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More "Prickly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... red-hot to touch, and nobody writes anything but accounts of amusements in the Hill-stations or obituary notices. Then the telephone becomes a tinkling terror, because it tells you of the sudden deaths of men and women that you knew intimately, and the prickly heat covers you with a garment, and you sit down and write: "A slight increase of sickness is reported from the Khuda Janta Khan District. The outbreak is purely sporadic in its nature, and, thanks to the energetic efforts of the District authorities, is now almost at an end. It is, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... upwards as Bertha hoped, but also sideways, and their circuit had lasted a weary while, and made them exhausted and breathless, when looking round for their bearings, they found themselves in an enchanted maze of gray rocks, half hidden in myrtle, beset by the bristly battledores of prickly pear, and shaded by cork trees. Above was the castle, perched up, and apparently as high above them as when they began their enterprise; below was a steep descent, clothed with pines and adorned with white heaths. The place was altogether strange; they had lost themselves; Bertha ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dead settlement there ought to be a live one, I reasoned, unless those who are buried here date from Peninsular battles. The first part of the road to Blanche's Castle is level, and bordered with thick growths of prickly pear; there is a view of the sea, and of the Guadalate, spanned by a metal bridge—a Menai on a small scale. Farther on, as we get to a district called La Piedad, the country is diversified by swampy flats at one side ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... plains above the river] they all repaired their moccasins, and put on double soles to protect them from the prickly-pear, and from the sharp points of earth which have been formed by the trampling of the buffalo during the late rains. This of itself is enough to render the portage disagreeable to one who has no burden; but as the men are loaded as heavily as their strength will permit, the crossing ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... and the distressed orphan, in all his brilliant array, shot backwards into some shrubs of a prickly nature, whose sharp thorns added ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... his face in little streams a the prickly heat began to move across his skin, like a fiery-footed centiped beneath his undershirt, but he noticed, neither. He began to be unconscious anything except the knowledge that the bones of his grandsire lay underneath him and that Mahommed Gunga ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... and stone fences now, and was fairly on the desolate brown moors; through the withered last year's ling and fern, through the prickly gorse, he tramped, crushing down the tender shoots of this year's growth, and heedless of the startled plover's cry, goaded by the furies. His only relief from thought, from the remembrance of Sylvia's looks and words, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... step could he take towards the big town. Neither could he turn directly round and again go the length of the one street in the village; he took the path up the mountain, climbed to the enchanted pine-wood, and wandered about among the stiff, prickly young trees, until a friendly path led him to the graveyard. There he found a hiding-place in a corner where the pines grew high as masts, and there he threw himself weary ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... to gladden Eversley Rectory with her presence she told how she longed to see the plant before which Linnaeus had fallen on his knees; and she walked up this selfsame hill and with eyes full of tears gazed on the prickly shrub with its mist of golden-colored, apricot-scented flowers. The old Hampshire proverb says, "When furze is out of flower kissing is out of fashion;" and, sure enough, there is not a month in the year in which you may not find a blossom or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... countries are the United States, Germany, France, Great Britain, Canada, and Mexico. Spain, Portugal, Japan, and China are also producers, and recent trouble with the "prickly-pear" pest in Queensland, Australia, has led to local development of arsenic mining in that country. For the most part, European production has been used in Europe and American production in ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... are very numerous, the fruit equalling any in the world. The produce of the islands includes tamarinds, olives, oranges, lemons, limes, citrons, pomegranates, pine-apples, figs, sapodillas, bananas, sour-sops, melons, yams, potatoes, gourds, cucumbers, pepper, cassava, prickly pears, sugar-cane, ginger, coffee, indigo, Guinea corn and pease. Tobacco and cascarilla bark also flourish; and cotton is indigenous and was woven into cloth by the aborigines. But although oranges, pine-apples and some other fruits form important ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... weeks in early summer the table-lands are seen in their most attractive guise. The open stretches of the mesas are carpeted with verdure almost hidden under a profusion of flowers. The gray and dusty sagebrush takes on a tinge of green, and even the prickly and repulsive greasewood clothes itself with a multitude of golden blossoms. Cacti of various kinds vie with one another in producing the most brilliant flowers, odorless but gorgeous. But in a few weeks all this brightness fades and the country resumes the colorless monotonous aspect ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... that the wild hyssop was employed, and one plant which was specially signalled out in olden times is the auberpine or white-thorn. In Germany holly is Christ-thorn, and according to an Eastern tradition it was the prickly rush, but as Mr. King [16] remarks, "the belief of the East has been tolerably constant to what was possibly the real plant employed, the nabk (Zizyphus spina-Christi), a species of buckthorn." The negroes of the ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... doorway and watched the angular, stoop-shouldered figure go down the hall; there was something so slinking, so furtively deadly in the burglar's motions that Bat felt a prickly sensation run up and down ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... Brazils, at Rio. This dignified diplomatist sported a long, twirling mustache, that almost enveloped his mouth. The sailors said he looked like a rat with his teeth through a bunch of oakum, or a St. Jago monkey peeping through a prickly-pear bush. ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... o'er, Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor; From thence a length of burning sand appears, Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears; Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye: There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar, And to the ragged infant threaten war; There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil; There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil; Hardy and high above the slender sheaf The slimy mallow waves ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... the middle of the road, between them and the fir-tree, was something neither of them had seen;—a huge tree just fallen, with its high, prickly branches on. ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... she was raised way down in Texas, Where the jimson weed and sand-burrs grow; Now we'll fill you up on prickly pear and cholla Till you are ready for the trail ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... clothed with fern and furze and low broom, crowned with luxuriant hedgerows, and famous for their summer smell of thyme. How lovely these banks are now—the tall weeds and the gorse fixed and stiffened in the hoar-frost, which fringes round the bright prickly holly, the pendent foliage of the bramble, and the deep orange leaves of the pollard oaks! Oh, this is rime in its loveliest form! And there is still a berry here and there on the holly, 'blushing in its natural coral' ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... "Nasty, prickly things—I hate them!" I cried; for I do detest being snubbed, and she could not have told me more plainly in so many words that she did not choose to speak of Will Dudley. Why not? I wonder. Was there some ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Cucumber. Egyptian Cucumber. Globe Cucumber. Gourd, or Calabash. The Melon. Musk-melon. Persian Melons. Water-melon. Papanjay, or Sponge Cucumber. Prickly-fruited Gherkin. ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... then that Whinney made the supreme call on his nerve, stiffened visibly and answered in a dead voice, "My wife, Babai-Alova-Babai, has prickly-heat!" ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... of the singular family Balanophoraceae, not before known as Australian, which was found here in abundance in the gloomy brushes, parasitic upon the roots of the tallest trees. We also met with here—in probably its southern limit upon the coast—a species of rattan (Calamus australis) with long prickly shoots, well illustrated in the annexed drawing by Mr. Huxley, representing the process of cutting through the scrub, during an excursion made with Mr. Kennedy, for the purpose of searching for a way out from the low ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... questions. It's a domned purposeful rig, mon. The big felt hat is a daisy for keepin' off the sun, an' that gaudy bit av a rag around his neck keeps the sun and sand from blisterin' the skin. The leather pants is to keep his legs from gettin' clawed up be the thorns av prickly pear an' what not, which he's got to ride through, an' the high heels is to keep his feet from slippin' through the stirrups. A kid c'ud tell ye what he carries the young cannon for, an' why he wears it so low on his hip. ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... round a prickly fir-tree at the end of the lawn. Jim stood in the background vaguely staring. The bicycle lamp sent a beam of strong white light deep into the uncanny foliage, heads clustered and hands worked. The night above was silent, dim. There was no wind. In the ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... numskull for thee, you mandy chap!" said Mrs. Nunsuch, as she helplessly danced round with him, her feet playing like drumsticks among the sparks. "My ankles were all in a fever before, from walking through that prickly furze, and now you must make 'em worse ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... joke, as it were, letting their threshold fall beneath the feet of the caller, and startling him with an explosion and a cloud of yellow powder, suggesting the day pyrotechnics of the Chinese. The prickly-pear cactus encloses its buzzing visitor in a golden bower, from which he must emerge at the roof as dusty as a miller. The barberry, in similar vein, lays mischievous hold of the tongue of its sipping bee, and I fancy, in his early acquaintance, before he has learned its ways, gives him ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... also cleared the gardens of the enemy. The marines and bluejackets now pushed bravely on, but encountered a terrific fire from the troops within the forts. Murray and Adair were side by side, scrambling over walls and leaping ditches, and cutting through hedges of prickly pears in spite of the showers of shot which rattled round ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... Later, at Constantinople, Peter, was suffering from remorse over neglected opportunities, from prickly heat, and from fleas. And it not been for the moving-picture man, and the poker and baccarat at the Cercle Oriental, he would have flung himself into the Bosphorus. In the mornings with the tutor he read ancient history, which he promptly forgot; and for the rest of the hot, dreary day with ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... at his mending and took the back track. Before they had gone a dozen yards Dewing saw the lost spur, far down the hill, lodged under a prickly pear. Stanley, searching intently for his pocketbook, did not see the spur. And Dewing said nothing; he lowered his eyelids to veil a sudden evil thought, and when he raised them again his eyes, which for a little had been clear of all save boyish mischief, ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... Devices. Spring. Loving, laughing, singing, benign. Summer. Prickly, angry, crafty, lean. Autumn. Sleepy, dull, sluggish, fat, white-faced. ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... satisfaction, that the current was taking him toward the northern shore of the lake, and he allowed himself to glide with it. About two o'clock in the morning he disembarked upon a promontory covered with prickly reeds, that proved very provoking and inconvenient even to a philosopher like him; but a tree grew there expressly to offer him a bed among its branches, and Joe climbed up into it for greater security, and there, without ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... Long-forgotten smiles, The smiles of her sweet childhood's innocence, Stole o'er her happy face. The wilderness Rejoiced, and blossom'd as the rose. The curse, Which for six thousand years had sear'd the heart Of nature, was repeal'd. And where the thorn Perplex'd the glens, and prickly briers the hills, Now, for the Word so spake and it was done, The fir-tree rear'd its stately obelisk, The cedar waved its arms of peaceful shade, The vine embraced the elm, and myrtles flower'd Among the fragrant orange-groves. No storms Vex'd the serene of heaven: but genial mists, Such ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... out the Glen Oriole acreage development, when he ironed woodland and dipping meadow into a glenless, orioleless, sunburnt flat prickly with small boards displaying the names of imaginary streets, he righteously put in a complete sewage-system. It made him feel superior; it enabled him to sneer privily at the Martin Lumsen development, Avonlea, which had a cesspool; ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... the family undressed at night and dressed in the morning. The older daughter, Anna, and the two big boys slept upstairs, where the rooms were theoretically warmed by stovepipes from below. The first (and the worst!) thing that confronted Thea was a suit of clean, prickly red flannel, fresh from the wash. Usually the torment of breaking in a clean suit of flannel came on Sunday, but yesterday, as she was staying in the house, she had begged off. Their winter underwear was a trial to all the children, but it was bitterest to Thea because she happened to have the ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... Near the summit of the mountains large flocks of alpacas were grazing, and lower down herds of cattle and sheep, while near the plain were patches of wheat, barley, and potatoes, which in turn were succeeded by fields of maize, apple and peach trees, and prickly-pears. At the foot were fields of sugar-cane, oranges, citron, pine-apples, cacao, and many other tropical fruits; while in the deeper ravines cotton was grown in abundance for the wants of the population. Here, in fact, were all varieties of climate, from ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... with the silence of the place. No children began to chatter, and no dogs barked. Nor could I see any native sheep or cattle. The place, though it had evidently been recently inhabited, was as still as the bush round it, and some guinea fowl got up out of the prickly pear bushes right at the kraal gate. I remember that I hesitated a little before going in, there was such an air of desolation about the spot. Nature never looks desolate when man has not yet laid his hand upon her breast; she is ...
— Long Odds • H. Rider Haggard
... hill towards Vitalis. But, strange to say, I made less haste going down than I had in climbing up. I threw myself into the thick of the thistles and brambles, scratching myself at every step. Scrambling out of a prickly bush I took a glance back. The animal was coming nearer! It was ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... hedgehog, or a prickly porcupine," said Bunker. "That animal is all covered with sharp quills, like a lot of toothpicks. They aren't very tightly fastened to him, and if a dog, or some other animal, tries to bite, he gets his mouth full ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-A-While • Laura Lee Hope
... long, ol' timer! I'm a wolf, an' it's my night to howl! Slip up to the hotel an' tell the cook to shoot me down a half-dozen buzzard's eggs fried in grizzly juice, a couple of rattlesnake sandwiches, a platter of live centipedes, an' a prickly-pear salad. I'm hungry, an' I'm on ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... and to avoid possible pursuit, struck into the underbrush at an angle which she calculated would bring her in a few rods to another path which would lead quickly into the main road. She had run only a few yards when she found herself in the midst of a clump of prickly shrubs and briars. Meantime the storm had burst; the rain fell in torrents. Extricating herself from the thorns, she pressed forward, but instead of coming out upon the road, found herself penetrating deeper and deeper ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... perhaps a little prickly. The men among them, often Free Church ministers, seemed on the lookout for the sort of snubs which Nonconformists often receive from the Anglican clergy at home. The chaplains, especially the Church of England chaplains, ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... think of is, that she has the sweetest, kindest, tenderest, funniest, merriest face they ever saw, or want to see. But Tom saw that she was a very tall woman, as tall as her sister; but instead of being gnarly, and horny, and scaly, and prickly, like her, she was the most nice, soft, fat, smooth, pussy, cuddly, delicious creature who ever nursed a baby; and she understood babies thoroughly, for she had plenty of her own, whole rows and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... things about my present condition is that I feel, not only so useless, but so prickly, so ugly, so unlovable. Even Maud's affection, stronger and more tender than ever, does not help me, because I feel that she cannot love me for what I am, but for what she remembers me as being, and hopes that I may be again. I know it is not so, and that she would ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... water-grass, and broken the smooth surface of the duckweed. Yellow loosestrife is rising, thick comfrey stands at the very edge; the sandpipers run where the shore is free from bushes. Back by the underwood the prickly and repellent brambles will presently present us with fruit. For the squirrels the nuts are forming, green beechmast is there—green wedges under the spray; up in the oaks the small knots, like bark rolled up in a dot, will be acorns. Purple vetches along the mounds, yellow ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... has embraced two stems of the tree, and covers them both so thickly that the bare ends of wood at top alone betray its secret; for it was sawn off, of course, above and below. I took the dimensions as accurately as may be, with an object so irregular and prickly. It measures—the solid bulk of it, leaves not counted—as nearly as possible five feet in height and four thick—one plant, observe, pulsating through its thousand limbs from one heart; at least, I mark no spot where the circulation ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... mountains, and patches of wheat and Indian corn peeping amidst masses of granite rock and tangled brushwood. The vine and the olive grew wild on every side; while the orange and the arbutus, loading the air with perfume, were mingled with prickly pear-trees and variegated hollies. We followed no regular track, but cantered along over hill and valley, through forest and prairie, now in long file through some tall field of waving corn, now in open order upon some level plain,—our Portuguese guide riding a little in advance of us, upon ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... that he slowed up, and the matter of riding did not require all his faculties. He passed several ranches and was seen by men. This did not suit him, and he took an old trail across country. It was a flat region with a poor growth of mesquite and prickly-pear cactus. Occasionally he caught a glimpse of low hills in the distance. He had hunted often in that section, and knew where to find grass and water. When he reached this higher ground he did not, however, halt at the first favorable camping-spot, but went on and on. Once he came out ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... pay a few days' visit to Laramie, ninety-five miles north-east of our post. Leaving at noon in procession, with three ambulances and as many army wagons, scaling the bluffs, bare of everything like trees or shrubs, and only covered with grass and wild flowers, and now and then sage-bush and prickly-pear cactus, which are very troublesome to the horses' feet. The roads were, as usual, very hard and fine, so that up hill and down dale we made six miles to the hour all the way. Our first station was Horse Creek, twenty-five miles, where ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... Mrs. Lansell's turn to test the exquisite torture of that prickly chill along the spine. Like Beatrice, ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... advance upon San Diego by any of the well-trodden trails, all of which were closely watched by the enemy's scouts. Carson chose a circuitous route over rocks and hills, where their feet were dreadfully lacerated by the prickly pear. ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... excel Man; as first for their unparalleled beauty, by the charm whereof they tyrannize over the greatest of tyrants; for what is it but too great a smatch of wisdom that makes men so tawny and thick-skinned, so rough and prickly-bearded, like an emblem of winter or old age, while women have such dainty, smooth cheeks, such a low, gentle voice, and so pure a complexion, as if Nature had drawn them for a standing pattern of all symmetry ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... the ammunition failing, their nectarines made admirable cannon-balls. Even the enlightened mind of Jeffrey cannot shake off the illusion that myrtles flourish at Craig Crook.[22] In vain I have represented to him that they are of the genus Carduus, and pointed out their prickly peculiarities.... Jeffrey sticks to his myrtle illusions, and treats my attacks with as much contempt as if I had been a wild visionary, who had never breathed his caller air, nor lived and suffered under the rigour of his climate, nor spent five years in discussing ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... discharge or perspiration that literally flowed from her legs and body, and accompanied by a miliary eruption. It was on the posterior portions, and twelve hours previous was usually preceded by a moldy smell and a prickly sensation. On the abdomen and the back of the neck there was a yellowish secretion. In place of catamenia there was a discharge reddish-green in color. The patient denied having taken any coloring matter or chemicals to influence the color of her perspiration, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the use of these test-phrases and sentences has not yet entirely departed from the schools. Familiar are: "Up the high hill he heaved a huge round stone; around the rugged riven rock the ragged rascal rapid ran; Peter Piper picked a peck of prickly pears from the prickly-pear trees on the pleasant prairies," and many others still in use traditionally among the school-children of to-day, together with linguistic exercises of nonsense-syllables and the like, pronouncing ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... walk. When I advise him to read science, I do not mean that he should choke himself with the dust of the pedants, and lose himself in the subdivisions of the Lepidoptera, or the classifications of the dicotyledonous plants. These dreary details are the prickly bushes in that enchanted garden, and you are foolish indeed if you begin your walks by butting your head into one. Keep very clear of them until you have explored the open beds and wandered down every easy path. For this reason avoid the text-books, which repel, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... children at play. A soft white sand formed its beach, and there these children played. I saw no grown people among them; but the children were all busy—some picking up shells; some playing with the bright-coloured berries of a prickly dwarf-plant which grew upon those sands; some watching the waves as they ran up and then fell back again on that shore; some running after the sea-birds, which ran with quick light feet along the wet sand, and ever flew off, skimming just along the wave-top, ...
— The Rocky Island - and Other Similitudes • Samuel Wilberforce
... just what Uncle Lucky did, and of course he got stuck with one of those prickly, stickery porcupine needles and it was an awful ...
— Billy Bunny and Uncle Bull Frog • David Magie Cory
... from the Jugdulluk direction the flanking elevations recede and merge in the transverse ridge, which is crowned by a low-cut abrupt rocky upheaval, worn down somewhat where the road passes over the crest by the friction of traffic. Just here the tribesmen had constructed a formidable abattis of prickly brushwood, which stretched athwart the road, and dammed back the fugitives in the shallow oval basin between the termination of the ravine and the summit of the ridge. In this trap were caught our ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... into the prickly blue serge costume provided by the "management," I heard the sound of stirring military music, played not far away by a brass band, and something queer happened at the same moment. The machine began to rock as if there were an ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... rich colour of the horse-chestnut, when quite ripe and fresh from its prickly green shell, can hardly be surpassed; underneath the tree the grass is strewn with shells where they have fallen and burst. Close to the trunk the grass is worn away by the restless trampling of horses, who love the shade its foliage gives in summer. The oak apples which appear on the oaks in ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... they now found themselves straitened by drought, and the work began to tell upon the horses. Scrub, too, that besetting hindrance of so many Australian explorers, began to impede their onward path. Eucalyptus brush overrun with creepers and prickly acacia bushes united to bar the way, and when, after much toil and suffering, they at last reached the point of a range, which Oxley named the Peel Range, the leader had reluctantly again to change his mind and to abandon ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... low, narrow passage, which branched off in zig-zag windings at the top, and terminated, as their woody path had done, in a solid wall. But again an invisible door flew open, closing behind them; and after walking about a hundred yards through prickly shrubs and entangled brushwood that obscured his sight, Marie paused, and Arthur gazed round bewildered. A seemingly boundless plain stretched for miles around him, its green level only diversified by rocks scattered about in huge masses and wild ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... places, the figwort, bears small velvety flowers, much the colour of the red velvet topknot of the goldfinch, the yellow on whose wings is like the yellow bloom of the furze which he frequents in the winter, perching cleverly on its prickly extremities. In the woods, in the bark of the trees, the varied shades of the branches as their size diminishes, the adhering lichens, the stems of the underwood, now grey, now green; the dry stalks of plants, ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... nothing of any particular interest. A succession of low hills rich in dust, a long stretch of what they call in Australia "bush," several prairies covered with a small prickly bush, considered a great dainty by the ovine tribe, embraced many miles. Here and there they noticed a species of sheep peculiar to New Holland— sheep with pig's heads, feeding between the posts of the telegraph line recently made between ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... scrambled eggs, maples grew knobby with red buds. Among the fresh bright grass came, here and there, exhilarating smells of last year's buried bones. The little upward slit at the back of Gissing's nostrils felt prickly. He thought that if he could bury it deep enough in cold beef broth it would be comforting. Several times he went out to the pantry intending to try the experiment, but every time Fuji happened to be around. Fuji was a Japanese pug, and rather correct, ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... powerful sympathy which exists between the nerves of the lower part of the spinal marrow and other organs. Artificial excitement appears in some degree natural; it is observed in several animals, especially in the feline race. Even snails plunge into each other a bony, prickly spur, that arises from their throats, and which, like the sting of the wasp, frequently breaks off, and ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... I don't look at him from any standpoint. That's what I complain of. He's encircled with a prickly hedge of clerks. 'You will hear from us.' 'It shall have our best consideration.' 'We have no knowledge of the MS. in question.' Yes, Peter, two valuable quartets have I lost, messing about with ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... the fearful shadow came That since my boyhood often visits me, And with dark musings fills my brain perturb'd; Making the current of my life-blood stagnate, My heart the semblance of a muffled bell, Within my ribs, its tomb; my flesh creep like The prickly writhings of a new-slough'd snake; Each several moment as the awaken'd glare Of the doom'd felon starting from his sleep, While the slow, hideous meaning of his cell Grows on him like an incubus, until The truth shoots like an ice-bolt to his brain From ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... is that they are acanaceous; covered all over with sharp thorns and needles. Spikes of all sorts and sizes bristle everywhere and admonish the tenderfoot to beware. Guarded by an impenetrable armor of prickly mail they defy encroachment and successfully repel all attempts at undue familiarity. To be torn by a cat-claw thorn or impaled on a stout dagger leaf of one of these plants would not only mean painful laceration but, perhaps, serious or even fatal injury. Notwithstanding their formidable and ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... terrible animal before him. Without a moment's hesitation, he tore a flaming beam out of the kiln, and pushed its burning end deep into the open mouth of the dragon. Roaring with pain the monster turned round beating violently with its prickly tail, trying in its agony to crush Siegfried. But he, jumping skilfully aside, rapidly dealt it heavy blows, and succeeded at last in smashing its head with a large piece of rock. He severed the head from the body, and threw it into the blazing flames. To his astonishment he ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... herbs, known only to the person supplying them. Rheumatic pains are treated in several ways. Sometimes the sweat lodge is used, or hot rocks are applied over the place where the pain is most severe, or actual cautery is practised, by inserting prickly pear thorns in the flesh, and setting fire to them, when they burn ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... thistle," says Tyndall, "always produces the thistle," and our opponents will have a prickly time of it with their own consciences, when the day dawns in righteousness over the American ballot-box. God prosper the struggle and give you heart and hope, for your triumph is sure as sunrise, and will win that final mastery which ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... springing from some great inner sea of light and fire in the man. The voice, if he speak to you, is of similar physiognomy: clear, melodious and sonorous; all tones are in it, from that of ingenuous inquiry, graceful sociality, light-flowing banter (rather prickly for most part), up to definite word of command, up to desolating word of rebuke and reprobation; a voice "the clearest and most agreeable in conversation I ever heard," says witty Dr. Moore. [Moore, View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland and Germany (London, 1779), ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... a brisk canter, and were soon out of sight of the post and settlements. Our course lay to the east of north, over an elevated, arid plain, covered with a thick growth of prickly-pear, ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... quantity of nettles, which were plentiful near this camp, and having boiled them thoroughly, we made of them a hearty if not quite an appetizing meal. They did not seem unpalatable at the time, and had we possessed salt to add taste and digestibility to our prickly diet, we might have felt quite happy. We supplied the deficiency by mixing with them a double quantity of pepper. At any rate, it was a relief to know that, while nettles lasted near our camp, we should at least ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... recover speech. "I knew that dear Colonel Dawson was only playing," she cried. "He only did it to please me. Thank you, Colonel, though you did frighten me just a weeny bit at first." And pulling him down towards her she kissed him heartily upon his prickly cheek. It was a ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... legend. All over the slope of the mountain are scattered the pagodas, mosques, and temples of numberless sects. Here and there the hot rays of the sun strike upon an old fortress, once dreadful and inaccessible, now half ruined and covered with prickly cactus. At every step some memorial of sanctity. Here a deep vihara, a cave cell of a Buddhist bhikshu saint, there a rock protected by the symbol of Shiva, further on a Jaina temple, or a holy tank, all covered with sedge and filled with water, once ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... been picking my way for some hours through a desolate plateau—the high veldt—about five thousand feet above the sea level, and entirely treeless. In places, to be sure, a few low bushes of prickly aspect rose in tangled clumps; but for the most part the arid table-land was covered by a thick growth of short brown grass, about nine inches high, burnt up in the sun, and most wearisome to look at. The distressing nakedness ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... Poplanas with short skirts and slippered feet pass my window; and groups of "tame" Indians, pueblos, crowd in from the neighbouring rancherias, belabouring their donkeys as they go. These bring baskets of fruit and vegetables. They squat down upon the dusty plaza, behind piles of prickly pears, or pyramids of tomatoes and chile. The women, light-hearted hucksters, laugh and sing and chatter continuously. The tortillera, kneeling by her metate, bruises the boiled maize, claps it into thin flakes, flings it on the heated ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... surrounded by towering rocks, which seemed to be meant to protect it from invasion. It was in the year 1325 that the Aztecs paused upon the shore of the lake, and saw, as the sun rose, a splendid eagle perched upon a prickly pear which shot out of a crevice in the rock. It held a large serpent in its claws, and its broad wings were opened towards the rising sun. The Aztecs saw in this a most favourable omen, and there and then set about building themselves a city, laying its foundations upon piles in ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... called for an instant remedy and I brought him the blotting paper, instead of smiling at the merry quality of my jest, he pursued me for two hours around my father's farm, and finally cornering me in the Discosaurus shed, larruped me for twenty full minutes with a paddle pulled from a prickly cactus plant in my mother's drawing-room, thorn side down. Indeed most of my early recollections of the old gentleman are inseparably associated with a series of chastisements which, even as he had prophesied when administering them, I have not been able to forget, although ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... hedgehog, isn't it?" I said. "Here, let me look." He slowly laid the little prickly animal down on the earthen floor and pushed it towards me—a concession of civility that was wonderful for Shock; and I eagerly examined the curious little creature, pricking my fingers a good deal in the efforts ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... Loiseau, who had the prickly disposition of a nettle remarked to her husband, at the moment they were going to bed:—"That stuck-up little Madame Carre-Lamadon laughed ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... instantaneous. These novel missiles flung from so great a height, acted like miniature bombshells, exploding with a loud report as they touched the deck, and flying into myriad fragments. Not even the most rage-intoxicated Malay could withstand the shock. The noise, the prickly splinters of glass, peppering their half-naked bodies like a charge of small shot, altered their blind fury to dismay and panic. With screams of affright they rushed to the sides of the junk. But the men left in the praus had already begun to paddle frantically away, heedless ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... before I could recall Elspeth's words without a sensation of prickly heat: it is strange how painfully these little pin-pricks to our vanity affect us. I was angry with myself for remembering them, and yet they rankled, in spite of Elspeth's quaint and homely consolation. Alas! I was not better ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... at Las Plumas was a spreading, one-story adobe building, with a large, high-walled court at the back. This wall was also of adobe, some ten feet high and three feet thick, without an opening, and crowned with a luxuriant growth of prickly-pear cactus. At certain hours of the day the prisoners were allowed the freedom of this court, while a guard kept on them an occasional eye. Behind the court, and coming up to its very walls, was a small tract of land planted with vegetables, flowers and fruit trees and worked by an old Mexican ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... are small engines with four spikes, one fixed in the ground, the three others erect or adverse, (Procopius, Gothic. l. iii. c. 24. Just. Lipsius, Poliorcetwv, l. v. c. 3.) The metaphor was borrowed from the tribuli, (land-caltrops,) an herb with a prickly fruit, commex in Italy. (Martin, ad Virgil. Georgic. i. 153 vol. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80 Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and re-crossed, weaves A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... end of the two hundred-mile voyage. At any rate, they did, and they found the Scotch heather here. Here, too, one finds another strange plant, plentiful over on the sandy peninsula of Coatue, the Opuntia or prickly pear, a variety of cactus common enough in Mexico and portions of our Southwest, but surprising ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... her way to be curt and quick," explained they to one another. "She doesn't mean a thing in the world by it. Julie says she's sharp and prickly as a chestnut burr, but with the sweetest ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... prickly and yet a tree-like look. Strong art thou, and ugly, but if my wisdom be not at fault, honest at the core, and a staff to lean on. Also one who thinks. But stay, oh Holly, stand not there, enter with me and be seated by me. I would not see thee ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... driving through a fine piece of chestnut wood as she said this. The blight had not struck these beautiful trees and they hung full of the prickly burrs. The frost of the previous night had opened many of these, and the brown nuts smiled ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... one moment she believed in the truth of those accusations brought against her sister, but Ellen was just the sort of girl, with her airs and notions, to get herself talked about at the Woolpack, and it was disgraceful to have such things said about one, even if they were not true. There was a prickly heat of shame in Joanna's blood as she hustled the mare over the white loops of ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... seated human groups, with the most perfect freedom. This freedom often amounts to impudence; and they frequent the tops of bazaars, in order to steal all they can lay their hands upon below. The only way to keep them off, is to cover the roof with a prickly shrub, the thorns of which stick to the flesh like fishhooks. The above mentioned traveller watched one, which he calls a bandar, and which took his station opposite to a sweetmeat shop. He pretended to be asleep, but every now and then softly raised his head to look at the ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... outfit of subjects that assemble at the meeting-house at Cactus, Tex., a mistake has been made. The wives and daughters of the ranchmen of the Frio country put forth Easter blossoms of new hats and gowns as faithfully as is done anywhere, and the Southwest is, for one day, a mingling of prickly pear, Paris, and paradise. And now it was Good Friday, and Tonia Weaver's Easter hat blushed unseen in the desert air of an impotent express car, beyond the burned trestle. On Saturday noon the Rogers girls, from the Shoestring Ranch, and Ella Reeves, from the Anchor-O, and Mrs. Bennet and ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... appeared to swell, And, ghastly as a gate of hell, Its fearful jaws were open wide, As if to seize the prey it tried; And in its black mouth, ranged about, Its teeth in prickly rows stood out; Its tongue was like a sharp-edged sword, And lightning from its small eyes poured; A serpent's tail of many a fold Ended its body's monstrous span, And round itself with fierceness rolled, So as to clasp ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the durian is green and prickly, about the size of a small melon, and even through the tough outside rind one can notice a faint nauseating odour. It is said that when one is opened in the market it takes but a few moments to ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... who slowly paddles his canoe upon the waters of this western sound, each tree of different kind by shade of green and shape of crown is known; the Toh-a-mupt or Sitca spruce with scaley bark and prickly spine; the feathery foliage of the Quilth-kla-mupt, the western hemlock, relieved in spring by the light green of tender shoots. The frond-like branches and aromatic scent betray to him the much-prized Hohm-ess, the giant cedar tree, from which he carves his staunch canoe. These form the ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... frightened in fact to cry, but stood in the middle of a little dry, bare space, looking around her at the scraggy growths of prickly shrubs that had torn her little dress to rags, scratched her bare legs and feet till they bled, and pricked her hands and arms as she had pushed madly through the bushes, for hours, seeking her home. Sometimes she ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... seen cattle so numerous as all along the Lachlan; and notwithstanding the very dry season, they were nearly all in good condition. We found this day, near the river bed, a new herbaceous indigo with white flowers and pods like those of the prickly liquorice (Glycyrrhiza echinata).* ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... fallen cross. Between showed no vestige of an opening; dark, impervious, formidable as a fortress wall, the tunal met the eye. Ferne, attacking it with his sword, thrust aside a heavy curtain of broad-leaved vine, came upon a network of thorn and spike and prickly leaf, hewed this away, to find behind it a like barrier. Evidently the man had lied!—to what purpose Sir Mortimer Ferne would presently make it his business to discover.... There overtook him a sudden revulsion ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... and then glancing on the crest of the dancing billows, shone the steady light of Scarthey. The rising wind whistled in the prickly star-grass and sea-holly. Beyond these, not a sight, not a sound—the earth was ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... nothing more than a few straggling small pines and dwarf cedars on the summits of the hills, nine-tenths of the ground being totally destitute of wood, and covered with short grass, aromatic herbs, and an immense quantity of prickly-pear; though the party who explored it for eight miles represented the low grounds on the river to be well supplied with cottonwood of a tolerable size, and of an excellent soil. They also report that the country is broken and irregular, like that ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... Hedgehog he spoke never a word, And he never stirred; His peeping eyes, his inquisitive nose, And his tender toes, Were all wrapped up in his prickly clothes. A provoking enemy you may suppose! And a dangerous one to flout— Like ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... near he noticed that a squirrel crept from the fork of one of these trees. The little creature rocked itself on the thin end of a swaying branch, plucking sometimes at the drooping fan of the chestnut, and sometimes at the prickly shell of its pendulous nut. When he opened the little gate Hugh Ritson observed that a cat sat sedately behind the trunk of that tree, glancing up at intervals at the sporting ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... seeds floating in it. This larger corossol has almost as delicate an interior, only the custard is white instead of yellow.... Here are christophines,—great pear-shaped things, white and green, according to kind, with a peel prickly and knobby as the skin of a horned toad; but they stew exquisitely. And mlongnes, or egg-plants; and palmiste-pith, and chadques, and pommes-d' Hati,—and roots that at first sight look all alike, but they are not: there are ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... golden-rod and sumach. In the centre of the waste, standing alike grim and majestic at all seasons, there was the charred skeleton of a gigantic tree, which had been stripped naked by a bolt of lightning long years ago. At its foot a prickly clump of briars surrounded the blackened trunk in a decoration of green or red, and from this futile screen the spectral limbs rose boldly and were silhouetted against the far-off horizon like the masts of a wrecked and deserted ship. A rail fence, where a trumpet-vine hung heavily, divided ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... lowlands present an appearance which is barren and desolate in the extreme, although the soil is fertile and under irrigation yields good crops. Vegetation is limited to a scanty growth of grass during a small part of the year, with small areas here and there scantily covered by the prickly greasewood and at intervals by clumps of sagebrush; but even these prefer a higher level, and develop better on the neighboring mesas than in the valleys proper. The arborescent growth consists of sparsely distributed cottonwoods and willows, closely confined to the river bottoms. On ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... was sitting in an arm-chair by the fire. There was very little light in the room, for the only window looked into a miniature conservatory, where there were all manner of prickly and spiky plants of the cactus kind, which had been the delight of the late owner ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... all; and who had gone through life with bitter sorrows, but reverencing that race, and vindicating that honour; Fairthorn's eye would tremble—his eyes flash on her while he talked. She, poor child, could not divine why; but she felt that he was angry with her—speaking at her. In fact, Fairthorn's prickly tongue was on the barbed point of exclaiming: "And how dare you foist yourself into this unsullied lineage—how dare you think that the dead would not turn in their graves, ere they would make room in the vault of the Darrells for the daughter of a Jasper Losely!" But though she could not conceive ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... still beautiful for all its scars, with its countless windows and arches and ways, tier upon tier, for a thousand feet, a vast carving of gray, broken by vine-clad terraces, and lemon and orange groves, and masses of agave and prickly pear, and puffs of almond blossom. And out under the archway that is built over the Piccola Marina other boats were coming; and as we came round the cape and within sight of the mainland, another little ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... charm for Michael Garth, and when one of us must go, it was usually I, his subordinate, who being delegated, congratulated myself on his indifference. Hard-earned dollars melted at Iquique; and to Garth, life in Chili had long been solely a matter of amassing them. So he stayed on, in the prickly heat of Agnas Blancas, and grimly counted the days, and the money (although his nature, I believe, was fundamentally generous, in his set concentration of purpose, he had grown morbidly avaricious) which should restore ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... alike covered and the boughs bent down under the heavy load of icy armor. Icicles, glistening like jewels, hung from the eaves of the house, from the fence rails, and from the limbs of our little fruit trees. The currant brush, the rose bushes, the briers and prickly ash were all encased in ice. From the points and ends of all the boughs, small and large, icicles formed and hung down like tapers. To the point of each was hanging a silver-like gem which had been frozen fast while in ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... judge. We started again about 3 P.M., and soon emerged from the mosquite bushes into an open prairie eight miles long, quite desolate, and producing nothing but a sort of rush; after which we entered a chaparal, or thick covert of mosquite trees and high prickly pears. These border the track, and are covered with bits of cotton torn from the endless trains of cotton waggons. We met several of these waggons. Generally there were ten oxen or six mules to a waggon carrying ten bales, but in deep sand more animals are necessary. They journey very slowly towards ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... farmer, no doubt, but not the goldfinches which daintily feed among the fluffy seeds, nor the bees, nor the "painted lady," which may be seen in all parts of the world where thistles grow, hovering about the beautiful rose-purple flowers. In the prickly cradle of leaves, the caterpillar of this thistle butterfly weaves a web around ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... great care to see that the folds and creases of the skin are dry. Use a little pure talcum powder or dry sifted corn starch under the arms and in the groin to prevent chafing. If any redness, chafing, or eruption like prickly heat, develops on the skin, no soap at all should be used in the bath. Sometimes a starch, or bran, or soda ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... the hutu-tree with crimson-tasseled flowers among broad leaves, and fruit prickly and pear-shaped. It is a fruit not to be eaten by man, but immemorally used by lazy fishermen to insure miraculous draughts. Streams are dammed up and the pears thrown in. Soon the fish become stupified and float upon the surface to the gaping nets of the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... water the party now found themselves straitened for want of it, and the journey, too, began to tell upon the horses. Thick scrubs of eucalyptus brush, overrun with creepers and prickly acacia bushes, soon helped to bar the way, and when they at last reached the point of a range, which they named Peel Range, Oxley reluctantly abandoned his idea of making for the coast in a south-west direction, and turned north. Wearily ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... sighting the A.P.M. brassard, promptly dumped the hut and dived through a wire fence. Sherlock hitched his horse to a post and followed afoot, snorting fire and brimstone. They led him at a smart trot over four acres of boggy plough, through a brambly plantation, two prickly hedges and a richly-perfumed drain and went to ground inextricably in some mine buildings. He returned, blown, battered and baffled, to the starting-point, to find that some third party had in the meantime removed the Armstrong ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... impossible. The times, and these wrangling Friends, with their stupid testimonies, irritate him daily until he is like a great, strong bull, such as the Spaniards tease to madness with little darts and fireworks. You see, Hugh, events are prickly things. They play the deuce with obstinate people. Your father will be better away from home. He has never been in England, and he will see how many, like Mr. Pitt and Colonel Barre, are with us. As for myself, I have been a bit ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... with them the wild mountain-side. To make up for this lack of luxuriance, the coast is furrowed with a succession of tiny harbours, where the fishing-boats rest at anchor. There are many villages upon the spurs of hills, and on the headlands naval stations, hospitals, lazzaretti, and prisons. A prickly bindweed (the Smilax Sarsaparilla) forms a feature in the near landscape, with its creamy odoriferous blossoms, coral berries, and glossy ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... only protected species; such as thistles, houndstongue, cuckoo-pint, charlock, nettles (once more), and thorn bushes. The cattle or the rabbits eat down at once all juicy and succulent plants, leaving only these nauseous or prickly kinds, together with such stringy and innutritious weeds as chervil, plantain, and burdock. Here we see the mechanism of natural selection at ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... sheep-walks of Maryland; a second spring seemed to clothe the fields, but with grief and shame I confess, that of these precious blossoms I scarcely knew a single name. I think the Michaelmas daisy, in wonderful variety of form and colour, and the prickly pear, were almost my only acquaintance: let no one visit America without having first studied botany; it is an amusement, as a clever friend of mine once told me, that helps one wonderfully up and down hill, and must be superlatively ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... in the library, I say, as you do a fawn in a field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times better than you; and the good ones, too, and will eat some bitter and prickly ones, good for it, which you had not the slightest thought would ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... her hands; white grapes produced different effects. The bone of an elk would throw her into an epileptic fit. The tooth of a mammoth produced a feeling of sluggishness. A spider's web rolled into a ball produced a prickly feeling in the hands, and a restlessness in the whole body. Glow-worms threw her into the magnetic sleep. Music somnambulised her. When she wanted to be cheerful, she requested Kerner to magnetise the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... are bunches of cactus with prickly leaves. Look out! don't catch your toe in those sea-ferns. Even that sweet green maiden-hair fern might pin down your foot so firmly that it would take a fish's sharp ...
— Lord Dolphin • Harriet A. Cheever
... wholesome dread, to the white beach outside, and picked up—and, alas! wreck, everywhere wreck—shells—old friends in the cabinets at home—as earnests to ourselves that all was not a dream: delicate prickly Pinnae; 'Noah's-arks' in abundance; great Strombi, their lips and outer shell broken away, disclosing the rosy cameo within, and looking on the rough beach pitifully tender and flesh-like; lumps and fragments of coral innumerable, reminding us ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... and there was no stirring out now for the ladies between eleven o'clock and five or six in the afternoon. Isobel, however, generally went in for a chat, the first thing after early breakfast, with Mrs. Doolan, whose children were fractious with prickly heat. ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... proceeded on alone to disappear in a green thicket. Presently he reappeared, and motioned for them to come on. He led the way over smooth, sandy paths between clumps of willows, into a heavy growth of alder bushes and prickly thorns, at length to emerge upon a beautiful grassy plot enclosed by green and yellow shrubbery. Above the stream, which cut the edge of the glade, rose a sloping, wooded ridge, with huge rocks projecting here and there ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... to use at night is made of one ounce of glycerine, half an ounce of rosemary (fluid), and twenty drops of carbolic acid. This is excellent for any irritation of the skin, and also for prickly heat. The face must always be well washed with water and pure soap before applying any of these preparations. If the skin is oily, bathe with diluted camphor (a teaspoonful to a pint of water), but it is injurious to ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... sides of the, Cordillera, across the continent. I saw it in unfrequented spots in Chile, Entre Rios, and Banda Oriental. In the latter country alone, very many (probably several hundred) square miles are covered by one mass of these prickly plants, and are impenetrable by man or beast. Over the undulating plains, where these great beds occur, nothing else can now live. Before their introduction, however, the surface must have supported, as in other parts, a rank herbage. I doubt whether ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... tame, and will allow you to stroke their cheeks. You remember our placing a hedgehog on the study table, and seeing how it got off on to the ground. It came to the edge, and threw itself off, coiling up its body partly as it fell; the elastic nature of its prickly covering enabling it to bear the shock of the fall without the ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... afforded by the belt of furze bushes was artificially improved by an inclosure of upright stakes, interwoven with boughs of the same prickly vegetation, and within the inclosure lay a renowned Marlbury-Down breeding flock ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... red-hot of touch, and nobody writes anything but accounts of amusements in the Hill-stations or obituary notices. Then the telephone becomes a tinkling terror, because it tells you of the sudden deaths of men and women that you knew intimately, and the prickly-heat covers you as with a garment, and you sit down and write:—“A slight increase of sickness is reported from the Khuda Janta Khan District. The outbreak is purely sporadic in its nature, and, thanks to the energetic efforts of the District authorities, is now ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... Linden,—"I see and hear a good many things. But nobody can get on in the world after such a prickly fashion,—why even a porcupine smooths himself down before he tries to go ahead. If you were to be a lawyer Phil, you'd fight your clients instead of helping them fight,—and if you were a farmer, you'd be like ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... like sentinels, as if to warn off trespassers. Clinging to their rugged sides were starfish of all sizes and colors, varying from white to red, with all the intervening shades. Sea urchins, those porcupines of the deep, with long, prickly spines, looking like a lady's pincushion, were in profusion, and clung tenaciously to every rock. Now our boat glides over a canon whose rugged sides extend away down into the depths, and on either side the verdure grows ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... their thick brows quite united by the energy of her frown as she gazed across a sand-dell, chary of vegetation but profuse in potsherds, towards the white walls and high red roof of the Mission-house seen above a wave of tamarisks on the opposite dune. The hedge of prickly pear defining her small domain did not obstruct the view, for it consisted largely of gaps, by one of which a group of three Frankish ladies had just gone from her. She could see their white-clad forms, under ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... subsist the year round on the open range. The strongest point in the original Spanish cattle was their inborn ability as foragers, being inured for centuries to drouth, the heat of summer, and the northers of winter, subsisting for months on prickly pear, a species of the cactus family, or drifting like game animals to more favored localities in avoiding the natural afflictions that beset an arid country. In producing the ideal range animal it was more important to retain ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... of Irish fields and roads and fences as I went up, and a very wide and extensive view of the country after I had reached the summit, and improving the atmosphere of my physical tenement amazingly. These mountains have no trees or bushes or other growth than a harsh prickly heather, about a foot high, which begins exactly at the foot of the mountain. You are walking on smooth, fine meadow land, when you leap a fence and there is the heather. On the highest point of this mountain, and on the highest point of all the mountains around, was ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... sheet indicated an open sky with scarcely a hint of cloud. Across the bottom she outlined a bit of Sunland Desert she well remembered, in the foreground a bed of flat-leaved nopal, flowering red and yellow, the dark red prickly pears, edible, being a near relative of the fruits she had used in her salad. After giving the prickly pear the place of honor to the left, in higher growth she worked in the slender, cylindrical, jointed stems of the Cholla, shading ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... or eighteen miles behind him. With that he slowed up, and the matter of riding did not require all his faculties. He passed several ranches and was seen by men. This did not suit him, and he took an old trail across country. It was a flat region with a poor growth of mesquite and prickly-pear cactus. Occasionally he caught a glimpse of low hills in the distance. He had hunted often in that section, and knew where to find grass and water. When he reached this higher ground he did not, however, ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... staggers to the camp that lies among thorn bushes, hungry and tired and full of fever. How then could one expect him to put up a mosquito net in the pitch-black darkness in a country where every tree has got a thorn? Long ago the army's mosquito nets have adorned the prickly bushes of the waterless deserts. "Tuck your mosquito net well in at night," so runs the Army Order. But what does it profit him to tuck in the net when dysentery drags him from his blanket ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... his head. The dark tavern room suddenly became hot and thick and suffocating—and people, people everywhere! Nejdanov began talking, talking incessantly, shouting furiously, in exasperation, shaking broad rough hands, kissing prickly beards. ... The enormous fellow in the greasy coat kissed him too, nearly breaking his ribs. This fellow turned out to be a perfect fiend. "I'll wring the neck," he shouted, "I'll wring the neck of anyone who dares ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... poor peas came at last, no one cared for them, as their day was over, and spring-lamb had grown into mutton. Tommy consoled himself with a charitable effort; for he transplanted all the thistles he could find, and tended them carefully for Toby, who was fond of the prickly delicacy, and had eaten all he could find on the place. The boys had great fun over Tom's thistle bed; but he insisted that it was better to care for poor Toby than for himself, and declared that he would devote his entire farm next ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... Marquis de Henares, idolized me. He was a soldier through and through, very stern and reserved toward everybody, even my mother, who never really understood his rare nature. Only to me he showed his heart of gold, his high and noble character, his deep feeling—a prickly pear, outside rough and inside honey-sweet. He brought me up as if I was to be a cabinet minister, and treated me like a beloved comrade from the time I was twelve, so that my mother was often jealous of me. When ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... but by the road that descends on the other side of the headland. We passed by groves of lemon, star-scattered with fruit and blossom and enclosed in rough walls of black lava; by the grey-green straggling of the prickly pears and by vines climbing up their canes. We caught glimpses of promontories dotted with pink and white cottages and of the thread of foam that outlines the curve of the bay where a train was busily puffing along by the stony, brown beach, showing how much a little movement will tell ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... Why had no one warned him of the presence of such a gift in this dazzling, prickly, unripe creature? He sat down against the wall of the house, as close as possible, but out of sight, and listened. All the romance of his spoilt and solitary life had come to him so far through music, and through ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as was his custom in her presence, of a warm, prickly sensation in the small of the back. Some kind of elephantiasis seemed to have attacked his hands and feet, swelling them to enormous proportions. He wished profoundly that he could get rid of his habit of yelping with nervous laughter whenever he encountered the girl of his dreams. ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... slowly paddles his canoe upon the waters of this western sound, each tree of different kind by shade of green and shape of crown is known; the Toh-a-mupt or Sitca spruce with scaley bark and prickly spine; the feathery foliage of the Quilth-kla-mupt, the western hemlock, relieved in spring by the light green of tender shoots. The frond-like branches and aromatic scent betray to him the much-prized Hohm-ess, the giant cedar tree, from which he carves his staunch canoe. These ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... figs the same, and in March you can buy five oranges or ten sweet lemons for a cent. Huge watermelons are about eight or ten cents a piece. We buy so many pounds of milk and oil and potatoes and charcoal. The prickly pear, or subire, is a delicious fruit, although covered with sharp barbed spines and thorns. It is full of hard large woody seeds, but the people are very fond of the fruit. Sheikh Nasif el Yazijy was ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... for this lack of luxuriance, the coast is furrowed with a succession of tiny harbours, where the fishing-boats rest at anchor. There are many villages upon the spurs of hills, and on the headlands naval stations, hospitals, lazzaretti, and prisons. A prickly bindweed (the Smilax sarsaparilla) forms a feature in the near landscape, with its creamy odoriferous blossoms, coral berries, and ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... expressed no pleasure as he stepped from the carriage and helped his companion, but she was not to be depressed by a brother-in-law's gravity. Calista Yohe, moving lightly in her pink delaine dress, resembled the prickly roses coming into bloom beside the gate, which would flourish and fade imperturbably in accordance with their own times and seasons. At present she looked as though the fading were remote. She shook hands joyfully and seized the carpet-bag ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... as it is anti-sin. Just so far and so fast as the true spirit of the gospel obtains in the land, and especially in the lives of the oppressed, will the spirit of slavery sicken and become powerless like the serpent with his head pressed beneath the fresh leaves of the prickly ash ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... following the streams, he will find the path blocked by fallen trees. It is necessary continually to climb over or under obstructions, and the traveller is fortunate if he does not fall into the cold water. Upon the banks it is even worse; one must struggle through dense prickly bushes and ferns, and be tripped every few rods. Though the forest may appear at first to offer an easier way, it will soon be found that creeping and crawling through the undergrowth of bushes and young trees is exceedingly ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... little mind that Finn was a fairly harmless person. So they sat up looking at one another, and Finn marvelled that the world should contain so curious a creature as his new acquaintance; while Echidna doubtless wondered, in his primitive, prickly fashion, how much larger dogs were likely to grow in that part of the country. Then the flying tail of a bandicoot caught Finn's attention, and the passing that way of an unusually fat bull-dog ant drew Echidna ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... my journey, rugged and uneven, Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind; But hearing thee, or others of thy kind, As full of gladness and as free of heaven, I, with my fate contented, will plod on, And hope for higher raptures, when life's ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... proclivities by losing me job, bein' already harassed in me soul on account of havin' quarrelled with Norah Flynn a week before by reason of hard words spoken at the Dairymen and Street-Sprinkler Drivers' semi-annual ball, caused by jealousy and prickly heat and that ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... or perspiration that literally flowed from her legs and body, and accompanied by a miliary eruption. It was on the posterior portions, and twelve hours previous was usually preceded by a moldy smell and a prickly sensation. On the abdomen and the back of the neck there was a yellowish secretion. In place of catamenia there was a discharge reddish-green in color. The patient denied having taken any coloring matter or chemicals to influence the color of her perspiration, and no remedy relieved ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... again the Muses from Helicon to so great a journey, especially in a matter they are wholly strangers to, it will be more suitable, perhaps, while I play the divine and make my way through such prickly quiddities, that I entreat the soul of Scotus, a thing more bristly than either porcupine or hedgehog, to leave his scorebone awhile and come into my breast, and then let him go whither he pleases, or to the dogs, I could wish also that I might change my countenance, ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... of these test-phrases and sentences has not yet entirely departed from the schools. Familiar are: "Up the high hill he heaved a huge round stone; around the rugged riven rock the ragged rascal rapid ran; Peter Piper picked a peck of prickly pears from the prickly-pear trees on the pleasant prairies," and many others still in use traditionally among the school-children of to-day, together with linguistic exercises of nonsense-syllables and the like, pronouncing ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... cattle and dispute about the price, or whet their bargains with a draught of wine. Meanwhile the nets are brought on shore glittering with the fry of sardines, which are cooked like whitebait, with cuttlefish—amorphous objects stretching shiny feelers on the hot dry sand—and prickly purple eggs of the sea-urchin. Women go about their labour through the throng, some carrying stones upon their heads, or unloading boats and bearing planks of wood in single file, two marching side by side beneath one load of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... at her feet very carefully. There was nothing near them but a big round stone that was about the size of her head, and a prickly thistle that she never would step on if she ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... altercation of a cat with a dog, was beginning little by little to wilt and droop. Upon him was already advancing the stage of self-revelation, next in order, in the paroxysm of which he several times attempted to kiss Yarchenko's hand. His lids had become red; around the shaven, prickly lips had deepened the tearful wrinkles that gave him an appearance of weeping; and it could be heard by his voice that his nose and throat were already ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... are desert now, and bare, Where flourished once a forest fair When these waste glens with copse were lined, And peopled with the hart and hind. Yon thorn—perchance whose prickly spears Have fenced him for three hundred years, While fell around his green compeers - Yon lonely thorn, would he could tell The changes of his parent dell, Since he, so grey and stubborn now, Waved in each ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... region was a black, rocky soil upon which vegetation would not grow. A rolling land, grimly black, metallic; with outcroppings of ore, red and white and with occasional patches of thin white sand whereon a prickly blue grass struggled ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... four families, of which the first is the poppy family (Papaveraceae), including the poppies, eschscholtzias, Mexican or prickly poppy (Argemone), etc., of the gardens, and the blood-root (Sanguinaria), celandine poppy (Stylophorum), and a few other wild plants (see Fig. 103, A-I). Most of the family have a colored juice (latex), which is white in the poppy, yellow in ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... tell what fun it was To see the prickly shower! To feel what a whack on head or back. Was ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... like flame, and an atmosphere of sulphur. No breath of air, not a single ruffle in the great, drooping leaves of the African trees and dense, prickly shrubs. All around the dank, nauseous odour of poison flowers, the ceaseless dripping of poisonous moisture. From the face of the man who stood erect, unvanquished as yet in the struggle for life, the fierce sweat ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... horizon. On the landward side of the train, as it reeled and squealed along its tortuous course, were gray and gold Sicilian villages perched high against the hills or drowsing among fields of artichoke and sumac and prickly pear. ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... north, building up out of fine dust which was over all the surface of the baked ground little whirl-winds—remolinos, as the Mexicans call them—which went dancing down the valleys as though they were ghostly things; and occasionally, when one of these struck us, we were covered with a prickly dust that fairly burned our skins. What water we got was to be had only by digging in the arroyos which traversed the centre of each valley longitudinally; and although this water always was muddy, and had a strongly alkaline ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... I, "with my scrubbing-brush of a beard, and whiskers like a prickly-pear hedge; why, you mast be all mad to think of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... and point back to a time when the prevailing creed of Yorkshire was Roman Catholicism. Both depict with deep solemnity the terrors of death and of the Judgment which lies beyond. Whinny Moor appears in either poem as the desolate moorland tract, beset with prickly whin-bushes and flinty stones, which the dead man must traverse on "shoonless feet" on his journey from life. And beyond this moor lies the still more mysterious "Brig o' Dreead," or "' Brig o' Deead," as "A Dree Neet" renders it. It would be tempting to conjecture ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... the national custom to eat rusks with 'muisjes' on on these occasions, and these little sweets are manufactured of two kinds. The sugar coating is smooth when the child is a girl, and rough and prickly like a chestnut burr when the child is a boy; and when one goes to buy 'muisjes' at a confectioner's he is always asked whether boys' or girls' 'muisjes' are required. Hundreds-and-thousands, the well-known decoration on buns and cakes in an English pastry-cook's ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... boots and walked onwards. He had no idea where the road lay, and every moment he stumbled into a patch of heather or prickly furze. The ground was very uneven with unexpected mounds and deep hollows: here and there were water-soaked, soggy places, and into these cold ruins he sank ankle deep. There was no longer an earth or a sky, but only a black void and ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... day Park reached Medina, the capital of the king of Woolli's dominions. It is a large place, and contains at least a thousand houses. It is fortified in the common African manner by a high mud wall, and an outward fence of pointed stakes and prickly bushes, but the walls were neglected, and the outward fence had suffered considerably by being plucked up for fire-wood. Mr. Park obtained a lodging with one of the king's near relations, who warned him, at his introduction to the king, not to shake hands with him, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... against any well-grounded fear of robbers. Great, therefore, was my surprise at hearing, shortly after I had taken my seat, two persons in animated conversation behind the spot which I had selected. A thicket of climbing plants and prickly cactuses alone separated me from them; but while it prevented me from catching even a glimpse of their persons, I lost not one word of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to the mountain ravines. A few months before, at the commencement of the rebellion, this same Austin friar, Father Rafael Redondo, had ignominiously treated his own and other native curates by having them stripped naked and tied down to benches, where he beat them with the prickly tail of the ray-fish to extort confessions relating to conspiracy. In San Fernando de la Union the native priests Adriano Garces, Mariano Gaerlan, and Mariano Dacanaya were tortured with a hot iron applied to their bodies to force a confession that they were ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... stewards rummage out lunch-drinks from the dewy ice-chest, the Desert whines louder than the well-wheels on the bank: 'I am here, only a quarter of a mile away. For mercy's sake, pretty gentleman, spare a mouthful of that prickly whisky-and-soda you are lifting to your lips. There's a white man a few hundred miles off, dying on my lap of thirst—thirst that you cure with a rag dipped in lukewarm water while you hold him down with the one hand, and he thinks he is cursing you aloud, but he isn't, because his ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... enough for all of us," said Bert. "But there will be a lot of fellows after the nuts this morning, on account of the frost which has cracked open the prickly burrs, and let the nuts fall out. So if we want to get our share we'll have to start soon. Nan and I will look after ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Home • Laura Lee Hope
... a place of considerable extent; and may contain from eight hundred to one thousand houses. It is fortified in the common African manner, by a surrounding high wall built of clay, and an outward fence of pointed stakes and prickly bushes; but the walls are neglected, and the outward fence has suffered considerably from the active hands of busy housewives, who pluck up the stakes for firewood. I obtained a lodging at one of the king's ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... the centre of a wide, rolling, thickly wooded estate encompassed by a holly hedge noted for miles around for its beauty and its prickly barrier to freedom. The house had been restored and added to in order to meet the demands of a school harboring sixty or seventy girls, though it still retained its old lines of beauty and its air ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... produced like the scenery of a piece, and when you arrive the curtain goes slowly up, and it is your first night. The beauty which you see is strangely artificial, and all partakes of the grotesque. Here flourishes that monstrous cactus-like growth called prickly-pear, with flat flap-like leaves resembling fingerless green hands; warped and brutal-looking stems looking like palsied arms. The cactus is abloom in red-hot poker ends. Orange trees and lemon trees and olive trees abound. Burlesquely-shaped palms, swathed in their overcoats, stand on the green ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... in a northerly direction in order to avoid the Indians. We travelled all that night, the next day, and a portion of its night until we reached the Arkansas River, and, having eaten nothing during that whole time excepting a few prickly-pears, were beginning to feel weak from the weight of our burdens and exhaustion. At this point we decided to lighten our loads by burying all of the money we had carried thus far, keeping only a small sum for each man. Proceeding to ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... protecting the flank chose this inopportune moment to cast her attention and her searchlight. Each time it caught him in its brilliant glare on the sky-line, Mac crashed down into the nearest shrub, prickly holly, arbutus or stunted oak, and cursed lowly to himself till the beam lifted. Progressing spasmodically when the beam was directed elsewhere, they reached the outpost, then stumbled wearily back along the beach, ate and bathed and turned in ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... Bremer's furze-bush." When the dainty Swedish novelist once came to gladden Eversley Rectory with her presence she told how she longed to see the plant before which Linnaeus had fallen on his knees; and she walked up this selfsame hill and with eyes full of tears gazed on the prickly shrub with its mist of golden-colored, apricot-scented flowers. The old Hampshire proverb says, "When furze is out of flower kissing is out of fashion;" and, sure enough, there is not a month in the year in which you may not find a blossom or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... too much water the party now found themselves straitened for want of it, and the journey, too, began to tell upon the horses. Thick scrubs of eucalyptus brush, overrun with creepers and prickly acacia bushes, soon helped to bar the way, and when they at last reached the point of a range, which they named Peel Range, Oxley reluctantly abandoned his idea of making for the coast in a south-west direction, and ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... humble town where I am not understood, where I shelter my pride, my suffering, and my joy, where I have hardly any other distraction than that of listening to the barking of my old dog and watching the faces of the poor. But I reach the hillside where the prickly furze is spread, and in musing upon my difficulties I am filled with a beneficent gentleness. To-day it is no longer the coarse and disdainful laugh of the public, nor the terrible doubt of everything, which disturbs me. The ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... the surface of the ocean. On the highest part were growing some bushes and small mangroves, (the dry part of which was our fuel) and the wild castor oil beans. We were greatly disappointed in not finding the latter suitable food; likewise some of the prickly pear bushes, which gave us only a few pears about the size of our small button pear; the outside has thorns, which if applied to the fingers or lips, will remain there, and cause a severe smarting similar to the nettle; the inside a spungy substance, full of juice and seeds, which are ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... the subsoil that they establish themselves and travel to and fro; with the help of their powerful mandibles, their hard cranium, their strong, prickly legs, they easily make themselves paths in the loose earth. They are living ploughshares. By the end of August, therefore, the female population is for the most part underground, busily occupied in egg-laying and provisioning. Everything ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... the plains above the river] they all repaired their moccasins, and put on double soles to protect them from the prickly-pear, and from the sharp points of earth which have been formed by the trampling of the buffalo during the late rains. This of itself is enough to render the portage disagreeable to one who has no burden; but as the men are loaded as heavily as their strength will permit, the ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... inclining to green; the feet and claws are like those of the arrau. The whole animal is of an olive-green, but it has two spots of red mixed with yellow on the top of the head. The throat is also yellow, and furnished with a prickly appendage. The terekays do not assemble in numerous societies like the arraus, to lay their eggs in common, and deposit them upon the same shore. The eggs of the terekay have an agreeable taste, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... exhausted at last upon the shore of Terceira. There were no insects then for the poor bird to feed upon, so it died of starvation and weariness before the day was out; but a little earth that clung in a pellet to one of its feet contained the egg of a land-shell, while the prickly seed of a common Spanish plant was entangled among the winged feathers by its hooked awns. The egg hatched out, and became the parent of a large brood of minute snails, which, outliving the cold spell of the Ice Age, had developed ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... mounted on the backs of goats and rams; but such animals as these must have been far too big for Pygmies to ride upon; so that, I rather suppose, they rode on squirrel-back, or rabbit-back, or rat-back, or perhaps got upon hedgehogs, whose prickly quills would be very terrible to the enemy. However this might be, and whatever creatures the Pygmies rode upon, I do not doubt that they made a formidable appearance, armed with sword and spear, and bow and arrow, blowing their tiny trumpet, and shouting ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the whole party sit down to breakfast in a little white-washed room, from the door of which the long, mountain coastline and the sparkling sea show of an impossible blue through the openings of a white-washed rampart. I try a sea-egg, one of those prickly fellows—sea-urchins, they are called sometimes; the shell is of a lovely purple, and when opened there are rays of yellow adhering to the inside; these I eat, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... kindly neighbor-folk that called the young ones in, Down fragrant yellow-tapered paths that thread the prickly whin; The hot, sweet smell of oaten-cake, the kettle purring soft, The dear-remembered Irish speech— they ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... as he scrambled up. "Oh, what an ass I am! Anyone would think I was old enough to know that I couldn't catch a rabbit on the run, even if he had no hole among the hazel-stubbs. Hole? Hundreds, where he could dive down. Horrid, prickly things furzes are. That was a sharp one; but there, it hasn't hurt much, only it makes one so ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... durian is green and prickly, about the size of a small melon, and even through the tough outside rind one can notice a faint nauseating odour. It is said that when one is opened in the market it takes but a few moments to clear the vicinity of Americans, while ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... places, so characteristic of Southern France, have a poetry of their own that to me is ever enticing. I love the stony wastes and their dazzling sun-glitter. There I find something that approaches companionship in the prickly juniper, the narcotic hellebore, and the acrid spurge. And these plants likewise love the places where the world has remained unchanged by man. The heat, however, was too great for me to linger upon this shadeless hill, where every stone was warm, and the reflected glare was almost as blinding ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... farther off than we had calculated, and it was quite dark before it was reached. It was not without difficulty that in these circumstances we could get to land through the breakers in the open road quite unknown to us, and then, in coal-black darkness, find our way through thickets of prickly bushes to the railway which here runs along the coast. We had then to go along the railway for a considerable distance before we reached a station from which our telegrams could be despatched. Scarcely had we entered the station when ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... the sweets of love. They live at ease ensconced in the branches of the trees, nestling amid green olive vines and garlands of flowers. I, only I, am exiled! Where shall I find a refuge? My rock-shelter is hedged about with prickly thorns and thistles.... E'en the wild birds of prey mate happily, only I, poor mourning dove, alone among all beings alive, dwell apart. E'en those who gorge themselves with innocent blood live tranquil in their home eyries. ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... the brows of all the impending hills. The water-gods to floods their rivulets turn, And each, with streaming eyes, supplies his wanting urn. The fauns forsake the woods, the nymphs the grove, And round the plain in sad distractions rove: In prickly brakes their tender limbs they tear, And leave on thorns their locks of golden hair. With their sharp nails, themselves the satyrs wound, And tug their shaggy beards, and bite with grief the ground. Lo Pan himself, beneath ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... couple of men standing directly on the brow of the hill; and having landed, the captain took his way round the hill, ordering me and one other to follow him. We followed, picking our way out, and jumping and scrambling up, walking over briers and prickly pears, until we came to the top. Here the country stretched out for miles, as far as the eye could reach, on a level, table surface, and the only habitation in sight was the small white mission of San Juan Capistrano, with a few Indian huts about it, standing in a small hollow, about ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... were as yellow as scrambled eggs, maples grew knobby with red buds. Among the fresh bright grass came, here and there, exhilarating smells of last year's buried bones. The little upward slit at the back of Gissing's nostrils felt prickly. He thought that if he could bury it deep enough in cold beef broth it would be comforting. Several times he went out to the pantry intending to try the experiment, but every time Fuji happened to be around. Fuji was a Japanese pug, and rather correct, ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... struck with the silence of the place. No children began to chatter, and no dogs barked. Nor could I see any native sheep or cattle. The place, though it had evidently been recently inhabited, was as still as the bush round it, and some guinea-fowl got up out of the prickly pear bushes right at the kraal gate. I remember that I hesitated a little before going in, there was such an air of desolation about the spot. Nature never looks desolate when man has not yet laid his hand upon her breast; ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... mortifications. But asceticism, here as everywhere else, tends to self-indulgence, since one extreme produces another. In one part of India, therefore, devotees are swinging on hooks in honor of Siva, hanging themselves by the feet, head downwards, over a fire, rolling on a bed of prickly thorns, jumping on a couch filled with sharp knives, boring holes in their tongues, and sticking their bodies full of pins and needles, or perhaps holding the arms over the head till they stiffen in that position. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... old Turkish well I led my stretcher-squads past the gun of the Field Artillery (mounted quite near our hospital tents) along a track which ran past a patch of dry yellow grass and dead thistles—here among the prickly plants and sage-bushes grew a white flower—pure and sweet-scented—something like a flag—a "holy flower" among the dead and scorched-up yellow ochre blades and the khaki and dull grey-greens of thorns. We went along this track, past the dead sniper which Hawk and I had so carefully ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... to spy that fearful thing All down the dusky walls in circlets wound; Alas! for what rare prize, with many a ring Girding the marble casket round and round? His folded tail, lost in the gloom profound, Terribly darkeneth the rocky base; But on the top his monstrous head is crown'd With prickly spears, and on his doubtful face Gleam his unwearied eyes, red watchers of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... has tried several sorts, but at present only makes use of three kinds of frame cucumber, which he considers preferable to all the others. One is a long black prickly fruit, with a fine bloom and short handle, well filled up. It will sometimes grow for table to the length of fifteen inches, and usually from eleven to twelve. It is an excellent bearer, but not so well adapted for October sowing as the other two kinds, ...
— The art of promoting the growth of the cucumber and melon • Thomas Watkins
... an English name and seems to be a millionaire, and something else which I could not catch, but by the sound of the Prickly-Thistleton's voice it seemed to ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... prodigious efforts to get at him. As the monster rose on its hind legs and reached its paws towards his shelf, the poor boy's spirit seemed to melt, indeed his whole interior felt as if reduced to a warm fluid, while a prickly heat broke out at his extremities, perspiration beaded his brow, and his heart appeared to have settled ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... tropical fruits that are imported are excellent breakfast fruits, such as the alligator pear, Lechosa prickly pear, pomegranate, ...
— Breakfast Dainties • Thomas J. Murrey
... known as Australian, which was found here in abundance in the gloomy brushes, parasitic upon the roots of the tallest trees. We also met with here—in probably its southern limit upon the coast—a species of rattan (Calamus australis) with long prickly shoots, well illustrated in the annexed drawing by Mr. Huxley, representing the process of cutting through the scrub, during an excursion made with Mr. Kennedy, for the purpose of searching for a way out from the low swampy district of ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... examples of that inspired soliloquy, those conversations of one, which are our nearest approach to the talk of other days. How good it is to listen to one of these!—for it is the great charm of their talk that we remember nothing. There were no prickly bits of information to stick on one's mind like burrs. Their talk had no regular features, but, like a sunrise, was ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... into the very prickly bramble-bush with which he has ingeniously contrived to beset this question. In the remarks I have to make I shall confine myself to four points: —1. That the committee find themselves in the painful condition of not spending enough money, and will ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... her gaze, he thought her wide-flung gesture a deserved tribute to the view. The Prickly Pear Valley lay before them, checkered in vivid green or sage-drab as water had been given or withheld. The Scratch Gravel Hills jutted impertinently into the middle distance; while on the far western side of the plain the Jefferson Range rose, tier on tier, the distances shading the climbing ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... soft-coal stove, the younger children of the family undressed at night and dressed in the morning. The older daughter, Anna, and the two big boys slept upstairs, where the rooms were theoretically warmed by stovepipes from below. The first (and the worst!) thing that confronted Thea was a suit of clean, prickly red flannel, fresh from the wash. Usually the torment of breaking in a clean suit of flannel came on Sunday, but yesterday, as she was staying in the house, she had begged off. Their winter underwear was a trial to all the children, but it was bitterest to Thea because she happened to have the ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... and partly to a desire to be absolutely correct, his manners were infused with an extraordinary stiffness and formality. Whenever he appeared in company, he seemed to be surrounded by a thick hedge of prickly etiquette. He never went out into ordinary society; he never walked in the streets of London; he was invariably accompanied by an equerry when he rode or drove. He wanted to be irreproachable and, if that involved friendlessness, it could not be helped. Besides, he had no very high opinion ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... confront an important and very interesting subject; but one which is more difficult to handle than the most prickly briers. There has been a confusion, in regard to Delsarte, of two very distinct things: his practical devotion and his philosophy of art, which does indeed assume a religious character. He himself helped on this confusion. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... which so often interferes to keep our heads from betraying us made me pull up. There was not a sound except the far-away bang of guns and rifles. Near to the kopje there was a garden surrounded by low trees and a hedge of prickly pear. The sun setting behind us slanted into it and made it appear as a charming, peaceful shelter from the dust and noise of the battle. I was still debating with myself as to whether I should go on ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... injudiciously hung within leap of puppy or grasp of urchin. And so you see him, the diligent parent, brooding with a tender mournfulness and sniffing the faint whiff of that fine Christmas tree odour—balsam and burning candles and fist-warmed peppermint—as he undresses the prickly boughs. Here they go into the boxes, red, green, and golden balls, tinkling glass bells, stars, paper angels, cotton-wool Santa Claus, blue birds, celluloid goldfish, mosquito netting, counterfeit stockings, nickel-plated horns, and all the comical accumulation of oddities that gathers from ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... was a work of no slight difficulty, and even danger. Occasionally plunging to the knees in a deep bog, then wading to the girth in a hillock of sand and prickly bent grass (the Arundo arenaria, so plentiful on these coasts), the horses were scarcely able to keep their footing—yet were they still urged on. Every step was expected to bring them within ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... boats, owing to the soft mud at its bottom. On the further side of this canal an earthwork had been constructed, having its crest stoutly palisaded and its steep sides planted with a natural defence of aloes and prickly-pears. ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... plaiting hats, or napping. No one was reading. There was no book-store in Tahiti. I had not read a line since I came. I had not stepped up to the genial dentist's to see an American journal. After years of the newspaper habit, reading and writing them, it had fallen away in Tahiti as the prickly heat after a week at sea. Of what interest was it that the divorce record was growing longer in New York, that Hinky Dink had been reelected in Chicago, and that Los Angeles had doubled in population. A dawn on the beach, a swim in the lagoon, the end ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... deadly shock. More than an hour long they contended with varying success. Musketeers, pikemen, arquebusmen, swordmen, charged, sabred, or shot each other from the various hollows or heights of vantage, plunging knee-deep in the sand, torn and impeded by the prickly broom-plant which grew profusely over the whole surface, and fighting breast to breast and hand to hand in a vast series of individual encounters. Thrice were the Spaniards repulsed in what for a moment seemed absolute rout, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... don't look at him from any standpoint. That's what I complain of. He's encircled with a prickly hedge of clerks. 'You will hear from us.' 'It shall have our best consideration.' 'We have no knowledge of the MS. in question.' Yes, Peter, two valuable quartets have I lost, messing about with ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... Human System.—Carbon dioxide, or carbonic anhydride, carbonic acid, etc., CO2, is a heavy gas, without color or odor. It has a sharp, prickly taste, and is commonly reckoned as poisonous if inhaled in large quantities, though it does not chemically combine with the blood as CO does. Ten per cent in the air will sometimes produce death, and five per cent produces drowsiness. It exists in minute portions ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... tribuli are small engines with four spikes, one fixed in the ground, the three others erect or adverse, (Procopius, Gothic. l. iii. c. 24. Just. Lipsius, Poliorcetwv, l. v. c. 3.) The metaphor was borrowed from the tribuli, (land-caltrops,) an herb with a prickly fruit, commex in Italy. (Martin, ad Virgil. Georgic. i. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... the boilers themselves were not a whit hotter than we were. How the stokers stood it is a marvel to this day. I suffered dreadfully with the prickly heat, as if in ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... stood motionless, there came from behind a dense screen of shrubs which would have resembled aloe and prickly pear bushes, save that they were as big as oak trees, a ghastly howling. The next second, hopped and hurtled across the beach toward the girls, a group of hair-covered, shaggy creatures which were neither apes nor men. The faces, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... cow and a horse grazed, and a place immediately about the house covered with thick grass and shaded by maple trees. There were some shrubs too, behind which one could hide if necessary, but they were prickly, uncomfortable to nestle against, and the unmown grass absorbed an immense quantity of dew. In imagination, however, the Baby wandered on pastoral slopes and in classic shades. At first he paid his visits at night when the family were asleep, ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... while due west on to General Stanhope's road. But that was nothing to me then. Turning my back upon it, I took another path, in woeful disrepair, which led me down by many windings between high stone walls and straggling clumps of prickly pear. There were few houses to stop the view—only some two or three farm buildings. Cottages can scarcely be said to exist. The labourer either lives in the towns, or else he lodges under his master's ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... spirits of the waves, From sea-silk beds in their coral caves, With snail-plate armour snatched in haste, They speed their way through the liquid waste; Some are rapidly borne along On the mailed shrimp or the prickly prong, Some on the blood-red leeches glide, Some on the stony star-fish ride, Some on the back of the lancing squab, Some on the sidelong soldier-crab; And some on the jellied quarl, that flings At once a thousand streamy stings— They cut the wave with ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... pipe and pouch; and now the burgher slowly and deliberately cleaned his pipe, and began as slowly to fill it. Several burgher girls had come up; they were speaking secretly with the woman and one another, and tittering as they looked at Anselmus. The student felt as if he were standing on prickly thorns and burning needles. No sooner had he recovered his pipe and tobacco-pouch, than he darted off at the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Lucky did, and of course he got stuck with one of those prickly, stickery porcupine needles and it was an awful bother to get ...
— Billy Bunny and Uncle Bull Frog • David Magie Cory
... see the roof of a sod house, and a little of the brown wall that rose not much higher than the corn. Grass had grown on the roof, for it was made of strips of sod, also, and turned sere and brown in the sun. A wire fence stood a prickly barrier between roaming cattle and this little field of succulent fodder. Morgan directed his course to skirt the field, and came at last ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... which I was heir, in common with every sad-eyed child of the Pale. This is the living seed which I found among my heirlooms, when I learned how to strip from them the prickly husk in which they were passed down to me. And what is the fruit of such seed as that, and whither lead such dreams? If it is mine to give the answer, let my words be ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... extent her own fault. At the present stage of her career she was an extraordinarily prickly child, and even to her two sponsors did not at times present a very amiable outside: like a hedgehog, she was ever ready to shoot out her spines. With regard, that is, to her veracity. She had been so badly grazed, in her recent encounter, ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... quotations illustrate further the list of unusual prepositions: "And she would be often weeping inside the room while George was amusing himself without."—Anna Ross, p. 81. "Several nuts grow closely together, inside this prickly covering."—Jacob Abbot. "An other boy asked why the peachstone was not outside the peach."—Id. "As if listening to the sounds withinside it."—Gardiner's Music of Nature, p. 214. "Sir Knight, you well might mark ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... now, and as the team reached the level ground, the driver lined them out and settled back in his seat with a satisfied grunt. About both sides of the trail at this point grew great thickets of brush—paloverde, the darker mesquites, and grotesque bunches of prickly pear. One of the ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... anxious about? There she is, a lily of the valley, untinted, needing no tint. What change could improve her? What pencil dare to paint? My sweetheart, if I ever have one, must bear nearer affinity to the rose—a sweet, lively delight guarded with prickly peril. My wife, if I ever marry, must stir my great frame with a sting now and then; she must furnish use to her husband's vast mass of patience. I was not made so enduring to be mated with a lamb; I should find more congenial responsibility in the ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... for cultivation and irrigation if necessary. There are several large gardens, inclosed by high and substantial walls, which now contain a great variety of fruit-trees and shrubbery. I noticed the orange, fig, palm, olive, and grape. There are also large inclosures hedged in by the prickly-pear (cactus), which grows to an enormous size, and makes an impervious barrier against man or beast. The stalks of some of these plants are of the thickness of a man's body, and grow to the height of fifteen feet. A juicy fruit is produced by the prickly-pear, ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... him he started on his ride from the city of oranges. Oranges grow plentifully enough in Spain, in Malta, in Egypt, in Jamaica, and other places, but within five miles of Jaffa nothing else is grown—if we except the hedges of prickly pear which divide the gardens. Orange garden succeeds to orange garden till one finds oneself on the broad open desert that leads away ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... away, Auntie," he replied. "The bark is hard to get through; it's tough and prickly and not always lovely, but it's the sap that counts in every case, and that's what I used to tell you and Connie. Every time I tapped these people up here, I saw and ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... last brought him to writing as if under a mask; whereas it would have been better to write out flowingly, musically, and lucidly. His mixture of satire and kindliness always reminds me of those lanes near Beyrout in which you ride with the prickly-pear bristling alongside of you, and yet can pluck the grapes which force themselves among it from the fields. Inveterately satirical as Jerrold is, he is even "spoonily" tender at the same time; and it lay deep ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the stem of a prickly-pear, which shot out from the crevice of a rock washed by the waves, a royal eagle of extraordinary size and beauty, with a serpent in its talons, and its broad wings opened to the rising sun. They hailed the auspicious omen, announced by an oracle as indicating the sight of their future ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... the night at Arimathea, a pretty village surrounded with gardens enclosed with hedges of prickly pear. Here they found hospitality, in an old convent, but all the comforts of Europe and many of the refinements of Asia had ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... excavated gallery The burrowing mole groped on from year to year; No harmless hedgehog curled because of me His prickly ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... two small streams of San Salvador and Santa Gertrudis, and these only contain water in the rainy season. Neither of them had running water when we passed them. The chaparral commences within forty or fifty miles of the Rio Grande. This is poor, rocky, and sandy; covered with prickly-pear, thistles, and almost every sticking thing, constituting a thick and perfectly impenetrable undergrowth. For any useful or agricultural purpose, the country is not worth ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... that delicious breeze. The short turf, fragrant with odorous herbs, rose and fell elastic, underfoot. The mountain-piles of white cloud moved in sublime procession along the blue field of heaven, overhead. The wild growth of prickly bushes, spread in great patches over the grass, was in a glory of yellow bloom. On we went; now up, now down; now bending to the right, and now turning to the left. I looked about me. No house; no road; no paths, fences, hedges, walls; no land-marks of any sort. All round us, turn which way we ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... down the mountain side is a chestnut wood. Did you ever see a chestnut tree? In the spring its branches are covered with bunches of creamy flowers, like long tassels. All the hot summer these are turning into sweet nuts, wrapped safely in large, prickly, green balls. 4. But when the frost of autumn comes, these prickly balls turn brown, and crack open. Then you may see inside one, two, three, and even four, sweet, brown nuts. 5. When her father says, one night at supper ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... about sunset, and I eagerly seized the opportunity to go ashore in the canoe and see what I could learn. It is here only a step from the marine algae to terrestrial vegetation of almost tropical luxuriance. Parting the alders and huckleberry bushes and the crooked stems of the prickly panax, I made my way into the woods, and lingered in the twilight doing nothing in particular, only measuring a few of the trees, listening to learn what birds and animals might be about, and ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... playing, O'er yon summits gray; Mild now the breeze is blowing, And the crystal streamlet 's flowing Gently on its way. On its banks the wild rose springing Welcomes in the sunny ray, Wet with dew its head is hinging, Bending low the prickly spray; Then haste, my love, while birds are singing, To ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80 Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... goldfinches which daintily feed among the fluffy seeds, nor the bees, nor the "painted lady," which may be seen in all parts of the world where thistles grow, hovering about the beautiful rose-purple flowers. In the prickly cradle of leaves, the caterpillar of this thistle butterfly weaves a web ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... hamlets. One, known as Modder River village, is clustered round the station; the other, Rosmead, lies a mile further down the river. In both are farms and cottages with gardens, bounded by trees, strongly-built mud walls, and fences of wire and prickly cactus. On the left bank, close to the river, there are two or three farms, surrounded by gardens and substantial enclosures. About five miles to the north-east of the Modder River village the Magersfontein kopjes ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... not by what was traditional in it, like the categories of substance and power, but rather by certain incidental errors—notably by admitting an experience independent of bodily life, yet compounded and evolving in a mechanical fashion. But I do not find in him a prickly nest of obsolete notions and contradictions from which, fledged at last, we have flown to our present enlightenment. In his person, in his temper, in his allegiances and hopes, he was the prototype of a race of philosophers native and dominant among people of English ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... was waiting for. And as soon as the frosts came and burst open the prickly pods that covered the beechnuts he intended to lead the first nutting party of the season to the place where ...
— The Tale of Jasper Jay - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... evaporation. Mountain-roads. Real del Monte. Guns and pistols. Regla. The father-confessor in Mexico. Morals of servitude. Cornish miners. Dram-drinking. Salt-trade. The Indian market. Indian Conservatism. Sardines. Account-keeping. The great Barranca. Tropical fruits. Prickly pears. Their use. The "Water-Throat." Silver-works. Volcano of Jorullo. Cascade of Regla. "Eyes of Water." Fires. The Hill of Knives. Obsidian implements. Obsidian mines. The Stone-age. The loadstone-mountain of Mexico. Unequal Civilization of the Aztecs. Silver and commerce of Mexico. ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... abundance of fresh water and fuel, they hove down their ships and caulked them. This occupied them forty days. To obtain suitable wood for repairs, they had to search for it in the forests, and drag it with infinite labour from among the prickly bushes, their feet suffering greatly, as their ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... water. In some instances, upon killing them after a full year's deprivation of all nourishment, as much as three gallons of perfectly sweet and fresh water have been found in their bags. Their food is chiefly wild parsley and celery, with purslain, sea-kelp, and prickly pears, upon which latter vegetable they thrive wonderfully, a great quantity of it being usually found on the hillsides near the shore wherever the animal itself is discovered. They are excellent and highly nutritious food, and have, no doubt, been the means of preserving the lives ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Somerset East, Graaf Reinet and Middelburg people were compelled to eradicate prickly pears and do other hard labour simply because they had remained quietly at home, according to the proclamation issued by Sir Alfred Milner, and refused to join a volunteer corps of some sort or other. Many magistrates, acting on instructions, forced guiltless people to walk ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... the stream, carrying down an avalanche of loose earth and stones after us, and breenged into the maze of prickly bushes, winding through those that the snow had been blown off. But mostly the bushes were dry and bare of snow, and this indeed proved our safety. We were nearly through the clumps when the horsemen on our right crossed the ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... Marstrand island which looked westward to the sea, unguarded by isles or skerries, there was nothing but bare and barren rocks and ragged headlands thrust out into the waves. Heather there was in brown tufts and prickly thorn bushes, holes of the otter and the fox, but never a path, never a house or any sign ...
— The Treasure • Selma Lagerlof
... care it is to guard a thousand flocks: Whether descended from beneath the rocks That overtop your mountains; whether come From vallies where the pipe is never dumb; 200 Or from your swelling downs, where sweet air stirs Blue hare-bells lightly, and where prickly furze Buds lavish gold; or ye, whose precious charge Nibble their fill at ocean's very marge, Whose mellow reeds are touch'd with sounds forlorn By the dim echoes of old Triton's horn: Mothers and wives! who day by day prepare The scrip, with needments, for the mountain ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... fretful persistence: Nay, taste, while awake, This half of a curd-white smooth cheese-ball That peels, flake by flake, Like an onion, each smoother and whiter; Next, sip this weak wine 110 From the thin green glass flask, with its stopper, A leaf of the vine; And end with the prickly-pear's red flesh That leaves thro' its juice The stony black seeds on your pearl-teeth. Scirocco is loose! Hark, the quick, whistling pelt of the olives Which, thick in one's track, Tempt the stranger to pick up and bite them, Tho' not yet half black! 120 How the old twisted ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... to sinners," may easily gain a reputation for goodness simply by doing nothing bad. Look wise and heavenward, frown severely but regretfully upon others' faults, and the world will whisper, "Ah, how good he is!" And you will be good—as the sinless, prickly pear. If the virtues of omission constitute saintship, and from a study of the calendar one might so conclude, seek your corona by the way of justice. For myself, I would rather be a layman with a few active virtues and a small sin or two, than a sternly just saint without a ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... volcanic islands lying under the equator, their black and rugged shores having a most uninviting appearance. In one only, Charles Island, is water to be found, though in another of considerable extent there are hills and valleys with groves of trees; but the chief vegetation on all of them is the prickly pear, which in most ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... of God say? That was a strange shrine for God, that poor, ragged, dry desert bush, with apparently no sap in its gray stem, prickly with thorns, with 'no beauty that we should desire it,' fragile and insignificant, yet it was 'God's house.' Not in the cedars of Lebanon, not in the great monarchs of the forest, but in the forlorn child of the desert did He abide. 'The goodwill of Him that dwelt in the bush' may dwell ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... love them, too, and I'm so glad we live on one, or the place where one used to be. That hedge is prickly-pear and was meant to keep the Indians out of the inclosure, if they were ugly. But it's a hundred years old, and Pedro could remember when it was ever so ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... great a height, acted like miniature bombshells, exploding with a loud report as they touched the deck, and flying into myriad fragments. Not even the most rage-intoxicated Malay could withstand the shock. The noise, the prickly splinters of glass, peppering their half-naked bodies like a charge of small shot, altered their blind fury to dismay and panic. With screams of affright they rushed to the sides of the junk. But the men left in the praus had already begun to paddle frantically away, heedless ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... hundred years a king's son heard of the castle and the enchanted princess who lay asleep there and determined to rescue her. So he cut his way through the thick prickly hedge and at length he came to the princess. When he saw how lovely and how sweet she looked he fell in love with her ...
— Children's Hour with Red Riding Hood and Other Stories • Watty Piper
... galloped along. Their Maharajah's speedier mount again took the lead; but even in India sport is democratic and his nobles, attendants and soldiers all tried to overtake and pass him. The white men, as is their wont, rode in silence but none the less keenly excited. Over sand and stones, past tall, prickly cactus-plants, in hot pursuit all ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... afternoon of next day when we reached the landing-place; but we immediately set out to see the ruin, if ruin it can be called, for it is almost in perfect preservation. After traversing a broad extent of ground covered with rank grass and prickly plants, we came to the customary palm-grove, and then entered what romancers would probably call the 'good city' of Edfou. It is a considerable collection of huts, principally constructed of mud, clustering amidst mounds of rubbish at the base of the temple. The lofty ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... in its rude and prickly bower, That crimson rose, how sweet and fair; But love is far a sweeter flower, Amid ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... them too much, they should be set in the open ground against a south wall in the latter end of May, and trained upon the wall like a fruit tree. When they have run up about five feet, they will send forth blossoms, and the fruit will soon appear. Cucumbers of the slender prickly sort are to be preferred, and they should not be watered too much while growing, as it will injure the fruit. The flesh of cucumbers raised in this way, will be thicker and firmer, and the flavour more delicious, than those ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... progressed about a mile, during which the outskirts of the city had given place to garden, cultivated field, trees dotted here and there, and then hedges which looked weird, ghastly, and strange in the moonlight, being composed of those fleshy, nightmare-looking plants of cactus growth, the prickly pears, with their horrible thorns, while more and more the way in front began to spread out wild, desolate and strange in the soft, misty, silvery grey of the moonlight, through which the long-legged animals stalked, casting weird shadows upon ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... and bran baths are often used in place of the ordinary soap and water bath when the skin is inflamed, as in cases of chafing or prickly heat. ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... the grapes having enough of their own. Pass that and consider the second point. Having started your ferment, how do you stop it?[A] Fermentation in Italy goes on in the barrel, after the liquor has left the vat. That gives you a peculiar prickly wine which the Italians call "Frizzante" and profess to like. Our ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... the African sun like mirrors. Swarms of insects buzzed in the air. In the green shade of the spreading fig trees, low and round, like roofs of verdure resting on their circle of supports, figs opened by the heat, fell, flattening on the ground like enormous drops of purple sugar. Prickly pears raised their thorny, wall-like trunks on either side of the road, and among their dusty roots whisked flexible, little animals, with long emerald green ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the prospect of an encounter with the terrible animal before him. Without a moment's hesitation, he tore a flaming beam out of the kiln, and pushed its burning end deep into the open mouth of the dragon. Roaring with pain the monster turned round beating violently with its prickly tail, trying in its agony to crush Siegfried. But he, jumping skilfully aside, rapidly dealt it heavy blows, and succeeded at last in smashing its head with a large piece of rock. He severed the head from the body, and threw it into the blazing ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... nuisances, when we set foot within the filthy and miserable town. After winding through some narrow dusty lanes, hemmed in by high walls of sun-baked bricks, that had fallen in gaps in several places, exposing gardens of prickly pears and date palms, we at length arrived at a large open place, that, if possible, smelt more strongly than the landing spot. Around this square, which was full of holes where the mud had been excavated for brickmaking, were the better class ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... their ears growing hot and red. Beneath the chilly stare of the populace they experienced all the sensations of a man who has come to a strange dinner-party in a tweed suit when everybody else has dressed. They felt warm and prickly. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... be made in daylight. That evening we received our ration of rum, and under cover of darkness moved in open order across the Salt Lake for about a mile, then through three miles of knee-high, prickly underbrush, to where our division was intrenched. Our orders were to reinforce the Irish. The Irish sadly needed reinforcing. Some of them had been on the peninsula for months. Many of them are still there. From the beach to the firing-line is not over four miles, but it is a ghastly four miles ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... intervals, the spark of red fire, often away to right or left, when I had lost my dead reckoning through groping round the slimy, rotten margins of deep lagoons, or creeping like a native bear over fallen timber, or tacking round clumps of prickly scrub, or tumbling into billabongs. I could show you the place in daylight, and you would say it was one of the worst spots on ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the long slope before them, and so came through a waste of prickly, twisted bushes and strange dry shapes of horny branches that grew amongst the rocks, into the levels below. And there the trail grew faint, for the soil was scanty, and the only herbage was this scorched dead straw that lay upon the ground. Still, by hard scanning, ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... capitals of the same building, and in many of St. Mark's: but one such instance would have been enough to prove, if the loveliness of the profiles themselves did not do so, that the sculptor understood and loved the laws of generalization; and that the feeling which bound his prickly leaves, as they waved or drifted round the ridges of his capital, into those broad masses of unbroken flow, was indeed one with that which made Michael Angelo encompass the principal figure in his Creation of Adam with the broad ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... it then. My poor boy, how the prickly heat has marked your forehead! Have you ever tried sulphate ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... Dinner was an outdoor meal. Stair carried it from the back door of the tower down to a little hidden cove where sea-pinks and prickly blue holly grew right down to the edge of the sand. Patsy served and they talked merrily. Though a famous "runner" of all manner of Hollands and Bordeaux, Stair tasted nothing except the water from the spring which ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
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