential, quite laying aside his usual backwoods pose of indifference and half derision. He made no move to go to bed, but refilled his pipe and watched his young comrade's face with shrewd, bright ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... with blue, Though the target and bosses are bright in the Highlands, The axe in your hands might be blunted well, too. Then forward—and see ye be huntsmen true, And, as erst the red deer felling, So fell ye the Gaul, and so strike ye all The tribes in the backwoods dwelling. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... they are as apt to kill moose and caribou as bear and deer; but elsewhere the two last, with an occasional cougar or wolf, are the beasts of chase which they follow. Nowadays as these old hunters die there is no one to take their places, though there are still plenty of backwoods settlers in all of the regions named who do a great deal of hunting and trapping. Such an old hunter rarely makes his appearance at the settlements except to dispose of his peltry and hides in exchange for ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... taught him great sympathy. His great sympathy for men gave him great influence over men. As a lonely motherless little boy living in the pitiless poverty of the backwoods he learned both humility and appreciation. Then from a gentle step-mother he learned the ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers
... produced an apple having a slightly different flavour to what it had in this country. You could always distinguish an American apple by its peculiar piquancy—a sub-acid piquancy, a wild strawberry piquancy, a sort of woodland, forest, backwoods delicacy of its own. And so on, and so on—"talk, talk, talk," as Mrs. ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... age of seventeen he began to earn his own living as a surveyor. It was no light work in those days, for the country where he had most to do was in the backwoods. Many a day he trudged through the forest from dawn to sunset, and lay down at night with nothing but a blanket between him and the stormy sky. But he was faithful and careful, ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... young man was almost as tall as Humphrey, but of a much slighter build; yet he was wiry and muscular, as could well be seen, and plainly well used to the life of the wild woodlands. His dress was that of the backwoods, dressed deerskin being the chief material used. Both travellers wore moccasins on their feet, and carried the usual ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of that wild daylight ride of Tomlinson and Bell, by comparison with which, my children, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, was as tame as the pitching of a rocking-horse in a boy's nursery—on that history-making twelfth of August, of the year 1782, when these two backwoods riflemen, during that same Revolution the Kentuckians then fighting a branch of that same British army, rushed out of Bryan's Station for the rousing of the settlements and the saving of the West—hemp was growing tall and thick near the walls of ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... son Paddy, a lad under ten years old, and little for his age. One midwinter night she was taken desperately ill, and Paddy, reckless of the terrors of the midnight solitudes, ran wildly to get help. The moon was high and full, and the lifeless backwoods road was a narrow, bright, white thread between the silent black masses of the spruce forest. Now and then, as he remembered afterwards, his ear caught a sound of light feet following him in the dark beyond the roadside. ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... Unfortunately it is not the woman—nor the man either, for that matter—who drives around in a car, that will buckle down and do this nation's work! I also knew there were others like myself who think this backwoods bushland God's own earth and second only to Paradise—but few! And these young girls that quake at their loneliness and yet go for a pittance and fill a mission! But was not my ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... what every settler who builds himself a hut in the backwoods must feel, Bert. It is the work of every wood-cutter and charcoal-burner; it is a good deal like the work of every miner. You have been brought ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... a pine-tree to extend his father's clearing, they found the settler's son, a brawny fellow about Cyrus's age, in buckskin leggings and coon-skin cap, who wielded his axe with arms which were tough and knotted as pine limbs. He bawled to them in the forceful language of the backwoods, which to unaccustomed ears sounded a trifle barbaric, to keep out of the way until ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... doublin' the fence corner? Ye're a fine lot of jays up here in th' backwoods! Do I know him? Full well I do! An' that shows, ye what honest workin'men has got to come to, these days. Didn't ye see him sittin' there on that castin'? Th' bosses put him there to keep tricks on ye. ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... like the "Pathfinder Tales" of J. Fenimore Cooper, combine historical information relating to early pioneer days in America with interesting adventures in the backwoods. Although the same characters are continued throughout the series, each book is complete in itself, and, while based strictly on historical facts, is an interesting and exciting tale ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... it a coloured sectional map of some new township marked out in squares. These are the advertisements of an Atlantic or Australian line, or of both; and the editor is their agent. When the young ploughman resolves to quit the hamlet for the backwoods of America or the sheepwalks of Australia, he comes here to engage his berth. When the young farmer wearies of waiting for dead men's shoes—in no other way can he hope to occupy an English farm—he calls here and pays his passage-money, and his broad shoulders ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... among poor curates, and, when met with, were equally as small; and so it happened, that as the landowners usually resided, like Mr. Honeywood, among their own people, a gentleman would occasionally be as badly off for a neighbour, as though he had been a resident in the backwoods of Canada. This evil, however, was productive of good, in that ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... and asks her what she says to selling the Emporium and hunting them up. 'I don't care,' says she, and that was a good deal of a speech for her to make. 'Do you leave it to me?' says I. 'Uh-huh,' says she. 'We-e-e-ough!' says I," and with that Maizie lets out one of them backwoods college cries that brings Tidson ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... bank president, who began life as a waiter in a backwoods tavern, tells the story of his life, we all like to gather close about him and listen to his tale. Peter H. Burnett, the first Governor of California, and now the President of the Pacific Bank in San Francisco, has recently related his history, or the "Recollections of an Old Pioneer;" ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... that a sister's influence is illimitable, and she felt besides an added weight of responsibility towards her motherless sister and brothers. "I don't know, papa," she said at last, "unless we all take to the backwoods, live in a wigwam, and feast on the fruits of the chase. Edward chafes a good deal under the restraints ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... "I'm only a backwoods doctor, Dunwody," said Jamieson at length, as he began rebandaging the limb. "I reckon there's a heap of good surgeons up North that could make a finer job of this. God knows, I wish they'd had it, and not me. But with what's at hand, I've done the best ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... caught the phraseology of his companion, and avoiding his intensity, was less likely to offend his hearers. His manner was better subdued to the social tone of ordinary life, his voice lacked the sharp twang of the backwoods man; and, unlike John Cross, he was able to modulate it to those undertones, which, as we have before intimated, are so agreeable from the lips of young lovers and fashionable preachers. At all events, John Cross himself, was something ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... in the backwoods have so few of the comforts of civilisation,' began the other person, ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... long story," replied the visitor, "but I always had the idea that we should meet again. Your photograph has been with me all over the world. In the backwoods of Canada, in the bush of Australia, it has been my one comfort and guiding star. If ever I was tempted to do wrong, I used to take your photograph out and look ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... his resistance at Fort Detroit in 1763, and it is possible that Brant was in the thick of the fight in this vicinity. It is possible, too, that he was with Colonel Bouquet in August at the battle of Bushy Run, near Fort Pitt. In this engagement, after two days of strenuous backwoods fighting, the Indians were finally worsted. Pontiac's star had begun to set. With hopeless odds against him, the stubborn chief of the Ottawas kept up the struggle until the following year, but at last he was compelled ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... broke out the clearings of the original settlers had been extended, and some of the loyalists still lived, grown grey with time and hardened by the rough life of the backwoods. Their sons, many of whom had faint recollection of their early homes across the line, had grown up in an atmosphere of strictest loyalty to the British crown, and had put in long years in clearing the farms on which they lived and adding such comforts to their ...
— History of Farming in Ontario • C. C. James
... together during the early days of their occupation. The hut consisted of a mere square box, made by piling logs on top of one another, the spaces between being filled with mud, while the roof was formed of loose stone slabs. Huts of that sort are everywhere common among the isolation of the American backwoods; and isolated indeed they were, for the Garfields' nearest neighbours, when they first set up house, lived as far as seven miles ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... prematurely coarse in feature and soured in mind by daily toil and care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and utterly void of elevating inspirations... Only when the family had "moved" into the malarious backwoods of Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother, a woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the children, the shaggy-headed, ragged, barefooted, forlorn boy, then seven years old, "began to feel like a human being." Hard work ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... the firesides of the backwoods people, the conversation generally runs into hunting stories, Indian reminiscences, and wild tales of what the pioneers suffered while establishing themselves in their forest homes. One event of startling interest had occurred in the Suwanee country a few weeks before ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... had taught me that, in the prosecution of my chief hobby, I would also solve the problem of the most economical mode of living. In the backwoods and jungles no ceremony or etiquette provokes unnecessary expenditure; whilst the fewer men and material I took with me on my sporting excursions the better sport I always got, and the freer and more independent I was to carry on the chase. I need now only ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... fellowship, and invited him to make the opening prayer. It was considered a good prayer, generally speaking, but it was criticised as not containing anything attractive to young people. He was understood to be on his way to take charge of a backwoods church down in Aroostook County, where probably his prayers would be more acceptable ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... alone by the wayside under nodding pines, with its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well-trodden croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw; a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and equally ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... almost ten years of separation, just the same careless, happy, dare-all do-no-goods that we were when we parted in St. James's street,—he for the West, I for the Eastern World—he to fell trees, and build log huts in the backwoods of Canada,—I to shoot tigers and drink arrack punch in the Carnatic. The world had wagged with us as with most others: now up, now down, and laid us to, at last, far enough from the goal for which we started—so that, as I have said already, on landing in New York, having heard nothing ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... hear the jingle of his bells in the tinkle of ice-crystal on twig and see his reindeer lift through the air of the woodland glade and prance to vanishment over the treetops in a whirl of the storm. For a little the world is young again and Santa Claus no myth, even to graybeards in the Dorchester backwoods, when Aunt Sue's snowbank comes tumbling home through the pine tops. On such days weather-wisdom is justified of her children and prophets of storm have honor, even in ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... writer of boys' books, is a native of Ohio, where he was born somewhat more than a half-century ago. His father was a famous hunter and rifle shot, and it was doubtless his exploits and those of his associates, with their tales of adventure which gave the son his taste for the breezy backwoods and for depicting the stirring life of the early settlers on ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... keep faith; it's impossible to see you and remember any such promise. Besides, it's sober truth,' he replied, growing bolder still. 'Let me get you some tea. Isn't it rather lively here? Doesn't it make you regret having buried yourself in the backwoods at the ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... assists Capt. Wharton to escape. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was born at Burlington, N.J., but was reared in the wild country around Otsego Lake, in central N.Y., on the yet unsettled estates of his father. It was here he learned the backwoods lore, which in combination with his romantic genius, made him one of the ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... and Convicts; or Recollections of Sixteen Years' Labour in the Australian Backwoods,' ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Charlestown, Beverly, Florence, Springfield, and other points in Massachusetts, and in Hartford, Connecticut; in 1844, in Cincinnati, Dayton, Zanesville, Springfield, Cleveland, Toledo, and several settlements in the backwoods of Ohio, and also in Richmond, Indiana; in 1845 and '46, I lectured three times in the Legislative Hall in Detroit, and at Ann Arbor and other places in Michigan; and in 1847 and '48, I spoke in Charleston and Columbia, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... eyes along the road. At last a cloud of dust appeared. "Here they are, I believe," cried Mrs. Bellairs. "Ah! Maurice, I ought to have sent you, two girls never are to be trusted." Mr. Percy turned round. He was conscious of a little amused curiosity about this Backwoods beauty, and, at hearing this second appeal to Maurice where she was concerned, it occurred to him to look more attentively than he had done before at the person appealed to. They were standing opposite to each other, and they had three attributes in common. Both were tall, ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... assemblies without end?... There is to be a dinner in New York, ... to which I have had an invitation with every known name in America appended to it.... I have had deputations from the Far West, who have come from more than two thousand miles' distance; from the lakes, the rivers, the backwoods, the log-houses, the cities, factories, villages, and towns. Authorities from nearly all the states have written to me. I have heard from the universities, congress, senate, and bodies, public and private, of every sort ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... are no rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were none in our backwoods, and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and hind legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic joltings. When the street turned into a road it turned into a road a ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... recluse was Harlson. His backwoods training would not allow of that. In every class encounter, in every fray with townsmen, it is to be feared in almost every hazing, after his own gruesome experience—for they hazed then vigorously—he was a ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... to get his whole case on paper, marshaling his facts in a brief, pointed way that served to convince better than eloquence. These are the characteristics that make for success in practise before our Courts of Appeal; and Jefferson's success shows that they serve better than bluster, even with a backwoods bench composed ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... that can be laid at your feet! The nephew and heir of the great Firm voluntarily surrendering consideration, ease, riches, unbounded luxury for the sake of the heathen—choosing a wigwam instead of a West End palace; parched maize rather than the banquet; the backwoods instead of the luxurious park; the Red Indian rather than the club and the theatre; to be a despised minister rather than a magnate of this great city; nay, or to take his place among the influential men of the land. What has this worn, weary old ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... millions and comparatively few of us are rich enough to support a yacht, let alone the fact that not one man in fifty lives near enough to yachting waters to make such an acquisition desirable—or feasible, even. It is different with the canoe. A man like myself can live in the backwoods, a hundred miles from a decent sized inland lake and much further from the sea coast, and yet be ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... soldiering-iron-looking nose; by him was a circus rider whose breath was enough to breed yaller fever and could be felt just as easy as cotton velvet! A cross old woman came next, and whose look would have given any reasonable man the double-breasted blues before breakfast; alongside of her was a rale backwoods preacher, with the biggest and ugliest mouth ever got up since the flood. He was flanked by the low comedian of the party, an Indiana Hoosier, 'gwine down to Orleans to get an army contract' to supply the forces then in ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... plain old backwoods aunt had admired and exclaimed over the butterfly so unexpectedly developed from the brown tailor-made chrysalis, Barbara determined to take a walk. She knew that over through that cool, fascinating ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... my way of looking at it, Major," answered Life, to whom the backwoods manner of talking was now a thing of the past. Deck had taught him how to speak correctly, and for this the tall Kentuckian was exceedingly grateful. He often declared that it was Deck who had made him fit to be an officer under ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... said to himself, as he breathed with relief the outside air again, "that was the rudest thing I ever knew a lady to do. She is a lady, there is no doubt of that. There is nothing of the backwoods about her. But she might at least have answered me. What have I done, I wonder? It must be something terrible and utterly unforgivable, whatever it is. Great heavens!" he murmured, aghast at the thought, "I hope that girl isn't going up to the ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... of Thomas, was a notable man. His parents were poor, and in early life he went into the backwoods of Virginia as a surveyor. He is described as a person of great stature and strength. His mind was equally robust. He was a natural mathematician, and was remarkable for hardihood and perseverance. His temper ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... in backwoods warfare, Dick was not unfamiliar with war's alarms, nor was he wanting in common sense. To side with the weaker party was a natural tendency in our seaman. That the pursuers were red, and the pursued white, ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... can give an adequate view of the general life of a colonist, unless he has been one himself. Unless he has experienced all the various gradations of colonial existence, from that of the pioneer in the backwoods and the inhabitant of a shanty, up to the epoch of his career, when he becomes the owner, by his own exertions, of a comfortable house and well-cleared farm, affording him the comforts and many of the luxuries ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... robust Yankee, hern in the backwoods of Maine, sallow, and with a long face;—the other was a short little Cockney, who had first clapped his eyes on ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... and far Cathay; to see the tropics and to live for a while in a tropical island; to be carried along the Grand Canal of Venice in a gondola; to see the gardens of Boccaccio and the cell of Savonarola; to camp and hunt in the backwoods of Canada, and to walk the streets of New York, all these things have I longed, from youth upwards, to see and to do—yea, as ardently as ever Drake desired to set an English sail upon the great and unknown sea, and all these things, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... shoot," ejaculated Grell smilingly. "Oh, I know. We're in England, not in the backwoods. Come downstairs and have a drink. I don't want you to arrest me until we've had a talk. By the way, may ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... daily press shocking stories of the ferocity of bears. What a pity that the truth of these stories cannot always be run to earth! Billy Le Heup, a prospector and guide of northern Ontario, once having occasion to call for his mail in a little backwoods settlement, opened a newspaper and was shocked to learn that a most harrowing affliction had befallen an old friend of his, by name—But I'm sorry I have forgotten it, so let us call him Jones. The paper reported that while several of Jones's children were out berry-picking, ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... the tea-planter has to do after getting possession of his lease is to clear the land and get ready for planting. The outlay for this is considerable, and not much unlike clearing up a farm in New England, or in the backwoods of Canada. Then the young plants are set out; after this has been done, the ground must be kept clear of weeds, just as in raising corn or potatoes. It must be frequently stirred, so that the plant can get as much nourishment as possible from the earth; and when this is done, ...
— Harper's Young People, July 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... teeth, I hadn't any clothes, I had to go to my first banquet just like that. Well, everybody came swarming in. It was the merest little bit of a village—hardly that, just a little hamlet, in the backwoods of Missouri, where nothing ever happened, and the people were all interested, and they all came; they looked me over to see if there was anything fresh in my line. Why, nothing ever happened in that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... coach shunted to a siding at a backwoods settlement on the borders of an inland sea. The scene was wild beyond description, where quite almost anything might be expected to happen, though I was a bit reassured by the presence of a number of persons ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... his money all gone, but the luck still with him, at Mass on the Sunday before going to the backwoods lumber-camp for the winter, as boss of a hundred men. He had a way with him, and he had brains, had Jacques Grassette, and he could manage men, as Michelin the lumber-king himself had found in a great river-row ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... 1748, at which time the rifle was used only by the hunters of the Alps and the hunters of the American backwoods; the latter having doubtless derived it from the former through German immigration. Bull's conservatism, however, was in the way. The lessons of Fort Duquesne, of Saratoga and of New Orleans were successively wasted on him. He did arm one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... crumbled, that's all. It must have! History shows it. It didn't take a hundred years after Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines, in Haiti, for the blacks to shuck off French civilization and go back to grass huts and human sacrifice—to make another little Central Africa out of it, in the backwoods districts, at any rate. And we—have had a thousand, Beatrice, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... was a splendid specimen of the backwoods' gentleman—you will admit there are gentlemen in the backwoods." (Here the doctor glanced good-humouredly, first at our English friend Thompson, and then at the Kentuckian, both of whom answered him with a laugh.) "His house was the type of a backwoods mansion; a wooden ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... work their brains till they haven't got any more backbone than a caterpillar, but as for manual labor, it's old-timey and out of fashion. I wonder how these farms would ever have been carved out of the backwoods, if the old Puritans had sat down on the rocks with their noses in a lot of books, and tried to figure out just how little work they could do, ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... around in an appreciative manner, while a deep, restful sigh escaped his weary soul. The dreary drive through the wilderness lent an added charm to the little oasis of civilized comfort thus encountered in the lonely backwoods of a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... much mischief for idle hands in Lindsay as anywhere else. The worst tragedy I ever heard of happened on a backwoods farm, fifteen miles from a railroad and five from a store. However, I expect your mother's son to behave himself in the fear of God and man. In all likelihood the worst thing that will happen to you over there will be that some misguided woman will put you to sleep in a spare ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... discovered a real pleasure in this fresh, clear passion. As he contemplated the abounding health, the upright carriage, the sparkling, bubbling spirits of the young woodsman, he could easily imagine the young girl and the young happiness, too big for a little backwoods farm. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... determination to seek his fortune in the then almost unknown Canadian West had been growing upon him, and as it grew he shrank more and more from disclosing his plans to his fiancee. Had she been one of the country girls of the neighbourhood, a daughter of the sturdy backwoods pioneers, bred to hard work in field and barnyard, he would have hesitated less. But she was sprung from gentler stock. It seemed almost profane to think of her in the lonely life of a homesteader on the bleak, unsettled plains—to see her in the monotony ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... dog; no "hunter's home" would be complete without one, but Louis scouted the idea of adding things as unfitting as plush table-covers and upholstered footstools. The table went bare, and he fashioned a footstool for his mother out of a log, in true backwoods fashion. ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... A. R. veteran was dying. He had come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods. He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey's readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the United States ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... a little beauty," said Alfred to himself, as he watched the graceful rider disappear. "What spirit! Now, I wonder who she can be. She had on moccasins and buckskin gloves and her hair tumbled like a tomboy's, but she is no backwoods girl, I'll bet on that. I'm afraid I was a little rude, but after taking such a stand I could not weaken, especially before such a haughty and disdainful little vixen. It was too great a temptation. What eyes she had! Contrary to what I expected, this little frontier settlement ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... of medicine and of the law, and the performance of the charges of the Church of England a long time ago. Such persons would bring their lines of demarcation with them, and in their new milieu of backwoods settlers and small traders would find no difficulty in drawing them again. But it was a very long time ago. The little knot of gentry-folk soon found the limitations of their new conditions; years went ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... me of one I had witnessed in Georgia a fortnight before, on my way south. The train stopped at a backwoods station; some of the passengers gathered upon the steps of the car, and the usual bevy of young negroes came alongside. "Stand on my head for a nickel?" said one. A passenger put his hand into his pocket; the boy did as he had promised,—in no very professional style, be it said,—and ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... manners and ideals which are among man's highest achievements, patriarchal society had its own dangers, and has now so nearly succumbed to them, that to see its institutions in working order we have to penetrate into Albania or amongst the least modern backwoods of the Slav-speaking east. To take only the leading instance, Greek tribal society dissolved within historic times under the double attack of individualism, industrial and commercial, at the one end, and of the ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... patiently repeated his story from the time he had left his backwoods cabin to his selection of the river bank for a "location." He pointed out the rich quality of this alluvial bottom and its adaptability for the raising of stock, which he hoped soon to acquire. The stranger smiled grimly, raised himself ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... a comfortable distance from the sea-board. The Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau fetches his Indian Student not from the outskirts of the settlement, but from the remote backwoods of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... relief works in famine time have been mainly road-making, and there are smooth hard roads through the hills in all directions, so the people complain of roads that would not be counted so very bad in the Canadian backwoods. However, the difficulty being of a rocky nature, we left the car at the house of a dumb man, the only one of the inhabitants spared by Adair. He and his sister, also dumb, lived together on the ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... to go down the Ohio, and get men. And then he picked up Clark where Louisville now is. And then he left the Ohio River and crossed by horseback to the Army post across from here, to get still more men for the expedition—soldiers, you see, good hardy men they were, who knew the backwoods life and feared nothing. So after they got all of the expedition together, they made winter quarters over yonder, and in the spring they came over here, and the great fleet of three boats and forty-five men started off ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... the great Jonathan Edwards, in December, 1734, preached the sermons which created the initial wave of a great religious movement. This religious revival spread slowly through generally lax New England, and through the no less lax Jerseys, and through the backwoods settlements of Pennsylvania, until it finally swept the southern colonies. At the time, 1738, the Rev. George Whitefield was preaching in Carolina, and acceptably so to his superior, Alexander Garden, the Episcopal ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... flint and steel, or a brimstone stick. He explained to Larry how easy it was to cook game, by making a fire in a hole until it had become very hot, and then placing the meat therein; sealing the oven until hours had elapsed; which backwoods method of cooking was really the first fireless ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... grew less comfortless, for Elizabeth interpreted literally the general's permission to do here what she chose. The eyes of the soldiers followed both women with delight, and one rugged fellow, a backwoods man, whose cheerfulness not even a broken leg and a great gash in his forehead could destroy, volunteered the statement: "By George! whether in peace or war we need our women." This was responded to by a cheer from the inmates of his tent. The demonstration ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... would you imagine it, he seems to think that everything here goes on as it does in his d——d little backwoods ranch at home; talks about the pretty girls who walk alone in the street; says how sensible it is; and how French parents are misrepresented in America; says that for his part he finds French girls,—and ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... never killed deer for mere sport. With rattlesnakes, now, it was different. There was the skin of one hanging upon a tree by the route we would take in the morning, a buster, he skinned him yesterday. There was an entire absence, of braggadocio in Big Tom's talk, but somehow, as he went on, his backwoods figure loomed larger and larger in our imagination, and he seemed strangely familiar. At length it came over us where we had met him before. It was in Cooper's novels. He was the Leather-Stocking exactly. And yet he was an original; for he assured us that he had never read the Leather-Stocking ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... take a concrete case, the egg of a starfish can not possess any organization corresponding to the starfish. The egg is a single cell, and the starfish a community of cells. The egg can, therefore, no more contain the organization of a starfish than a hunter in the backwoods can contain within himself the organization of a great metropolis. The descendants of individuals like the hunter may unite to form a city, and the descendants of the egg cell may, by combining, give rise ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... time, brief as it was, could not be compared in celerity with the flight of the Nicaraguans, who betook themselves to the backwoods with an impetuosity seldom seen outside of a race-course. There was no loss of life so far as the British were concerned, and the only casualties resulting to the Nicaraguans were colds caught through the overheating of themselves in ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
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