|
|
|
More "Spruce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worked our way leisurely through the crowd toward the side-street down which Anazeh had led his party. We found them looking very spruce and savage, four abreast, drawn up in the throat of an alley, old Anazeh sitting his horse at their head like a symbol of the ancient order waiting to assault the new. My horse was close beside him, held by ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... of a distressed elderly gentlewoman. It has none of the smug mercantile primness of the northern cities, but a look of state, as of quondam wealth and importance, a little gone down in the world, yet remembering still its former dignity. The northern towns, compared with it, are as the spruce citizen rattling by the faded splendors of an old family-coach in his newfangled chariot—they certainly have got on before it. Charleston has an air of eccentricity, too, and peculiarity, which formerly were not deemed unbecoming the well-born and well-bred gentlewoman, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... dark shadow from the spruce there, Ranald," she cried, pointing to a deep, black turn in the road. For answer there came from behind them the long, mournful hunting-cry of the wolf. He was on their track. Immediately it was answered ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... return carrying a bowl of soup. The stranger drank it ravenously, and then lay back and closed his eyes once more. He would have been a clever man who could have recognized in the emaciated being upon the bed, the spruce, well-cared-for individual who was known to the Hotel of the Three Desires ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... an excavation, about three feet deep, twelve feet long, and sixteen feet wide. Spruce saplings about four feet long and four inches through are set upright side by side around the interior, supported by the beams. Two posts six feet long and one ridge piece support the arched roof, light saplings being used for rafters. An oblique external portal, five feet long, two feet high, and ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... Kitty Spruce went up on spec? Very enterprising of you both, I am sure! And did you make anything ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... quite a different looking spider, is protected in the same way—by its resemblance to the bark upon which it lives. Emerton speaks of finding it on the bark of spruce trees, which it "closely resembles in color." Menge says that it is common in Prussia, where it is seen in great numbers on fir trees, whose spotted bark it resembles in color, so that it is not easily seen. We have found them, most commonly, upon birch trees, and in this ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... the woods near-by, and a greasy man-cook stood in the doorway of the long log cabin where the gang put up throughout the winter, while conducting their operations of leveling the forest, or, at least, robbing it of all the spruce for the pulp mill over ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... The view of the beach seemed to come into sharper focus as he watched, and he saw now that it was an incredibly lonely scene, with the sea stretching away to a vanishing point and a stand of stunted spruce flanking the width of sand. But what caught his eye and held him almost in a trance was the array of objects littering the sand at the ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... declared Mr. Adams, after he and Charley had noted eggs priced at twelve dollars a dozen, squashes at a dollar a pound, and some cabbages at two dollars apiece! "Hello; there's Lieutenant Sherman." For a spruce military figure was briskly crossing ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... had of late years been introduced'. The teapot and the mug of ale jointly possessed the breakfast table, and meat and pudding smoked on the board every noon. Formerly one might see at church what was the cut of a coat half a century ago, now dress was spruce and modern.[481] As a proof of the spirit of improvement among farmers, Marshall instances the custom in the Midlands of placing their sons as pupils on other farms to widen their experience. 'Their entertainments are as expensive as they are elegant, ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... them had covered the wounds thickly with gum, as the muskrat had done. Last spring the same Indian caught a bear in a deadfall. On the animal's side was a long rip from some other bear's claw, and the wound had been smeared thickly with soft spruce resin. This last experience corresponds closely with one of my own. I shot a bear years ago in northern New Brunswick that had received a gunshot wound, which had raked him badly and then penetrated the leg. He had plugged the wound carefully with clay, evidently to stop the bleeding, and then had ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... time the coachman, a spruce middle-aged man, who had long wanted to marry the clever, pretty laundry-maid, going to the pump to get water for his horses overheard her giving orders to the three feathers, and peeping through the keyhole as the butler ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... of the Dominion are heavily wooded, and comparatively little inroad has been made on the forest wealth of the country. It is estimated that there are 1,200,000 square miles of woodland and forest, chiefly spruce and pine, including about a hundred varieties; consequently the industries connected with the forest are of great importance, especially since the development of the pulp industry. The central prairie ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... git religion, Sir, the thing can't never be; Nut but wut I respeck," sez she, "your intellectle part, But you wun't noways du for me athout a change o' heart: Nothun religion works wal North, but it's ez soft ez spruce, Compared to ourn, for keepin' sound," sez she, "upon the goose; A day's experunce'd prove to ye, ez easy 'z pull a trigger, It takes the Southun pint o' view to raise ten bales a nigger; You'll fin' thet human natur, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... an old linen duster, a black slouch hat, and a pair of light blue pants thrust into the tops of heavy boots which were seldom blacked, but often splashed with Cairo mud. But everybody stepped respectfully aside to let him pass, and the spruce young staff officers never failed to salute. It was ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... Fir, spruce and pines line the shore of this part of Westport, the ground rising moderately inland. A half mile, more or less, from the river, runs the public highway from Clough Point, the northern extremity of ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... and fixed purpose, never turning her head, out into the lane, through the gate and up the hill. We watched her spellbound till she reached the horizon, and there saw her pause, roll up her sleeves and furiously attack an old spruce tree. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... its office first in humble quarters in Spruce street, and since then it has occupied rooms in Beekman, John and Reade streets. These down-town locations have served some valuable purposes. They were accessible to the teachers and workers in passing to and from the South, and in the shipment of goods to the South and to Africa—once ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... apple-tree. Be it said, in understanding of the subject, that there are naturally dwarf forms of many plants, and probably all ordinary plants are capable of producing them. Thus there are very compact condensed forms of arbor-vitae, Norway spruce, peach-tree. These have originated as seed sports and are multiplied by cuttings. So are there dwarf tomatoes, dwarf China asters, dwarf sweet peas, all coming more or less true from seeds, for these species (of short generations) have been bred to reproduce their ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... of air stirred the generous spruce and darkening pinewoods. The drooping, westering sun, already athwart the barren crown of the hill tops, left a false, velvety suggestion of twilight in the heart of the valley, while a depressing superheat enervated all life, except the profusion of vegetation which beautified ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... tree, particularly of the evergreen class. Their branches brushed into the carriage as we passed along, and left us with that pleasant woody smell belonging to leaves. One of the ladies, catching a bit of green from one of these intruding branches, said it was cedar, and another thought it spruce. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Raspberries Rhubarb Rockets Roses Rue Rustic Vases Sage Salvias Savoys Saxifrage Scarlet Runner Beans Seeds Sea Daisy or Thrif Seakale Select Flowers Select Vegetables and Fruit Slugs Snowdrops Soups Spinach Spruce Fir Spur pruning Stews Stocks Strawberries Summer-savory Sweet Williams Thorn Hedges Thyme Tigridia Pavonia Transplanting Tree lifting Tulips Turnips Vegetable Cookery Venus's Looking-glass Verbenas Vines Virginian Stocks Wallflowers ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... FELLOWS goes out, JILL runs to the window, but has no time to do more than adjust the curtains and spring over to stand by her father, before CHARLES comes in. Though in evening clothes, he is white and disheveled for so spruce a young mean.] ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... immense spruce, all powdered with silvery fringe, and Leo had only to tie on the little gilt tags numbered to correspond with the packages of gifts, which were heaped on surrounding tables, and fasten on the candles of red and blue wax. When this ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... decks. The beams of the main-deck are of American or German oak, those of the lower deck and half-deck of pitch-pine and Norwegian fir. All the deck planks are of Norwegian fir, 4 inches in the main-deck and 3 inches elsewhere. The beams are fastened to the ship's sides by knees of Norwegian spruce, of which about 450 were used. Wooden knees were, as a rule, preferred to iron ones, as they are more elastic. A good many iron knees were used, however, where wood was less suitable. In the boiler and engine room the beams of the lower deck had to be raised about 3 feet to ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... careful of their personal appearance, and have kept up the shadow and image of London. They wear shiny frock-coats and the worst-brushed and most odd-shaped of top-hats, and imagine they are well-dressed; at least I suppose they do, for they seem to have a sort of contempt for the spruce tweed suits and round hats of 'new chums,' and such of the rising generation as have followed their example and adopted that fashion. Can you imagine yourself wearing a black coat and high hat with the thermometer jogging ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... I suppose, in the first crash, and which was nearest to the pond, taking a more easterly direction, sank among our screen of chestnuts and firs, knocking down one spruce-fir, breaking off the head of another, and stripping the two corner chestnuts of several branches in its fall. This is not all: the maple bearing the weathercock was broken in two, and what I regret more than all the rest is, that all the ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... cell, and from the fact that he was not brought back Kirk judged that the British intervention had been effectual. But it was not until the next morning, the second of his imprisonment, that the cell door opened once more, this time to admit the portly figure of John Weeks and the spruce person of Senor ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... the following day. A horse stood grazing in the midst of a small grass patch surrounded by a thick bush of spruce, and maple, and blue gums. A velvet twilight was gathering over all, and the sky above was melting to the softer hues ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... of them. But the largest happen to be the two giant incense cedars, which stand on either side of the main entrance. These are eight feet and ten inches in diameter. Then there are two columns on the south side, both cut from a spruce that was four feet seven inches through at 101 feet ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... of the front step. A servant threw open the door of the breakfast room, and Delme mechanically entered it. It was filled with strangers; on some of these the spruce undertaker was fitting silk scarfs; while others were busy at the ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... her, he showed excellent taste, and it would be utter sacrilege to punish you for failing to learn her whereabouts. Come, Agathocles, be not so gloomy. Do you think it is Aesculapius who has come to your aid? He, at least, is no spruce, young rival. Be conciliatory, or I may, perhaps, venture to try my ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... sat up to find the room full of sunshine and Spike standing beside him, a bright-faced, merry-eyed Spike, very spruce and ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... is seven miles long by five miles wide, and is covered with a dense forest of pine, oak, maple, basswood, aspen, balsam fir, cedar and spruce, which is nearly in a state of nature. It is much to be hoped that in the near future this park will be enlarged to many times its present size ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... models of a "seventy-five" shell tied round with a bow of narrow tricolor ribbon; a baker's boy in a white apron and blue jumpers went by carrying a basket of bread on his head; and from the nearby tobacconist's, a spruce young lieutenant dressed in a black uniform emerged lighting a cigarette. At nine in the morning I was contemplating a side street of busy, orderly, sunlit Nancy; that night I was in a cellar seeking refuge ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... son, a regular shop-drudge," he raged inwardly, watching the youth of the Faubourg Saint-Germain pass under his eyes; graceful, spruce, fashionably dressed, with a certain uniformity of air, a sameness due to a fineness of contour, and a certain dignity of carriage and expression; though, at the same time, each one differed from the rest in the setting by which he had ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... in the forest, where there was no undergrowth and they could walk straight ahead, side by side, through the interminable colonnade of beeches and birches which upheld the green, gold-flecked roof,—the dark tangled spruce thicket, where one must stoop under the interlacing lower branches, dead and brittle, and creep over the soft brown carpet of fallen needles, dry and slippery, in order to reach a little open glade, moist with springs, where the red wood-lily and the purple-fringed ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... visitors, while at our Long Island hotel there was a losing bet on a scant generation of them. When it seemed likely that it might be a winning bet the sand was planked there in front of the hotel to the sea with spruce boards. It was very handsomely planked, but it was never afterwards touched, apparently, for any manner of repairs. Here, for half a mile the dune on which the hotel stands is shored up with massive ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... given, our hero, when Hall was over made himself uncommonly spruce in a new white tie, and spotless kids; and as he was dressing, drew a mental picture of the party to which he was going. It was to be composed of quiet, steady men, who were such hard readers as to be called "fast men." He should therefore hear ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... classes, even the poorest, partook of it. Their domestic habits are excellent. They are fond of their homes; and, above all things, they are clean and tidy. They strew the floors of their ground apartments with spruce pine twigs, which form a natural carpet as well as give out a sweet balsamic perfume. These are swept away every morning and ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... old-fashioned red-brick building set well back from the road and surrounded by great oak-trees, and smaller ones of birch and maple and spruce and pine, and shrubs of various kinds. It was Claxon's one redemption. Shading my eyes, I read the tin sign swinging in the wind from a rod nailed at right angles to a sagging post at its gateless yard. "Swan Tavern." ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... rope, peat, the stems of flax, straw, the Spanish and African esparto grass, and especially wood; but much more paper is made of wood than of all the rest together. Poplar, gum, and chestnut trees, and especially those trees which bear cones, such as the spruce, fir, balsam, and pine are used. There are two methods of manufacturing wood pulp; the mechanical, by grinding up the wood, and the chemical, by treating it chemically. By the mechanical method the wood is pressed against a large grindstone which ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... water, 2-1/2 pints molasses, 3 eggs well beaten, 1 gill yeast, put into two quarts of the water boiling hot, put in 50 drops of any oil you wish the flavour of, or mix one ounce each, oil sarsafras, spruce, and wintergreen; then use the 50 drops. For ginger flavour take 2 ounces ginger root bruised and a few hops, and boil for 30 minutes in one gallon of the water, strain and mix all; let it stand 2 hours and bottle, using yeast, of course, ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... glass rings low, the charming power that lives Within it makes the music that it gives. It dims! it brightens! it will shape itself. And see! a graceful dazzling little elf. He lives! he moves! spruce mannikin of fire, What more can we? what ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... not even the most careful observer, would have recognised in the two dusty figures, the once spruce forms of Captain ...
— The Pirate's Pocket Book • Dion Clayton Calthrop
... remarkably broad as he leaned back in his chair in the slightly lolling fashion of large, good-humored men. For all the nonchalance of his attitude, he looked, from evening tie to thin-soled dress-boots, beautifully spruce, as Aurora had remarked, and made an appropriate pendant to her in ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... chiefly among the coniferous evergreens, embracing the Pine, the Fir, the Spruce, and the Cypress. Though many of the deciduous trees assume more or less of this outline, it is the normal and characteristic form of the Pines and their kindred species. It is a peculiarity of the pyramidal trees, with a few exceptions, to remain always disfigured, after the loss of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... melancholy, too; but presently, with reviving faith to urge them, opened wide and heartily, and began to twinkle again. The bar was in festive array: Christmas greens, red berries, ribbons, tissue-paper and gleaming tinfoil—flash of mirrors, bright colour, branches of pine, cedar and spruce from the big balsamic woods. It was crowded with lumber-jacks—great fellows from the forest, big of body and passion, here gathered in celebration of the festival. John Fairmeadow, getting all at once and vigorously under way, shouted "Merry Christmas, boys!" and "Hello, Charlie!" to the bartender; ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... rheumatiz—couldn't do no work for more'n six munfs, an' don't reckon I'll be much use any more, nohow. Vina's tuk car' ob me more'n two year now. She's had a sight ob beaux, but she's allus tole 'em she couldn't leab her ole fader. Las' one was dat spruce yaller schoolmarster from Oberlin. Says I, 'Vina, why don't yer git married? 'Pears like yer'd feel less onsettled an' lonesome ef yer had an ole man.' Says she, 'I'se got one ole man: dat's 'nuff.' ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... the grapples fast, and it took but an instant to run up the rungs. There was no one in sight, so Constans, shifting the ladder to the inner side, made the descent quite at his ease, and found himself in a little plantation of spruce-trees. ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... Robert had sunk steadily. Gambling, drink, morphia, billiards and cigars—he had taken to them all; until now in the wretched figure of the outcast on the Embankment you would never have recognized the once spruce figure of Handsome Hardrow. ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... their rich fragrance, mixed with the delicate scent of the feathery ceanothus, (New Jersey tea.) The vivid greenness of the young leaves of the forest, the tender tint of the springing corn, were contrasted with the deep dark fringe of waving pines on the hills, and the yet darker shade of the spruce and balsams on the borders of the creeks, for so our Canadian forest rills are universally termed. The bright glancing wings of the summer red-bird, the crimson-headed woodpecker, the gay blue-bird, ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... May 31st, 1884, at 8 P.M., the Commission met at the house of the Provost, 1811 Spruce Street, for the purpose of sealing a slate to be left with the Medium, Mrs. Patterson, who was to try to procure independent writing upon the inside surfaces. There were present Dr. Pepper, Mr. Furness, Professor Thompson and Mr. Fullerton. Mr. Furness brought the slate and seals. The slate ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... work of the eager lads. As soon as they had eaten a light meal, Ned and Alan, with a couple of lanterns and a half dozen of candles, began to adjust the sections of the car. These, seven in number, when joined, were 54.12 feet in length. The American spruce frame and the aluminum joints were all intact. This work finished ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... and gig With promises to pay; And he pawned his horns for a spruce new wig, To redeem as he came away: And he whistled some tune, a waltz or a jig, And drove off at ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... side of the house stretched a lawn, shaded-in from the carriage drive by a fringe of larch and spruce, and on this lawn, innocent of tennis-courts and similar abominations, were planted here and there single trees. It had been the fancy of the owner that not one of these on the lawn should be indigenous, and almost ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... younger of the two interpreters, was known to have been sick of the scurvy at Stadacona, so that Cartier was much surprised to see him out and well. He contrived to make him relate the particulars of his recovery, and thus found out that a decoction of the bark and foliage of the white spruce-tree furnished the savages with a remedy. Having recourse to this enabled the French captain to arrest the progress of the disease among his own people, and, in a short time, to bring about ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... exception of a thin wall left to safeguard against an early thaw in the stream, while the bore was being equipped with a five-foot flume. You all know what that means, hundreds of miles from navigation or a main traveled road. To get that necessary lumber, he felled trees in a spruce grove up the ravine; every board was hewn by hand. And about two-thirds of those sluice-boxes, the bottoms fitted with riffles, were finished. Afterwards, at that camp where he stopped for dogs, I learned that aside from a few days at long intervals, when the two miners had ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... they zigzagged down a narrow canyon heavily timbered with fir and spruce—a dark, stern avenue, crossed by roaring streams, and filled with frequent boggy meadows whereon the water ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... slake our own thirst; and the first night we encamped under shelter of a wood, where there was plenty of grass for our steeds. We contented ourselves with forming a lean-to, but did not light a fire lest it should betray our whereabouts. Having eaten a little more pemmican, we formed our beds of spruce-fir tops, ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... he lay hidden under a fallen tree in the snow and bitter cold; but even there he was not safe, and the gamekeeper took him deeper into the forest, where a big spruce grew on a hill in the middle of a frozen swamp. There no one would seek him till he could make a shift to get him out of the country. The hill is still there; the people call it the King's Hill, and not after King Christian, either. But in those long nights ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... knew just why trains stopped at Millward siding. Nobody was ever known to get off there or get on. There was only one house nearer to it than four miles, and it was surrounded by acres of blueberry barrens and scrub spruce-trees. ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... applying it between the timbers directly to the under-side of the planks, leaving the beams themselves in sight. If the floor is double the planks or boards lying directly upon the joists may be of common, coarse stock, hemlock or spruce, upon which must be laid another thickness of finished boards. It is for you to say whether the finished upper floor shall be of common, cheap stock, to be always covered by carpets, or of some harder wood carefully polished ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... Gum.' He's the boy what sells gum to the theayter. He was agoin' to a party whar you hev to be the name of a book. He wore the surplus so his name was the Little Minister. We took it out in gum— spruce and pepsin. Iry swallered his'n every time, and Miss Hudgers was afeard he'd be stuck ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... very heavy, as it was hollow and decayed. They hove it up, with great effort, upon the fire, and its fall upon the heap threw up a large, bright column of sparks and flame. Another boy had the top of a young spruce, which he had cut off with his knife, by dint of great labor; it made a great roaring and crackling when it was put upon the fire. And, finally, behind all the rest, there came a little boy not so big as Oliver, tugging away at a long branch, which he dragged ...
— Jonas on a Farm in Winter • Jacob Abbott
... aromatic fragrance, refreshing as the scent of vinegar, into the long, unfloored room, which certainly needed something of the kind. It reeked with stale tobacco-smoke, the smell of cookery, and the odors of frowsy clothes. A row of bunks, filled with spruce twigs and old brown blankets, ran down one side of it, a very rude table down the other, and a double row of men with bronzed faces, in dusty garments, sat about the latter, eating voraciously. Fifteen minutes was, at the outside, the ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... desirable region, with the hills and mountains for forty miles, containing inexhaustible quantities of timber. We noticed tall cedar and oaks of every description; one kind more interesting than the others, being a white oak from twenty to forty feet in the body. Pine and spruce, with superior white ash and walnut, were found, and the most gigantic cotton-woods, particularly on the Sonoita. * * * * "The mountains in the neighborhood are filled with minerals, and the precious metals are said to abound. The famous Planchas de Plata and Arizona silver mines, which the Count ...
— Memoir of the Proposed Territory of Arizona • Sylvester Mowry
... deary me, is that what they call the fashion?" cried Mrs Asplin, holding the girl in outstretched arms, and turning her slowly round and round, to take in the details of her attire. "You look so spruce, child, that I hardly knew you; but there, it won't be long, I expect, before the true Peggy peeps out. Come in, darling. There's a new rug in the hail; don't trip over it! We have been saying we needed it for five years back, but it was bought only last week, to smarten the house ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... being plainly at a loss to understand how there could be any doubt about the matter. Alice went to the round drawing-room, where she found Mr. Parker examining a trophy of Indian armor, and presenting a back view of a short gentleman in a spruce blue frock-coat. A new hat and pair of gloves were also visible as he stood looking upward with his hands behind him. When he turned to greet Alice lie displayed a face expressive of resolute self-esteem, with eyes whose watery brightness, together with the bareness of his temples, from ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... to console her. As Miss La Creevy sat on a large old-fashioned window-seat, where there was ample room for two, it was also natural that Tim should sit down beside her; and as to Tim's being unusually spruce and particular in his attire that day, why it was a high festival and a great occasion, and that was the ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... them from other trees: The spruce and hemlock belong to the evergreen class and may be told from the other trees by their leaves. The characteristic leaves of the spruce are shown in Fig. 9; those of the hemlock in Fig. 10. These are much shorter than ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... fill this void land with everything British which he could transport or transplant His gardens were filled with the flowers, the vegetables, the fruit trees of the old land. The oak, the elm, the willow, the poplar, the spruce, the ash grew in his plantations. His cattle were Shorthorns, Herefords, and Devons. His farm horses were of the best Clydesdale and Suffolk Punch blood. The grasses they fed upon were mixtures of cocks-foot, timothy, rye-grass, and white clover. When it was found that the red clover would not flourish ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... Foedora! How often I had given the price of a week's sustenance to see her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least of it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed, run to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce as any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer the difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course of my love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white waistcoat! Oh, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the cold nipped at his blood, and lighted a fresh cigar, half-turning to shield himself from a wind that was growing out of the east. As the match flared in the cup of his hands for an instant there came from the black gloom of the balsam and spruce at his feet a wailing, hungerful cry that brought a startled breath from his lips. It was a cry such as Indian dogs make about the tepees of masters who are newly dead. He had never heard such a cry before, and yet he knew that it ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... are spread before the doors and the tripang is put out to dry, as well as sugar, salt, biscuit, tea, cloths, and other things that get injured by an excessively moist atmosphere. In the morning and evening, spruce Chinamen stroll about or chat at each other's doors, in blue trousers, white jacket, and a queue into which red silk is plaited till it reaches almost to their heels. An old Bugis hadji regularly takes an evening stroll in all the dignity ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... climb, except east, where you might roll if you chose; in fact, you could hardly do otherwise. The first day of my hunt I started west. I climbed a hill devoted to pasture, passed through the bars, and faced my mountain. It presented a compact front of spruce-trees closely interlaced at the ground, and of course impassable. But a way opened in the midst, the path of a mountain brook, deserted now and dry. I sought an alpenstock. I abandoned all impedimenta. I started up that stony path escorted on ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... sounded a very, very little impatient; but Ford once more politely expressed his sorrow, and abstained from putting on his coat. At that moment, too, Dick Lee came tiptoeing in from his cheerless garret, and looking astonishingly spruce. The "shine" on his shoes was a brilliancy to be remembered; and so was the shine on his face, and the sunset glow ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... strain in his blood. His accent too, though not that of an educated man, was quite free from the hateful Cockney twang. His dress was spare as his figure, but though well worn there was something spruce and trim about his whole demeanour which indicated that he was not totally indifferent to the impression he created on others. He looked round the "office," took a comprehensive glance at Short, who was occupying the only available stool and smoking hard with a meditative ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... its success, took my place among the elders at the edge of the wood, whence I could command the door of the pavilion. The shutters were all once more closed, which I remember thinking odd; and the house, with its white walls and green venetians, looked spruce and habitable in the morning light. Hour after hour passed, and still no sign of Northmour. I knew him for a sluggard in the morning; but, as it drew on towards noon, I lost my patience. To say the truth, I had promised myself to break my fast in the pavilion, and ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Street in a coach drawn by six horses and attended by two footmen. In his stables on Minor Street was a stud of twelve or fourteen horses. General John Cadwallader, father-in-law of the second Lord Erskine, in his great house at Second and Spruce, made liberal use of ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... poultry too,—strange to me at least, for never had I expected to find flocking together wild turkeys, Canadian geese, black ducks, wood ducks, and mallards (all with wings clipped so that they never again could fly), sage hens, quail, spruce-grouse, partridge, ptarmigan and western mountain quail. All seemed perfectly ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... the range, till he came out above a magnificent valley. Descending the slope, he entered a forest of towering spruce, while on all sides the snow was trampled with tracks as wide as a snow-shoe. There came to him a noise which, as he proceeded, increased till it filled the woods. It was a frightful din, as though a thousand wolves were howling with the madness of the kill. Cautiously creeping ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... Prouty House, redolent of the juniper and spruce boughs which took the bareness from the walls, the guests hungrily watched the hands of the clock creep towards the fashionable hour ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... several thousand feet of butternut lumber from my farmland through my own sawmill and used it for a variety of purposes. It is probably the strongest wood for its weight except spruce. I have used it successfully to make propellers which operate electric generators for deriving power from the wind. Because butternut is so light and, properly varnished, resists weathering and decay to so great an ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... of the Southern Hernifphere, showing Captain Cook's tracks, and those of some of the most distinguished navigators. Port Praya, in the Island of St. Jago, one of the Cape de Verds. View of the Ice-Islands. New Zealand spruce. Family in Dusky-Bay, New Zealand. Sketch of Dusky Bay, New Zealand. Flax plant of New Zealand. Poi Bird of New Zealand. Tea Plant of New Zealand. Van Diemen's Land. Otoo King of Otaheite. Plant used at Otaheite to catch fish by intoxicating them. Potatow, Chief of Attahourou, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... Yakaga, when the Pole, with his guard, had disappeared among the spruce trees, "when you have learned the medicine you ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... Mountain up to an altitude of about 4,000 feet is covered by a somber forest of evergreens composed of the white and black pines; Douglas, Lovely and Noble firs; the white cedar; spruce, and hemlock. There are found also several deciduous trees—large-leafed maple, {p.130} white alder, cottonwood, quaking aspen, vine and smooth-leafed maples, and several species of willows. Thus the silva ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... had reached a second and almost a third hill about three miles distant. In Yalbury Bottom, or Plain, at the foot of the hill, he listened. At first nothing, beyond his own heart-throbs, was to be heard but the slow wind making its moan among the masses of spruce and larch of Yalbury Wood which clothed the heights on either hand; but presently there came the sound of light wheels whetting their felloes against the newly stoned patches of road, accompanied by the distant ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... east and west, diminishing at either end to a shimmering blur of silver. South of the railroad these level immensities, rich in their season with ripe bunch-grass and grama-grass roll up to the barrier of the far blue hills of spruce and pine. The red, ragged shoulders of buttes blot the sky-line here and there; wind-worn and grotesque silhouettes of gigantic fortifications, castles and villages wrought by some volcanic Cyclops who grew tired of his labors, abandoning his ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... Lellan, and gossipp of ye laste greate partie, where Dorsey dyd serve so well ye terrapines and steamed oysters, and howe thatt itt is verament and trewe thatt Miss Porridge is to live, after hir marriage, in a howse in Locust strete, or peradventure in Spruce, or in Pyne, for in this towne all the stretes are of woode, albeit ye houses ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... under this class, and are excellent climbers. One of the most remarkable is the Marcgravia umbellata, the stem of which in the tropical forests of South America, as I hear from Mr. Spruce, grows in a curiously flattened manner against the trunks of trees; here and there it puts forth claspers (roots), which adhere to the trunk, and, if the latter be slender, completely embrace it. ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... upland trail that meandered among the spruce and pine, skirting the edges of the mountain meadows and keeping within the timber, Cheyenne finally reached the main ridge of the range. Occasionally he dismounted and examined the ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... widens, the trail leads farther from the river and through dense forests. The woods are so silent that they become oppressive, and the air is damp, for the sunlight is almost excluded. The tall trees, fir, hemlock, and spruce, with now and then a cedar, stand close together. Shrubs of many kinds are crowded among them, while mosses and ferns cover the ground. The fallen trunks are wrapped in moss, and young trees are growing upon them, drawing their nourishment from the decaying ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... The peculiar beckoning twist of this presumptuous individual's chin and henna-stained beard summoning me to come out and "perform" reminds me of nothing so much as some tamer of wild animals ordering a trained baboon to spruce himself up and dance for the edification of the circus-going public. Signifying my unwillingness to be thus made a circus of over and over again, the officer beckons even more peremptorily than before, and even makes a feint of coming and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... coming was celebrated by a dinner of wild goose, plum pudding, and coffee. After the voyage from Halifax it seemed good to rest a little with the firm earth under foot, and where the walls of one's habitation were still. Through the open windows came the fragrance of the spruce woods, and from the little piazza in front of the house you could look down and across Lake Melville, and away to the blue mountains beyond, where the snow was still lying in ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... the tumult of the battle; the flourish of old heroic music, heard thirty years before—such scenes and sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-masters, the spruce clerks and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of his commercial and Custom-House life kept up its little murmur round about him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the General appear to sustain the most distant relation. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... on the next night the west wind cautioned them. But this third warning was equally futile. On the fourth night came the south wind. It breathed into Suha's ear that he alone had been good and should be saved, and bade him make a hollow ball of spruce gum in which he might float while the deluge lasted. Suha and his wife immediately set out to gather the gum, that they melted and shaped until they had made a large, rounded ark, which they ballasted with jars of nuts, acorn-meal and ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... "exceeding proud, neat, and spruce" Doctor of Laws, William Parry, who had been busying himself at about the same time with his memorable project against the Queen of England, proved as successful as Balthazar Gerard, the fate of Christendom would ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... paused a moment in the yard, leaning on his slim umbrella to admire the brilliant yellow of the renewed sheets, standing out in vivid blots against the tarnished verdigris of the old. To pass from Blackpool to the West, however, is a tardy process; and when Rainham reached the spruce, little house in one of the most select of the discreet and uniform streets which adjoin Portman Square, he found the clatter of teacups for the most part over. There were, in fact, only two persons in the long room, which, with its open Erard, and ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... among the phantasmic buildings. With its verandah, that was polished like a deck, and its spotless life-belts and brilliant port-hole windows, it had the air of a ship which had been exiled to land but was trying to bear up; and so, too, had the three old captains, spruce little men, with sea-reflecting eyes and pointed, grizzled beards, whom Richard brought out of the club after he had got the boathouse keys. Ellen liked them very much indeed. She had never before had any chance of seeing the beautiful and generous emotion that old men who have lived bravely ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... reached before noon next day, and was over in little more than half an hour. Soames—pale, spruce, sad-eyed in the witness-box—had suffered so much beforehand that he took it all like one dead. The moment the decree nisi was pronounced he left the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... with their roots in the ancient soil. Associated with the stumps and overlying them, are lignite beds with fresh-water shells of recent species, and laminated clay without fossils. Through the lignite and forest-bed are scattered cones of the Scotch and spruce firs with the seeds of recent plants, and the bones of at least twenty species of terrestrial mammalia. Among these are two species of elephant, E. meridionalis, Nesti, and E. antiquus, the former found in the Newer Pliocene beds of the Val ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... dost thou glory in thy Perfidy? [To her aside angrily. —Yes, Faith, I've many Exceptions to him— [Aloud. Had you lov'd me, you'd pitcht upon a Blockhead, Some spruce gay Fool of Fortune, and no more, Who would have taken so much Care of his own ill-favour'd Person, He shou'd have had no time to have minded yours, But left it to the Care of some ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... just taken trout enough for our supper, which had been killed, and roasted over the fire on sharp sticks, and eaten before they had an opportunity to feel the chill of this deceitful world. We were lying under the hut of spruce-bark, on fragrant hemlock-boughs, talking, after supper. In front of us was a huge fire of birchlogs; and over it we could see the top of the falls glistening in the moonlight; and the roar of the falls, and the brawling of the stream near ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and glittering bayonets he caught the flourish of energetic drumsticks. The big drum gave forth its clamor with window-shaking insistence; it seemed to be the summons of power that all else should stand aside. On they came, these spruce Guards, each man a marching machine, trained to strut and pose exactly as his fellows. There was a sense of omnipotence in their rhythmic movement. And they all had the grand manner—from the elegant captain in command down ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... was the drive up to the house-door, and a sweep, or small oval plot, of turf, surrounded by gravel; and a gate at the corner of this sweep opened into a grove of the grandest old spruce-firs in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... remarkable intimation of "Pulled Wool." Gold Street, also, is redolent of all these things, as I turn into it, nor is there any remission of the pungent trade-stenches of the district until I have gained a good distance up Spruce Street, toward the City Hall Park. Here the Bowery proper, viewed as a great artery of New York trade and travel, may be said to begin. The first reach of it is called Chatham Street; and, having plunged into this, I have nothing before me now but Bowery for a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... so smart and active, for Mr Schank had taken care to get a picked crew, which some officers in those days could get and some could not; the Captain and Lieutenants and midshipmen in their new uniforms looked so spruce, and the marines so trim and well set up, that I could not help rejoicing that I was once more afloat, though I did not forget my kind friends at Whithyford, nor the dear Little Lady. We passed out at the Needle passage, with Hurst Castle on one side and the tall ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... evident miracle. 'If all the doctors of Lorraine and Montpellier had been there with all the drugs of Alexandria,' he wrote, 'they could not have done as much in a year as the said tree did in six days.' An entire tree—probably a white spruce—was used up in less than eight days. The scourge passed and the sailors, now restored to health, eagerly awaited ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... an enormous spruce lay the dead body of a man. Standing silent above it they noted such particulars as first strike the attention—the face, the attitude, the clothing; whatever most promptly and plainly answers the unspoken question of ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... country, where the land becomes more solid. The armies must move, instead of through marshes, along innumerable small lakes, most of the lakes being long and narrow and running north and south, with a fairly thick growth of timber among them, mostly pine and spruce and fir. In character this section is rather similar to parts of Minnesota. There are two cities to be conquered in this drier region, Dvinsk, and, further south, Vilna, once the chief city or capital of the Lithuanians. We shall see the Russians thrust back from Koenigsberg, and the heavy ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... on Earth yearns for a job that will send him shuttling from one planet to another. To achieve it they study, they sweat, they make all out efforts to meet and suck up to anybody they think might help. Finally, when and if they get an interview for one of the few openings, they spruce up in their best clothes, put on their best party manners, present themselves as the sincere, high I.Q., ambitious young men that they are—and then flunk their chance. I decided I might as ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... left, close to the inn, and then go straight on; it is the third house past Poret's. There is a small spruce fir close to the gate; you ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... grievous load, And Chelsea, flower'd and spruce, And antique thingummies in spode; The only thing that none bestowed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... point,—an arrangement doubtless prompted by the deep snows and severe cold of this latitude. The typical Canadian dwelling-house is also presently met with on entering the Dominion,—a low, modest structure of hewn spruce logs, with a steep roof (containing two or more dormer windows) that ends in a smart curve, a hint taken from the Chinese pagoda. Even in the more costly brick or stone houses in the towns and vicinity this style is adhered to. It is so universal that one wonders ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... they came to a growth of spruce so dense that it formed a shelter from both snow and wind, with a thick carpet of brown needles under foot. They were shut out from the stars, and in the darkness MacVeigh began to whistle cheerfully. He unstrapped his pack and spread out one of his blankets ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... and bark had been built by the men during his absence. In it were all the stores, as well as a quantity of spruce boughs and hemlock tips for bedding. The chill evening air was filled with a delicious fragrance of burning cedar, mingled with the pleasant odor of boiling coffee. Several white-fish nailed to oak planks were browning before a bed of glowing coals, while slices ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature. Surely good courage will not flag here on the Atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur Countries. There is enough in that sound to cheer one under any circumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair. Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that the Esquimaux sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... lie Where day never shuts his eye, Up in the broad fields of the sky. There I suck the liquid air, All amidst the gardens fair Of Hesperus, and his daughters three That sing about the golden tree. Along the crisped shades and bowers Revels the spruce and jocund Spring; The Graces and the rosy-bosomed Hours Thither all their bounties bring. There eternal Summer dwells; And west winds with musky wing About the cedarn alleys fling Nard and cassia's balmy smells. Iris there with humid bow Waters the odorous banks, that blow Flowers ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... time appointed, as I stood in the hall, a tall, clean-shaven, rather spruce young man entered and spoke to the concierge, who at once brought him ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... one thing: 'This way I have passed.' Two sprigs, crossed in certain ways and left upon the trail, compose the patteran. But they must always be of different trees or shrubs. Thus, on the ranch here, a patteran could be made of manzanita and madrono, of oak and spruce, of buckeye and alder, of redwood and laurel, of huckleberry and lilac. It is a sign of Gypsy comrade to Gypsy comrade, of Gypsy lover to ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... the most careful observer, would have recognised in the two dusty figures, the once spruce forms of Captain Thomas Tomb ...
— The Pirate's Pocket Book • Dion Clayton Calthrop
... shouted the little fellow. "He'll get you if you don't. Who said Hooky couldn't pitch? There's more pitch in him than you can find in a big chew of spruce gum." ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... operations immediately, to find the rate of the time-keeper, and to make other observations. The remainder of the empty water-casks were also sent on shore, with the cooper to trim, and a sufficient number of sailors to fill them. Two men were appointed to brew spruce beer; and the carpenter and his crew were ordered to cut wood. A boat, with a party of men, under the direction of one of the mates, was sent to collect grass for our cattle; and the people that remained on board were employed in refitting the ship, and arranging ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... Holati Tate. "But it appears to be a duplicate of it." He was a mild-looking little man, well along in years, sparse and spruce in his Precol uniform. The small gray eyes in the sun-darkened, leathery face weren't really mild, if you considered them more closely, or if you knew ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... of tenderness and admiration in the glance she bent upon him. He was a goodly youth to look at, tall and strongly knit in figure, upright as a young spruce fir, with a keen, dark-skinned face, square in outline and with a peculiar mobility of expression. The eyes were black and sparkling, and the thick, short, curling hair was sombre as the raven's wing. There was no lack of intellect in the face, but the chief ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... them the esteem of every one, for they were the most quiet, inoffensive beings I ever met with; and, to their great credit, they never once begged. The man was remarkable for his extraordinary fondness for treacle, sugar, salt, acids, and spruce-beer, which the others of the tribe could not even smell without disgust; and he walked about to the different messes in hopes of being treated with these delicacies. Shega was a timid, well-behaved girl, and generally remained ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... forest-shaded stretches of the Dvina River and casting its mellow, melancholy light upon the wrecked church of a village, is an ineffaceable picture of North Russia. For this is our Russia—a church; a little cluster of log houses, encompassed by unending forests of moaning spruce and pine; low brooding, sorrowful skies; and over all oppressive stillness, sad, profound, mysterious, yet strangely lovable ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... single floor of shining water over the whole valley. The trees, or most of them, that stand about the banks have grown since the Duke saw the water. There are old oaks on the northern shore, but the southern and eastern sides were planted with spruce and other conifers at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, when all that remained of the victor of Culloden was his horrible nickname and his obelisk above the lake. The trees are glorious in December or June, when the green leaf is high on the beeches ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... southern Birches. Illinois, 140 feet high and Dogwood. 8 feet thick at the butt [A]; does Pine. not transplant well; best rais'd the Elm. from seeds—the lumbermen Chesnut. call it yellow poplar.) Linden. Sycamores. Aspen. Gum trees, both sweet and sour. Spruce. Beeches. Hornbeam. Black-walnuts. Laurel. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... fresh and charming about London in April. The parks are aglow with young green, and the trees nod cheerfully to the little breeze that dances round them, whispering of summer. Even the houses perk up under their spruce new coats of paint, while every window that can afford it puts forth its carefully tended box of flowers. It is as though the old city suddenly awoke from her winter slumber and preened herself like a bird making its toilet; there is an ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... presented to the mighty river a low chain of hills, fringed at the base with a scattered growth of scrubby spruce, birch, willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above the river brink; beyond that height, rocks and moss covered ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... roadside, as we reach the foot of the lake, stands a spruce and rather large house of modern aspect, but with several gables and much overgrown with ivy,—a very pretty and comfortable house, built, adorned, and cared for with commendable taste. We inquired whose it was, and the coachman ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... tanquam te, His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptorie: his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gate maiesticall, and his generall behauiour vaine, ridiculous, and thrasonicall. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odde, as it were, too peregrinat, as ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... set of people fill the streets. The goods in the shop-windows are invitingly arranged; the shopmen in their white neckerchiefs and spruce coats, look as it they couldn't clean a window if their lives depended on it; the carts have disappeared from Covent-garden; the waggoners have returned, and the costermongers repaired to their ordinary 'beats' in the suburbs; clerks are at their offices, and gigs, cabs, omnibuses, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... narrow and without timber; the country is high and broken; a large portion of black rock and brown sandy rock appears in the face of the hills, the tops of which are covered with scattered pine, spruce, and dwarf cedar; the soil is generally poor, sandy near the tops of the hills, and nowhere producing much grass, the low grounds being covered with little else than the hyssop, or southernwood, and the pulpy-leaved thorn. Game is more scarce, particularly beaver, of which ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... High rocks, whose rugged faces look as if their titanic architect had been surprised and driven away while as yet his task was not half completed; long gaping gulches lined with an evergreen decoration of spruce, cedar, manzanita, and mountain mahogany, are some of the sidelights to be found in a day's journey in the realms adjacent to the Old ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... the new logs are for the dwelling, and how sweet the pine and spruce boughs for a bed! A good new log house in the green woods is the best home ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... to look down, had at any rate an attentive and considerate lover. Elaine walked towards the Park gates feeling that in one essential Suzette possessed something that had been denied to her, and at the gates she met Joyeuse and his spruce young ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... left to safeguard against an early thaw in the stream, while the bore was being equipped with a five-foot flume. You all know what that means, hundreds of miles from navigation or a main traveled road. To get that necessary lumber, he felled trees in a spruce grove up the ravine; every board was hewn by hand. And about two-thirds of those sluice-boxes, the bottoms fitted with riffles, were finished. Afterwards, at that camp where he stopped for dogs, I learned that ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... poles at an angle of forty or fifty degrees. The sloping poles were about a foot and a half apart. These poles were like the scantling or inside framework of a wooden house and they covered it all with spruce and birch bark, beginning at the bottom and allowing each piece to overlap the one beneath it, after the fashion of a shingled roof. They secured pieces partly with wooden pegs and partly with other and heavier wooden poles leaned against them. One end of the ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... door, and he stepped forward into the inner room, where, leaning lazily back before a desk, smoking a cigar over his newspaper, arrayed in a loose white jacket, with open throat and slippered feet, reposed a gentleman, much transformed from the spruce butler, but not difficult of recognition. He started to his feet with equal alacrity and consternation, and bowed, not committing himself until he should see whether he were actually known to his lordship. Fitzjocelyn was in too great haste to pause on this matter, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... feathery ceanothus (New Jersey tea). The vivid greenness of the young leaves of the forest, the tender tint of the springing corn, was contrasted with the deep dark fringe of waving pines on the hills, and the yet darker shade of the spruce and balsams on the borders of the creeks, for so our Canadian forest rills are universally termed. The bright glancing wings of the summer red-bird, the crimson-headed woodpecker, the gay blue-bird, and noisy but splendid plumed jay might be seen among ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... journalist in a small way, fair-haired and spruce, a pretty fellow enough, but with a face marked by the faded look peculiar to waiters at all-night restaurants, actors and prostitutes, made up of conventional grimaces and the sallow reflection of the gas. He was reputed to be the plighted lover of an exiled queen ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... SPRUCE-FIR. Burgundy Pitch. L. E. D.—This is entirely confined to external use, and was formerly an ingredient in several ointments and plasters. In inveterate coughs, affections of the lungs, and other internal complaints, plasters of this resin, ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... low limbs dangle the tempting wares, and a stump serves as a chopping-block. Under the shrubbery, where the sun cannot penetrate, are stored home-made firkins full of yellow butter, and great cheeses, and heaps of substantial home-baked bread. Kegs of hard cider and spruce beer and perhaps more potent brews are abroach, and behind the haggling and jesting and bustle you may catch the sound of muskets or the whoop of the Indians from afar. Meanwhile, in the settlements, all manner of industries were stimulated, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... would make surer money farming than digging for gold," declared Mr. Adams, after he and Charley had noted eggs priced at twelve dollars a dozen, squashes at a dollar a pound, and some cabbages at two dollars apiece! "Hello; there's Lieutenant Sherman." For a spruce military figure was briskly crossing this plaza of ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... diminishing at either end to a shimmering blur of silver. South of the railroad these level immensities, rich in their season with ripe bunch-grass and grama-grass roll up to the barrier of the far blue hills of spruce and pine. The red, ragged shoulders of buttes blot the sky-line here and there; wind-worn and grotesque silhouettes of gigantic fortifications, castles and villages wrought by some volcanic Cyclops who grew tired of his labors, abandoning ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... glass of his wine to drain But, soft—to the left o' the fire I see Three riflemen, who from the Tyrol should be Emmerick, come, boy, to them will we. Birds of this feather 'tis luck to find, Whose trim's so spruce, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... change very much and the breath of spruce and pine was invigorating. But there was a little nervous feeling about Cynthia. Cousin Giles was somewhat of a lady's man, and he was on the continual lookout that Cynthia should not tire herself unduly, that she be assisted over the rough places, that she should have the best of everything. He ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... found cork trees and palms growing almost side by side with the birch, the pine, and the spruce. Among other things, their attention was attracted to some beautiful fern trees, which were fully twenty feet high, and there were climbing plants in great profusion, some of them clinging to the trees, and ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Speech House the place teems with interest. In the last years he would walk every evening to look at the great stag-headed ruins of the oaks, which thrust their gnarled and crooked limbs fantastically into the closing night, or stand watching the shadows fall on the spruce rides which stretch out near the old inn, till, in the fading light, it seemed as though figures were moving in and out on the greensward of the great vistas. In the bright sunshine, imposing silence on himself and his companions, he would watch for long ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce or arbor vitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature. Surely good courage will not flag here on the Atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur Countries. There is enough in that sound to cheer one under any circumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair. Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that the Esquimaux sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the northern ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... and fallen, on the watry fields; And Nature to the waste dominion yields, Stript her last robes, with gold and purple gay.— So droops my life, of your soft beams despoil'd, Youth, Health, and Hope, that long exulting smil'd; And the wild carols, and the bloomy hues Of merry Spring-time, spruce on every plain Her half-blown bushes, moist with sunny rain, More pensive thoughts in my sunk heart infuse Than Winter's grey, and desolate domain, Faded, like my lost Youth, that no bright ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... wet umbrella on the veranda, and aunt Helen led me into the dining-room, where a spruce maid was making a pleasant clatter in laying the table. Caddagat was a very old style of house, and all the front rooms opened onto the veranda without any such preliminary as a hall, therefore it was necessary to pass through the dining-room ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... of dynamite were wrapped in pieces of old bagging and fastened on the end of long spruce poles, which we had brought along specially for this purpose. A wire from the battery had, of course, been connected with one of the primers buried in the dynamite. Pole, wire, and dynamite were thrust down through cracks in the ice at several places in the adjacent floes. The other end of ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... amber basin. Out of this basin we had just taken trout enough for our supper, which had been killed, and roasted over the fire on sharp sticks, and eaten before they had an opportunity to feel the chill of this deceitful world. We were lying under the hut of spruce-bark, on fragrant hemlock-boughs, talking, after supper. In front of us was a huge fire of birchlogs; and over it we could see the top of the falls glistening in the moonlight; and the roar of the falls, and the brawling of the stream near us, filled all the ancient woods. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... from other trees: The spruce and hemlock belong to the evergreen class and may be told from the other trees by their leaves. The characteristic leaves of the spruce are shown in Fig. 9; those of the hemlock in Fig. 10. These ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... lampblack, fine threads plaited together in strands, cotton soaked in boiling tar, lamp-wick, twine, tar and lampblack mixed with a proportion of lime, vulcanized fibre, celluloid, boxwood, cocoanut hair and shell, spruce, hickory, baywood, cedar and maple shavings, rosewood, punk, cork, bagging, flax, and a host of other things. He also extended his searches far into the realms of nature in the line of grasses, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... and we come to a very commonplace house, and then, after a cinematograph office and another calle, to the Palazzo Benzon, famous a hundred years ago for its literary and artistic receptions, and now spruce and modern with more of the striking blue posts, the most vivid on the canal. In this house Byron has often been; hither he brought Moore. It is spacious but tawdry, and its plate-glass gives one a shock. Then the Rio Michiel and then the Tornielli, very ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... beneath his weight. A restless tramp is Mooween, who scatters his records over forty miles of hillside on a summer day, when his lazy mood happens to leave him for a season. Here, on the other side, are the bronze-green petals of a spruce cone, chips from a squirrel's workshop, scattered as if Meeko had brushed them hastily from his yellow apron when he rushed out to see Mooween as he passed. There, beyond, is a mink sign, plain as daylight, where Cheokhes sat down a little while after his breakfast of frogs. And ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... lovely, on the other side of an extensive lawn; a grove of spruce firs making a beautiful setting for it on one side. The riders passed round the lawn, through a part of the plantations, and came up to the house at the before-mentioned left wing. Mr. Carlisle threw himself off his horse and ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... published with prints, designed by Kent; but the most execrable performance you ever beheld. The graving not worse than the drawing; awkward knights, scrambling Unas, hills tumbling down themselves, no variety Of prospect and three or four perpetual spruce firs. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the barrel received a new charge, by a side chamber, which produced an almost incredible effect. An ellipsoidal missile of ninety gauge and several diameters long, made of brass, was driven through thirty-six inches of oak and twenty-four inches of green spruce timber, or fifty inches of the most impenetrable of timbers. The same principle of acceleration has, it is said, been most successfully applied in Boston by the use of a hollow tige or tube fixed at the bottom of the bore with the inside of which the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... sovereign," or the son of one, free in his habits as the Indian that roamed the prairies of his frontier home? He had not heard of "the latest fashion," and paid no attention to the cut of his garments, although, it must be confessed, he sometimes wished them a trifle more spruce and comfortable. His home, as I have hinted, was on the prairie. Nevertheless, the family domain was an unpretending one. Less than an acre, fenced in the rudest manner, enclosed the "farm and farm buildings," the latter consisting of a small log house ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... a shout rent the air! The spruce widow affords the most excellent cheer; For comfort in quarters there's nothing can beat her, So up rose the lads with a welcome to greet her: The muse with true gallantry led her to place, And Truth said good humour ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... skins, he took his traps and camping outfit and set out for that region of country, although it was more than two hundred miles away. Here he found tracks in abundance, and so before he made his little hunting lodge in the midst of a spruce grove, he set his traps for the fierce wolves in a spot which seemed to be a rallying place of theirs. As they are very suspicious and clever, he carefully placed two traps close together and sprinkled them over with snow, leaving ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... and barn, in most cases the two buildings touching at some point,—an arrangement doubtless prompted by the deep snows and severe cold of this latitude. The typical Canadian dwelling-house is also presently met with on entering the Dominion,—a low, modest structure of hewn spruce logs, with a steep roof (containing two or more dormer windows) that ends in a smart curve, a hint taken from the Chinese pagoda. Even in the more costly brick or stone houses in the towns and vicinity this style is adhered ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... great deal of snow and a little meal, and the "soup" so concocted was set out to cool for the dogs. They were afraid to sleep in one of the cabins; it might be plague-infected. The Indians had cut all the spruce for a wide radius round about—no boughs to make a bed. They hoisted some tent-poles up into one of the empty caches, laid them side by side, and on this bed, dry, if hard, they ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... The dark spruce-shrouded mountains drew close together in the Dyea Canyon, and the feet of men churned the wet sunless earth into mire and bog-hole. And when they had done this they sought new paths, till there were many paths. And on such a path ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... and complains of spleen.... Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down, Threatening with deluge this devoted town, To shops in crowds the draggled females fly, Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy, The Templar spruce, while ev'ry spout's abroach, Stays till 'tis fair, yet seems to call a coach, The tuck'd up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides; Here various kinds, by various fortunes led, Commence ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... nests are placed high in hemlocks or pines, which are the bird's favorite resorts. From all accounts the nests of this species are elegantly and compactly made, consisting of a densely woven mass of spruce twigs, soft vegetable down, rootlets, and fine shreds of bark. The lining is often intermixed with horse hairs and feathers. Four eggs of greenish-white or very pale bluish-green, speckled or spotted, have usually been ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... would have probably ensued, but it was prevented by the spruce toastmaster, who gave a sentiment, and turning to the two politicians, "Pray, gentlemen," said he, "let us have done with these musty politics: I would always leave them to the beer-suckers in Butcher Row. Come, let us have something of the fine arts. That was a damn'd hard ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... day or night, so drinking a mint julep and lighting a cigar, he joined the throng. He fumed and fretted for over an hour and a half, when he saw Mrs. Maroney coming down the street, looking very warm. He met her and she excused herself by saying that she had called on a lady friend who lived on Spruce street, just above Twentieth, and finding her sick had been unable to get away; that she had walked back very fast and ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... whirled them down to Taddington, in Barfordshire. There was Harris, with three servants, waiting for them, one with a light cart for their luggage, and two with an open carriage and two spanking bays, whose coats shone like satin. The servants, liveried, and top-booted, and buckskin-gloved, and spruce as if just out of a bandbox, were all smartness and respectful zeal. They got the luggage out in a trice, with Harris's assistance. Mr. Harris then drove away like the wind in his dog-cart; the traveling party were soon in the barouche. It glided ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... could scarce pass each other on it, there we'd sot Warry 't th' end o' th' neck. Jest 'fore we got t' him we heard a shot, 'n' I remarked t' Erne, 'Guess th' old man thinks he's got a bite.' 'N' then we broke through a thick bunch o' spruce; 'n' we both nigh fell dead to see old Warry sawin' at th' throat o' a doe, tryin' to 'pear 's natural 's if he'd never done nothin' else but kill 'n' dress deer. Mebbe Erne 'n' me wan't pleased none th' old man had ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... the smith of Andouillets held a council of wheels; and by seven, the morning after, all look'd spruce, and was ready at the gate of the convent for the hot-baths of Bourbon—two rows of the unfortunate stood ready there an ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... thing you had under your coat was a saw. I saw you hide something under the woodpile here, but I'm so dumb that I didn't think much of it at the time. Now, the log over the gully was a spruce log, wasn't it?" ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... their trail is still fresh in the snow. There are many of them, and our wigwam will again be full of fat venison. Hist, yonder they are; they will see us if we do not move with great caution. You take the circuit round that clump of spruce to the right, and I will keep ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... upon so sinister a country or a swamp so vast and desolate. It seemed more black than dusky, and the gloom lay not in the obscure light of thick-set spruce, pine, and hemlock, but in the shaggy, monstrous, and forbidding growth which appeared to be soiled with some common dye, water, earth, tree-trunks, foliage—all wore the same inky livery, and seemed wrought ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... are two hard woods which may be added to the list. Sugar, particularly, is a good-working wood, but maple is more difficult. Spruce, on the other hand, is the strongest and toughest wood, considering its weight, which is but a little ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... we scholars fish for a living in these shallow fords without a silver hook. Why, would it not gall a man to see a spruce gartered youth of our college, a while ago, be a broker for a living and an old bawd for a benefice? This sweet sir preferred me much kindness when he was of our college, and now I'll try what wind remains in his ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... activities as hunter, trapper and lumberman. Just now he was all lumberman. He was acting as what is called a "timber-cruiser," roaming the remoter and less-known regions of the wilderness to locate the best growths of spruce and pine for the winter's lumbering operations, and for the present his keen faculties were set on the noting of tree growths, and water-courses, and the lay of the land for the getting out of a ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... coniferous trees like spruce, fir, and pine are so full of turpentine and resin that they burn like tinder. The heat is almost beyond the power of words to express. The fire does not seem to burn in a steady manner, the flames just breathe upon an immense tree and ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Charlton, Fairlop Oak, and Barnet; there were also lotteries. Besides these amusements, which were all for the lower orders as well as for the rich, they had their mug-houses, whither the men resorted to drink beer, spruce, and purl; and for music there was the street ballad-singer, to say nothing of the bear-warden's fiddle and the band of marrow-bones and cleavers. Lastly, for those of more elevated tastes, there was the ringing of the church bells. Now, with the exception of the last ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... ivory, or wooden "osculatory" of the mediaeval Church?[94] So with "Ash-Wednesday," a single syllable opens a whole chapter of Church history. Again, the Latin headings to the psalms of the Psalter; with what an impatient gesture can we imagine a spruce reviser brushing these away as so much trash! They are not trash, they are way marks that tell of times when devout men loved those catchwords, as we love the first lines of our favorite hymns. A few of the headings, such as "De Profundis" and "Miserere," ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... the wind abated greatly, and small, infrequent snowflakes came drifting by. Snow also spread more abundantly below, and the only trees were clumps of pine and spruce in the lower valleys. Kurt went with three men into the still intact gas-chambers, let out a certain quantity of gas from them, and prepared a series of ripping panels for the descent. Also the residue of the bombs and explosives in the magazine were thrown overboard ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... foot or used canoes. In the northern parts where birch trees were plentiful, the canoe was of birch bark stretched over a light wooden frame, sewed with strips of deerskin, and smeared at the joints with spruce gum to make it watertight. In the South tree trunks hollowed out by fire and called dugouts were used. In the West there were "bull boats" made of skins stretched over wooden frames. For winter travel the Northern and Western Indians ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... made good, you foreign faring; You money magic to far lands has whirled; Can you forget those days of vast daring, There with your soul on the Top o' the World? Nights when no peril could keep you awake on Spruce boughs you spread for your couch in the snow; Taste all your feasts like the beans and the bacon Fried at ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... worn, and melancholy, too; but presently, with reviving faith to urge them, opened wide and heartily, and began to twinkle again. The bar was in festive array: Christmas greens, red berries, ribbons, tissue-paper and gleaming tinfoil—flash of mirrors, bright colour, branches of pine, cedar and spruce from the big balsamic woods. It was crowded with lumber-jacks—great fellows from the forest, big of body and passion, here gathered in celebration of the festival. John Fairmeadow, getting all at once and vigorously under way, shouted "Merry Christmas, boys!" and "Hello, Charlie!" ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... first thing we ought to do when we get started is to have that hall painted," said Diana, as they drove past the Avonlea hall, a rather shabby building set down in a wooded hollow, with spruce trees hooding it about on all sides. "It's a disgraceful looking place and we must attend to it even before we try to get Mr. Levi Boulder to pull his house down. Father says we'll never succeed in DOING that. Levi Boulter is too mean to spend the ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... "In a spruce-fir was a hang-nest of some unknown bird, suspended at the four corners to the boughs; it was open at top an inch and a half in diameter, and two deep; the sides and bottom thick, the materials moss, worsted, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... of took things easy." They were riding almost straight away from the sun. His dress had been changed again, and in a suit of new, dark brown homespun wool, over a pink calico shirt and white cuffs and collar, he presented the best possible picture of spruce gentility that the times would justify. "'What day of the month,' did you ask? I'll never tell you, but I know ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... she had ever known, and declaring that she would work all day and all night rather than leave her; but the more reluctance she showed, the more determined was Perronel, and she could not but submit to her fate, only adding one more entreaty that she might take her jackdaw, which was now a spruce grey-headed bird. Perronel said it would be presumption in a waiting-woman, but Ambrose declared that at Chelsea there were all manner of beasts and birds, beloved by the children and by their father himself, and that he believed the daw would be welcome. ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... William Penn in laying out Philadelphia was Thomas Holme. It was at the close of the year 1682, that the town was surveyed, and the boundaries of the streets marked on the trunks of the chestnut, walnut, locust, spruce, pine and other forest trees covering the land. Many of the streets were named for the forest monarchs on which these inscriptions were cut, and still bear the names. The growth of the town was rapid, and, within a year after ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... used while backing the hind wheels across the new hole in which the tree is to be planted. The machine (Figs. 149, 150) consists of a hind axle twelve feet long, and broad-tired wheels. The frame is made of spruce three-by-eight inches and twenty feet long. The braces are three-by-five inches and ten feet long, and upright three-by-nine inches and three feet high; these are bolted to the hind axle and main frame. ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... An' all the gents was a-sittin' at breakfast, with the winders wide open an' the smell of 'am an' eggs comin' through strong, an' they larfed fit to split theirselves, an' one on 'em tried to kiss Kitty Spruce, an' she spanked ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... your jacket," said the Elector, laughing. "Remember always that you are the servant of the master, and those spruce fellows but the lackeys of the servant, although I must say that the servant is a much richer, more magnificent man than his master. Run and bring ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... see they think this 'ere is jest a right fur enough out the way place for 'em. This 'ere red-haired one that was in here this evenin', Rollin his name is, he's a dreadful rich one, I suppose, dreadful rich! I've heered all about him. He's an old bachelder, I reckon, that is, he keeps mighty spruce, but I reckon he's hard on to thirty. Emily's got a cousin that works for some o' them big folks down to Providence, and she's heered all about him, this red-haired one, and how he keeps a big house down thar', and sarvants enough, ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... winter months and save what money they could, then both work on the tunnel in warm weather. They chose a spot down in the canyon that was high, but still near the stream, and there built a log shanty to live in while they worked the claim. He wrote me how they cut the great spruce on the side of the mountain far above the chosen spot and rolled them in. Dad let them use his team of donkeys to pack in the necessary lumber and shingles for the 'shack.' Father came home, and Tad, with some hired help, erected the first log ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... the woodland die, these smaller trees, which previously were shaded, develop rapidly as a result of their freedom from suppression. In many cases they grow almost as large and high as the huge trees that they replace. In our eastern forests the hemlock often follows the white pine in this way. Spruce trees may live for many years in dense shade. Then finally, when they have access to plenty of light they may develop into sturdy trees. A tree that is a pigmy in one locality may rank as a giant in another region due to different conditions ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... gale, and Smoke Bellew staggered against it along the beach. In the gray of dawn a dozen boats were being loaded with the precious outfits packed across Chilkoot. They were clumsy, home-made boats, put together by men who were not boat-builders, out of planks they had sawed by hand from green spruce-trees. One boat, already loaded, was just starting, ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... old saw-mill there any longer, wasting a vast water-power to turn its dripping wheel and cut up a few pine-logs into fragrant boards. There is a big steam-mill a little farther up the river, which rips out thousands of feet of lumber in a day; but there are no more pine-logs, only sticks of spruce which the old lumbermen would have thought hardly worth cutting. And down below the dam there is a pulp-mill, to chew up the little trees and turn them into paper, and a chair factory, and two or three industrial establishments, with quite a little ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... shelter of a man's breast as a horse cantered down a glade, under an ardent sky, amid blooms never seen since then. She was whisked back into that distant, unreal world by the figure of a young Romany standing beside a spruce-tree, and by her father's voice which uttered the startling words: "He says ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... portions near the line With rocky soil and stunted spruce and pine, With scarce a wigwam or a ranger's hearth, We left untilled, and deemed of little worth; The petals of this desert rose unfold, When man discovers mines of ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... country is one of exceeding beauty. The dark green forests of spruce, larch and pine, broken now and then by a grove of poplars or silver birches, the secluded valleys and the rounded hills are strangely restful and give one a sense of infinite peace. It is a place ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... suit him, that dainty, military, very English kind of pride, in seeming precisely what one is, neither more nor less. And the first mention of Uthwart's purpose defines also the vague outlooks of James Stokes, who will be a soldier too. Uniforms, their scarlet and white and blue, spruce leather and steel, and gold lace, enlivening the old oak stalls at service time—uniforms and surplices were always close together here, where a military garrison had been established in the suburbs for centuries past, and there were always sons of its officers in the school. If you stole out ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... of fashion,—the far-off days when fashion itself had not become old-fashioned and got improved into Smart Society,—this haunted half-mile or more still retains many fine old residences of brown stone and of red brick, which are spruce and well-kept. One such, on the west side of the street, of red brick, with a high stoop of brown stone, is a boarding-house, and in it is an apartment to which, on a certain clear, cold afternoon in October, the reader's presence in ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Bent Wade far up the valley of White River under the shadow of the Flat Top Mountains. It was beautiful country. Grassy hills, with colored aspen groves, swelled up on his left, and across the brawling stream rose a league-long slope of black spruce, above which the bare red-and-gray walls of the range towered, glorious with the blaze of sinking sun. White patches of snow showed in the sheltered nooks. Wade's gaze rested ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... below them the valley had suddenly brimmed with sunshine that flickered and twinkled on the birch leaves or shimmered on sombre stretches of pine and spruce. Close at hand, pennyroyal grew thick in the shadow of the wall; and just beyond, mullen candles cast slender bars of shade across the grass. The sunken graves and the lines of ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... but they did not turn aside. "I think I'm going there with some one else," she said softly, and before her vision of this eager lover there popped a spruce ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... that they should be fed well, and kept in good heart, in the same manner as it is his interest that his working cattle should be so. The blacks, accordingly, have almost everywhere their allowance of rum, and of molasses or spruce-beer, in the same manner as the white servants; and this allowance would not probably be withdrawn, though those articles should be subjected to moderate duties. The consumption of the taxed commodities, therefore, in proportion to the number of inhabitants, would ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... brisk or windy liquor. In North America, a mixture of spruce beer, rum, and sugar, was so called. The 17th regiment had a society called the Swizzle Club, at ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... when it was raining, they sat beside their fire in a desolate gorge. A cold wind swept between the thin spruce trunks that loomed vaguely out of the surrounding gloom as the red glare leaped up, and wisps of acrid smoke drifted about the camp. There was a lake up the hollow, and now and then the wild and mournful cry of a loon rang out. The men were tired and somewhat dejected as they ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... He presented a spruce appearance in his smart, well-cut evening coat, with the red button of the Legion d'Honneur in his lapel, and to the ladies who wished him "bon soir" as they filed out he drew his ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... as the cold nipped at his blood, and lighted a fresh cigar, half-turning to shield himself from a wind that was growing out of the east. As the match flared in the cup of his hands for an instant there came from the black gloom of the balsam and spruce at his feet a wailing, hungerful cry that brought a startled breath from his lips. It was a cry such as Indian dogs make about the tepees of masters who are newly dead. He had never heard such a cry before, and yet he knew that it was a wolf's. It impressed him with an awe which ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. Here reigned the dashing ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... tired to fix a date for the resumption of his own name or the taking of another. Flinging himself on his couch of moss and trailing ground-spruce, with the ferns closing over him, and the pines over them, he was ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... Rosamond had surprised Mary Douglas. Apparently engaged in selecting the most suitable branches of fir and spruce, she was more intently occupied in the study of her own thoughts. She was wondering why the mention of the brook adventure had caused that look which, notwithstanding protests to the contrary, recalled something ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... he had grown very tall and gaunt, but this afternoon his years sat lightly on him. And in a moment more they had vanished entirely, and he was as young as ever he was in his life, for, as he stepped cautiously around a little spruce, he came upon another lynx, nearly as tall as he, and quite as handsome in her early winter coat. They both stopped short and stared. And no wonder. Each of them was decidedly worth looking at, especially if the one ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... "You're all remarkably spruce," he commented. "Can any one tell me why almost every maid I have met in my house this day turns and flees as though I were the plague? Sarah is the only one who doesn't shun me, and her mind appears to be taken up with affairs of State, for I asked her ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... stunted spruce trees edged on the lake, and soon its dreary solitudes rang to the strokes of axes. The trees were small and uniform in size. Black stumps protruded, here and there, from the ground, showing work of the steel in time gone by. Jones observed that the living trees were no ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... equal to the higher demands of imaginative prose—witness his Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow—but his forte is in miniature, and the orthodox dimensions of three volumes post-octavo would suit him almost as ill as would the Athenian vesture of Nick Bottom the spruce proportions of royal Oberon: Haliburton is inimitable in his own line of things; his measure of wit and humour—qualities unknown, or nearly so, to Cooper—is 'pressed down, and shaken together, and running over;' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... in the form of an oblong, perhaps a hundred feet in length and quarter as many across. Down the center a long fire was built, while either side was carpeted with spruce boughs. The lodges were forsaken, and the fivescore or so members of the tribe gave tongue to their folk-chants in honor ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... Triplett came into my Lady Airy's about eight of the clock. You know the manner we sit at a visit, and I need not describe the circle; but Mr. Triplett came in, introduced by two tapers supported by a spruce servant, whose hair is under a cap till my lady's candles are all lighted up, and the hour of ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... "You and Kitty Spruce went up on spec? Very enterprising of you both, I am sure! And did you make anything ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... environment of the Collector's office. The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish of old heroic music, heard thirty years before—such scenes and sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-masters, the spruce clerks and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of his commercial and Custom-House life kept up its little murmur round about him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the General appear to sustain the most distant ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... meetings, and gather the news. Friday night the local undertaker, who advertised in the paper and paid in kind, took the forms over to New York, where the presswork was done. In the early morning hours I shouldered the edition—it was not very large in those days—and carried it from Spruce Street down to Fulton Ferry, and then home on a Fifth Avenue car. I recall with what inward rage I submitted to being held up by every chance policeman and prodded facetiously in the ribs with remarks about the "old man's millions," etc. Once or twice it boiled over ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... Bergin, Swinsound, Mott, Longland, Dranton, &c. (which experienc'd work-men call the dram) being long, strait and clear, and of a yellow more cedry colour, is esteemed much before the white for flooring and wainscot, for masts, &c. those of Prussia, which we call spruce, and Norway (especially from Gottenberg) and about Riga, are the best; unless we had more commerce of them from our Plantations in New England, which are preferable to any of them; there lying rotting at present ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... the material from which the chimney, which entirely occupied one gable, was built. It was pierced with two windows and a door, roofed with smaller logs, and thatched with long half cylinders of spruce bark. But the interior gave certain indications of the distinction as well as the peculiar experiences of its occupant. In place of the usual bunk or berth built against the wall stood a small folding camp bedstead, and upon a rude deal table that held a tin ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... its own dignity. The sharp retort, the sly innuendo, the dexterous hint, the hard, keen subtlety, the rough common sense, all valuable in their degree, and all profitable to their possessor, are only of an inferior grade. Let the true orator come forth, and the spruce pleader is instantly flung into the background. Let the appeal of a powerful mind be made to the jury, and all the small address, and practical skill, and sly ingenuity, are dropped behind. The passion of the true orator communicates its passion; his natural richness of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... of the plain my breath. No woodsman am I. My eyes are set For the wide low lines. The level rim Of the prairie land is mine. The semi-gloom of the pointed firs, The sleeping darks of the mountain spruce, Are prison and poison to such as I. In the forest I long for the rose of the plain, In the dark of the firs ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... prism (Fig. 3). The smallest side of the prism is designed to serve as a flat keel. The axis is formed of a metallic float, from whence start radii that form the skeleton of the framework, and that are designed for connecting the center with five long spruce beams that form the angles of the prism. To these beams are affixed the cross pieces that form the openwork sides. Five long pieces of wood parallel with the beams, but not so strong as they, protect the cross pieces and secure them against breakage ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... occur in the Eathie Lias, the smallest seems to have resembled in size and appearance that of the Scotch fir; the largest, which consisted from bottom to top, as seen in section, of from nine to ten scales, appears to have been more in the proportions of the oblong oval cones of the spruce family; while a cone of intermediate length, but of considerably greater breadth, assumed the rounded form of the cones of the cedar. I have found in the same deposit what seems to be the sprig of a conifer, with four apparently embryo cones attached to it in the alternate order. These are rather ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... lustily at the bell-rope. The old people of the village came stooping along the street. Children with bright faces tripped merrily beside their parents or mimicked a graver gait in the conscious dignity of their Sunday clothes. Spruce bachelors looked sidelong at the pretty maidens, and fancied that the Sabbath sunshine made them prettier than on week-days. When the throng had mostly streamed into the porch, the sexton began to toll the bell, keeping his eye on the Reverend ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... while below us the river, now big enough to have a name, the Ya, turned and twisted in splendid green swirls. Seen from a distance the villages were very attractive, built usually of wood, their thatched roofs just putting forth green shoots. A new feature in the landscape were tall spruce trees, reminding me in their outlines of the rock pines of Italy. As the road was now good, it was possible for me to ride in my chair once more, for which I was glad, as the hard climbs and still more wearying ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... had been hot after him, and he knew not how to defend himself. His photograph was implored. He was waylaid by journalists shabby and by journalists spruce, and the resulting interviews made him squirm. He became a man of mark at Pickering's. Photographers entreated him to sit free of charge. What irritated him in the whole vast affair was the continual insistence ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... spruce, trim, or smart fellow. A man that is always thirsty, is said to have a spark in ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... in contiguous drops the flood comes down, Threatening with deluge this devoted town. To shops in crowds the dangled females fly, Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy. The Templar spruce, while every spout's abroach, Stays till 'tis fair, yet seems to call a coach. The tuck'd-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 64, January 18, 1851 • Various
... and spruce, and keeps everything round herself ... what d'you call it. And in our poverty, you know, it's a pair of hands, I mean; and the wedding needn't cost much. But the chief thing's the offence, the offence to the lass, and she's a what d'you call it, ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... went forward rapidly. The pool kept its reputation good and yielded abundantly to the solicitation of Herbert's flies. The trout were large and in excellent condition and were quickly made ready for the trapper's treatment. A large piece of bark, peeled from a giant spruce standing near, and laid upon the ground, served for the table,—against the dark bark of which the tin dishes freshly scoured in the sand of the beach gleamed bright. The venison and trout were cooked ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... next thing the camper should do is to make a bed, and the branches of the spruce ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... peeresses and their daughters, &c. The simplest pew below belongs to the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward, peers and their sons, or members of Parliament, &c. The Chapel Royal, like the State-rooms, is fresh and spruce from renewal. It has, however, wisely avoided all departure from the original character of the building, which has nothing but the carved roof and the great square window to distinguish it from any other chapel of the same size and style. It is difficult to realise that ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... comparatively exalted summer heat.' It is, however, only the barley which ventures so far north: the limit of rye is 67 degrees, of oats, 65 degrees, of wheat, 64 degrees, on the west side of the peninsula, and from 1 to 2 degrees less on the east. In Southern Norway, the spruce-fir ceases to grow beyond the line of 2900 feet above the sea-level; while in Switzerland, it is commonly met with at the height of 5500 feet, and in some situations, 7000; shewing that the influences which affect the growth of grain do not similarly affect that of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... coachman, a spruce middle-aged man, who had long wanted to marry the clever, pretty laundry-maid, going to the pump to get water for his horses overheard her giving orders to the three feathers, and peeping through the keyhole as the butler had done, saw her sitting at her ease in a chair while ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... pines, firs, walnut, {83b} chesnut, hornbeam, yew, laurels, hollies, birches, Gordonia, {83c} Michelias, etc, most of them species hitherto unnoticed by botanists; but some exactly the same as in Europe, such as the yew, holly, hornbeam, walnut, Weymouth pine, (Pinus strobus, W.) and common spruce fir, (Pinus picea, W.) As, however, the greater part are of little value, from the inaccessible nature of the country, I shall only ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... Steller's jay and a true nut-cracker, Clark's crow (Picicorvus columbianus). True jays and orioles are also well represented. The gallinaceous birds include the large blue grouse of the coast, replaced in the Rocky Mountains by the dusky grouse. The western form of the "spruce partridge" of eastern Canada is also abundant, together with several forms referred to the genus Bonasa, generally known as "partridges" or ruffed grouse. Ptarmigans also abound in many of the higher mountain regions. Of the Anatidae only passing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Large quantities of wood pipe have been removed from trenches in Boston, New York City. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and elsewhere, usually in perfectly sound condition. It was commonly made of logs of spruce, yellow pine, or oak, from 12 to 18 ft. long, 12 to 24 in. in diameter, and with a bore from 3 to 6 in. in diameter. Some 6-in. pipe taken up in Philadelphia had an external diameter of 30 in. The ends were usually bound with wrought-iron collars, and adjacent lengths were connected ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell
... and a new set of people fill the streets. The goods in the shop-windows are invitingly arranged; the shopmen in their white neckerchiefs and spruce coats, look as it they couldn't clean a window if their lives depended on it; the carts have disappeared from Covent-garden; the waggoners have returned, and the costermongers repaired to their ordinary 'beats' in the suburbs; clerks are at their ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... down the rural road, our house being on the verge where Norton Bury melted into "the country." It turned out to be the cloak of a well-to-do young farmer's wife riding to market in her cart beside her jolly-looking spouse. Very spruce and self-satisfied she appeared, and the market-people turned to stare after her, for her costume was a novelty then. Doubtless, many thought as I did, how much prettier ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Anne, for directly in front of them was a wigwam, so cunningly built in behind a growth of small spruce trees that unless one knew of its whereabouts it might be easily passed by. The Indian girl laughed at Anne's exclamation, and nodded at her in a ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... in a grove of pines, but the trees that crowded one another almost out into the lake among the lily pads were spruce ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... wood-sorrel bell As yet, though the leaves' green floor Awaited their flower, that would tell Of a red-veined moist yestreen, With its droop and the hues it wore, When we two stood overnight One, in the dark van-glow On our hill-top, seeing beneath Our household's twinkle of light Through spruce-boughs, gem ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... downward from the top of the spruce tree to feed upon the brown seeds still clinging to the pigweed and goldenrod stalks sticking out above the snow by the roadside, it dips and floats through the air like its charming little cousin, the goldfinch. They have several characteristics in common besides their ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... level we encountered a steeper ascent than any I had yet climbed. Here the character of the forest began to change. There were other trees than pines, and particularly one kind, cone-shaped, symmetrical, and bright, which Dick called a silver spruce. I was glad it belonged to the conifers, or pine-tree family, because it was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. We climbed ridges and threaded through aspen thickets in hollows till near sunset. Then Stockton ordered ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... the Assistant Commissioner. The door opened and Chief Inspector Kerry entered. His face was as fresh-looking, his attire as spruce and his eyes were as bright, as though he had slept well, enjoyed his bath and partaken of an excellent breakfast. Whereas he had not been to bed during the preceding twenty-four hours, had breakfasted upon biscuits ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... cakes, and read from grown-up books. She is never allowed to go fishing, or wade in the cove on warm days, or go off in the woods as I do. I doubt if Melvina Lyon could tell the difference 'twixt a partridge and heron, or if she could tell a spruce tree from a fir. And as for presents, hers are of no account. They are but dolls, and silver thimbles and silk aprons. Why! did not my father bring me home a fine beaver skin for a hood, and a pair of duck's wings, and a pair of moccasins the very last ...
— A Little Maid of Old Maine • Alice Turner Curtis
... our coming was celebrated by a dinner of wild goose, plum pudding, and coffee. After the voyage from Halifax it seemed good to rest a little with the firm earth under foot, and where the walls of one's habitation were still. Through the open windows came the fragrance of the spruce woods, and from the little piazza in front of the house you could look down and across Lake Melville, and away to the blue mountains beyond, where the snow was ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... foliage. In one of these natural parlours they paused for their mid-day repast—mid-day in the world without, but here, where only vagrant gleams of the spring sun pierced the forest solitudes, gloomy with spruce and pine, there was a sense of morning in the air. This appearance was heightened by the delicate curtains of cobweb, strung with shining pearls, which still might be seen after the fog at early dawn. There was no sound except sometimes that of an invisible bird, singing in the upper air, ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... seem like a sudden transition back into the winter. The Christmas tree with its gay decorations and lighted candles was a beautiful sight, and the green-trimmed room with its spicy odours of spruce and pine ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... however, and up the hill toiled, and to the door of a sort of spruce-looking lanthorn of a house, without tree or shrub near it. But still it might be good to sleep in; and, nothing daunted by the maid's prophecies and ominous voice, we determined to try our fate. Sir Culling got down and rubbed his hands; while, after his man's knocking at the door ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... considerable shrewdness, and it was plain that he would eventually become as good a merchant as his father. He was little older than Lucy, but his fair hair and his clean-shaven face gave him a more youthful look. With his spruce air and well-made clothes, his conversation about hunting and golf, few would have imagined that he arrived regularly at his office at ten in the morning, and was as keen to make a good bargain as any of the men he came in ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... beat hot upon them, and they diffused a faint aromatic fragrance, refreshing as the scent of vinegar, into the long, unfloored room, which certainly needed something of the kind. It reeked with stale tobacco-smoke, the smell of cookery, and the odors of frowsy clothes. A row of bunks, filled with spruce twigs and old brown blankets, ran down one side of it, a very rude table down the other, and a double row of men with bronzed faces, in dusty garments, sat about the latter, eating voraciously. Fifteen minutes was, at the outside, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... farther north than the quail, and is found throughout the United States. With us he affects high and rocky ground, but northward he keeps at a lower level. At the White Mountains, the regions of this species and of the Canada grouse or spruce partridge are as well defined in height as those of the maples and the "black growth." Still farther north I have observed that our partridge frequents the lowest marshy ground, thus equalizing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... had pined for any kind of civilization rather than a continuance of the eternal snows, wondered if this were any better. Jim pitched the tent under some spruce-trees and high up on a ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... favourable to any of the European kinds of grain; but produces great plenty of maize, which the people bake into bread, and brew into beer, though their favourite drink is made of molasses hopped, and impregnated with the tops of the spruce-fir, which is a native of this country. The ground raises good flax and tolerable hemp. Here are great herds of black cattle, some of them very large in size, a vast number of excellent hogs, a breed of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... side chamber, which produced an almost incredible effect. An ellipsoidal missile of ninety gauge and several diameters long, made of brass, was driven through thirty-six inches of oak and twenty-four inches of green spruce timber, or fifty inches of the most impenetrable of timbers. The same principle of acceleration has, it is said, been most successfully applied in Boston by the use of a hollow tige or tube fixed at the bottom of the bore with the inside of which the cap-fire communicates,—so that, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... grounds are narrow and without timber; the country is high and broken; a large portion of black rock and brown sandy rock appears in the face of the hills, the tops of which are covered with scattered pine, spruce, and dwarf cedar; the soil is generally poor, sandy near the tops of the hills, and nowhere producing much grass, the low grounds being covered with little else than the hyssop, or southernwood, and the pulpy-leaved thorn. Game is more scarce, particularly ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... Orgeat Cherry shrub Currant wine To make cherry brandy Rose brandy Peach cordial Raspberry cordial Raspberry vinegar Mint cordial Hydromel, or mead To make a substitute for arrack Lemon cordial Ginger beer Spruce beer Molasses beer To keep lemon juice Sugar vinegar Honey vinegar Syrup of vinegar Aromatic vinegar Vinegar of the four thieves Lavender water Hungarian water To prepare cosmetic soap for washing the hands Cologne water Soft pomatum To make soap ...
— The Virginia Housewife • Mary Randolph
... you; what, you; fellow, you; and thus much for greeting. Now, my spruce companions, is all ready, and all ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... greeted with special enthusiasm. Speeches were made, toasts were drunk, the supple boards of the table creaked with good things, cook and messman vied with each other in lavish hospitality, the Hut was ornate with flags, every man was spruce in his snowiest cardigan and neck-cloth, the gramophone sang of music-hall days, the wind roared its appreciation through the stove-pipe, and rollicking merriment was supreme. On such occasions the photographer and the biologist ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... wise Queen Dolores, saying: "I have studied mathematics. I will question this young man, in my tent to-night, and in the morning I will report the truth as to his claims. Are you content to endure this interrogatory, my spruce young fellow who wear ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... think of our first Tree, in some way," said Polly softly, with glistening eyes, looking up at the beautiful branching spruce, its countless arms shaking out brilliant pendants, and gay with streamers and candles, wherever a decoration could be placed, the whole tipped with a shining star. "Oh, Bensie, ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world's commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the birthplace ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... of human servants to minister to his comfort. Yet he was modest and unassuming, and appeared really to enjoy his life of hard work; varying his struggles with a kernel of hard corn on the ground, where his color shone out like a flower against the green, with a rest on a spruce-tree, where ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce." ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Albert, a spruce, good-looking youth, had been too grand to make friends with so young a sister; but, now that she was a person of consequence, his tone was different. He talked his best, and she had a perfect feast of Wrangerton ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... approaching the higher hills. Towering, broken crags loomed ahead darkly in the gathering gloom. The vast riven facets cut the sky-line, and black patches of pine forests, and spruce, gave a ghostly, threatening outlook. They must have been riding over two hours when Scipio realized they were passing over a narrow cattle track on the summit of a wooded hill. Then presently their horses began a steep shelving descent which required ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... and decorations gay, The tinsel-trappings of a vain array. The spruce trimm'd jacket, and the waving plume, The powder'd head emitting soft perfume; These may make fops, but never can impart The soldier's hardy frame, or daring heart; May in Hyde-Park present a splendid train, But are not weapons for a dread campaign; May please ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... currant-bush more nearly than any thing else I can think of. Where the branches are widest the plant is three or four feet from side to side. The lowest branches are the longest, and the plant, standing by itself, has a shape similar to that of the Northern spruce. The stalk is sometimes an inch and a half in diameter where it leaves the ground. Before the leaves have fallen, the rows in a cotton-field bear a strong resemblance to ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... he met Cash walking down the slope where the trail seemed tunneled through deep green, so thick stood the young spruce. Cash was swinging his arms in that free stride of the man who has learned how to walk with the least effort. He did not halt when he saw Bud plodding slowly up the trail, but came on steadily, his keen, blue-gray eyes peering sharply from ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... returned from his surgery at the agency for his midday meal, and his abundant toned hail reached his wife in a remote bedroom in the almost luxurious home which he had had set up amidst the spruce ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... far-off days when fashion itself had not become old-fashioned and got improved into Smart Society,—this haunted half-mile or more still retains many fine old residences of brown stone and of red brick, which are spruce and well-kept. One such, on the west side of the street, of red brick, with a high stoop of brown stone, is a boarding-house, and in it is an apartment to which, on a certain clear, cold afternoon in October, the reader's presence in the ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... poles and bark had been built by the men during his absence. In it were all the stores, as well as a quantity of spruce boughs and hemlock tips for bedding. The chill evening air was filled with a delicious fragrance of burning cedar, mingled with the pleasant odor of boiling coffee. Several white-fish nailed to oak planks were browning before a bed of glowing coals, while slices of a lake-trout were sizzling ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... this gallant and spruce company (for every man had donned his best, and dressed himself with the utmost care) came Caron La Boulaye. He walked alone, for although their comrade in death, he was their comrade in nothing else. Their heads might lie together in the sawdust of Sanson's basket, but ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... into the woods. In the winter wild you will hardly get far into them, except at the Christmas season for greenery. Gathering this by deputy is poor business. It is all very well, if you can do no better, to engage Mr. Brown to engage some one else to bring in the needed spruce, fir, and hemlock with which to obscure the fresco deformities of St. Boniface's; but it is far better to hunt for them yourself. There is something intensely delightful in the changes of the search; for it begins dull enough. You start in the drear December weather, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... choose to call them, stretching more than twenty feet from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending as perfectly into them as if your spinal cord ran down the centre strip of your boat, and the nerves of your arms tingled as far as the broad blades of your oars,—oars of spruce, balanced, leathered, and ringed under your own special direction. This, in sober earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever made or perhaps ever will make. As the hawk sails without flapping his pinions, so you drift ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a party of returned Californians. Their line was uneven, their wheeling excessively loose, their evolutions of the simplest and yet awkwardly executed. Evidently they were newly embodied, and from the country; for the Charleston companies are spruce in appearance and well drilled. Half a dozen of them, who had been on sentinel duty during the night, discharged their guns in the air,—a daily process, rendered necessary by the moist atmosphere of the harbor at this season; and then, the exercise being over, there was a general scamper for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... old snow-shoes, stuffed with spruce tips underneath, and covered with dressed deerskin. He had cut off the back ends of them. You shall see them to-morrow. I found them down yonder where he had left them after crossing the warm spring. He had five bits of sharp round ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... lord may be) Thus low I take off mine to thee, The homage of a layman's castor, To the spruce delta of his pastor. Oh mayst thou be, as thou proceedest, Still smarter cockt, still brusht the brighter, Till, bowing all the way, thou leadest Thy sleek ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to cross the country, where the land becomes more solid. The armies must move, instead of through marshes, along innumerable small lakes, most of the lakes being long and narrow and running north and south, with a fairly thick growth of timber among them, mostly pine and spruce and fir. In character this section is rather similar to parts of Minnesota. There are two cities to be conquered in this drier region, Dvinsk, and, further south, Vilna, once the chief city or capital of the Lithuanians. We shall see the Russians thrust back from Koenigsberg, and the heavy fighting ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... I stood in the hall, a tall, clean-shaven, rather spruce young man entered and spoke to the concierge, who at once ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... the drawing-room on their return. Her suspicion reasserted itself, and it was strengthened, against her reason, by the fact that Arthur Twemlow made no comment on John's invisibility. In the dusk of the spruce stable, where an enamelled name-plate over the manger of a loose box announced that 'Prince' was its pampered tenant, she opened the cornbin, and, entering the loose-box, offered the cob a handful of crushed oats. And when ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... Drangollie, and the Draget fine, Mead, Mattebru, and the Metheling. Red wine, the claret and the white, with Tent and Alicant, in whom I delight. Wine of Languedoc and of Orleans thereto: Single beer, and other that is double: Spruce beer, and the beer of ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... although it was no laughing matter, at the plight the liquidator was now in. He was changed in a moment from the spruce and natty personage into a miserable and draggled being. From every part of him the salt water was streaming, and the curl was completely taken out of his whiskers. He could not speak from terror, which the boat-boys soon ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... midnight before he went to bed. He was up with the first cold gray of dawn. All that day he strode steadily eastward on snowshoes, over the company's trail to the bay. Two hours before dusk he put up his light tent, gathered balsam for a bed, and built a fire of dry spruce against the face of a huge rock in front of his shelter. It was still light when he wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down on the balsam, with his feet stretched out to the reflected heat of the big ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... It was notorious in the canyon that the only bear Old Bill ever saw was a fifty-pound cub that stole a string of trout from under Bill's nose, waded the creek and went away while Old Bill was throwing his gun into the brush and hitching frantically along a fallen spruce under the impression that he was climbing a tree. As for himself, he was getting too old and rheumatic to hunt, but he had had a little sport with bears in his time. He recalled with especial glee a little incident of ten or a dozen years ago. He had been over on the Iron Fork hunting ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... appear'd, what a shout rent the air! The spruce widow affords the most excellent cheer; For comfort in quarters there's nothing can beat her, So up rose the lads with a welcome to greet her: The muse with true gallantry led her to place, And Truth said good humour ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... a secret, says a beau, And sneers at some ill-natured wit below; But faith, if we should tell but half we know, There's many a spruce young fellow in this place, Wou'd never presume to show his face; Women are not so weak, what e'er men prate; How many tip-top beaux have had the fate, T'enjoy from mama's secrets their estate! Who, if her early folly had made known, Had rid behind ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... leaving her to question herself whether she existed, for more of life seemed to be with their mystery than with her speculations. The phantom ring of mist enclosing for miles the invariable low-sweeping dark spruce-fir kept her thoughts on them as close as the shroud. She walked fast, but scarcely felt that she was moving. Near midday the haunted circle widened; rocks were loosely folded in it, and heads of trees, whose round ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wonderful garden. She and Old Aaron lived in a little gray cube of a house that had its front face set straight to the edge of Charlotte Street. However, the north side of the cube looked into a great green yard where tall spruce trees, overrun with trumpet vines and woodbine, shaded long beds of flowers that love semi-shady places. The rear of the house overlooked an old-fashioned garden enclosed with a white-washed picket fence. Always were there flowers at Granny's house. In the cold days ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... world!"? At such moments a great force seems to uplift one as on wings; and one flies, and everything else flies, but contrariwise—both the verst stones, and traders riding on the shafts of their waggons, and the forest with dark lines of spruce and fir amid which may be heard the axe of the woodcutter and the croaking of the raven. Yes, out of a dim, remote distance the road comes towards one, and while nothing save the sky and the light clouds through which the moon ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... was signalled. The orchestra struck up a rollicking measure and Tony Luton made his entrance amid a rousing storm of applause. He was dressed as an errand-boy of some West End shop, with a livery and box- tricycle, as spruce and decorative as the most ambitious errand-boy could see himself in his most ambitious dreams. His song was a lively and very audacious chronicle of life behind the scenes of a big retail establishment, and sparkled ...
— When William Came • Saki
... OR DOUBLE SPRUCE.) Leaves about 1/2 in. long, erect, stiff, somewhat 4-sided, very dark green or whitish-gray; branchlets pubescent. Cones persistent, 1 to 1 1/2 in. long, ovate or ovate-oblong, changing from dark purple ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... upon the ground. He generally wore an old linen duster, a black slouch hat, and a pair of light blue pants thrust into the tops of heavy boots which were seldom blacked, but often splashed with Cairo mud. But everybody stepped respectfully aside to let him pass, and the spruce young staff officers never failed to ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... eastward. No Crag (Number 2) known east of Cromer Jetty. 3 prime. Fluvio-marine series. At Cromer and eastward, with abundant lignite beds and mammalian remains, and with cones of the Scotch and spruce firs and wood. At Runton, north-west of Cromer, expanding into a thick freshwater deposit, with overlying marine strata, elsewhere consisting of alternating sands and clays, tranquilly deposited, some with ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... were at the topmost source—fons et origo—of our chosen river. This single spring, crystal-clear and ice-cold, gushing out of the hillside in a forest of spruce and yellow birch and sugar maple, gave us the clue that we must follow for a week ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... block; but when the mate came to shake the cat's-paw out of the downhaul, and we began to boom end the sail, it shook the ship to her center. The boom buckled up and bent like a whipstick, and we looked every moment to see something go; but, being of the short, tough upland spruce, it bent like whalebone, and nothing could break it. The carpenter said it was the best ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... top fell off, and revealed the neatest collection of little packages that ever pleased the eye of the admirer of spruce arrangement. Popanilla took up packets upon all possible subjects; smelt them, but they were not savory; he was sorely puzzled. At last, he lighted on a slender volume bound in brown calf, which, with the confined but sensual notions of a savage, ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... a small space in front of the aperture. To hold the stakes all the more firmly, large stones were piled up against them, and the uprights themselves were closely wattled together by the broad flat branches of the spruce pines that grew near. In this way was constructed a fence that a cat could not have crawled through, much less a bear. One aperture only was left in it, and that was directly in front—a hole at about the height of a man's knee from the ground, and just big enough to admit the head of ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... for they knew that my designs were honourable and virtuous; and I know that they often said as much to Leonisa, in order to dispose her to receive me as her betrothed; but she had set her heart on Cornelio, the son of Ascanio Rotulo, whom you well know—a spruce young gallant, point-de-vice in his attire, with white hands, curly locks, mellifluous voice, amorous discourse—made up, in short, of amber and sugar-paste, garnished with plumes and brocade. She never cared ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... nearly as wide. It was constructed of wood, and covered with the rinds of trees, and skins of deer. It contained large quantities of venison, estimated to have been the choicest parts of at least 100 deer—the flesh was in junks, entirely divested of bone, and stored in boxes made of birch and spruce rinds—each box containing about two cwt. The tongues and hearts were placed in the middle of the packages. In this structure, says the celebrated William Cull, we saw three lids of tin tea kettles, which he believed to be the very same given ...
— Lecture On The Aborigines Of Newfoundland • Joseph Noad
... this northern country is one of exceeding beauty. The dark green forests of spruce, larch and pine, broken now and then by a grove of poplars or silver birches, the secluded valleys and the rounded hills are strangely restful and give one a sense of infinite peace. It is a place to go for tired nerves. Ragged peaks, towering mountains, and yawning chasms, splendid ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... short distance away, and but a few feet from the path, was a low, tent-like spruce. With instant decision he made for it, drawing the camera from his ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... he had reached a second and almost a third hill about three miles distant. In Yalbury Bottom, or Plain, at the foot of the hill, he listened. At first nothing, beyond his own heart-throbs, was to be heard but the slow wind making its moan among the masses of spruce and larch of Yalbury Wood which clothed the heights on either hand; but presently there came the sound of light wheels whetting their felloes against the newly stoned patches of road, accompanied by the distant ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... ashes of fires where the Indians had encamped earlier in the spring; they were absent now, at the silvery falls, higher up the stream, where fish abounded at that season. The soft June breeze, laden with the delicate breath of wild-flowers and the pungent odors of spruce and pine, ruffled the duplicate sky in the water; the new leaves lisped pleasantly in the tree tops, and the birds were singing as if they had gone mad. No ruder sound or movement of life disturbed the primeval solitude. Master Pring would scarcely recognize the spot were ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... been said very prettily of the spruce-tree, that it keeps the secret of its greenness well; so well that we hardly know when it sheds its leaves. There are women who resemble the spruce in their perennial youth, and the vigilance with which they guard the secret of it. The Baroness was one of these. ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... that their future was thus being settled by Mrs. Rachel, were sauntering through the shadows of the Haunted Wood. Beyond, the harvest hills were basking in an amber sunset radiance, under a pale, aerial sky of rose and blue. The distant spruce groves were burnished bronze, and their long shadows barred the upland meadows. But around them a little wind sang among the fir tassels, and in it there was ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... into the woods with its fragrant scents of hemlock, spruce and wintergreen, and out into ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... insisted on his waiting and resting the night there; for he had need of sleep, he was so tired after walking and bathing, dancing and weeping. And they gave him a nice, spruce, dimity-curtained bed to sleep in; and presented him with a beautiful suit of new garments for the morrow; "for," they said, "they had been at his christening, and it was easy to see that the good Dame Ursula, wherever she had been all these years, had brought ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... among others of fashionable cut and finest cloth. Black broad-cloth frocks, and satin or velvet vests, were quite common. Individuals thus attired formed a majority of the guests—for in young settlements the "hotel" or "tavern" is also a boarding-house, where the spruce "storekeepers" and better class of clerks take their meals—usually sleeping in the office ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... rushing in to say all aboard. Then they snaked me on to the caboose platform when the train was under way, pulled me inside and ran me half a mile up the track before they could stop her again. But that half-mile did the business for Mr. Howard. There he was spruce and dandified as you please, dressed fit to kill in a bang-up better suit than I ever hope to own, trying to sit behind a newspaper. They pulled Burtis aboard, too, and in the scuffle he fell all over Howard, knocked his hat off, and I knew the face in a second, and ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... the first day seems to me worth narrating. The brigade bivouacked on a large plantation, where was a colonial house of generous proportions. It fronted on a spacious lawn, which sloped from the house to the highway and was fringed with handsome old spruce and Austrian pines. In front and rear the house had broad porches. A wide hall ran through the center of the house from one porch to the other and on either side of the hall were well furnished rooms of ample size. In rear, in an enclosure as broad as the house, was a well ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... is a spruce brick tenement, red, high, and narrow, boasting, one above another, three sash-windows, the only sash-windows in the village, with a clematis on one side and a rose on the other, tall and narrow like itself. That slender ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... for Max," I declared. So I did, through the spruce woods and over the field as fast as my feet could carry me, thanking my stars that there was a Max to go ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Yosemite Park, richer and wilder become the forests and streams. At an elevation of 6000 feet above the level of the sea the silver firs are 200 feet high, with branches whorled around the colossal shafts in regular order, and every branch beautifully pinnate like a fern frond. The Douglas spruce, the yellow and sugar pines and brown-barked Libocedrus here reach their finest developments of beauty and grandeur. The majestic Sequoia is here, too, the king of conifers, the noblest of all the noble race. These colossal trees are as wonderful in fineness of ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... scarcely even be called torrents, being precipitated as it were in one leap from the Lebanon to the Mediterranean. Olives, vines, and corn cover the maritime plain, while in ancient times the heights were clothed with impenetrable forests of oak, pine, larch, cypress, spruce, and cedar. The mountain range drops in altitude towards the centre of the country and becomes merely a line of low hills, connecting Gebel Ansarieh with the Lebanon proper; beyond the latter it continues without interruption, till at length, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... door as French entered. The Inspector, who was looking very spruce and well-brushed, wished them a general good-morning. His eyes rested last and longest upon Laura, who seemed, however, ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you git religion, Sir, the thing can't never be; Nut but wut I respeck," sez she, "your intellectle part, But you wun't noways du for me athout a change o' heart: Nothun religion works wal North, but it's ez soft ez spruce, Compared to ourn, for keepin' sound," sez she, "upon the goose; A day's experunce'd prove to ye, ez easy 'z pull a trigger, It takes the Southun pint o' view to raise ten bales a nigger; You'll fin' thet human natur, South, ain't wholesome more 'n skin-deep, An' once't a darkie's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... departs amid a shower of blessings, and again urging his horse to speed, reaches his second place of destination. It is a stately mansion. A spruce waiter hastens to answer his ring, but the lady herself meets him as ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... hills were literally carpeted with flowers. I could not learn that any skilled botanist had ever visited Kamchatka and classified its flora. Among the arboreal productions the alder and birch were the most numerous. Pine, larch, and spruce grow on the Kamchatka river, and the timber from them is brought to Avatcha from the mouth ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... people favoured Joyce with glances of admiration, especially a spruce-looking young constable who officially held up the traffic to allow us to cross the road. He paid no attention at all to me, but I consoled myself with the reflection that he was missing an ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... one general store, would as likely be napping on a counter, his head pillowed upon a pile of calico. A little further up the street and near the one tall-spired white church Mrs. Mears, the village gossip, may be sitting on the veranda of a small house almost hid by luxuriantly growing Norway spruce, and idly rocking while she chats with the widow Sloper, who lives there, and whose mission in life is to cut and fit the best "go to meetin'" gowns of female Sandgate. Both dearly love to talk over all that's going on, and whether this or that village swain is paying especial ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... change the whole front, or nobody will knock at the door. The several parts, which must compose this new front, are elegant, easy, natural, superior good-breeding; an engaging address; genteel motions; an insinuating softness in your looks, words, and actions; a spruce, lively air, fashionable dress; and all the glitter that a young ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... rounded the Cape, that the extreme heat of an Indian climate is so favourable to the growth of hair as to put those wights who are afflicted with dark chevelures, which was my case, to the inconvenient necessity of chin-scraping twice on the game day, when they wish to appear particularly spruce of an evening. Now I intended to have shaved before the play began, but in the hurry of dressing had forgotten all about it; and upon inspecting my visage in a glass, after I had donned Lady Macbeth's night-gear, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... the door, and he stepped forward into the inner room, where, leaning lazily back before a desk, smoking a cigar over his newspaper, arrayed in a loose white jacket, with open throat and slippered feet, reposed a gentleman, much transformed from the spruce butler, but not difficult of recognition. He started to his feet with equal alacrity and consternation, and bowed, not committing himself until he should see whether he were actually known to his lordship. Fitzjocelyn was in too great haste to pause on this matter, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the river were varied and picturesque; sometimes steep cliffs and uncouth heaps of rock, in the most fantastic shapes, rose to a great height; sometimes the shores sloped away into mountains covered with thick forests of pine and spruce. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... ken ye'd be glad o' that if ye was lost in the woods," he said, when he saw the faces of the lads. "What mair can ye want? Dry your clothes, and then there are your beds for ye." He pointed to a heap of spruce fir tops, in a corner of the hut. Though the food was coarse, and their beds rough, the lads slept soundly. They had food of their own, but they wished to husband that for the woods, ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... Tate. "But it appears to be a duplicate of it." He was a mild-looking little man, well along in years, sparse and spruce in his Precol uniform. The small gray eyes in the sun-darkened, leathery face weren't really mild, if you considered them more closely, or ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... drays pass and collide at the corners of the narrow streets. Suddenly the marquis stops; he has found what he wanted. Between a charcoal dealer's dark shop and an undertaker's establishment, where the spruce boards leaning against the wall cause him to shudder, is a porte-cochere surmounted by a sign, the word "BATHS" on a dull lantern. He enters and crosses a damp little garden where a fountain weeps in a basin of artificial rockwork. That is just the dismal ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... furniture,—everything had been set out in the best style,—and she and her girls had been looking forward to the pleasure which they supposed the little surprise of the arrangements would give him. He was received in the spruce fresh room, set himself comfortably down in the chair prepared for him, and remained in the full enjoyment of his own fireside, and a return to his family circle, without the least consciousness that any change had taken place—until, at length, Mrs. Scott's patience ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... was taken, and liked so much that I was offered the basis (at twenty dollars a week) that I desired; I was even assigned to a desk where I should write in the office; and the next morning I came joyfully down to Spruce Street to occupy it. But I was met at the door by one of the editors, who said lightly, as if it were a trifling affair, "Well, we've concluded to waive the idea of an engagement," and once more my bright hopes of a basis dispersed themselves. I said, with what ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Creek tumbled out of the southeast, and roved between noble borders of silver spruce into the shadows of the Blue Mountains of the north, half a dozen miles across and ten long of grazing and farm land, rich, loamy bottom land ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... deliciously penetrating odour of the mimosa and sweetbriar. Down one special alley, where the white philadelphus, or 'mock orange' grew in thick bushes on either side, intermingled with ferns and spruce firs, whose young green tips exhaled a pungent, healthy scent that entered into the blood like wine and invigorated it, Sir Roger de Launay was pacing to and fro with a swinging step which, notwithstanding its ease ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... southward on snow-shoes. Their way was over the ice of Lake Champlain, for more than a century the great thoroughfare of war-parties. They bivouacked in the forest by squads of twelve or more; dug away the snow in a circle, covered the bared earth with a bed of spruce boughs, made a fire in the middle, and smoked their pipes around it. Here crouched the Christian savage, muffled in his blanket, his unwashed face still smirched with soot and vermilion, relics of the war-paint he had worn a week before ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... stirred the generous spruce and darkening pinewoods. The drooping, westering sun, already athwart the barren crown of the hill tops, left a false, velvety suggestion of twilight in the heart of the valley, while a depressing superheat enervated all life, except the profusion of vegetation which beautified the rugged ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... lost a fraction of his belligerence, but none of his arrogance and natty appearance. Homer wondered vaguely how the other managed to remain so spruce in the inadequate ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... visitors, when Malcolm and Moodie returned from the field. There was no affectation about the former. He was manly in his person, and blunt even to rudeness, and I saw by the quizzical look which he cast upon the spruce little Crowe that he was quietly quizzing him from head to heel. A neighbour had sent me a present of maple molasses, and Mr. Crowe was so fearful of spilling some of the rich syrup upon his drab shorts that he spread a large pocket-hankerchief over his knees, and tucked ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... cottages and gardens, is the station with a train usually ready to start from it for Ronda or Seville or Malaga, I do not know which, and with the usual company of freight-cars idling about, empty or laden with sheets of cork, as indifferent to them as if they were so much mere pine or spruce lumber. There is a sufficiently attractive hotel here for transients, and as an allurement to the marine and military leisure of Gibraltar, "The Picnic Restaurant," and "The Cabin Tea Room," where no doubt there is something to be had beside sandwiches and tea. Here also is the pier for the Gibraltar ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... who apparently had been looking around more or less since they came ashore, "there are plenty of spruce and hemlock and fir trees close by. We can make our beds like hunters always used to do, away back in Daniel ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... uncoarsened by the clang of time and uncorroded by the salt of tears. Rich terraces flowed in velvet waves down to the waiting river, murmuring its trysting joy; a full-robed choir of oak and elm and maple kept their eternal places in a grander loft than man could build them, while pine and spruce and cedar, disrobing never, but snatching their bridal garments from the winter ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... with the exception of the last two, seem to explain themselves. During the summer months in the North Woods you will not need a rifle. Partridges, spruce hens, ptarmigan, rabbits, ducks, and geese are usually abundant enough to fill the provision list. For them, of course, a shotgun is the thing; but since such a weapon weighs many pounds, and its ammunition many more, ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... of narrow streets; with carriers' carts, and travel-stained pedestrians, make up the aggregate of the objects on the road. But in another hour the scene will change; the aristocratic 'turn-out,' with its brilliant appointments and spruce footmen—the cab, the brougham, and the open chariot, all filled with gaily-dressed company, will crowd the way; for a Chiswick fete is one of the events of a London season. People go there as they do to the Opera—to see and to be seen. As I journey onward, I catch glimpses of blooming fruit-trees, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... solitude, driving a high-mettled animal upon a sledge so small as to be entirely concealed by his person, so that, to all appearance, he seemed to be gliding away only attached to the horse by the reins in his well-guarded hands. The way led through noble woods of Scotch and Spruce fir, sometimes catching sight of a lofty mansion of stone, or passing a low thatched building of wood with numberless little sash windows, where some of the nobles still reside, and which are the remnants of more simple times. And now "the sun ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... brought back dear memories of glorious April mornings on Long Island, when through the singing of robin and song-sparrow comes the piercing cadence of the meadowlark; and of the far northland woods in June, fragrant with the breath of pine and balsam-fir, where sweetheart sparrows sing from wet spruce thickets and rapid brooks rush under the drenched and ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... really do think there is no luxury equal to that of lying before a good fire on a good spruce bed, after a good supper, and a hard moose chase in a fine clear frosty moonlit starry night. But to enter into the spirit of this, you must understand what a moose chase is: the man himself runs the moose down by pursuing ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... camp cots or bed sacks are usually provided for the men to sleep on. In a shelter tent camp beds should be made of hay, grass, leaves, pine or spruce boughs, or pine needles, on top of which the poncho and blanket are spread, thus softening the ground and keeping the sleeper away from the cold and dampness. Neglect to prepare the bed when sleeping without cot or bed sack means a loss of sleep, and may lead to colds, bowel ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... the saddle on and mounted. "I must be going back, or they will decide I am not coming till to-morrow, and quickly eat my supper." He spoke jauntily from his horse, arm akimbo, natty short jacket put on for to-day's courting, gray steeple-hat silver-embroidered, a spruce, pretty boy, not likely to toil severely at wood contracts so long as he could hold soul and body together and otherwise be merry, and the hand of that careless arm soft on his pistol, lest Don Ruz should abruptly dislike ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... a storm signal, and one they liked little. The temperature was falling. It was quite dark at three o'clock in the afternoon, and they were obliged to travel by snow-light. When camp was finally made, after halting for the night in a thicket of pine and spruce trees, the men were ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... children feeding a pig. The wide flagstoned street smelt sour. At various cavern doors sat groups of the billeted soldiers. Now and then squads marched up and down, monotonously clad in khaki and dun-coloured helmets. Officers, some only recognizable by the Sam Browne belt, others spruce and point-device, passed by. Here and there a shop was open, and the elderly proprietor and his wife stood by the doorway to get the afternoon air. Women and children straggled rarely through the streets. The Boche had left the little town alone for some time; they had other ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... been found in pine trees in Southern Michigan at an elevation of forty feet. In all cases the nests are placed high in hemlocks or pines, which are the bird's favorite resorts. From all accounts the nests of this species are elegantly and compactly made, consisting of a densely woven mass of spruce twigs, soft vegetable down, rootlets, and fine shreds of bark. The lining is often intermixed with horse hairs and feathers. Four eggs of greenish-white or very pale bluish-green, speckled or spotted, have usually been ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... trees, from whose low limbs dangle the tempting wares, and a stump serves as a chopping-block. Under the shrubbery, where the sun cannot penetrate, are stored home-made firkins full of yellow butter, and great cheeses, and heaps of substantial home-baked bread. Kegs of hard cider and spruce beer and perhaps more potent brews are abroach, and behind the haggling and jesting and bustle you may catch the sound of muskets or the whoop of the Indians from afar. Meanwhile, in the settlements, all manner of industries were stimulated, and a great number of women throughout ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... all. A Norway spruce cone. When it is dry its scales are open. I filled them with grass seed and put the cone in a small tumbler so that the lower end might be damp all the time. The dampness makes the scales close and starts the seed to sprouting. This has ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... didn't have no hatchet, but I had a good huntin' knife along with me, and I managed to whittle down a good-sized spruce, which I trimmed so's to make a sort of ladder of it. When that was done I lowered the butt end of it into the hole, and Handsome—that was who it was in the bottom of the hole—he climbed up so's I could get hold of him, and then ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... Dig them in, and their decay will nourish the next crop. If early sowing is practised, and the earliest possible produce of everything is aimed at, there must be always at hand the means of protection, such as litter, spruce branches, mats, or other material, as circumstances require. The vigilant gardener is not surprised by the weather, but is always armed for an emergency. Read the notes for January before proceeding further; and in respect of what remains undone, spare the necessity ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... a spirit of half jest: "I'll have to go out and show you men how to call a Moose." I cut a good piece of birch-bark and fashioned carefully a horn. Disdaining all civilized materials as "bad medicine," I stitched the edge with a spruce root or wattap, and soldered it neatly with pine gum flowed and smoothed with a blazing brand. And then I added the finishing touch, a touch which made the Indian and the halfbreed shake their heads ominously; I drew ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... an Exact and Perfect Relation of the Life and Devilish Practises of Joan Peterson, who dwelt in Spruce Island, near Wapping; Who was condemned for practising Witchcraft, and sentenced to be Hanged at Tyburn, on Munday the 11th of April 1652, ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... was left at liberty to enjoy it, and also to take note of the many gay and fashionable folk who enrich and embellish Ryde in the season; for Mr. Cecil Burleigh was entirely engrossed with another person. The party they had joined consisted of a very thin old gentleman, spruce, well brushed, and well cared for; of a languid, pale lady, some thirty years younger, who was his wife; and of two girls, their daughters. It was one of these daughters who absorbed all Mr. Cecil Burleigh's ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... chairman to bite his lips, to keep in a good round laugh, when those words, fellow-countrymen, came out)—I tell you what it is, the things that are wanted now are boots, and shoes, and stockings, and jackets—and not gingerbread, and sugar plums, and spruce beer, and gimcracks of ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... a useful young fellow enough, and clean and spruce; but lately, he has become shabby and dirty, and ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... from Massachusetts. Maine is noted for being the easternmost State in the Union, and has been utilized by a number of eminent men as a birthplace. White-birch spools for thread, Christmas-trees, and tamarack and spruce-gum are found in great abundance. It is the home of an industrious and peace-loving people. Bar Harbor is a cool place to go to in summer-time and violate the liquor ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... even the most careful observer, would have recognised in the two dusty figures, the once spruce forms of Captain Thomas Tomb and ...
— The Pirate's Pocket Book • Dion Clayton Calthrop
... wind might be rollicking and boisterous. Here it always went gently. Little, winding, fairy paths ran here and there over spruce roots cushioned with moss. Wild cherry trees, that in blossom time would be misty white, were scattered all over the valley, mingling with the dark spruces. A little brook with amber waters ran through it from the Glen village. ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... gold chariot. He taught six green monkeys to draw it; they were harnessed with fine traces of flame-colored morocco leather. He went to another place, where he met with two monkeys of merit, the most pleasant of which was called Briscambril, the other Pierceforest—both very spruce and well educated. He dressed Briscambril like a king and placed him in the coach; Pierceforest he made the coachman; the others were dressed like pages; all which he put into his ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... Enth. Any quantity of it. What shall it be? They've "Anti-Bass Beer," or "Spruce Stout;" or perhaps you'd like to try their "Pennyroyal Porter?" I'm rather ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... usual fashion is to place the body doubled up on its side in a box of plank hewed out of spruce logs and about four feet long. This is elevated several feet above the ground on four posts which project above the coffin or box. The sides are often painted with red chalk in figures of fur animals, birds, and fishes. According to the wealth of the dead man, a number ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... further discrimination: <complaisant, elegant, trim, dapper, spruce, genteel, urbane, well-bred, gracious, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... men—lads and lasses too—there, halt a bit. Mrs. Fairfield, do you hear?—halt! I think his reverence has given us a capital sermon. Go up to the Great House all of you, and drink a glass to his health. Frank, go with them; and tell Spruce to tap one of the casks kept for the hay-makers. Harry, [this in whisper,] catch the Parson, and tell him to ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... of this ceremony extends through a period of four days and four nights. The day preceding is spent in preparation: the head of the family of the sick person makes ready for a feast, and helpers build a corral of pinon and spruce branches. This corral is circular, about forty yards in diameter and six feet high, with an opening at the east. To the west, close to the fence, is the medicine kozhan. The latter part of each morning of the four days is spent by the medicine-man and ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... says one thing: 'This way I have passed.' Two sprigs, crossed in certain ways and left upon the trail, compose the patteran. But they must always be of different trees or shrubs. Thus, on the ranch here, a patteran could be made of manzanita and madrono, of oak and spruce, of buckeye and alder, of redwood and laurel, of huckleberry and lilac. It is a sign of Gypsy comrade to Gypsy comrade, of Gypsy lover to ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... think that the weapon used was a knife with a very sharp, triangular blade judging from the wound," the spruce-looking doctor explained. "The police, however, have failed ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... of barges lay one after another along the canal, many of them looking mighty spruce and ship-shape in their jerkin of Archangel tar picked out with white and green. Some carried gay iron railings, and quite a parterre of flower-pots. Children played on the decks, as heedless of the rain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce." ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Sir, the thing can't never be; Nut but wut I respeck," sez she, "your intellectle part, But you wun't noways du for me athout a change o' heart: Nothun religion works wal North, but it's ez soft ez spruce, Compared to ourn, for keepin' sound," sez she, "upon the goose; A day's experunce'd prove to ye, ez easy 'z pull a trigger, It takes the Southun pint o' view to raise ten bales a nigger; You'll fin' thet human ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... right: it was like walking with a dumb man. They left the wood and walked downhill beside a ploughed field, and in the shelter of a high wall. An open lane brought them to a gate, the gate opened on a rough road through yet another wood of larch and spruce and fir. The road was deeply rutted and they walked in single file until Charles turned, saying, 'This is what I've brought you to see. This ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... a vest, at another a shawl, and at another a turban—I threw off my dress of a dervish, hastened to the bath, and after a few minutes under the barber, came out like a butterfly from its dark shell. No one would have recognised in the spruce young Turk, the filthy dervish. I hastened to Constantinople, where I lived gaily, and spent my money; but I found that to mix in the world, it is necessary not only to have an attaghan, but also to have the courage to use it; and in several broils which took place, from my too frequent use of the ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... him, with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity—and I don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there—very spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that garden-party ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... themselves on the hatch, and the German sailors busied themselves bringing tea and cigarettes to their latest captives. We were then left to ourselves for a short time on deck, and just before dark a spruce young Lieutenant came up to me, saluted, and asked me to tell all the passengers that we were to follow him and go aft. We followed him along the ship, which seemed to be very crowded, to the well deck aft, where we met the remaining few passengers and some of the crew ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... garb of mine is hardly worth brushing," said Wildrake; "and but for this hundred-weight of rusty iron, with which thou hast bedizened me, I look more like a bankrupt Quaker than anything else. But I'll make you as spruce as ever was a canting rogue ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... battle and the game the campaign,' quoth the King, with a smile. 'Our German friend is a master of camp-fire metaphors. But methinks our poor horses are in a sorry state. What would cousin William over at The Hague, with his spruce guards, think of such a show ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a-swash in our boots; Our hands are hard-calloused by peavies and poles, And we're drenched with the spume of the chutes; We gather our herds at the head, Where the axes have toppled them loose, And down from the hills where the rivers are fed We harry the hemlock and spruce. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... strong tendency, in some of its posterior parts, to trail along the ground in the form, commonly called "tatters." The three friends were settling the exact site of Troy, or some other equally momentous subject, when they were passed by two spruce gownsmen, one of whom said to the other, which just caught the ear of Mr. C., "That sloven thinks he can hide his ribbons by the gowns of his companions." Mr. C. darted an appalling glance at him, and passed on. He ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... appearance with great exactness. The boy is extremely handsome, give him his due; has dark hazel eyes, auburn hair, and very elegant proportions. His air and gait have nothing of the clown in them. Take away his jacket and trousers, and you have as spruce a fellow as ever came from dancing-school or college. He is the exact picture of his mother, and the most perfect contrast to the sturdy legs, squat figure, and broad, unthinking, sheepish face of the father that can be imagined. You must confess that his appearance here ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... of fury echoes through the primeval forest. It plays amidst the countless aisles of jack-pine. It loses itself in the dense growing tamarack, or dies amidst the softer plumage of spruce. It is no mere bellow of impotent rage. It is a note of defiance. It is a challenge to the legions of the forest. It is the gage of ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... could look into the heart of the mountains whence the stream issued through a narrow canyon, with steep, forested ridges on either side, and little level glades along the water, set with tall, conical blue spruce trees, pines with their warm red boles, and little clumps of aspen with gleaming white stems, and trembling leaves of mingled ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... hat-roof—I mean of slates, garnished with bay windows—observe its heavy jaws of areas, its hard, close mouth of a door; its dark, deep sunken eyes of windows peering out from the heavy brow of dark stone coping that supports the slate hat in question: what a contrast to the spruce mock gentility of its neighbour, with a stand-up collar of white steps, a varnished face, and a light, jaunty, yet stiff air, like a city ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... Death and not to fear, But rather to take truce! How often have I seen you at a bier, And there look fresh and spruce! You fragrant flowers! then teach me, that my breath Like yours may sweeten ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... pranks that they had over thar. He said thar was an old bachelor that, kept a dry-goods store who never had had much to do with women. He was bashful-like, but thar was one young woman that he had his eye on, an' now an' then he'd spruce up an' go to see 'er or take 'er out to meetin', but Jeff said he was too weak-kneed to pop the question, an' the gal went off on a visit to Alabama and got married. Now, the old bach' had a gang o' friends that was always in for fun, an' ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... and mast of a sailing outfit should be of spruce or some other light but strong wood, while cedar or some non-splitting wood is best for the leeboards. Young canoeists will enjoy making their own sailing outfits; or a complete Lateen rig as made by various canoe manufacturers can be purchased ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... te, His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptorie: his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gate maiesticall, and his generall behauiour vaine, ridiculous, and thrasonicall. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odde, as it were, too peregrinat, as I may ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... a light shed of fir poles roofed with spruce-fir branches over the log, so that he might work sheltered from the bitter winds of the early spring. As the warmth increased he had taken the shed down, and now as the sun rose higher was glad of the shade ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... AMERICAN SPRUCE. In the spring of the year, this valuable extract is obtained from the young shoots and tops of the pine or fir trees; and in autumn, from their cones. These are merely boiled in water, to the consistence of honey or molasses. The bark and softer part of the tops and young shoots, being easily ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... against the bothy door, and walked with a steady and fixed purpose, never turning her head, out into the lane, through the gate and up the hill. We watched her spellbound till she reached the horizon, and there saw her pause, roll up her sleeves and furiously attack an old spruce tree. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... came to a growth of spruce so dense that it formed a shelter from both snow and wind, with a thick carpet of brown needles under foot. They were shut out from the stars, and in the darkness MacVeigh began to whistle cheerfully. He unstrapped ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... voice, her never seeming to hurry and yet going about any matter as if it was the first thing to be done; her little orderly methods. She kept her mother's room neat, she put the books back in their places; there was a cluster of autumn leaves in a vase, or a sprig of spruce or cedar that for a long while would put forth new leaves. She was very glad now that she had taken so much pains. Was she rather unpolished when they had first come from Laconia. But her circle there ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... most execrable performance you ever beheld. The graving not worse than the drawing; awkward knights, scrambling Unas, hills tumbling down themselves, no variety Of prospect and three or four perpetual spruce firs. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... before fully appreciated them. They came in the Firebird, their automobile, and declared that they would camp out in the open Maine woods, cook in the open, make soups of lily bulbs, stirred with the aromatic boughs of the spruce, and otherwise conform to all the glorious hardships peculiar to the pioneers—according to the stories told by ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... elaborately set out with silver-branched candlesticks and all the Governor-General's fine collection of plate, but the servants waited in heavy fur-coats and caps. Of course no flowers could be used in that temperature, so the silver vases held branches of spruce, hemlock, and other Canadian firs. The French cook had to be very careful as to what dishes he prepared, for anything with moisture in it would freeze at once; meringues, for instance, would be frozen into uneatable ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... poor and helpless as I am needs the wherewithal to do good work, I shall have helped him as Thou hast helped me." And according to his promise so he did, and the pieces of richly curled maple, of sycamore, and of spruce began to accumulate. They were cut from the sunny side of the trees, in just the right season of the year, split so as to have a full inch thickness towards the bark, and a quarter inch towards the heart. They were then laid for weeks under one ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... beneath it. But it came back to earth with awful force, and I felt the ground tremble as it crushed a wide way through the woods. It finally brought up at the bottom of a gulch with a wreckage of hundreds of noble spruce trees that it had crushed ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... wouldn't hear of a cent less. Howard wants I should save every penny, so's at least one of the younger children can have more of an education than James an' Sally an' Austin an' Ruth. I don't look at it that way—seems to me it ain't fair to give one child more than another. I want to spruce up this place a little, an' lay by to raise the mortgage ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... Indian, 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 ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... their quarters, a small party of enlisted men, apparently recruits, were observed clustered about a wagon loaded with boxes. A spruce, handsome, blond-moustached young soldier stepped suddenly into view from behind the wagon, where he had been superintending the unloading of some of the goods. At sight of him Miss Sanford stopped short. Looking ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... difficult for the horses. The banks of the river were varied and picturesque; sometimes steep cliffs and uncouth heaps of rock, in the most fantastic shapes, rose to a great height; sometimes the shores sloped away into mountains covered with thick forests of pine and spruce. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... ocean now I fly, And those happy climes that lie Where day never shuts his eye, Up in the broad fields of the sky. There I suck the liquid air, All amidst the gardens fair Of Hesperus, and his daughters three That sing about the golden tree. Along the crisped shades and bowers Revels the spruce and jocund Spring; The Graces and the rosy-bosomed Hours Thither all their bounties bring. There eternal Summer dwells; And west winds with musky wing About the cedarn alleys fling Nard and cassia's balmy smells. Iris there ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... of Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world's commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the birthplace mentioned on his certificate be ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... a mushroom 'Mark,' Young guns, intolerably spruce, Have cast thee from the social 'park'; Which, to their humbled patriarch, Must ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... ground back from the river. They followed a well-worn moose trail, and two or three hundred yards from the stream came upon a small opening cluttered by great rocks and surrounded by clumps of birch, spruce, and banskian pine. The moose trail crossed this rough open space; and, following it to the opposite side, Philip and Jeanne came upon a clear, rippling little stream, scarcely two yards in width, hidden in places under thick caribou moss and jungles of seedling pines. ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... divan, one swimming circle glides Swift without stop: the old bashaws click time, As if on polish'd ice; in trance sublime The iman hoar with some spruce courtier slides. Nor rank nor age from capering refrain; Nor can the king his royal foot restrain! He too must reel amid the frolic row, Grasp the grand vizier by his beard of snow, And teach the aged man once more to bound amain!" ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... Brene. This pleased Grangousier very well, and he commanded that it should be done. At night at supper, the said Des Marays brought in a young page of his, of Ville-gouges, called Eudemon, so neat, so trim, so handsome in his apparel, so spruce, with his hair in so good order, and so sweet and comely in his behaviour, that he had the resemblance of a little angel more than of a human creature. Then he said to Grangousier, Do you see this young boy? He is not as yet full twelve ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... that very dark shadow from the spruce there, Ranald," she cried, pointing to a deep, black turn in the road. For answer there came from behind them the long, mournful hunting-cry of the wolf. He was on their track. Immediately it was answered by a chorus of howls from the bush on the swamp side, but still ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... the former in great abundance. Earlier in the summer the hills were literally carpeted with flowers. I could not learn that any skilled botanist had ever visited Kamchatka and classified its flora. Among the arboreal productions the alder and birch were the most numerous. Pine, larch, and spruce grow on the Kamchatka river, and the timber from them is brought to Avatcha from the mouth ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... and saw Mildred with her companion, a smooth-faced young man with sleek hair and the spruce look of a commercial traveller, sitting in the second row of the stalls. Mildred wore a black picture hat with ostrich feathers in it, which became her well. She was listening to her host with that quiet smile which Philip knew; ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... measured. The good old gentlewoman was not so simple as to go into his projects—she began to smell a rat. "This Trim," quoth she, "is an odd sort of a fellow; methinks he makes a strange figure with that ragged, tattered coat appearing under his livery; can't he go spruce and clean, like the rest of the servants? The fellow has a roguish leer with him which I don't like by any means; besides, he has such a twang in his discourse, and an ungraceful way of speaking through the nose, that one can hardly understand him; I wish ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... branches of an enormous spruce lay the dead body of a man. Standing silent above it they noted such particulars as first strike the attention—the face, the attitude, the clothing; whatever most promptly and plainly answers the unspoken question of a ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... star-tremulous sky; sculptured buttresses of snow, enclosing hollows filled with diaphanous shadow, and sweeping aloft into the upland fields of pure clear drift. Then came the swift descent, the plunge into the pines, moon-silvered on their frosted tops. The battalions of spruce that climb those hills defined the dazzling snow from which they sprang, like the black tufts upon an ermine robe. At the proper moment we left our sledge, and the big Christian took his reins in hand to follow ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... saw that it was a full-size bed blanket of heavy gray wool. The man's ingenuity seemed endless. Without seeming to have any extra luggage, he had nevertheless carried a very efficient camp outfit with him. He took his hunting knife, went to the spruce grove and cut many small, green branches, returning with all he could hold in his arms. She watched him lay them tips up for a mattress, and was secretly glad that she knew this much at least of camp comfort. He spread the blanket over them and then, without a word, ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... reputation was that of "a hard case, and addicted to drink," I found also in hospital in Korogwe, recovered from an operation for abscess of the liver, and living in hospital with his wife. Spruce and rather jumpy he insisted on exhibiting his operation wound to me, paying heavy compliments to English skill in surgery; not, mark you, that he had any but the greatest contempt that all German doctors, too, ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... interpreters, was known to have been sick of the scurvy at Stadacona, so that Cartier was much surprised to see him out and well. He contrived to make him relate the particulars of his recovery, and thus found out that a decoction of the bark and foliage of the white spruce-tree furnished the savages with a remedy. Having recourse to this enabled the French captain to arrest the progress of the disease among his own people, and, in a short time, to bring ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... longer than you can imagine, Bertha, forests were growing along the shores of the Baltic Sea. There was a great deal of gum in the trees of these forests. It oozed out of the trees in the same manner as gum from the spruce-tree and ...
— Bertha • Mary Hazelton Wade
... so much higher, that between England and Ireland, and, what is more, between England and Norway, was firm dry land. The country then must have looked—at least we know it looked so in Norfolk—very like what our moors look like here. There were forests of Scotch fir, and of spruce too, which is not wild in England now, though you may see plenty in every plantation. There were oaks and alders, yews and sloes, just as there are in our woods now. There was buck-bean in the bogs, as there is in Larmer's and Heath pond; ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... one old bull moose kept just ahead of us. We knew he was old because of his size and his being alone. Two or three times we passed other bulls with two or three cows and their calves of that season yarding among the young spruce, but the old bull kept on steadily down the mountain. His years had made him weather-wise. The third day the wind shifted the snow, and we saw him on the round crown of a hill ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... see that if economic reasons suggest it, we may use the selection system as a basis for artificially managing the shade bearing species such as hemlock, white fir, cedar, spruce, and even Western yellow pine. We may cut the largest and oldest trees and still have a well started second crop. If there is not much young growth to leave, even a little is valuable. It may be decidedly best to leave medium sized trees, which otherwise we would cut, because ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... bears. It was notorious in the canyon that the only bear Old Bill ever saw was a fifty-pound cub that stole a string of trout from under Bill's nose, waded the creek and went away while Old Bill was throwing his gun into the brush and hitching frantically along a fallen spruce under the impression that he was climbing a tree. As for himself, he was getting too old and rheumatic to hunt, but he had had a little sport with bears in his time. He recalled with especial glee a little incident of ten or a dozen years ago. He had been over on the Iron Fork hunting ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... plying with skill their nets in the emerald waters. Two hundred white winters and more have fled from the face of the Summer Since DuLuth, on that wild, somber shore, in the unbroken forest primeval, From the midst of the spruce and the pines, saw the smoke of the wigwams up-curling, Like the fumes from the temples and shrines of the Druids of old in their forests. Ah, little he dreamed then, forsooth, that a city would stand on that hill-side, And bear the proud name of Duluth, the untiring and dauntless explorer. ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... and portions near the line With rocky soil and stunted spruce and pine, With scarce a wigwam or a ranger's hearth, We left untilled, and deemed of little worth; The petals of this desert rose unfold, When man ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... passon for me, an' bring a harnser, an' I'll give yer somethink when yer gits back.' An' all the gents was a-sittin' at breakfast, with the winders wide open an' the smell of 'am an' eggs comin' through strong, an' they larfed fit to split theirselves, an' one on 'em tried to kiss Kitty Spruce, an' she spanked his face ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... when through the singing of robin and song-sparrow comes the piercing cadence of the meadowlark; and of the far northland woods in June, fragrant with the breath of pine and balsam-fir, where sweetheart sparrows sing from wet spruce thickets and rapid brooks rush under the ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... carefully away from the hindquarters of a spruce tree and remove the tenderloin. One of last year's Christmas trees is excellent for the purpose. Chop it up fine and place in a saucepan. Add boiling water and let it simper two hours. Season with a pinch ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... the outer ward of the financial stronghold he had penetrated, with its curving sweep of counters, brass railings, and wirework screens defended by the spruce clerks behind them, he was again impressed with the position of the man he had just quitted, and for a moment hesitated, with an inclination to go back. It was with no idea of making a further appeal to his old ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... moss slipped and broke beneath his weight. A restless tramp is Mooween, who scatters his records over forty miles of hillside on a summer day, when his lazy mood happens to leave him for a season. Here, on the other side, are the bronze-green petals of a spruce cone, chips from a squirrel's workshop, scattered as if Meeko had brushed them hastily from his yellow apron when he rushed out to see Mooween as he passed. There, beyond, is a mink sign, plain ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... hired a horse and gig With promises to pay; And he pawned his horns for a spruce new wig, To redeem as he came away: And he whistled some tune, a waltz or a jig, And drove off at ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... it stands. It has lost its wild, damp, and shaggy look, the countless fallen and decaying trees are gone, and consequently that thick coat of moss which lived on them is gone too. The earth is comparatively bare and smooth and dry. The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea. The surface of the ground in the Maine woods is everywhere spongy and saturated with moisture. I noticed that the plants which cover the forest floor there are such as are commonly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... Jacob, we're well out of that," he said, looking up at the great cave that had been excavated by the landslip. "Quite a hole, eh? A great place to sleep in. Lots of spruce about, too. We'll just camp here for the night. I guess I'll have to let those coyotes go this trip. This beastly foot of mine won't let me dig much. Hello!" he continued, "that's a mighty queer rock. I'll just take a ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... clean sweep of. Adj. clean, cleanly; pure; immaculate; spotless, stainless, taintless; trig; without a stain, unstained, unspotted, unsoiled, unsullied, untainted, uninfected; sweet, sweet as a nut. neat, spruce, tidy, trim, gimp, clean as a new penny, like a cat in pattens; cleaned &c. v.; kempt[obs3]. abstergent[obs3], cathartic, cleansing, purifying. Adv. neatly &c. adj.; clean ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... wonderfully pleased with himself; and, since there was not a bit of chocolate on his trousers, he looked unusually spruce and handsome, too. Sara skipped along beside him delightedly; only, sometimes when she looked back, she wished she could stay with Avrillia while she was in such a lovely mood, and all those interesting ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... Pills specially recommended to purify the blood." His office consisted of a room about ten feet square, located in what was then known as the Sun building, an edifice ten by forty feet, situated at the corner of Spruce and Nassau streets, where the Tribune is now published. His "factory" was at his residence in Hudson street. He put up a large gilt sign over the Sun office, five or six feet wide by the length of ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... Balfour's trees have thriven remarkably well. He tried all sorts, convinced that something should be done, and that an ounce of experiment was worth a pound of theory. Sycamore, ash, elm, beech, birch, poplar, alder, larch, Scotch fir, spruce, silver fir, sea buckthorn, elder, and willow—he gave them all a chance, some as main plantations, some as shelter belts. All proved successful except the silver fir. Besides this, three hundred and fifty holdings have been ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the charming power that lives Within it makes the music that it gives. It dims! it brightens! it will shape itself. And see! a graceful dazzling little elf. He lives! he moves! spruce mannikin of fire, What more can we? what ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... smiled broadly. "Why, by Henry," he declared, "I ain't heard you talk that way afore since you shipped aboard this General Minot craft along of me. That's the way you used to poke fun at me aboard the old Wild Ranger when we was makin' port after a good v'yage. What's happened to spruce you up so? Doctor ain't told you any special good news about them legs of yours, has he, Cap'n? Limpin' Moses, ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... pine is not all that can be wished as a shade-producer, he is in all his varieties a beautiful object to look upon. First, I think, in point of magnificence towers the Himalayan spruce, rearing his gaunt shaft, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... ready to start from it for Ronda or Seville or Malaga, I do not know which, and with the usual company of freight-cars idling about, empty or laden with sheets of cork, as indifferent to them as if they were so much mere pine or spruce lumber. There is a sufficiently attractive hotel here for transients, and as an allurement to the marine and military leisure of Gibraltar, "The Picnic Restaurant," and "The Cabin Tea Room," where no doubt there is something to be had beside sandwiches and tea. Here also is the pier ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... 3/8-in. steel angles, and, when set, were blocked up on the sidewalks opposite each other in the two tunnels. A temporary platform was laid on the bottom chord angles of the ribs, on which the concrete was dumped, the same as on the form carriages. The lagging used was 3 by 3-in. dressed pine or spruce 16 ft. long, and was placed as the concreting of the arch proceeded above the 15 deg. line on the side-wall and above the sidewalk on the core-wall. After the arch had reached such a height that the concrete could not be passed over the lagging directly from the main platform, it was cast ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace and Francis Mason
... he had helped the others put up the fragrant spruce pine-tree which reached to the ceiling, helped to dress it midst jolly chatter and joyous confusion, helped to hide the innumerable presents for the morrow's findings; and on Christmas morning had as eagerly dumped the contents of his stocking as had Jack ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... human servants to minister to his comfort. Yet he was modest and unassuming, and appeared really to enjoy his life of hard work; varying his struggles with a kernel of hard corn on the ground, where his color shone out like a flower against the green, with a rest on a spruce-tree, where ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... branches brushed into the carriage as we passed along, and left with us that pleasant woodsy smell belonging to fresh leaves. One of the ladies, catching a bit of green from one of these intruding branches, said it was cedar, and another thought it spruce. 'Let me discourse on a theme I understand,' said the President. 'I know all about trees, by right of being a backwoodsman. I'll show you the difference between spruce, pine, and cedar, and this shred of green, which is neither one nor the other, but a kind of illegitimate cypress.' He then proceeded ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... along through the wood in great fear; and the wild beasts roared about her, but none did her any harm. In the evening she came to a little cottage, and went in there to rest herself, for her weary feet would carry her no further. Everything was spruce and neat in the cottage: on the table was spread a white cloth, and there were seven little plates with seven little loaves and seven little glasses with wine in them; and knives and forks laid in order, and by the wall stood seven little beds. Then, ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... problem or two in mechanics, without being the worse for it; but, somehow, I can't for the life of me hark back to the opinions that had such power over me at Oxford. I can't even recollect the half of them. It is as if that hemlock spruce had battered them out of ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have; they are too gloriously, terribly beautiful to be silent. I've stood in the whispering spruce groves and tried to sing contentment back into my heart, but I couldn't do it. This is the first real taste I've had in three years. ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... would grow up to be women and men, intelligent, patriotic and influential in their lives; and lest any who may read these words are ignorant—which is hardly possible—of the whereabouts of GOLDEN DAYS, we gladly give the address, James Elverson, Ninth and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia. ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... earlier in the spring; they were absent now, at the silvery falls, higher up the stream, where fish abounded at that season. The soft June breeze, laden with the delicate breath of wild-flowers and the pungent odors of spruce and pine, ruffled the duplicate sky in the water; the new leaves lisped pleasantly in the tree tops, and the birds were singing as if they had gone mad. No ruder sound or movement of life disturbed the primeval solitude. Master Pring would ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to come down, they made themselves comfortable under some immense spruce trees whose branches almost touched the ground. Here supper was had, and then Henry and Barringford, accompanied by White Buffalo; moved up to the top of a small hill which was close at hand, hoping to discover something from that ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... distressing vividness that I had seen that same kind of tree many and countless times in my sleep. So I was not surprised, still later on in my life, to recognize instantly, the first time I saw them, trees such as the spruce, the yew, the birch, and the laurel. I had seen them all before, and was seeing them even then, every night, in ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... through a couple of streets, we came to a humble but neat-looking dwelling house, with an apology for a garden in front. Tables and seats were arranged beneath some trees; "spruce beer" was advertised for sale, but there were indications that other kinds of refreshments could be obtained. The place wore a comfortable aspect. We nodded smilingly to each other, as much as to say, "This will do!" ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... of the Daer Nol home, which was only two minutes' walk from the church. They saw then what they had not observed before, that the path leading from the town hall to the house of Daer Nol was strewn with spruce twigs and that a spruce tree had been placed at either side of the gate. Then it was from there a body was to be taken. They wondered why nothing had been said about a death in a family of such prominence. Besides, there were no sheets put up at the windows, as there ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... hard wood, including oak, maple, hickory, birch, walnut and beech; and soft wood, including pine, fir, spruce, elm, chestnut, poplar and willow. Contrary to general opinion, the heat value per pound of soft wood is slightly greater than the same value per pound of hard wood. Table 41 gives the chemical composition and the heat values of the common woods. ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... first in humble quarters in Spruce street, and since then it has occupied rooms in Beekman, John and Reade streets. These down-town locations have served some valuable purposes. They were accessible to the teachers and workers in passing to and from the South, and in the shipment of goods to the South and to Africa—once a large ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... a long one. It was the 29th of July when they reached a point far down the lake, near the present site of Crown Point. They had paddled all night. They hid here all day. Champlain fell asleep on a heap of spruce boughs, and in his slumber dreamed that he had seen the Iroquois drowning in the lake, and that when he tried to rescue them he had been told by his Algonquin friends to leave them alone, as they were not worth the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... miles, containing inexhaustible quantities of timber. We noticed tall cedar and oaks of every description; one kind more interesting than the others, being a white oak from twenty to forty feet in the body. Pine and spruce, with superior white ash and walnut, were found, and the most gigantic cotton-woods, particularly on the Sonoita. * * * * "The mountains in the neighborhood are filled with minerals, and the precious metals are ...
— Memoir of the Proposed Territory of Arizona • Sylvester Mowry
... storm-beaten ledges like eagles' claws; while their lithe, cord-like branches bend round compliantly, offering but slight holds for winds, however violent. The other alpine conifers—the Needle Pine, Mountain Pine, Two-leaved Pine, and Hemlock Spruce—are never thinned out by this agent to any destructive extent, on account of their admirable toughness and the closeness of their growth. In general the same is true of the giants of the lower zones. The kingly Sugar Pine, towering aloft to a height of more than two ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... and leveled to the tree-girdled mesa. Young Pete stared. This was the most beautiful spot he had ever seen. Ringed round by a great forest of spruce, the Blue Mesa lay shimmering in the sunset like an emerald lake, beneath a cloudless sky tinged with crimson, gold, and amethyst. Across the mesa stood a cabin, the only dwelling in that silent expanse. And this was to ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... it did seem like a sudden transition back into the winter. The Christmas tree with its gay decorations and lighted candles was a beautiful sight, and the green-trimmed room with its spicy odours of spruce and pine ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... reflected there. He even claimed that he got a splinter in his hand, so doing! Upside down or wedged across a channel under water, trees were all the same to Hervey Willetts. He lived in trees. He knew nothing whatever about the different kinds of trees and he could not tell spruce from walnut. But he could hang by one leg from a rotten branch, the while playing a harmonica. He was for the boy scout movement, because he was for movement generally. As long as the scouts kept moving, he was with them. He had a lot of ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... shook him to and fro. And now was I minded to choke him outright, but, even then, spied a cavalier who spurred his horse against me. Hereupon I dashed the breathless Gregory aside and turned to meet my new assailant, a spruce young gallant he, from curling lovelock to Spanish boots. I remember cursing savagely as his whip caught me, then, or ever he could reach me again, I sprang in beneath the head of his rearing horse and seizing the rein close by the bridle began to drag and ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... drooped, and sez he, "A Norway spruce, a willer, a sycamore, and a pine. Dum it all, what do they want to put on such names as them onto trees that grow right in ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... here is simply an excavation, about three feet deep, twelve feet long, and sixteen feet wide. Spruce saplings about four feet long and four inches through are set upright side by side around the interior, supported by the beams. Two posts six feet long and one ridge piece support the arched roof, light saplings being used for rafters. An oblique ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... she and Harold disappeared as soon as breakfast was over, and only Eustace remained, spruce beyond all imagination, and giving himself childlike credit for not being with them; but when at church I can't say much for his behaviour. He stared unblushingly, whispered remarks and inquiries, could not find the ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pushed open her little gate, hung crookedly in a very compact and prim spruce hedge, she stopped in amazement and said, "Well, for ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Dogwood. 8 feet thick at the butt [A]; does Pine. not transplant well; best rais'd the Elm. from seeds—the lumbermen Chesnut. call it yellow poplar.) Linden. Sycamores. Aspen. Gum trees, both sweet and sour. Spruce. Beeches. Hornbeam. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... hard woods which may be added to the list. Sugar, particularly, is a good-working wood, but maple is more difficult. Spruce, on the other hand, is the strongest and toughest wood, considering its weight, which is but a little ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... it? Mr. Oldeschole at last declared, with some indignation in his tone, that he had been there for forty years and knew well that the office was very useful; but that he would not undertake to define its exact use. 'Thank you, thank you, Mr. Oldeschole—that will do, I think,' said the very spruce-looking new ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... have been found in pine trees in Southern Michigan at an elevation of forty feet. In all cases the nests are placed high in hemlocks or pines, which are the bird's favorite resorts. From all accounts the nests of this species are elegantly and compactly made, consisting of a densely woven mass of spruce twigs, soft vegetable down, rootlets, and fine shreds of bark. The lining is often intermixed with horse hairs and feathers. Four eggs of greenish-white or very pale bluish-green, speckled or spotted, have usually been found in ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... blinding storms of autumn snow, that cheerful winter frost and cold, that joy of sledging over the smooth ice, when the sharp-shod horse careers at full speed with the light sledge, or rushes down the steep pitches over the crackling snow through the green spruce wood—all these form a Nature of their own. These particular features belong in their fulness and combination to no other land. When in the midst of all this natural scenery, we find an honest manly race, not the race of the towns and cities, but of the dales and fells, ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... lay for many miles over a barren, rocky, undulating country, covered with var and spruce trees, with an undergrowth of raspberry, wild rhododendron, and alder. We passed a chain of lakes extending for sixteen miles, their length varying from one to three miles, and their shores covered with forests of gloomy pine. People are very ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... six munfs, an' don't reckon I'll be much use any more, nohow. Vina's tuk car' ob me more'n two year now. She's had a sight ob beaux, but she's allus tole 'em she couldn't leab her ole fader. Las' one was dat spruce yaller schoolmarster from Oberlin. Says I, 'Vina, why don't yer git married? 'Pears like yer'd feel less onsettled an' lonesome ef yer had an ole man.' Says she, 'I'se got one ole man: dat's 'nuff.' Says I, 'But don't yer nebber t'ink yer'd like to git married, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... called torrents, being precipitated as it were in one leap from the Lebanon to the Mediterranean. Olives, vines, and corn cover the maritime plain, while in ancient times the heights were clothed with impenetrable forests of oak, pine, larch, cypress, spruce, and cedar. The mountain range drops in altitude towards the centre of the country and becomes merely a line of low hills, connecting Gebel Ansarieh with the Lebanon proper; beyond the latter it continues without interruption, till at ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... gilded nuts and glass beads. They are hanging the last strings of those blue and red metallic beads, fastening on the last gilded and silvered walnuts on the trees out there at home in the North; they are lighting the blue and red tapers; the wax is beginning to run on to the beautiful spruce green branches; the children are waiting with beating hearts behind the door, to be told that the Christ-Child has been. And I, for what am I waiting? I don't know; all seems a dream; everything vague ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... the end of the Thanksgiving dinner, when, heralded by a slam in the wood-shed, a hoppytyskip in the hall, the dining-room door flung widely open on Carol's eyes twinkling like a whole skyful of stars through the shaggy, dark branches of a young spruce-tree. It made young Derry ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... such dainties, Lady Mary. In the forest, he feeds upon hickory-nuts, and butter-nuts, and acorns, and beech-mast, and the buds of the spruce, fir and pine kernels, and many other seeds and nuts and berries, that we could not get for him; he loves grain too, and Indian corn. He sleeps on green moss and leaves, and fine fibres of grass and roots; and drinks ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... the men the smoke was creepin' out between the lids of the hatch. We ripped that off and began diggin' up the cargo—crates of chairs, rolls of mattin', some spruce scantling—runnin' the nozzle of the hose down as far as we could get it. There were no water-tight compartments which we could have flooded in those days as there are now, or we could have smothered ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... would not be converted from smoking, if his wife resolutely demanded her right of moiety in the cigar-box. No Lady Mary, no loveliest Marquise, could make snuff-taking beauty otherwise than repugnant to this generation. Rustic females who habitually chew even pitch or spruce-gum are rendered thereby so repulsive that the fancy refuses to pursue the horror farther and imagine it tobacco; and all the charms of the veil and the fan can scarcely reconcile the most fumacious American ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... collected himself, and looked forward across the dimpled floor of his harbor, which in its quietude was like a lump of massy silver or rich ore, displaying here and there a spur of light, a surface sparkle. The serenity of his own soul was in part a reflection of this nightly calm, when the spruce on the bank could not be known from its fellow in the water by a man standing on his head. Moreover, to maintain this calm was the plain duty of the harbor master. For five years he had held that office by an annual vote of the town meeting. With his title went ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and till the middle of the next forenoon, concealing the landscape almost entirely; but we had hardly got out of the streets of Bangor before I began to be exhilarated by the sight of the wild fir and spruce tops, and those of other primitive evergreens, peering through the mist in the horizon. It was like the sight and odor of cake to a schoolboy. He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly. Near Bangor, the fence-posts, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... channel, with a strip of dark rocks fringing the land within, and another dark strip fringing the barren Eilean Chaisteil outside,—lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully diminutive, but evidently a little thing of high spirit, taut-masted, with a smart rake aft, and a spruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her triangular flag of blue in the sun. I pointed first to the manse, and then to the yacht. The minister shook ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... watching the grotesque antics of a squirrel negotiating the fresh tips of a young spruce. The squirrel sat up on his hind legs and chittered, whether at the Senator's brands or their heresy it would be hard to tell; ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... stated that Professor Lawson had prepared a new dye of great richness, in the laboratory of Queen's College, Canada, from an insect, a species of coccus, found the previous summer for the first time on a tree of the common black spruce (Abies nigra), in the neighbourhood of Kingston. Having been but recently observed, a sufficient quantity had not been obtained for a complete series of experiments as to its nature and uses; but the habits of the insect, as well ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... advantage, for the embellishment of the breakfast-table. There was fresh groundsel, too, for Miss Maylie's birds, with which Oliver, who had been studying the subject under the able tuition of the village clerk, would decorate the cages, in the most approved taste. When the birds were made all spruce and smart for the day, there was usually some little commission of charity to execute in the village; or, failing that, there was rare cricket-playing, sometimes, on the green; or, failing that, there was always something to do in the garden, or about the plants, ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... for our Masting Camp for at present we use Spruce Tea, which causes some murmuring." ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... house stretched a lawn, shaded-in from the carriage drive by a fringe of larch and spruce, and on this lawn, innocent of tennis-courts and similar abominations, were planted here and there single trees. It had been the fancy of the owner that not one of these on the lawn should be indigenous, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... the badly-fitting attic windows, and made the whole room look cloudy. The girls' faces, too, had altered with the months. Jasmine had lost a good deal of her vivacity, her expression was slightly fretful, and she no longer looked the spruce and sparkling little lass who had gone away from Rosebury in the summer. Primrose had lost the faint color which used to tinge her cheeks; they were now almost too white for beauty, but her eyes were still clear, calm, and sweet; her dress was still the essence of simplicity ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... was plenty of grass for our steeds. We contented ourselves with forming a lean-to, but did not light a fire lest it should betray our whereabouts. Having eaten a little more pemmican, we formed our beds of spruce-fir tops, and lay ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... their chairs to the table, and with loosened collars set about enjoying the good things. Or pretending to enjoy them. This was Mahony's case; for the day was no holiday for him, and his head ached from the sun. At tea-time Hempel arrived to pay a call, looking very spruce in a long black coat and white tie; and close on his heels followed old Mr. Ocock. The latter, having deposited his hat under his seat and tapped several pockets, produced a letter, which he unfolded and handed to Polly with a broad grin. It was from his daughter, and contained the news of ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... and a crackling roar this blazed up. In a moment it was a column of fire stretching skyward. The sight was terrible to behold. Then like a whirlwind the arms of fire reached out and enveloped another tree, and sparks flying with the wind lodged in a spruce nearby and converted it into a roaring furnace. And thus in the space of a minute a forest fire ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... everybody happy as sandboys or mudlarks. What a great day that was—Plancus being M. P. and I a boy in a provincial town—when the Blues and the Reds meant broken heads, and the flowing tide of beer, and spruce carriages with beribboned horses, and jocund waggonettes, and bands and banners, and "hoorays," and shuttered shops, and an outpour of citizens; a day festive, yet solemn, pregnant with mysterious dooms and destinies, fatal, ineluctable, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... small room he seemed even bigger than I remembered him. He wore an old Norfolk jacket, and he had not shaved for several days. When last I saw him he was spruce enough, but he looked ill at ease: now, untidy and ill-kempt, he looked perfectly at home. I did not know how he would take the remark I ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... long the track To follow down or struggle back. The sun has set on fair Naushon Long ere my western blaze is gone; The ocean disk is rolling dark In shadows round your swinging bark, While yet the yellow sunset fills The stream that scarfs my spruce-clad hills; The day-star wakes your island deer Long ere my barnyard chanticleer; Your mists are soaring in the blue While mine are sparks of ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... is usually no other source of warmth. A bitter skirmish of winds, carrying powdered snow dust, nipped round the gateways of the dormitories and Tait McKenzie's fine statue of Whitefield stood sharply outlined against a cold blue sky. I lunched at a varsity hash counter on Spruce Street and bought tobacco in a varsity drug store, where a New York tailor, over for the day, was cajoling students into buying his "snappy styles" in time for Christmas. There is no more interesting game than watching a lot of college men, trying to pick out those who may ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... song-sparrows, perched at a safe distance, poured forth floods of melody, the Peabody bird added his high weird note, while other wild birds occasionally chimed in. The path led up through forests of black spruce whose sighing branches whispered softly over our heads. Every one was in excellent humor and had a capital story or a bit of geological scientific or botanical wisdom. The wild-flowers were scarcer than on Cardigan but there was greater variety of ferns. Half way up, a tiny spring welled up ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... by the dying fire, 5 Watching the spruce boughs glow and pale, I heard outside a tumult dire, And the fierce roaring ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... out, and saw that it was a servant-maid of fifteen or sixteen, who was indeed extremely winsome and spruce. As soon however as the maid caught a glimpse of Chia Yuen, she speedily turned herself round and withdrew out of sight. But, as luck would have it, it happened that Pei Ming was coming along, and seeing the servant-maid in front of the door, he observed: "Welcome, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... situation exposed to the salt gales of the Atlantic, but Mr. Balfour's trees have thriven remarkably well. He tried all sorts, convinced that something should be done, and that an ounce of experiment was worth a pound of theory. Sycamore, ash, elm, beech, birch, poplar, alder, larch, Scotch fir, spruce, silver fir, sea buckthorn, elder, and willow—he gave them all a chance, some as main plantations, some as shelter belts. All proved successful except the silver fir. Besides this, three hundred and fifty holdings have been planted with shelter belts, and about six hundred and fifty more were ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... protest. The mountains, which had gradually been assuming shape and color, were now looming up in grand proportions, their rugged outlines clearly defined against the sky. Already the mountain breezes, fragrant with the breath of tamarack, spruce and pine, stole in on adventurous wings through the car windows; lifted locks, both golden and silvered, from heated brows, kissed a fretful infant into peaceful slumber, turned the pages of novels and flapped newspapers so persistently that their readers were compelled to abandon them, and brought ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... "The spruce young spark," says Sizer, "who thinks chiefly of his mustache and boots and shiny hat, of getting along nicely and easily during the day, and talking about the theatre, the opera, or a fast horse, ridiculing the faithful young fellow who came to learn the business and ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... cabin of poles and bark had been built by the men during his absence. In it were all the stores, as well as a quantity of spruce boughs and hemlock tips for bedding. The chill evening air was filled with a delicious fragrance of burning cedar, mingled with the pleasant odor of boiling coffee. Several white-fish nailed to oak planks were browning before a bed of glowing coals, while ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... shown in this volume is that of a characteristic reindeer team and sled. Another shows the home of the North Russian branch of the Eskimo family. The writer vividly recalls the sight of a semi-wild herd of reindeer feeding in the dense pine and spruce woods. They were digging down through the deep snow to get the succulent reindeer moss. We approached on our Russian ponies with our, to them, strange-looking dress. What a thrill it gave us to see them, as if at signal of some sentry, raise their heads in one concerted, ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... night rather than leave her; but the more reluctance she showed, the more determined was Perronel, and she could not but submit to her fate, only adding one more entreaty that she might take her jackdaw, which was now a spruce grey-headed bird. Perronel said it would be presumption in a waiting-woman, but Ambrose declared that at Chelsea there were all manner of beasts and birds, beloved by the children and by their father himself, and ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... up the hill toiled, and to the door of a sort of spruce-looking lanthorn of a house, without tree or shrub near it. But still it might be good to sleep in; and, nothing daunted by the maid's prophecies and ominous voice, we determined to try our fate. ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... in the two filbert orchards at Geneva. In the younger orchard which is exposed to the full sweep of the west wind not a catkin survived on any of the 66 varieties in that orchard. In the other older orchard which is protected on the west and north by buildings and spruce trees, sufficient catkins survived on three varieties to provide for proper pollination. In discussing the effects of winter injury on the different varieties it will be necessary to make a distinction between ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... one swimming circle glides Swift without stop: the old bashaws click time, As if on polish'd ice; in trance sublime The iman hoar with some spruce courtier slides. Nor rank nor age from capering refrain; Nor can the king his royal foot restrain! He too must reel amid the frolic row, Grasp the grand vizier by his beard of snow, And teach the aged man once more to bound amain!" WIELAND, Oberon ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... Rainbow People, to work for the people of Ha-arts, the earth. He divided this creation into six parts, and each had its home in a spring in the heart of a great mountain upon whose summit was a giant tree. One was in the spruce tree on the Mountain of the North; another in the pine tree on the Mountain of the West; another in the oak tree on the Mountain of the South; and another in the aspen tree on the Mountain of the East; the fifth was on the cedar tree on the Mountain ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... in the matter of adaptation among living organisms, there is a factor at work other than chemistry and physics—not independent of them, but making a purposive use of them. Cut off the central shoot that leads the young spruce tree upwards, and one of the shoots from the whirl of lateral branches below it slowly rises up and takes the place of the lost leader. Here is an action not prompted by the environment, but by the morphological ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... PEMBRY." Now as I stood beneath the finger-post, debating which road I should take, I was aware of the sound of wheels, and, glancing about, saw a carrier's cart approaching. The driver was a fine, tall, ruddy-faced fellow, very spruce as to his person, who held himself with shoulders. squared and bolt upright, and who shouted a cheery ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... hell you would," grunted Torrance. "It's worth fifty bucks in your hand if you do. Horses don't grow on spruce ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... They were full of excitement; for they thought that he had escaped to the enemy. They ranged the woods in search of him, and at length found him in a thicket near the town. He lay dead, on a bed of spruce boughs which he had made, his throat deeply gashed with a knife. He had died by his own hand, a victim of mortified pride. 'See,' writes Father Ragueneau, 'how much our Indians stand ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... rapids we had yet met, not excepting the ones we had portaged. The cliffs, about 2500 feet high, of red sandstone, were often almost perpendicular on both sides, or at least they impressed us so at the time. There was much vegetation, pine, spruce, willow-leaved cottonwood, aspens, alder, etc., which added to the beauty and picturesqueness of the wild scenery. Beaman stopped each day where possible and desirable to take photographs, and at these times the others investigated the surroundings and climbed up side ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... the steel trail of the railroad runs east and west, diminishing at either end to a shimmering blur of silver. South of the railroad these level immensities, rich in their season with ripe bunch-grass and grama-grass roll up to the barrier of the far blue hills of spruce and pine. The red, ragged shoulders of buttes blot the sky-line here and there; wind-worn and grotesque silhouettes of gigantic fortifications, castles and villages wrought by some volcanic Cyclops who grew tired of his labors, abandoning his unfinished task to the weird ravages ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... serenity of nature. Surely good courage will not flag here on the Atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the Fur Countries. There is enough in that sound to cheer one under any circumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair. Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that the Esquimaux sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the northern night, the hunter does not give ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... variety of trees, but only one kind, the Douglas spruce, is suitable for good lumber. The quaking aspen is the only deciduous tree that is abundant. Elk and deer browse about these trees and keep them trimmed at a ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... rheumatic sufferers. There are establishments in Germany where the Pine Cure is pursued by the above means, together with medicated baths. Pine cones were regarded of old by the Assyrians as sacred symbols, and were employed as such in the decoration of their temples. From the tops of the Norway Spruce fir a favourite invigorating drink is brewed which is known in the north as spruce beer. This has an excellent reputation for curing scurvy, chronic rheumatism, and cutaneous maladies. Laplanders make a bread from the inner ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... were launched and the wild flotilla glided on its way, now in the shadow of the heights, now on the broad expanse, now among the devious channels of the Narrows, beset with woody islets where the hot air was redolent of the pine, the spruce, and the cedar,— till they neared that tragic shore where, in the following century, New England rustics battled the soldiers of Dieskau, where Montcalm planted his batteries, where the red cross waved so long amid the smoke, and where, at length, the summer night was hideous with carnage, ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... sufficiently luxuriant vegetation to afford them food. The great American Mastodon, though not certainly known to have possessed a hairy covering, has been shown to have lived upon the shoots of Spruce and Firs, trees characteristic of temperate regions—as shown by the undigested food which has been found with its skeleton, occupying the place of the stomach. The Lions and Hyaenas, again, as shown by Professor Boyd Dawkins, do not indicate necessarily a warm climate. Wherever a sufficiency ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... looking very spruce in her new Safety Scout uniform, was dancing up and down before the mirrors while Bob's blouse was having the buttons set over ...
— Sure Pop and the Safety Scouts • Roy Rutherford Bailey
... by the weather, until their return. Among other things which lay strewed about here, were a spearshaft, eight feet in length, recently made and ochred; parts of old canoes, fragments of their skin-dresses, &c. For some distance around, the trunks of many of the birch, and of that species of spruce pine called here the Var (Pinus balsamifera) had been rinded; these people using the inner part of the bark of that kind of tree for food. Some of the cuts in the trees with the axe, were evidently made the preceding year. Besides these, we were ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... once lighted and steam raised; and before midnight the old Chin-yen—looking very spruce and fit, despite her age—and her three companion cruisers quietly got their anchors and proceeded to sea, while aboard the ships still in harbour the crews were busily engaged in making the preparations referred to in the general ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... masts, a gap opened and Tartarin could see the harbour mouth and the movement of ships. An English frigate leaving for Malta, spruce and scrubbed, with officers in yellow gloves, or a big Marseilles brig, casting off amid shouting and cursing, with, in the bows, a fat captain in an overcoat and a top hat, supervising the manoeuvre in broad provencal. There were ships outward ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... pillowed upon a pile of calico. A little further up the street and near the one tall-spired white church Mrs. Mears, the village gossip, may be sitting on the veranda of a small house almost hid by luxuriantly growing Norway spruce, and idly rocking while she chats with the widow Sloper, who lives there, and whose mission in life is to cut and fit the best "go to meetin'" gowns of female Sandgate. Both dearly love to talk over all that's going ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... apothecary's son, a regular shop-drudge," he raged inwardly, watching the youth of the Faubourg Saint-Germain pass under his eyes; graceful, spruce, fashionably dressed, with a certain uniformity of air, a sameness due to a fineness of contour, and a certain dignity of carriage and expression; though, at the same time, each one differed from the rest in ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... day and till the middle of the next forenoon, concealing the landscape almost entirely; but we had hardly got out of the streets of Bangor before I began to be exhilarated by the sight of the wild fir and spruce tops, and those of other primitive evergreens, peering through the mist in the horizon. It was like the sight and odor of cake to a schoolboy. He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly. Near Bangor, the fence-posts, on account of the frost's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... true word spoken from the chest," I sighed, just as Uncle Peter made his first cast and cleverly wound about eight feet of line around a spruce tree ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... The observatories were carried ashore, and placed upon an elevated rock on one side of the cove, close to the Resolution. A party of men, with an officer, was sent to cut wood, and to clear a place for the conveniency of watering. Others were employed to brew spruce-beer, as pine-trees abounded here. The forge was also set up, to make the iron-work wanting for the repairs of the fore-mast. For, besides one of the bibs being defective, the larboard trestle-tree and one of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... Things.—It is easy to make a small cache by bending down a young tree, tying your bundle to the top, and letting it spring up again. A spruce-tree gives excellent shelter to anything placed in its branches. (See also what is said on "Burying Letters," ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... is enough to give him inflammation of the lungs. If Bergenheim were to see him sweating and panting like this in this bleak wind, he would give me a sound blowing-up. Upon my word, it is becoming comical! There are no more young girls! I shall see her appear presently as spruce and conceited as if she had been playing the finest trick in the world. It will do for once; but if we sojourn in these quarters some time yet, she must be educated and taught to say, 'If you please' and 'Thanks.' Ah! ha! she has no idea what ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... would use their snow-shoes to shovel a wide, circular pit in the snow, clearing it away to the bare earth. In the centre of the pit, they would build their camp fire, and sleep around it on piles of spruce boughs, secure from the winter wind. The leaders, usually members of the nobility, fared on these expeditions as rudely as their men, and outdid them in courage and endurance. Some of the most noted chiefs of the wood-rangers were scions of ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... him. He passed the whole day in the same ignorance of the cheat, and it was not till the evening that he perceived it; for supping with Francis Payva, and other Portuguese, who were privy to the matter,—"It is perhaps to do honour to our table," said one amongst them, "that you are so spruce to-day, in your new habit." Then, casting his eyes upon his clothes, he was much surprised to find himself in so strange an equipage. At length, being made sensible of the prank which they had played him, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... made me think hard was the way that government man got results from the I.W.W. in the lumber country. You see, the government had to have an immense amount of timber for ships, an' spruce for aeroplanes. Had to have it quick. An' all the lumbermen an' loggers were I.W.W.—or most of them. Anyhow, all the strikin' lumbermen last summer belonged to the I.W.W. These fellows believed that under the capitalistic ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... elderly were in their prime, then, thirty years since, when yon royal George was still fighting the dragon. As for you, my pretty lass, with your saucy hat and golden tresses tumbled in your net, and you, my spruce young gentleman in your mandarin's cap (the young folks at the country-place where I am staying are so attired), your parents were unknown to each other, and wore short frocks and short jackets, at the date of this ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and there with dark evergreen-forests, and elsewhere by the lighter green of deciduous woods, lay on the starboard side, warm-looking and welcome to the eyes. This shore, as then seen, reminded me more than any other ever did of the Spanish coast on the approach to Gibraltar,—the spruce woods answering in hue to olive-groves, the other to the green of vines. Meanwhile, the palpitating sheen on the land, the star-sprinkled blueness of the sea, together with the softness of the delicious day, brought vividly to mind those days in the Aegean when not even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... Draget fine, Mead, Mattebru, and the Metheling. Red wine, the claret and the white, with Tent and Alicant, in whom I delight. Wine of Languedoc and of Orleans thereto: Single beer, and other that is double: Spruce beer, and the beer of Hamburgh: Malmsey, Tires, ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... they were smart fellows, clean-shaven and even spruce in their new blue coats and scarlet trousers. Now the war had put its dirt upon them and seemed to have aged them by fifteen years, leaving its ineffaceable imprint upon their faces. They had stubble beards ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... el-Kelb,* can scarcely even be called torrents, being precipitated as it were in one leap from the Lebanon to the Mediterranean. Olives, vines, and corn cover the maritime plain, while in ancient times the heights were clothed with impenetrable forests of oak, pine, larch, cypress, spruce, and cedar. The mountain range drops in altitude towards the centre of the country and becomes merely a line of low hills, connecting Gebel Ansarieh with the Lebanon proper; beyond the latter it continues ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... his appearance with great exactness. The boy is extremely handsome, give him his due; has dark hazel eyes, auburn hair, and very elegant proportions. His air and gait have nothing of the clown in them. Take away his jacket and trousers, and you have as spruce a fellow as ever came from dancing-school or college. He is the exact picture of his mother, and the most perfect contrast to the sturdy legs, squat figure, and broad, unthinking, sheepish face of the father that can be imagined. You must confess that his ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... east, where you might roll if you chose; in fact, you could hardly do otherwise. The first day of my hunt I started west. I climbed a hill devoted to pasture, passed through the bars, and faced my mountain. It presented a compact front of spruce-trees closely interlaced at the ground, and of course impassable. But a way opened in the midst, the path of a mountain brook, deserted now and dry. I sought an alpenstock. I abandoned all impedimenta. I started up ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... The characters and happenings are purely imaginary. He is the artist using his experiences and his fancy as his colors, and the minimum of experience and small observation suffice. His perception of character is marvelous. He pictures the colonel, his daughters, the spruce lieutenant, and the Irish deserter with such familiarity that the reader would think that he had spent most of his life in a garrison, and his ability to portray vividly life in the mines, where his actual experience was so very ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... of Somes's Pond: Not the little pond, by which the willow stands, Where laughing boys catch alewives in their hands In brown, bright shallows; but the one beyond. There, when the frost makes all the birches burn Yellow as cow-lilies, and the pale sky shines Like a polished shell between black spruce and pines, Some strange thing tracks us, ...
— Nets to Catch the Wind • Elinor Wylie
... salmon-trout and wild strawberries. The town contains about six hundred inhabitants, and has a pleasant seat along the bay. Its principal industry seems to be lumber, or deals, which mean three-inch plank, in which shape most of the pine and spruce exported from the Dominion find their way to England. Here they also put up salmon and lobsters for the American market—America meaning the United States. Two steamers touch here weekly, and there is a daily mail and telegraphic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... with tar, all kinds of threads, fish-line, threads rubbed with tarred lampblack, fine threads plaited together in strands, cotton soaked in boiling tar, lamp-wick, twine, tar and lampblack mixed with a proportion of lime, vulcanized fibre, celluloid, boxwood, cocoanut hair and shell, spruce, hickory, baywood, cedar and maple shavings, rosewood, punk, cork, bagging, flax, and a host of other things. He also extended his searches far into the realms of nature in the line of grasses, plants, canes, and similar products, and ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... air stirred the generous spruce and darkening pinewoods. The drooping, westering sun, already athwart the barren crown of the hill tops, left a false, velvety suggestion of twilight in the heart of the valley, while a depressing superheat enervated all life, except the profusion of vegetation which beautified ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... peculiarities of Fowler township. Bare, sterile, famished-looking, as far as horticultural and herbaceous crops are concerned, yet rich in pasture and abounding in herds—with vast rocks crested and plumed with rich growths of black balsam, maple, and spruce timber, and with huge boulders scattered carelessly over its surface and margining its streams, St. Lawrence County presents to-day features of savage grandeur as wild and imposing as it did ere the foot of a trapper ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... Salamander, Aneides hardii (Taylor), is a plethodontid of relict distribution in the spruce-fir vegetational formation from 8500 to 9600 feet elevation in Otero and Lincoln counties, New Mexico. The salamanders on which most of this report is based were collected three, four, and six miles northeast of Cloudcroft in the Sacramento Mountains. Additional ...
— Natural History of the Salamander, Aneides hardii • Richard F. Johnston
... included chiefly among the coniferous evergreens, embracing the Pine, the Fir, the Spruce, and the Cypress. Though many of the deciduous trees assume more or less of this outline, it is the normal and characteristic form of the Pines and their kindred species. It is a peculiarity of the pyramidal trees, with a few exceptions, to remain always disfigured, after the loss of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... sun there,"—a very roundabout way to accomplish a very simple end. As years passed on, trees sprang up and grew apace, and too often the churches became overhung and heavily shadowed by dense, sombre spruce, cedar, and fir trees. A New England parson was preaching in a neighboring church which was thus gloomily surrounded. He gave out as his text, "Why do the wicked live?" and as he peered in the dim light at his manuscript, he exclaimed abruptly, "I hope they will live long enough to cut down this ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... it followed the course which its owner seemed to intend that it should take. His hands hung down also along the back legs of the chair, till his fingers almost touched the ground, and altogether his appearance was pendent, drooping, and woebegone. Miss Spruce was seated in one corner of the room, with her hands folded in her lap before her, and Mrs Roper was standing on the rug with a look of severe virtue on her brow,—of virtue which, to judge by its appearance, was very severe. Nor was its severity intended to be exercised solely against Mrs ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... Mr. Farwell was spruce and brisk and businesslike; also he was young, a fact which he tried to conceal by a rather feeble beard, and much professional dignity of manner and expression. Occasionally, in the heat of conversation, he forgot the dignity; the beard he never forgot. Shown into the ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... me which travellers usually experience on their first arrival. My donkey, while dashing at full speed through a crowd of Smyrniotes in their Sunday dresses, slipped up in a little pool of black mud, and came down with a crash. I flew over his head and alighted firmly on my feet, but the spruce young Greeks, whose snowy fustanelles were terribly bespattered, came off much worse. The donkey shied back, levelled his ears and twisted his head on one side, awaiting a beating, but his bleeding legs ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... lamp hung from the ceiling and the little room exactly suited its mistress both were neat and clean, trim and spruce, simple and yet nice. Snowy transparent curtains enclosed the bed as a protection against the mosquitoes, a crucifix of delicate workmanship hung above the head of the couch, and the seats were covered with good cloth of various colors, fag-ends from the looms. Pretty ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fair land of Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world's commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the birthplace mentioned on his certificate be Nova Scotia. ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... expectantly towards the door as French entered. The Inspector, who was looking very spruce and well-brushed, wished them a general good-morning. His eyes rested last and longest upon Laura, who seemed, ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sand; the isle bearing W. by N. one mile distant. As soon as this was done, we hoisted out a boat, in which I went on ashore, accompanied by the botanists. We found the tall trees to be a kind of spruce pine, very proper for spars, of which we were in want. After making this discovery, I hastened on board in order to have more time after dinner, when I landed again with two boats, accompanied by several of the ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... him to a partly dry muskeg bottom. Beyond this was a thicker growth of timber, mostly spruce and cedar, from behind which came the rushing sound of water. A few moments more and he stood with the wide tumult of the Athabasca at his feet. He had chosen this spot for his little cabin because the river ran wild here among the rocks, and because pack-outfits going into the southward ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... hands, an' stanin' juist like's he'd on a wid crinoline. You never heard sic a roostin' an' roarin' an' hear-hearin' an' hurrain'! I had to shut my een for fear o' bein' knokit deaf a'thegither. Stumpie Mertin jumpit up as spruce as gin he had baith his legs, instead o' only ane, an' forgettin' whaur he was, he glowered a' roond the wa' an' says, "Whaur's the ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... and I know that they often said as much to Leonisa, in order to dispose her to receive me as her betrothed; but she had set her heart on Cornelio, the son of Ascanio Rotulo, whom you well know—a spruce young gallant, point-de-vice in his attire, with white hands, curly locks, mellifluous voice, amorous discourse—made up, in short, of amber and sugar-paste, garnished with plumes and brocade. She never cared to bestow a look on my less ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Captain Cook. Chart of the Southern Hernifphere, showing Captain Cook's tracks, and those of some of the most distinguished navigators. Port Praya, in the Island of St. Jago, one of the Cape de Verds. View of the Ice-Islands. New Zealand spruce. Family in Dusky-Bay, New Zealand. Sketch of Dusky Bay, New Zealand. Flax plant of New Zealand. Poi Bird of New Zealand. Tea Plant of New Zealand. Van Diemen's Land. Otoo King of Otaheite. Plant used at Otaheite to catch fish ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... signal, in the morning we prepared to follow them. First we sent up another smoke for half an hour, and watched for an answer; but nothing happened. Then we cached the camp stuff by rolling in the bedding, with the tarpaulins on the outside, what we couldn't carry, and stowing it under a red spruce. The branches came down clear to the ground, in a circle around, and when we had crawled in and had covered the bundle with other boughs and needles, it couldn't be seen unless you looked ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... to salute. From the door of the Red Bank the white disc of a straw hat flashed reply: spruce figure: passed. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... a fair in the town the day I left Kronstadt. The field where it is held is right opposite Hotel "No. 1," and the whole place was crowded with country-folks in quaint costumes—spruce, gaily-dressed people mixed up with Wallack cattle-drivers and other picturesque rascals, such as gipsies and Jews, and here and there a Turk, and, more ragged than all, a sprinkling of refugee Bulgarians. Though it was a scene of strange incongruities—a very ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... to such dainties, Lady Mary. In the forest, he feeds upon hickory-nuts, and butter-nuts, and acorns, and beech-mast, and the buds of the spruce, fir and pine kernels, and many other seeds and nuts and berries, that we could not get for him; he loves grain too, and Indian corn. He sleeps on green moss and leaves, and fine fibres of grass and roots; and drinks heaven's ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... back of the pasture. But no sooner had he fairly entered these thickets than he found his further progress barred by the steel-meshed fence. This was a bitter disappointment, for he had expected to go striding through miles of alder swamp and dark spruce woods, fleeing the hated world of men and bondage, before setting himself to get acquainted with his new followers. His high-strung temper was badly jarred. He drew off, shaking his vast antlers, and went shambling with spacious stride down along the barrier towards ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... the more crowded district again. She began to be a little perturbed, forgot her anger; at least it was dimmed. Coming to Spruce Street she saw the usual crowd of men hanging about the door of the Ardmore. They always stood there, clustered about on the steps, with their cigarettes and their half-burned cigars and their flashy clothes and their burnt-out eyes and their appraising ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... a good-looking man; spruce and dapper, and very tidy. He is somewhat below middle height, being about five feet four; but he makes up for the inches which he wants by the dignity with which he carries those which he has. It ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it...He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument." —Love's Labor's Lost. Act ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the glut; and the ends stood up like a porcupine's quills, at every conceivable angle. The obstructing logs in the throat of the fall bore the pressure rather lengthwise than across the fibre. These sticks were of yellow spruce, fifty feet long, and fully three feet through. Such logs, when green, will bear an enormous strain. From the way the exposed ends sprang we knew they were buckling like steel ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... the fort is one immense level swamp, thickly covered with willows, and dotted here and there with a few clumps of pine-trees. The only large timber in the vicinity grows on the banks of Hayes and Nelson Rivers, and consists chiefly of spruce fir. The swampy nature of the ground has rendered it necessary to raise the houses in the fort several feet in the air upon blocks of wood; and the squares are intersected by elevated wooden platforms, which form the only promenade the inhabitants have during the summer, as no one can ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... particularly of the evergreen class. Their branches brushed into the carriage as we passed along, and left with us that pleasant woodsy smell belonging to fresh leaves. One of the ladies, catching a bit of green from one of these intruding branches, said it was cedar, and another thought it spruce. 'Let me discourse on a theme I understand,' said the President. 'I know all about trees, by right of being a backwoodsman. I'll show you the difference between spruce, pine, and cedar, and this shred ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... had stood there in the edge of the bleak spruce forest, with the wind moaning dismally through the twisting trees—midnight of deep December—the Transcontinental would have looked like a thing of fire; dull fire, glowing with a smouldering warmth, but of strange ghostliness and out of place. It was a weird shadow, helpless and without ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... where Mr Waller lived was one of a row of semi-detached villas on the north side of the Common. The door was opened to them by their host himself. So far from looking battered and emitting last breaths, he appeared particularly spruce. He had just returned from Church, and was still wearing his gloves and tall hat. He squeaked with surprise when he saw who were standing on ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... Deary, deary me, is that what they call the fashion?" cried Mrs Asplin, holding the girl in outstretched arms, and turning her slowly round and round, to take in the details of her attire. "You look so spruce, child, that I hardly knew you; but there, it won't be long, I expect, before the true Peggy peeps out. Come in, darling. There's a new rug in the hail; don't trip over it! We have been saying we needed it for five years back, but it was ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... when we sat around a big camp-fire near our tents in the valley, and saw the full moon come up and look down upon us from behind Sentinel Rock, and heard the intermittent booming of Yosemite Falls sifting through the spruce trees that towered around us, and felt the tender, brooding spirit of the great valley, itself touched to lyric intensity by the grandeurs on every hand, steal in upon us, and possess our souls—surely that was a night none of us can ever forget. As Yosemite can ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... city newspapers are located in or around Printing House Square, immediately opposite and east of the City Hall. One of the greatest curiosities of this square is a huge engine, which runs a large number of presses. It is situated in Spruce street, between William and Nassau streets, and occupies the basement of the building in which it is located. There are two engines here—one of 150 horse power, which is used during the day, and a smaller one of 75 horse power, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... at Carlisle—The inhabitants of this city lately witnessed the sale of a wife by her husband, Joseph Thompson, who resides in a small village about three miles distant, and rents a farm of about forty-two or forty-four acres. She was a spruce, lively, buxom damsel, apparently not exceeding twenty-two years of age, and appeared to feel a pleasure at the exchange she was about to make. They had no children during their union, and that, with some family disputes, caused them ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... citizen, basking in the sunshine of his shop-door, and gathering in the flock which is so bountifully reared on his withered tribe of children. There strutted the spruce cavalier, with his upper-man furnished at the expense of his lower, and looking ridiculously imposing: and there—but sacred be their daughters, for the sake of one, who shed a lustre over her squalid sisterhood, sufficiently brilliant ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... sheltered bay, into which flowed a little creek of pure, sparkling water, overshadowed by great, low-branching cotton-woods and tall, feathery silver spruce trees. ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... still; below them the valley had suddenly brimmed with sunshine that flickered and twinkled on the birch leaves or shimmered on sombre stretches of pine and spruce. Close at hand, pennyroyal grew thick in the shadow of the wall; and just beyond, mullen candles cast slender bars of shade across the grass. The sunken graves and the lines of iron markers lay ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... by fires. A snug harbour having been found, the ship was warped into it, and places forthwith cleared in which the observatories, forge, and the tents were set up. By the suggestion of Captain Cook, wholesome beer was brewed from the leaves of a tree resembling the American black spruce; indeed, he at all times attended to the most minute points calculated to maintain the health ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... way and plucked a bright-red bud, and, bringing it to him, she began to fasten it on the lapel of his coat. "You are getting entirely too slouchy," she mumbled, a pin in her mouth. "You never used to wear such dowdy clothes. You've got to spruce ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... little stream with the ice-cold water is the Spruce Creek you've got marked on your map, of course, Jack?" suggested Toby. "Now how far away would you say Paradise River lies from ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... the light would be something; to go like this, to carry with her only the memory of a dark looming house without cheer was unthinkable. The gate was never locked. If she but went into the garden and round by the spruce tree to the back of the house, it ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... moose kept just ahead of us. We knew he was old because of his size and his being alone. Two or three times we passed other bulls with two or three cows and their calves of that season yarding among the young spruce, but the old bull kept on steadily down the mountain. His years had made him weather-wise. The third day the wind shifted the snow, and we saw him on the round crown of a hill ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... their operations immediately, to find the rate of the time-keeper, and to make other observations. The remainder of the empty water-casks were also sent on shore, with the cooper to trim, and a sufficient number of sailors to fill them. Two men were appointed to brew spruce beer; and the carpenter and his crew were ordered to cut wood. A boat, with a party of men, under the direction of one of the mates, was sent to collect grass for our cattle; and the people that remained on board ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... had lost a fraction of his belligerence, but none of his arrogance and natty appearance. Homer wondered vaguely how the other managed to remain so spruce in the ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... is sometimes resorted to is to place the articles in the top of an evergreen tree, such as the pine, hemlock, or spruce. The thick boughs are so arranged around the packages that they can not be seen from beneath, and they are tied to a limb to prevent them from being blown out by the wind. This will only answer for such articles as will not become ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... calculations. I have read over a Greek play, and made out a problem or two in mechanics, without being the worse for it; but, somehow, I can't for the life of me hark back to the opinions that had such power over me at Oxford. I can't even recollect the half of them. It is as if that hemlock spruce had battered them out ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her search. "Here's yer grandpa's watch-fob, but I'm skeered fer you to wear it, you might lose it. It's a family remnant—been handed down two generations. What about this here red comforter? It would sorter spruce you up, an' keep you warm, besides; you know you 've had a cold fer a week, an' yer pipes is all stopped up." So it was decided, and Billy ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... side of the wooden, frame by which the hopper is supported and it may be made of one inch pine or spruce. ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the gun, so he had better come down and put it away, which he did. I don't know whether it was my saying "Germans" to him that explained it, but his sleepiness seemed suddenly to have disappeared, so he asked for the chance to wash and shave; and half an hour later he came down all slicked up and spruce, with a very visible intention of paying court to the lady of the house. Irish, you see,—white hairs no obstacle. I could not help laughing. "Hoity-toity," I said to myself, "I am getting all kinds ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... cautiously to one side. The view through the hole narrowed, as if it faced the trail squarely. He edged around the old birch to get behind it, and from that side there was no hole, just the same old Alaskan scenery, birch and rose bushes and spruce. From the front, though, it ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... myself going and just did get hear. You get supplies horses at Snowy Gulch go up Poor Man Creek through Spruce Pass over to Yuga River. Go down Yuga River past first rapids along still place to first creek you'll know it cause there's an old cabin just below and my canoe landing. Half mile up, in creek bed, is the pocket and new cabin. And don't tell no one in Snowy ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... a couple of streets, we came to a humble but neat-looking dwelling house, with an apology for a garden in front. Tables and seats were arranged beneath some trees; "spruce beer" was advertised for sale, but there were indications that other kinds of refreshments could be obtained. The place wore a comfortable aspect. We nodded smilingly to each other, as much as to say, "This will do!" entered the gateway, which ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... turned away with cynicism from the overladen table, with its shoulder of stewed wild boar in the centre; with its chocolate, coffee, tea, spruce-beer, cassava-cakes, pigeon-pies, tongues, round of beef, barbecued hog, fried conchs, black crab pepper-pod, mountain mullet, and acid fruits. It was so unlike what his past had known, so "damnable luxurious!" ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... various trees, in groups or single specimens, which most invite our notice, would interfere with the main object of our visit. We have come for a special purpose, and we can only allude to a very few of the species to which our attention may be supposed to be directed. A white spruce, in rich luxuriance, measuring, as the branches trail upon the sward, upwards of sixty feet in circumference; the Himalayan white pine, with its deep fringe-like foliage, twenty-five feet in height; the Cephalonian fir, with leaves as pungent as an ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... resounded in the vaulted aisle. The cruse lamps hanging from the high rafters shed their dim light upon the bare stone walls, where branches of red-berried holly were entwined with tufts of larch and spruce and sprays of mistletoe. The flickering light of many tapers shone upon the embroidered vestments of the abbot ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... infant wanderings still lives unfaded, or with fresher dyes. A new sense comes upon me, as in a dream; a richer perfume, brighter colours start out; my eyes dazzle; my heart heaves with its new load of bliss, and I am a child again. My sensations are all glossy, spruce, voluptuous, and fine: they wear a candied coat, and are in holiday trim. I see the beds of larkspur with purple eyes; tall hollyhocks, red or yellow; the broad sunflowers, caked in gold, with bees buzzing round them; wildernesses of pinks, and ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... think forms of government and names can make a country great. We started with astonishment on the chairman saying he had pleasure in introducing Mr Snellgrove as the next speaker. It was he sure enough, older but still spruce, and resplendent in full evening dress. He did not touch on currency, but confined himself to advocating a protective tariff so high that it would shut out foreign goods. That would enable manufacturers ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... are covered with tall cottonwood timber, and the last with willows only. The river has become more rapid, the country much the same as yesterday, except that there is rather more rocks on the face of the hills, and some small spruce pine appears among the pitch. The wild roses are very abundant and now in bloom; they differ from those of the United States only in having the leaves and the bush itself of a somewhat smaller size. We find the musquitoes troublesome, notwithstanding the coolness of the morning. The ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... less. Howard wants I should save every penny, so's at least one of the younger children can have more of an education than James an' Sally an' Austin an' Ruth. I don't look at it that way—seems to me it ain't fair to give one child more than another. I want to spruce up this place a little, an' lay by to raise the mortgage ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... lass is hard-working and spruce, and keeps everything round herself ... what d'you call it. And in our poverty, you know, it's a pair of hands, I mean; and the wedding needn't cost much. But the chief thing's the offence, the offence to the lass, and she's a what d'you ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... it is evidently very great. Large quantities of wood pipe have been removed from trenches in Boston, New York City. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and elsewhere, usually in perfectly sound condition. It was commonly made of logs of spruce, yellow pine, or oak, from 12 to 18 ft. long, 12 to 24 in. in diameter, and with a bore from 3 to 6 in. in diameter. Some 6-in. pipe taken up in Philadelphia had an external diameter of 30 in. The ends were usually bound with wrought-iron collars, ...
— The Water Supply of the El Paso and Southwestern Railway from Carrizozo to Santa Rosa, N. Mex. • J. L. Campbell
... well disdain With the peasant a glass of his wine to drain But, soft—to the left o' the fire I see Three riflemen, who from the Tyrol should be Emmerick, come, boy, to them will we. Birds of this feather 'tis luck to find, Whose trim's so spruce, and their purse ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... was the happy time When all New England sparks, Drest in their best, go out to court, As spruce and ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... competition, By virtue of some sly petition: Yet mum for that; hope still the best, Nor let such cares disturb thy rest. Methinks I hear thee loud as trumpet, As bagpipe shrill or oyster-strumpet; Methinks I see thee, spruce and fine, With coat embroider'd richly shine, And dazzle all the idol faces, As through the hall thy worship paces; (Though this I speak but at a venture, Supposing thou hast tick with Hunter,) Methinks I see a blackguard rout Attend thy coach, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... of pretty things which threaten to make the tapers turn bottom upward! Part and parcel of all this was I, Christopher, most reckless of rheumatism, most careless of dignity, the round, bald top of my head to be seen emerging everywhere from the thick boughs of the spruce, now devising an airy settlement for some gossamer-robed doll, now adjusting far back on a stiff branch Tom's new little skates, now balancing bags of sugar-plums and candy, and now combating desperately with some contumacious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... bell-rope. The old people of the village came stooping along the street. Children with bright faces tripped merrily beside their parents or mimicked a graver gait in the conscious dignity of their Sunday clothes. Spruce bachelors looked sidelong at the pretty maidens, and fancied that the Sabbath sunshine made them prettier than on week-days. When the throng had mostly streamed into the porch, the sexton began to toll the bell, keeping his eye on the Reverend Mr. Hooper's door. The first glimpse of the clergyman's ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... work by Mr. Hough, entitled, "The Complete Boy Camper," of which, as I have remarked before, I already had a copy by me, there was a chapter describing how a balmy couch, far superior to any ordinary bed, might be constructed of the boughs of the spruce, the hemlock, the cedar, or other evergreen growths indigenous to our latitude; and also a chapter describing methods of cooking without pots or pans over a wood fire. The author went so far as to say that ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... when he can see for himself the great value it will be in his family, and he will thank us in his heart for calling his attention to it. Address James Elverson, publisher, GOLDEN DAYS, corner Ninth and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, Penna. ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... blush,—he never blushed,—but he looked "voolish" enough to warrant the suspicion that his errand was a tender one, and he had no other reason to give for his spruce appearance ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... wine Orgeat Cherry shrub Currant wine To make cherry brandy Rose brandy Peach cordial Raspberry cordial Raspberry vinegar Mint cordial Hydromel, or mead To make a substitute for arrack Lemon cordial Ginger beer Spruce beer Molasses beer To keep lemon juice Sugar vinegar Honey vinegar Syrup of vinegar Aromatic vinegar Vinegar of the four thieves Lavender water Hungarian water To prepare cosmetic soap for washing the hands Cologne water ...
— The Virginia Housewife • Mary Randolph
... all was the Christmas Tree. How big it was! a large stout Spruce in the upper part of the hall. It bore a gift for every child in the town. Two little girls had the whooping cough, and could not come out; but there were two playthings for them also, given to their brothers to be taken home. ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... find other substances to replace wood as far as is possible, so as to keep the forests from being used up, we are requiring more and more for the manufacture of paper. The spruce forests are fast disappearing in pulp mills, from which the blocks of wood emerge as sheets of paper. Perhaps after a time we shall find something to take the place of wood in the ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... highlands. Then old Peboean[35]—the winter— Laughed along the stormy waters, Danced upon the windy headlands, On the storm his white hair streaming, And his steaming breath, ascending, On the pine-tops and the cedars Fell in frosty mists of silver, Sprinkling spruce and fir with silver, Sprinkling ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... of course, if it is his wish, let him! He'll have to live with her, not me. But she's certainly uncommon spruce. How's one to take her into one's hut? Why, she'll not let her mother-in-law so much as pat ...
— Fruits of Culture • Leo Tolstoy
... was to be found at Glyndewi, Mr Plympton left his friend at B——, where the salmon was unexceptionable, and had completed the most arduous day's walk in his journal, nearly thirteen miles, in a state of dust and heat far from agreeable to a stoutish gentleman of forty, who usually looked as spruce as if he came out of a band-box. Hanmer and he seemed really glad to see each other. On those "oxless" shores, where, as Byron ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... dry stick checked her. The next instant she picked up his rifle, seized his arm, and fairly dragged him into a spruce thicket. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... gallant and spruce company (for every man had donned his best, and dressed himself with the utmost care) came Caron La Boulaye. He walked alone, for although their comrade in death, he was their comrade in nothing else. Their heads might lie together in the sawdust of Sanson's basket, but while they lived, ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... more. . . . Oh, at last! At last! They rushed together, they stopped aghast. They looked at each other with blank dismay, They simply hadn't a word to say. He thought with a shiver: "Can this be she?" She thought with a shudder: "This can't be he?" This simpering dandy, so sleek and spruce; This languorous lily in garments loose; They sought to brace from the awful shock: Taking a seat, they tried to talk. She spoke of Bergson and Pater's prose, He prattled of dances and ragtime shows; She purred of pictures, Matisse, Cezanne, His tastes to the girls of Kirchner ran; She raved ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... had no sooner been converted to the vernacular, and disappeared, than another stranger entered the room. He had evidently been lurking in the passage: it was a man of smallish stature, singularly gaunt, angular, and haggard, but dressed in a spruce suit of black, tight, new, and glossy. In short, he looked like Romeo's apothecary gone to Stultz with the money. He fluttered in with pale cheek and apprehensive body, saying hurriedly, "Now, my dear sir, be calm: pray be calm. I have come down all the way from London to see ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... his face outlined between the close-growing trunks of two spruce trees, were the ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... event of the vessel being searched by the Spanish authorities, there should be nothing in the nature of concealed weapons on board to afford an excuse for the making of trouble. Thus, by the end of the afternoon watch the yacht was again spruce and clean as a new pin, and made a very brave show with her brand-new, silver-bright guns grinning threateningly out over the rail, and the two Maxims all ready for action on the top of the deck-house. Her appearance said, as plainly as words: "Touch me ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... along the edge of the road, with her hair flying, and her hat hanging by its ribbons. She chased a rabbit, and squirrels, and picked certain green branches, and managed to get her hands and the front of her dress all "stuck up" with spruce gum in trying to get a piece ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... many thousand lakes of various sizes, some of which are connected by fine water courses, while others are entirely isolated. The wooded country is undulating, the elevated portions being covered chiefly with pine, fir, spruce, and other coniferous trees, and the lowest depressions being occupied by lakes, ponds, or marshes, around which occur the tamarack, willow, and other trees which thrive in moist ground, while the regions between these extremes are covered ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... that Jabe's interest in the craft was limited pretty strictly to his activities as hunter, trapper and lumberman. Just now he was all lumberman. He was acting as what is called a "timber-cruiser," roaming the remoter and less-known regions of the wilderness to locate the best growths of spruce and pine for the winter's lumbering operations, and for the present his keen faculties were set on the noting of tree growths, and water-courses, and the lay of the land for the getting out of a winter's cutting. On this particular cruise the Boy—who, for all the disparity in their years and ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... toned voice, her never seeming to hurry and yet going about any matter as if it was the first thing to be done; her little orderly methods. She kept her mother's room neat, she put the books back in their places; there was a cluster of autumn leaves in a vase, or a sprig of spruce or cedar that for a long while would put forth new leaves. She was very glad now that she had taken so much pains. Was she rather unpolished when they had first come from Laconia. But her circle there was ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... we steam out across the main fjord, and early in the afternoon call at several small places on the northern shore—Bakke, Vikingnaes, Nordheimsund—each with its spruce hotel, enticing the traveller to loiter and explore the country in the neighbourhood. A little later we enter the Fiksensund, a narrow branch fjord, and a wonder of wonders. For a distance of seven miles it wends its way amongst the mountains. In ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... has got to be filled by someone, and the only person who can fill it with anything permanent is a dentist. You wonder if you might not be able to patch it up yourself for the time being,—a year or so—perhaps with a little spruce-gum and a coating of new-skin. It is fairly far back, and wouldn't have to be ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... for directly in front of them was a wigwam, so cunningly built in behind a growth of small spruce trees that unless one knew of its whereabouts it might be easily passed by. The Indian girl laughed at Anne's exclamation, and nodded at her in a ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... to all as to how he got his commission. He was tall and spruce, most scrupulous in the fit of his uniform, but absolutely too lazy to learn his job. He was something of a joke as an officer, yet his men got to like him for his good humor and absolute indifference to the censure of his superiors. In instructing ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... the Squire, calling up a spruce embodiment of blue cloth, brass buttons, and pink cravat,—"I say! here's Cilly off the hooks to get hold of the new teacher. Whereabouts do you ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... drunk, then, and cutting up, Prue?" said a spruce quadroon chambermaid, dangling, as she spoke, a ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Inside another contingent had arranged these contributions, festooned the running-track with red and green bunting, risked their lives to fasten Japanese lanterns to the cross-beams, and disguised the apparatus against the walls with great branches of spruce and cedar, which still other merry, wind-blown damsels, driving a long-suffering horse, had deposited at intervals near the back door. By five o'clock it was finished and everybody, having assured everybody else that the gym never ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, As it were too peregrinate, as I may ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... inhabitants woodsmen and rustics; that is, a selvaggia and its inhabitants salvages." What Thoreau loved, like all men of healthy minds, was the occasional experience of untamed wildness. "I love to see occasionally," he adds, "a man from whom the usnea (lichen) hangs as gracefully as from a spruce." ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Where day never shuts his eye, Up in the broad fields of the sky. There I suck the liquid air, All amidst the gardens fair Of Hesperus, and his daughters three That sing about the golden tree. Along the crisped shades and bowers Revels the spruce and jocund Spring; The Graces and the rosy-bosomed Hours Thither all their bounties bring. There eternal Summer dwells; And west winds with musky wing About the cedarn alleys fling Nard and cassia's balmy smells. Iris there with humid bow Waters the odorous banks, that blow Flowers of ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... back into his pockets and came closer to the fire. Its warmth felt most comfortable, for the Spring night was growing chill. He looked about him at the motley company, some half-spruce in clothing that suggested a Kuppenmarx label and a not too far association with a tailor's goose, others in rags, all but one unshaven and all more or less dirty—for the open road is close to Nature, ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... side. Then yonder is spruce. And our gardens! If you women-folks love posies as most females does, you'd ought to be here a spell later. Roses ain't out yet but ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... ridges in the forest, where there was no undergrowth and they could walk straight ahead, side by side, through the interminable colonnade of beeches and birches which upheld the green, gold-flecked roof,—the dark tangled spruce thicket, where one must stoop under the interlacing lower branches, dead and brittle, and creep over the soft brown carpet of fallen needles, dry and slippery, in order to reach a little open glade, moist with springs, where the red wood-lily and the ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... toward the Chinaman as we ate it; and the more so that as soon as he saw us well started, in place of hanging about to be asked to join, he whetted his knife again, trotted off, and began to collect pine-needles, and cut down boughs of fir and spruce to pack together under the biggest tree ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... how Jim loved her, all the details of that night became vivid. She sat alone under the spruce-trees near the cabin. The shadows thickened, and then lightened under a rising moon. She heard the low hum of insects, a distant laugh of some woman of the village, and the murmur of the brook. Jim was later than usual. ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... said the Senior Tutor of St. Boniface: and two scholars came in. (He knew they were scholars, because this was his hour for seeing scholars.) One was a heavy-looking young man in a frock coat and tall hat. The other was a spruce youth, who looked as if nature had intended him for an attorney's ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... across the beautiful river and away into the country, along red clay roads which were often lined with spruce, and always with grass cropped down to a lawnlike shortness by the sheep and kept bright green ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... elsewhere—he scorned to seek repose before the milkman started on his rounds, and during the greater portion of the year never thought of rising until the sun had set, when he would emerge from his Bond Street rooms as spruce and gay as a lark." He had been engaged to a daughter of Douglas Jerrold (whose other daughter, it will be remembered, was the wife of Henry Mayhew), but on the ground that "one Mayhew is enough in the family," Jerrold would not ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... good, you foreign faring; You money magic to far lands has whirled; Can you forget those days of vast daring, There with your soul on the Top o' the World? Nights when no peril could keep you awake on Spruce boughs you spread for your couch in the snow; Taste all your feasts like the beans and the bacon Fried at the camp-fire ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... increases in depth and thickness eastward. No Crag (Number 2) known east of Cromer Jetty. 3 prime. Fluvio-marine series. At Cromer and eastward, with abundant lignite beds and mammalian remains, and with cones of the Scotch and spruce firs and wood. At Runton, north-west of Cromer, expanding into a thick freshwater deposit, with overlying marine strata, elsewhere consisting of alternating sands and clays, tranquilly deposited, some with marine, others with freshwater shells. 4. Boulder clay of glacial period, with far ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... know, surely, the Hemlock spruce of America; which, while growing by itself in open ground, is the most wilful and fantastic, as well as the most graceful, of all the firs; imitating the shape, not of its kindred, but of an enormous ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... had been raging among these beeches, spruce and oaks. Great tangles of their cut boughs were cluttering the ground, as though a band of gigantic woodcutters had just passed by. The trunks had been severed a little distance from the ground with a clean and glistening ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... wound forbidding it. Goguelat replied that he was more ingenious than the other thought for, and had propped up the weapon in the ground and fallen on the point—'just like Nebuchadnezzar,' he added, winking to the assistants. The doctor, who was a little, spruce, ruddy man of an impatient temper, pished and pshawed and swore over his patient. 'Nothing to be made of him!' he cried. 'A perfect heathen. If we could only find the weapon!' But the weapon had ceased to exist. A little resined twine was perhaps blowing ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at last declared, with some indignation in his tone, that he had been there for forty years and knew well that the office was very useful; but that he would not undertake to define its exact use. 'Thank you, thank you, Mr. Oldeschole—that will do, I think,' said the very spruce-looking new gentleman out ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... touching at some point,—an arrangement doubtless prompted by the deep snows and severe cold of this latitude. The typical Canadian dwelling-house is also presently met with on entering the Dominion,—a low, modest structure of hewn spruce logs, with a steep roof (containing two or more dormer windows) that ends in a smart curve, a hint taken from the Chinese pagoda. Even in the more costly brick or stone houses in the towns and vicinity this style is adhered to. It is so universal that one wonders if the reason of ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... beautiful lake, its ice cold water well stocked with the finny tribe of speckled mountain trout, the delight of the angler. The park was inclosed by mountains of great height and grandeur, their rocky slopes were dotted with spruce, pine, and cottonwood, and capped with ages of crystal snow, presenting a sight more pleasing to the eye than the Falls of Niagara, and a perfect haven for ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... Felix constructed a light shed of fir poles roofed with spruce-fir branches over the log, so that he might work sheltered from the bitter winds of the early spring. As the warmth increased he had taken the shed down, and now as the sun rose higher was glad of the shade of an ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. Here reigned ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... was the aggressor; she was irresistibly drawn, she would not be repulsed. A stenographer in the Wessex National Bank, she boarded with a Welsh family in Spruce Street; matter-of-fact, plodding, commonplace, resembling—as Janet thought—a horse, possessing, indeed many of the noble qualities of that animal, she might have been thought the last person in the world to discern and appreciate ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was too late for the life of day, too early for the nocturnal roamings and voices of the creatures of the night. Like the basin of a great amphitheater the frozen lake lay revealed in the light of the moon and a billion stars. Beyond it rose the spruce forest, black and forbidding. Along its nearer edges stood hushed walls of tamarack, bowed in the smothering clutch of snow and ice, ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... declared. So I did, through the spruce woods and over the field as fast as my feet could carry me, thanking my stars that there was a Max to go to in ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... at me now and again over his spectacles suspiciously, and would, I dare say, have joined hands with my enemy the police officer, as to the probabilities affecting my moral character. Everything else was done by Mr. Prime, who I was pleased to notice was as spruce as ever in his personal appearance. His gloves, his boots, his cravats, and Ike, the beautifully ugly Ike, were ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... have been childless. Think of getting up in the morning and picking out your shoes and stockings from among seventeen pairs of them. Imagine yourself a child, gentle reader, in a family where you would be called upon, every morning, to select your own cud of spruce gum from a collection of seventeen similar cuds stuck on a window sill. And yet B. Franklin never murmured or repined. He desired to go to sea, and to avoid this he was apprenticed to his brother James, who ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... branches just beginning to spray out in the first green of spring. Farther back, where the higher lands arose from the swamp, could be discerned the graceful frond of white pines and hemlock, and the sturdy tops of Norways and spruce. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... framework of the bottom consists of three strips of wood, either hemlock, spruce, or pine (the first mentioned being the most durable), a little longer than the width of the pot, about 2-3/4 inches wide and 1 inch thick. In the ends of each of the outer strips a hole is bored to receive the ends of a ...
— The Lobster Fishery of Maine - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Vol. 19, Pages 241-265, 1899 • John N. Cobb
... American or German oak, those of the lower deck and half-deck of pitch-pine and Norwegian fir. All the deck planks are of Norwegian fir, 4 inches in the main-deck and 3 inches elsewhere. The beams are fastened to the ship's sides by knees of Norwegian spruce, of which about 450 were used. Wooden knees were, as a rule, preferred to iron ones, as they are more elastic. A good many iron knees were used, however, where wood was less suitable. In the boiler and engine room the beams of the lower deck had ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... David is cast in a different mould. He is essentially unconventional. And yet, though his mother sighs now and then over his repugnance to young ladies, and tries to badger him into looking a little more spruce, I can perceive that she is thoroughly proud of his originality and independence, and believes that he is even more likely than his conventional brother to distinguish himself and immortalize the family name. Josephine used to say, ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... to the river, these woods, and overhung it—each bank a mute monotonous screen of foliage, unbroken by glade or clearing; pine and spruce and hemlock, maple and alder; piled plumes of green, motionless, brooding, through which no sunrays broke, though here and there a silver birch drew a shaft of light upon their sombre background. Here were no English ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fair in the town the day I left Kronstadt. The field where it is held is right opposite Hotel "No. 1," and the whole place was crowded with country-folks in quaint costumes—spruce, gaily-dressed people mixed up with Wallack cattle-drivers and other picturesque rascals, such as gipsies and Jews, and here and there a Turk, and, more ragged than all, a sprinkling of refugee Bulgarians. Though it was a scene of strange incongruities—a very jumble of races—yet it was by no ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... few moments the door was thrown open, and a spruce, dapper looking gentleman, clothed in sombre colored garments, irreproachable linen, and carrying a small merino bag in his hand, ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... had scraped each wall, Pulled out the stately pews, and smartened all, "It will be well," declared the spruce ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... than the captain's prediction. Hurrying into my clothes, I went on deck, from which, through the slight haze that hung over the water, I could discern the lights of a ship, and beyond, dimly visible, the old familiar line of Post buildings showing against the dark spruce-covered hills behind, where the great ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... neck so narrow two pike could scarce pass each other on it, there we'd sot Warry 't th' end o' th' neck. Jest 'fore we got t' him we heard a shot, 'n' I remarked t' Erne, 'Guess th' old man thinks he's got a bite.' 'N' then we broke through a thick bunch o' spruce; 'n' we both nigh fell dead to see old Warry sawin' at th' throat o' a doe, tryin' to 'pear 's natural 's if he'd never done nothin' else but kill 'n' dress deer. Mebbe Erne 'n' me wan't pleased none th' old ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... is not all that can be wished as a shade-producer, he is in all his varieties a beautiful object to look upon. First, I think, in point of magnificence towers the Himalayan spruce, rearing ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... Gould set up as a leather merchant in New York City; the New York directory for that year contains this entry: "Jay Gould, leather merchant, 39 Spruce street; house Newark." For several years after this his name did ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... study and not to play? You are writing home too much about girls and society and dances and theatres, and nothing about work. Remember, I am footing the bills. When I was your age I got up at 4 in the morning and toiled away in the fields till sundown, and then I was too tired to spruce up and play at being a gentleman. If you're going to be a doctor, you'd better take a ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... birds had come, punctual as ever, and the bluejays were screaming in the orchard, robins were perking up their heads and tails as they went house-hunting, purple finches in their little red hoods were feasting on the spruce buds, and the faithful chip birds chirped gayly on the grapevine trellis where they had lived all winter, warming their little gray breasts against the southern side of the house when the sun shone, and hiding under the evergreen boughs when ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... a little grove about a mile from my house, to see the grave of a beautiful little child, that was buried on the summit of a little hill, covered with pines, spruce and other evergreens. ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... praise General! Mac Lellan, and gossipp of ye laste greate partie, where Dorsey dyd serve so well ye terrapines and steamed oysters, and howe thatt itt is verament and trewe thatt Miss Porridge is to live, after hir marriage, in a howse in Locust strete, or peradventure in Spruce, or in Pyne, for in this towne all the stretes are of woode, albeit ye houses ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... flowers, this northern country is one of exceeding beauty. The dark green forests of spruce, larch and pine, broken now and then by a grove of poplars or silver birches, the secluded valleys and the rounded hills are strangely restful and give one a sense of infinite peace. It is a place to go for tired nerves. Ragged peaks, towering mountains, and yawning chasms, splendid as ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... Betty, looking very spruce in her new Safety Scout uniform, was dancing up and down before the mirrors while Bob's blouse was having the buttons set over ...
— Sure Pop and the Safety Scouts • Roy Rutherford Bailey
... us the river, now big enough to have a name, the Ya, turned and twisted in splendid green swirls. Seen from a distance the villages were very attractive, built usually of wood, their thatched roofs just putting forth green shoots. A new feature in the landscape were tall spruce trees, reminding me in their outlines of the rock pines of Italy. As the road was now good, it was possible for me to ride in my chair once more, for which I was glad, as the hard climbs and still more wearying descents ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... too, never consorted well with the dirty outside woolen wrapper which generally hung loose from the man's neck. Heaven knows, I did not begrudge him his comforter in that cold weather, or even his long, uncombed shock of hair; but I think he might have been made more spruce, and I am sure that he could not have looked more uncomfortable. As I went, however, I felt for him a sort of affection, and wished in my heart of hearts that he might soon be enabled to return to some ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... was right about her own house. Two coats of paint outside gave it a decidedly spruce appearance, while, inside, that lady's vision as to its capabilities had been more than realized. The blending of roughness and luxury, of camp and home characteristics, gave the large central apartment a quaintness that ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... Fashious, troublesome. Fasten-e'en, Fasten's Even (the evening before Lent). Faught, a fight. Fauld, the sheep-fold. Fauld, folded. Faulding, sheep-folding. Faun, fallen. Fause, false. Fause-house, hole in a cornstack. Faut, fault. Fautor, transgressor. Fawsont, seemly, well-doing; good-looking. Feat, spruce. Fecht, fight. Feck, the bulk, the most part. Feck, value, return. Fecket, waistcoat; sleeve waistcoat (used by farm-servants as both vest and jacket). Feckless, weak, pithless, feeble. Feckly, mostly. Feg, a fig. Fegs, faith! ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... plants come under this class, and are excellent climbers. One of the most remarkable is the Marcgravia umbellata, the stem of which in the tropical forests of South America, as I hear from Mr. Spruce, grows in a curiously flattened manner against the trunks of trees; here and there it puts forth claspers (roots), which adhere to the trunk, and, if the latter be slender, completely embrace it. When this plant has climbed to the light, it produces free branches with rounded stems, clad ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... so spreading a single floor of shining water over the whole valley. The trees, or most of them, that stand about the banks have grown since the Duke saw the water. There are old oaks on the northern shore, but the southern and eastern sides were planted with spruce and other conifers at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, when all that remained of the victor of Culloden was his horrible nickname and his obelisk above the lake. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... Samson were alone on a cliff-protected shelf, and the painter had just blocked in with umber and neutral tint the crude sketch of his next picture. In the foreground was a steep wall, rising palisade-like from the water below. A kingly spruce-pine gave the near note for a perspective which went away across a valley of cornfields to heaping and distant mountains. Beyond that range, in a slender ribbon of pale purple, one saw the ridge of a more remote and ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... celebrated by a dinner of wild goose, plum pudding, and coffee. After the voyage from Halifax it seemed good to rest a little with the firm earth under foot, and where the walls of one's habitation were still. Through the open windows came the fragrance of the spruce woods, and from the little piazza in front of the house you could look down and across Lake Melville, and away to the blue mountains beyond, where the snow was still lying ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... adobe, the material from which the chimney, which entirely occupied one gable, was built. It was pierced with two windows and a door, roofed with smaller logs, and thatched with long half cylinders of spruce bark. But the interior gave certain indications of the distinction as well as the peculiar experiences of its occupant. In place of the usual bunk or berth built against the wall stood a small folding camp ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... waiting for her in the passage. Always punctilious in his dress to-day he was exceptionally spruce, his tie very new, ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... times the need of larger forest reserves and closer government supervision. Under the most favorable conditions, the pine requires from seventy-five to one hundred years to yield timber twenty-five feet in length and ten inches in diameter at the top. Spruce will reach the same size in seventy-five to eighty years. In the higher altitudes of the central part of the country the pine requires one hundred and fifty years, and rarely exceeds one hundred feet in height, and it decreases toward the coast ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... fine rain, and around it crouched several urchins busy making oatmeal cakes in the embers. On one side a respectable lean-to had been constructed by nailing a plank to two fir-trees, running sloping poles thence to the ground, and thatching the whole with spruce branches and heather. On the other side two small dilapidated home-made tents were pitched. Dougal motioned his companion into the lean-to, where they had some privacy from the ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... generously looped, Bear Creek tumbled out of the southeast, and roved between noble borders of silver spruce into the shadows of the Blue Mountains of the north, half a dozen miles across and ten long of grazing and farm land, rich, loamy bottom land scattered ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... taint which scares their game away. The paddles were and are of all shapes and sizes, long and short, broad and narrow, spoon-blade and square; and they were and are made of all kinds of wood, from the lightest spruce to the much heavier but handsomer bird's-eye maple. Sails were and are only used with light winds dead aft, and not often in birch-barks even then, because there is no ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... thousands and tens of thousands they drift southward, sending vague notes down, but themselves invisible to us, save when now and then a tiny black mote floats across the face of the moon—an army of feathered mites, passing from tundra and spruce to ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... is simply an excavation, about three feet deep, twelve feet long, and sixteen feet wide. Spruce saplings about four feet long and four inches through are set upright side by side around the interior, supported by the beams. Two posts six feet long and one ridge piece support the arched roof, light saplings being used for rafters. An oblique ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... the pine, the spruce, and the balsam trees, 'will give our gums and our balsam.' The slippery elm offered its bark; the sassafras its roots; the cherry tree its bark and its berries. One after another, the other trees and shrubs offered their berries, their bark, their ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... shore worn sheer as a wall, with not the width of a hand for camping-place below. On a spit of the north shore was the camping-place known as Devil's Point, where no voyageur would ever stay because the long point was inhabited by demons. The bank is steep here, flanked by a swamp of huge spruce trees criss-crossed by the log-jam of centuries. The reason for the ill omen of the place is plain enough—a long point running out with three sides exposed to a ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... Batty was right: it was like walking with a dumb man. They left the wood and walked downhill beside a ploughed field, and in the shelter of a high wall. An open lane brought them to a gate, the gate opened on a rough road through yet another wood of larch and spruce and fir. The road was deeply rutted and they walked in single file until Charles turned, saying, 'This is what I've brought you to see. This ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... in the loft above Kilbuck's living quarters Jean was kneeling at a tiny window looking up at the ridge where dark spruce trees peaked a line against the night sky. It was a strange guest chamber pungent with a faint, unforgetable odor from fox pelts dangling from the rafters, bear hides tacked to the slanting roof, and rows of smoked salmon and dried cod hanging from lines along the sides. Loll ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... vats and in tuns; Ping, Drangollie, and the Draget fine, Mead, Mattebru, and the Metheling. Red wine, the claret and the white, with Tent and Alicant, in whom I delight. Wine of Languedoc and of Orleans thereto: Single beer, and other that is double: Spruce beer, and the beer of Hamburgh: Malmsey, ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... the coast of Siberia {63} in crazy skiffs, related that the sea-beaver always disappeared northeastward, whence the spruce driftwood and dead whales with harpoons of strange hunters and occasionally wrecks of walrus-skin boats came ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... agreed, that Hell's Spawn should break trail for his master across the last divide, and the court was adjourned down to the river bank, where a big spruce tree stood by itself. Slackwater Charley put a hangman's knot in the end of a hauling-line, and the noose was slipped over Leclere's head and pulled tight around his neck. His hands were tied behind his back, and he was assisted to the top of a cracker box. Then the running end of the line ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... the North-Western Rhodesia Native Police, a smart body of 380 natives, officered by eleven or twelve Englishmen. To Colonel Colin Harding, C.M.G., was due the credit of recruiting and drilling this smart corps, and it was difficult to believe that these soldierly-looking men, very spruce in their dark blue tunics and caps, from which depend enormous red tassels, were only a short time ago idling away their days in ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... varied and picturesque; sometimes steep cliffs and uncouth heaps of rock, in the most fantastic shapes, rose to a great height; sometimes the shores sloped away into mountains covered with thick forests of pine and spruce. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... loads of pretty things which threaten to make the tapers turn bottom upward! Part and parcel of all this was I, Christopher, most reckless of rheumatism, most careless of dignity, the round, bald top of my head to be seen emerging everywhere from the thick boughs of the spruce, now devising an airy settlement for some gossamer-robed doll, now adjusting far back on a stiff branch Tom's new little skates, now balancing bags of sugar-plums and candy, and now combating desperately with some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... night, too, when we sat around a big camp-fire near our tents in the valley, and saw the full moon come up and look down upon us from behind Sentinel Rock, and heard the intermittent booming of Yosemite Falls sifting through the spruce trees that towered around us, and felt the tender, brooding spirit of the great valley, itself touched to lyric intensity by the grandeurs on every hand, steal in upon us, and possess our souls—surely that was a night none of us can ever forget. As Yosemite can stand the broad, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... with evergreens,—pine and spruce. The New Year's Day having fallen on a Monday, Little Bel had had a clear working-day on the Saturday previous; and her faithful henchmen, Archie and Sandy, had been busy every evening for a week drawing the boughs ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... ordered. Three minutes later he was joined by his friend. Until the trail took them down into a draw grown up in spruce Chuck's gun remained very much in evidence. Any unbiased spectator without a knowledge of the facts would have said that he was keeping a close ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... slept he caused birch, spruce, and cottonwood trees to spring up in the low places, and when the people awoke in the morning they clapped their hands in delight, for the birds were singing in the tree-tops and the green leaves with ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... with a thick growth of cedars. Deep and small basins occur, which are occupied by lakes that give rise to rivers flowing to the St. Lawrence or to the St. John. These are intermingled with thickets of dwarf spruce, and the streams are sometimes bordered by marshes covered by low alders, and sometimes cut deep into rocky channels. In this apparent labyrinth one positive circumstance marks the line of division, or the true height of land: ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... walnut, {83b} chesnut, hornbeam, yew, laurels, hollies, birches, Gordonia, {83c} Michelias, etc, most of them species hitherto unnoticed by botanists; but some exactly the same as in Europe, such as the yew, holly, hornbeam, walnut, Weymouth pine, (Pinus strobus, W.) and common spruce fir, (Pinus picea, W.) As, however, the greater part are of little value, from the inaccessible nature of the country, I shall ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... destroying them outright, Cartier did not allow any of them to approach the fort. One day, however, chancing to meet one of them who had himself been ill with the scurvy, but now was quite well, he was told of a sovereign remedy, a decoction of the leaves of a certain tree, probably the spruce. The experiment was tried with success, and the ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... tincture of Calvinism for stiffening a line of battle,' said Saxon. 'Look at the Swede when he is at home. What more honest, simple-hearted fellow could you find, with no single soldierly virtue, save that he could put away more spruce beer than you would care to pay for. Yet if you do but cram him with a few strong, homely texts, place a pike in his hand, and give him a Gustavus to lead him, there is no infantry in the world that can stand against him. On the other ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... blue, that had brought it home, and were led to rest, the horses drooping their meek heads as they cooled their feet among the weed in the dark pond;—the ducks moving, with low contented quacks and quickly-wagging tails, in one long single file to their evening foraging in the dewy meadows; the spruce younger poultry pecking over the yard, staying up a little later than their elders to enjoy a few leavings in peace, free from the persecutions of the cross old king of the dung-hill;—all this left in shade, while the ruddy light had ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... if it was the first thing to be done; her little orderly methods. She kept her mother's room neat, she put the books back in their places; there was a cluster of autumn leaves in a vase, or a sprig of spruce or cedar that for a long while would put forth new leaves. She was very glad now that she had taken so much pains. Was she rather unpolished when they had first come from Laconia. But her circle there ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... any of us until that one jumpy moment, just at the end of the Thanksgiving dinner, when, heralded by a slam in the wood-shed, a hoppytyskip in the hall, the dining-room door flung widely open on Carol's eyes twinkling like a whole skyful of stars through the shaggy, dark branches of a young spruce-tree. It made young Derry ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... on each side of the front step. A servant threw open the door of the breakfast room, and Delme mechanically entered it. It was filled with strangers; on some of these the spruce undertaker was fitting silk scarfs; while others were ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... commenced operations by purchasing shares in a dice-board, a vingt et un table, and a quino table.[12] Jack Mallet and I, also, set up a shop, on a capital of three dollars. We sold smoked herring, pipes, tobacco, segars, spruce beer, and, as chances of smuggling it in offered, now and then a little Jamaica. All this time, the number of the prisoners increased, until, in the end, we got to have a full prison, when they began to send them to England. Only one of the Julias was sent away, however, ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Marble was observed by the chairman to bite his lips, to keep in a good round laugh, when those words, fellow-countrymen, came out)—I tell you what it is, the things that are wanted now are boots, and shoes, and stockings, and jackets—and not gingerbread, and sugar plums, and spruce beer, and ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... parts of the old wood, left in these majestic circular clumps, disposed at equal distances with wonderful symmetry: there are some single shrubs scattered in elegant profusion: here a Portugal laurel, there a juniper; here a laurustinus, there a spruce fir; here a larch, there a lilac; here a rhododendron, there an arbutus. The stream, you see, is become a canal: the banks are perfectly smooth and green, sloping to the water's edge: and there is Lord Littlebrain, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... to go to spend money at the ordinary, and there spent an hour or two, it being a pleasant day, seeing people play at Pell Mell; where it pleased me mightily to hear a gallant, lately come from France, swear at one of his companions for suffering his man (a spruce blade) to be so saucy as to strike a ball while his master was playing ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... pipe between the snow-man's grinning, orange-colored teeth. Gloves hung limply from the snow-man's arm-stumps and to one of them a cane was fastened. Billy had managed to give the snow-man's head a cock to one side. Altogether he looked so spruce and jovial that it was impossible not ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... like a story for interest, and there was a bush that bore a secret worth the telling. Even Simeon Holly glowed into a semblance of life when David had unerringly picked out and called by name the spruce, and fir, and pine, and larch, and then, in answer to Mrs. Holly's murmured: "But, David, where's the difference? They look so ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... to fill this void land with everything British which he could transport or transplant His gardens were filled with the flowers, the vegetables, the fruit trees of the old land. The oak, the elm, the willow, the poplar, the spruce, the ash grew in his plantations. His cattle were Shorthorns, Herefords, and Devons. His farm horses were of the best Clydesdale and Suffolk Punch blood. The grasses they fed upon were mixtures of cocks-foot, timothy, rye-grass, and white clover. When it was found that ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... toward permanent establishment did not relax. He took a long tramp in search of canoe birches, from which at last he brought back huge rolls of thick bark. These he and the girl sewed together in overlapping seams, using white spruce-roots for the purpose. The result was a water-tight covering for the wigwam. A pile of firewood was the fruit of two hours' toil. In the meantime May-may-gwan had caught some fish with the hook and line and had gathered some berries. She made ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... and the air was full of the deliciously penetrating odour of the mimosa and sweetbriar. Down one special alley, where the white philadelphus, or 'mock orange' grew in thick bushes on either side, intermingled with ferns and spruce firs, whose young green tips exhaled a pungent, healthy scent that entered into the blood like wine and invigorated it, Sir Roger de Launay was pacing to and fro with a swinging step which, notwithstanding ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... there is no luxury equal to that of lying before a good fire on a good spruce bed, after a good supper, and a hard moose chase in a fine clear frosty moonlit starry night. But to enter into the spirit of this, you must understand what a moose chase is: the man himself runs the moose down by pursuing the track. Your success in killing ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the house stretched a lawn, shaded-in from the carriage drive by a fringe of larch and spruce, and on this lawn, innocent of tennis-courts and similar abominations, were planted here and there single trees. It had been the fancy of the owner that not one of these on the lawn should be indigenous, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... and evergreen country, this style of cottage is peculiarly appropriate. It takes additional character from bold and picturesque scenery, with which it is in harmony. The pine, spruce, cedar, or hemlock, or the evergreen laurel, planted around or near it, will give it increased effect, while among deciduous trees and shrubs, an occasional Lombardy poplar, and larch, will harmonize ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... brain should not get fat and unwieldy, as well as any other part of the human frame. Some of our best poets have written in paroxysms of hunger, and I really believe that Addison would have had more point if he had had less victuals; and if you do not restrict yourself to a sheep's trotter and spruce beer, your style will betray your luxury." But soon came an increase of the very thing feared for her fame, in the form of an invitation from Lady Abercorn and the marquis to pass the chief part of every year with them. This was accepted, and thus she met her fate. Lord Abercorn kept a physician ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... with the latitude, but approximately 6000 ft. in the Yangtsze basin, there exist in districts remote from the traffic of the great rivers, extensive forests of conifers, like those of Central Europe in character, but with different species of silver fir, larch, spruce and Cembran pine. Below this altitude the woods are composed of deciduous and evergreen broad-leafed trees and shrubs, mingled together in a profusion of species. Pure broad-leafed forests of one or two species are rare, though small woods of oak, of alder ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... very clounch and bacon-slicer of Brene. This pleased Grangousier very well, and he commanded that it should be done. At night at supper, the said Des Marays brought in a young page of his, of Ville-gouges, called Eudemon, so neat, so trim, so handsome in his apparel, so spruce, with his hair in so good order, and so sweet and comely in his behaviour, that he had the resemblance of a little angel more than of a human creature. Then he said to Grangousier, Do you see this young boy? He is not as yet full twelve years old. Let us try, if it please you, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... elevation of forty feet. In all cases the nests are placed high in hemlocks or pines, which are the bird's favorite resorts. From all accounts the nests of this species are elegantly and compactly made, consisting of a densely woven mass of spruce twigs, soft vegetable down, rootlets, and fine shreds of bark. The lining is often intermixed with horse hairs and feathers. Four eggs of greenish-white or very pale bluish-green, speckled or spotted, have usually ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... thing we ought to do when we get started is to have that hall painted," said Diana, as they drove past the Avonlea hall, a rather shabby building set down in a wooded hollow, with spruce trees hooding it about on all sides. "It's a disgraceful looking place and we must attend to it even before we try to get Mr. Levi Boulder to pull his house down. Father says we'll never succeed in DOING that. Levi Boulter is too mean to spend ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... rarely a more liberal employer than he. He was generous in the wages he gave; he allowed more resting hours than any of his neighbors; he was less exacting in his demands; he always reserved the finest lambs and chickens to supply his table in that season; he had the best of spruce beer in Summerfield, and the clearest crystal water. And while with these mitigations, the toils of the harvesters were still hot and heavy to be borne, there was that in their fare, in their songs, and animation, which told of ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... would be called, could not have been made of the spruce, but rather feeble octogenarian at the other end of the piazza. He was evidently absorbed in the novel he held so conspicuously open, and which, from the smiles now and then disturbing the usual placidity ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... Barker returned to the outer ward of the financial stronghold he had penetrated, with its curving sweep of counters, brass railings, and wirework screens defended by the spruce clerks behind them, he was again impressed with the position of the man he had just quitted, and for a moment hesitated, with an inclination to go back. It was with no idea of making a further appeal to his old comrade, but—what would have been odd in any other nature but his—he was affected ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... Felix Morrison, and old Mr. Sommerville were all sitting together on the wide north veranda, evidently waiting to be called to luncheon when, at half-past one, the two pedestrians emerged through a side wicket in the thick green hedge of spruce, and advanced up the path, with the free, swinging step of people who have walked far and well. The effect on the veranda was unimaginable. Sheer, open-mouthed stupefaction blurred for an instant the composed, carefully arranged masks of those four exponents of decorum. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... advanced by Materialists applies only to the form, for as a carpenter uses material from a certain pile of lumber to build a house in which he afterwards lives, so does the spirit take the substance wherewith to build its house from the parents. The carpenter cannot build a house of hard wood from spruce lumber and the spirit also must build a body which is like those from which the material was taken, but the theory of Heredity does not apply upon the moral plane, for it is a notorious fact, that in the rogues galleries of America and Europe there is no case where both father and son are represented. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... friend at B——, where the salmon was unexceptionable, and had completed the most arduous day's walk in his journal, nearly thirteen miles, in a state of dust and heat far from agreeable to a stoutish gentleman of forty, who usually looked as spruce as if he came out of a band-box. Hanmer and he seemed really glad to see each other. On those "oxless" shores, where, as Byron says, "beef ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... of business and politics whom we will call M. Leroux—just for the sake of giving him a name, you understand," he resumed, looking at me maliciously. "And that this M. Leroux imagines that there is more than spruce timber to be found on the seigniory. Bien, but consider further that this M. Leroux is a mole, as we call our politicians here. It would not suit him to appear openly in such an enterprise? He would always work ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... founder, removed to 50, Albemarle Street. In the Athenaeum of 1843 a writer describes how Byron used to stroll in here fresh from his fencing-lessons at Angelo's or his sparring-bouts with Jackson. He was wont to make cruel lunges with his stick at what he called "the spruce books" on Murray's shelves, generally striking the doomed volume, and by no means improving the bindings. "I was sometimes, as you will guess," Murray used to say with a laugh, "glad to get rid of him." Here, in 1807, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... great deal of pity for those honest but misguided people who call their little, spruce suburban towns, or the shaded streets of their inland cities,—the country and I have still more pity for those who reckon a season at the summer resorts—country enjoyment. Nay, my feeling is more violent than pity; and I count it nothing less ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... time the best they could, some playing seven up, others playing billiards, and others looking on. Some of the truly good people in town thought the boys were pretty tough, and they wore long faces and prayed for the blockade to raise so the spruce ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... Navy Island, and during the summer they continued to arrive, until about 5,000 had settled between Parrtown (St. John) and St. Anne's. The peninsula now occupied by the city of St. John was then almost a wilderness, covered with shrubs, scrubby spruce, and marsh. Large numbers of emigrants also arrived at Annapolis, Port Roseway, and other points; and Governor Parr, in a letter to Lord North in September, 1783, estimates the whole number that had arrived in Nova Scotia and the island of St. John (Prince Edward's Island) ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... being precipitated as it were in one leap from the Lebanon to the Mediterranean. Olives, vines, and corn cover the maritime plain, while in ancient times the heights were clothed with impenetrable forests of oak, pine, larch, cypress, spruce, and cedar. The mountain range drops in altitude towards the centre of the country and becomes merely a line of low hills, connecting Gebel Ansarieh with the Lebanon proper; beyond the latter it continues without interruption, till at length, above the narrow ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... a spruce boy that served us with warm water, began to imitate a nightingale; till Trimalchio giving the word, a servant that waited on Habinas, set up another humour, and, as I believe, commanded by his master, ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... they could see three or four white sails. Far away beyond a group of islands rose a trail of smoke that told some small steamer was passing. A gull was circling over the cove, and a black crow cawed dismally from the top branch of a tall spruce. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... a curious mingling of tenderness and admiration in the glance she bent upon him. He was a goodly youth to look at, tall and strongly knit in figure, upright as a young spruce fir, with a keen, dark-skinned face, square in outline and with a peculiar mobility of expression. The eyes were black and sparkling, and the thick, short, curling hair was sombre as the raven's wing. There was no lack of ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... from the scant eaves of the little church of the Sidon Brethren at West Woodlands. Hewn out of the very heart of a thicket of buckeye spruce and alder, unsunned and unblown upon by any wind, it was so green and unseasoned in its solitude that it seemed a part of the arboreal growth, and on damp Sundays to have taken root again and sprouted. There were moss and shining spots ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and that can be smoothly wrought, may be used. Those you mention are all good; so are half a dozen more,—the different kinds of ash, yellow-pine, butternut, white-wood, cherry, cedar, even hemlock and spruce in some situations. There are several important points to be religiously observed if you leave the wood, whatever the variety, in its unadorned beauty. It must be the best of its kind; it must be seasoned ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... hairs; or they might be brown, with markings of darker brown and black with white hairs; but they would be at least three inches long when full grown, and would have a queer habit of rearing and drawing leaves to their mouths when feeding. I was told I would find them in August, on leaves of spruce, pine, cherry, birch, alder, sycamore, elm, or maple; that they pupated in the ground; and the moths were common, especially around lights in city parks, and at ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... investigation. He carried his problem and its possibilities to his friend, Heinrich Voelter, a master mechanic. Together they began experiments. They decided to emulate the wasp. They would have to granulate the wood as she had done. The insect had apparently used spruce; they used spruce under an ordinary grindstone. Hot water served as a substitute for ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... north than the quail, and is found throughout the United States. With us he affects high and rocky ground, but northward he keeps at a lower level. At the White Mountains, the regions of this species and of the Canada grouse or spruce partridge are as well defined in height as those of the maples and the "black growth." Still farther north I have observed that our partridge frequents the lowest marshy ground, thus equalizing his climate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... attempt fruitless; so that we were obliged to anchor in thirty-nine fathoms water, the bottom fine coral sand; the isle bearing W. by N. one mile distant. As soon as this was done, we hoisted out a boat, in which I went on ashore, accompanied by the botanists. We found the tall trees to be a kind of spruce pine, very proper for spars, of which we were in want. After making this discovery, I hastened on board in order to have more time after dinner, when I landed again with two boats, accompanied by several of the officers and gentlemen, having with us the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... and unceremoniousness of the whole affair; their gladness at finding a public entertainment where one's clothes were not obliged to be selected with a view to outshining those of every one else in the room; the students shrouded in a mystery, secret and impenetrable, of tobacco smoke. The spruce-looking school-boys from the Gymnasium and Realschule, the old captains and generals, the Fraeulein their daughters, the gnaedigen Frauen their wives; dressed in the disastrous plaids, checks, and stripes, which somehow ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... streams. At an elevation of 6000 feet above the level of the sea the silver firs are 200 feet high, with branches whorled around the colossal shafts in regular order, and every branch beautifully pinnate like a fern frond. The Douglas spruce, the yellow and sugar pines and brown-barked Libocedrus here reach their finest developments of beauty and grandeur. The majestic Sequoia is here, too, the king of conifers, the noblest of all the noble race. ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... a tent, open on the one side where a campfire burned. It was all of moose-skins, this fly—moose-skins, smoke-cured, hand-rubbed, and golden-brown. Under it everything was neat and orderly as no Indian camp ever was. The bed was laid on fresh spruce boughs. There were furs galore, and on top of all was a robe of swanskins—white swan-skins—I have never seen anything like that robe. And on top of it, sitting cross-legged, was Lucy. She was nut-brown. I have called her a girl. But she was not. ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... planet to another. To achieve it they study, they sweat, they make all out efforts to meet and suck up to anybody they think might help. Finally, when and if they get an interview for one of the few openings, they spruce up in their best clothes, put on their best party manners, present themselves as the sincere, high I.Q., ambitious young men that they are—and then flunk their chance. I decided I might as well ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... came a light-weight electric, driven by a man who, in his spruce uniform, might have passed at a glance for a very dusky European. The car had a limousine back, and as the chauffeur slowed down, out from the open windows right and left ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... "Antiquarian Repertory" (ed. 1807), i. 251-270, the reader will find an interesting account of the Trained Bands and the Artillery Company. Old writers are fond of sneering at the City warriors. The following passage is from Shirley's "Witty Fair One," v. 1:—"There's a spruce captain newly crept out of a gentleman-usher and shuffled into a buff jerkin with gold lace, that never saw service beyond Finsbury or the Artillery-Garden, marches wearing a desperate feather in his lady's beaver, while a poor soldier, bred up in the school of ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... seen, He damns the climate and complains of spleen.... Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down, Threatening with deluge this devoted town, To shops in crowds the draggled females fly, Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy, The Templar spruce, while ev'ry spout's abroach, Stays till 'tis fair, yet seems to call a coach, The tuck'd up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides; Here various kinds, by various fortunes led, Commence acquaintance underneath ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Philadelphia runs on oiled wheels. After the huge clatter of New York, there is something mellow and human about the drowsy hum of Chestnut Street, the genteel reaches of Walnut, and the neat frontage of Spruce Street. Ellenora, so quick to notice her surroundings, was at first bored, then amused, at last lulled by the intimate life of her new home. She had never been abroad, but declared that London, out-of-the-way London, must be something like this. The fine, disdainful air of Locust Street, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... really she! It was in a long lane bordered on both sides by dark spruce and beeches decked out in the golden brown tints of autumn. The sunbeams, distinctly bluish in the fine mist, slantingly penetrated the dark spruce, and fell in golden radiance upon the pale green moss, and the blue ether and the brown ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... writings you promised me your opinion; not incidentally, as before, but turning page after page. It would ill beseem us to treat Milton with generalities. Radishes and salt are the picnic quota of slim spruce reviewers: let us hope to find somewhat more solid and of better taste. Desirous to be a listener and a learner when you discourse on his poetry, I have been more occupied of late ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... on until they came to a growth of spruce so dense that it formed a shelter from both snow and wind, with a thick carpet of brown needles under foot. They were shut out from the stars, and in the darkness MacVeigh began to whistle cheerfully. He unstrapped ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... through the wood in great fear; and the wild beasts roared about her, but none did her any harm. In the evening she came to a little cottage, and went in there to rest herself, for her weary feet would carry her no further. Everything was spruce and neat in the cottage: on the table was spread a white cloth, and there were seven little plates with seven little loaves and seven little glasses with wine in them; and knives and forks laid in order, and by the wall stood seven little beds. Then, ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... land was so much higher, that between England and Ireland, and, what is more, between England and Norway, was firm dry land. The country then must have looked—at least we know it looked so in Norfolk—very like what our moors look like here. There were forests of Scotch fir, and of spruce too, which is not wild in England now, though you may see plenty in every plantation. There were oaks and alders, yews and sloes, just as there are in our woods now. There was buck-bean in the bogs, as there is in Larmer's and Heath pond; and white and yellow ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... to fallen trees that are almost rotted away. Hit the knot a lick with the pole of the axe and generally it will yield; if you must chop, cut deep to get it all and to save the axe edge. The knots of old dead balsams are similarly used. Usually a dead stump of pine, spruce, or balsam, all punky on the outside, has a core very rich in resin that makes ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... sat the industrious citizen, basking in the sunshine of his shop-door, and gathering in the flock which is so bountifully reared on his withered tribe of children. There strutted the spruce cavalier, with his upper-man furnished at the expense of his lower, and looking ridiculously imposing: and there—but sacred be their daughters, for the sake of one, who shed a lustre over her squalid sisterhood, sufficiently brilliant ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... features in flying machine construction, viz.: lightness, strength and extreme rigidity. Spruce is the wood generally used for glider frames. Oak, ash and hickory are all stronger, but they are also considerably heavier, and where the saving of weight is essential, the difference is largely in favor of spruce. This will be ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... the delving old figure in the ploughed field, and discovered, even at a distance, that his jaws were still and his brow knotted, run up to him, and proffer as a substitute for the beloved weed a generous piece of spruce-gum. The old man always took it, and spat it out when the boy's ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... lengthwise, and rudely plastered at each point of contact with adobe, the material from which the chimney, which entirely occupied one gable, was built. It was pierced with two windows and a door, roofed with smaller logs, and thatched with long half cylinders of spruce bark. But the interior gave certain indications of the distinction as well as the peculiar experiences of its occupant. In place of the usual bunk or berth built against the wall stood a small folding camp bedstead, and upon a rude deal table that held a tin wash-basin ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... side of a valley; wooded ground, with leafy trees among the spruce and pine, and grass beneath. Hours of this, and twilight is falling, but his ear catches the faint purl of running water, and it heartens him like the voice of a living thing. He climbs the slope, and sees the valley half in darkness below; beyond, the sky to the south. ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... was like a story for interest, and there was a bush that bore a secret worth the telling. Even Simeon Holly glowed into a semblance of life when David had unerringly picked out and called by name the spruce, and fir, and pine, and larch, and then, in answer to Mrs. Holly's murmured: "But, David, where's the difference? They look so much alike!" ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... authoritative manner. The peculiar beckoning twist of this presumptuous individual's chin and henna-stained beard summoning me to come out and "perform" reminds me of nothing so much as some tamer of wild animals ordering a trained baboon to spruce himself up and dance for the edification of the circus-going public. Signifying my unwillingness to be thus made a circus of over and over again, the officer beckons even more peremptorily than before, and even makes a feint of coming and fetching ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... and dances and theatres, and nothing about work. Remember, I am footing the bills. When I was your age I got up at 4 in the morning and toiled away in the fields till sundown, and then I was too tired to spruce up and play at being a gentleman. If you're going to be a doctor, you'd ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... its fame by continued success, and, as I hope owes much of its increasing prosperity to its characteristic good-humour; so, without more preface, imagine a little dapper-looking fellow of about five feet something in altitude, attended by a tall sharp-visaged gentleman in very spruce costume, parading up and down the High-street, Cheltenham—lounging for a few minutes in Williams's library—making very inquisitive remarks upon the passing singularities—and then the little man most impertinently whispering to his friend ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... had inquired into the natural products of the country. There were tin mines, he found, in parts of the island, and iron in small quantities; but copper was imported from the Continent. The vegetation resembled that of France, save that he saw no beech and no spruce pine. Of more consequence were the people and the distribution of them. The Britons of the interior he conceived to be indigenous. The coast was chiefly occupied by immigrants from Belgium, as could be traced ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... the climatic conditions. These conditions exist, and they result in a varied natural production. In the extreme south-western section plants of a semi-tropical nature were to be found in the early days in luxurious growth; while in the extreme north, spruce, somewhat stunted in size and toughened in fibre, are still to ...
— History of Farming in Ontario • C. C. James
... beyond the further shore, the sky was murky with the smoke of unseen forest fires, and through this the afternoon sun broke feebly, throwing a vague radiance to earth, and unreal shadows. To the sky-line of the four quarters—spruce-shrouded islands, dark waters, and ice-scarred rocky ridges—stretched the immaculate wilderness. No sign of human existence broke the solitude; no sound the stillness. The land seemed bound under the unreality of the unknown, wrapped in ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... stone pick or hatchet. It is said that the women of the North American tribes used a hoe made of an elk's shoulder-blade and a handle of wood. In Sweden the earliest records of tillage represent a huge hoe made from a stout limb of spruce with the sharpened root. This was finally made heavier, and men dragged it through the soil in the manner of ploughing. Subsequently the plough was made in two pieces, a handle having been added. Finally a pair of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... remember certain spruce woods with openings where the sun shone through. The shadows were very black, the sunlight very white. As I looked back I could see the pack-horses alternately suffer eclipse and illumination in a strange flickering manner good to behold. The dust of the trail eddied and billowed ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... lustrous and subdued on the silver and fruit and flowers, on the girls' white necks, on George's well-coloured face and glossy shirt-front, gleamed in the jewels on his mother's long white fingers, showed off the Squire's erect and still spruce figure; the air was languorously sweet with the perfume of azaleas and narcissus bloom. Bee, with soft eyes, was thinking of young Tharp, who to-day had told her that he loved her, and wondering if father would object. Her mother was thinking of George, stealing timid glances at his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and melancholy, too; but presently, with reviving faith to urge them, opened wide and heartily, and began to twinkle again. The bar was in festive array: Christmas greens, red berries, ribbons, tissue-paper and gleaming tinfoil—flash of mirrors, bright colour, branches of pine, cedar and spruce from the big balsamic woods. It was crowded with lumber-jacks—great fellows from the forest, big of body and passion, here gathered in celebration of the festival. John Fairmeadow, getting all at once and vigorously under ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... wrapper which generally hung loose from the man's neck. Heaven knows, I did not begrudge him his comforter in that cold weather, or even his long, uncombed shock of hair; but I think he might have been made more spruce, and I am sure that he could not have looked more uncomfortable. As I went, however, I felt for him a sort of affection, and wished in my heart of hearts that he might soon be enabled to return to ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... had made an effort to 'spruce up' for the interview, by putting on a clean white neckerchief, and a bran new pair of brogans, but she still wore the tattered red and yellow turban, and the thin, coarse Osnaburg gown, clean, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... coat-collar, and has put on a spotless suit of black cloth, and sports his gold chain and seals conspicuously, and wears his spectacles easily, and drops them in a genteel manner on the silk ribbon that is suspended around his neck; and if he is altogether neat and spruce, as becomes an ecclesiastic of some standing in his diocese, is that a reason why he should be stared at, and why men should put their hands in their pockets and whistle, and why rather perky young fellows should cry "Hallo!" and whisper, "Who's the stranger?" And even why the bishop, when he ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce." ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... because if this Indian had been of the same origin as the aborigines who acquainted Jacques Cartier with the virtue of the aneda plant in cases of scurvy, he would have understood the meaning of the word. Aneda is the Iroquois word for the spruce tree, but there is no evidence to prove that Champlain was ever aware that it was a specific. Had he known of its efficacy he would ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... your Philip!... Philip!" and the poor soldier went towards the laburnum-tree; but when he stood three paces away, the Countess eyed him almost defiantly, though there was timidity in her eyes; then at a bound she sprang from the laburnum to an acacia, and thence to a spruce-fir, swinging from bough to ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... twenty-five, with black hair and eyes, a small, carefully trained moustache, and a dark olive skin. His physiognomy was not displeasing, but his expression had a harsh and supercilious tinge. In attire he erred towards the immaculately spruce. ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... an immense spruce, all powdered with silvery fringe, and Leo had only to tie on the little gilt tags numbered to correspond with the packages of gifts, which were heaped on surrounding tables, and fasten on the candles of red and blue wax. ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... we sat around a big camp-fire near our tents in the valley, and saw the full moon come up and look down upon us from behind Sentinel Rock, and heard the intermittent booming of Yosemite Falls sifting through the spruce trees that towered around us, and felt the tender, brooding spirit of the great valley, itself touched to lyric intensity by the grandeurs on every hand, steal in upon us, and possess our souls—surely that was a night none of us can ever forget. As Yosemite can stand the broad, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... land of Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world's commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the birthplace mentioned on his ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... the exception of the last two, seem to explain themselves. During the summer months in the North Woods you will not need a rifle. Partridges, spruce hens, ptarmigan, rabbits, ducks, and geese are usually abundant enough to fill the provision list. For them, of course, a shotgun is the thing; but since such a weapon weighs many pounds, and its ammunition many more, I have come ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... him in that first encounter. He was crisp and quick in manner, clear-skinned, very spruce, and clear-eyed; his eyes appraised ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... down the road, and Madison, with a sort of speculative flip to the ash of his cigar, resumed his way. Just across the bridge he found the wagon track, and turned into it. It ran through a thick wood of fir and spruce, and here, apart from now being able to see but little before him—he had elected to "steal" away in the darkness after supper—he found the going ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... him with undisguised astonishment—indeed, it was difficult to recognize in this tattered, unkempt wanderer, with ghastly white face and fierce, wild eyes, the spruce young hunter of former days. Having, however, at last, satisfied himself as to his identity, the man's surprise changed ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for a short distance before finding a little cove, bordered with overhanging spruce and cedars, at the head of which they made a landing on a ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... forth the hunting cry to summon his loyal band. An hour later Cripp and Peg were with him, the three of them swinging west along the divide toward the rough mass of the main range of hills. Morning found them climbing through a matted jungle of close-growing spruce and down-timber. ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... dull a lawn would be without his pert movements when he comes down alternately with his russet wife. One blackbird with a broad white feather on each side of his tail haunted Elderfield for two years, but, alas! one spring day a spruce sable rival descended and captivated the faithless dame. They united, chased poor Mr. Whitetail over the high garden hedge, and he ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... season I cleaned up about one hundred and twenty dollars from the Fourth to Labor Day," says he. "But there was lots of good days when I didn't git any parties at all. You see, I look kind of old and shabby. So does the Curlew; and the spruce young fellers with the new boats gits the cream of the trade. But it don't take much to ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... of Aland, upon which is situated the town of Mariehamn with a population of 1171. The inhabitants are mostly of Swedish descent, and are hardy seamen and fishermen. The surface of the islands is generally sandy, the soil thin and the climate keen; yet Scotch fir, spruce and birch are grown; and rye, barley, flax and vegetables are produced in sufficient quantity for the wants of the people. Great numbers of cattle are reared; and cheese, butter and hides, as well as salted meat and fish, are exported. There are several ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... some wheat bran, till it tastes sufficiently of the spruce; bruise some allspice, and put in; strain it, and put two quarts of molasses to half a barrel; when it is nearly cold, put in half a pint of yeast; after it has worked sufficiently, bung ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... the big hole when drawing the tree away; and they are also used while backing the hind wheels across the new hole in which the tree is to be planted. The machine (Figs. 149, 150) consists of a hind axle twelve feet long, and broad-tired wheels. The frame is made of spruce three-by-eight inches and twenty feet long. The braces are three-by-five inches and ten feet long, and upright three-by-nine inches and three feet high; these are bolted to the hind axle and main frame. The front axle has a set of blocks ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... not reply, being plainly at a loss to understand how there could be any doubt about the matter. Alice went to the round drawing-room, where she found Mr. Parker examining a trophy of Indian armor, and presenting a back view of a short gentleman in a spruce blue frock-coat. A new hat and pair of gloves were also visible as he stood looking upward with his hands behind him. When he turned to greet Alice lie displayed a face expressive of resolute self-esteem, with eyes whose watery brightness, ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... time afterward when I led Grace out and spent a blissful ten minutes swinging through the mazes of a prairie dance, before we found a nook under dark spruce branches from the big coulee, where Grace listened with interest while I told her of our experiences in the Dominion. The background of somber sprays enhanced her fair beauty, and her dress, which, though there was ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... days and help him with the new inclosure. To this Edward cheerfully consented; and as soon as they arrived at the cottage, and Humphrey had his breakfast, they took their axes and went out to fell at a cluster of small spruce-fir about a mile off. ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... ourselves so well as not to recognize each other. Madame Duplessis was charming in a red petticoat; Ursule, in a blue blouse and a big hat was a most comical fellow; Casimir, got up as a beggar, had some halfpence given him in all good faith; Stephane, whom I think you know, as a spruce peasant, made believe to have been drinking, stumbled against our sous-prefet and accosted him—he is a nice fellow, and was just going to depart when all of a sudden he recognized us. Well, it was a most farcical evening, and would have amused you I will ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... with water, which they spill into the air. For making clear weather, they use a small stick to the end of which a string is tied. A small flat piece of wood is attached to the end of the string, and this implement is shaken. Storm is produced by strewing down on the ends of spruce branches" (404. 92). ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... they spread by their seeds and mar the order of the garden. Dig them in, and their decay will nourish the next crop. If early sowing is practised, and the earliest possible produce of everything is aimed at, there must be always at hand the means of protection, such as litter, spruce branches, mats, or other material, as circumstances require. The vigilant gardener is not surprised by the weather, but is always armed for an emergency. Read the notes for January before ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... economic reasons suggest it, we may use the selection system as a basis for artificially managing the shade bearing species such as hemlock, white fir, cedar, spruce, and even Western yellow pine. We may cut the largest and oldest trees and still have a well started second crop. If there is not much young growth to leave, even a little is valuable. It may be decidedly best to leave medium sized trees, ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... mechanically adjusting a machine-gun lock, which he had taken from his haversack. Captain Wagstaffe was making cocoa over a Tommy's Cooker. He looked less the worse for wear than the others, but could hardly have been described as spruce in appearance. The whole party were splashed with mud and soaked to the skin, for it had rained hard during the greater part of the night. They were all sick for want of food and sleep. Moreover, all had seen unusual sights. ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... agone, when he, a wide-eyed boy in his father's care, first had viewed the intricacies of a mountain sawmill, had wandered about the bunk houses, and ridden the great, skidding bobsleds with the lumberjacks in the spruce forests, on a never-forgotten trip of inspection. It was Thayer, the same Thayer that he once had looked upon with all the enthusiasm and pride of boyhood, but whom he now viewed with suspicion and distrust. Thayer had brought him out ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... Oh, at last! At last! They rushed together, they stopped aghast. They looked at each other with blank dismay, They simply hadn't a word to say. He thought with a shiver: "Can this be she?" She thought with a shudder: "This can't be he?" This simpering dandy, so sleek and spruce; This languorous lily in garments loose; They sought to brace from the awful shock: Taking a seat, they tried to talk. She spoke of Bergson and Pater's prose, He prattled of dances and ragtime shows; She purred of pictures, Matisse, Cezanne, His tastes to the girls of Kirchner ran; She ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... could tell by the trees that it was a high altitude. There were no cottonwoods, though the cottonwoods will follow a stream for more than a mile above sea level. Far below them a pale mist obscured the beautiful silver spruce which had reached their upward limit. Around the cabin marched a scattering of the balsam fir. They were nine thousand feet above the sea, at least. Still higher up the sallow forest of lodgepole pines began; and above these, beyond the timberline, rose ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... of their freedom from suppression. In many cases they grow almost as large and high as the huge trees that they replace. In our eastern forests the hemlock often follows the white pine in this way. Spruce trees may live for many years in dense shade. Then finally, when they have access to plenty of light they may develop into sturdy trees. A tree that is a pigmy in one locality may rank as a giant in another region due to different conditions of growth and climate. ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... Cairns waiting for her in the passage. Always punctilious in his dress to-day he was exceptionally spruce, his tie very new, ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... one after another along the canal, many of them looking mighty spruce and ship-shape in their jerkin of Archangel tar picked out with white and green. Some carried gay iron railings, and quite a parterre of flower-pots. Children played on the decks, as heedless of the rain as if ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... guests made a circle round, the clergyman in his white surplice among the ladies' gay dresses, the white figure of Chatty leaning with her hand on the table, her mother's anxious face close behind her. Poor Dick in his spruce wedding clothes, with his ghostly face, stood drawing back a little, staring with eyes that seemed to sink deeper in their sockets as he gazed. He had never looked upon that face since he parted with her in utter disgust and misery six years before. She came in, almost forced into the ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Hemlock spruce of America; which, while growing by itself in open ground, is the most wilful and fantastic, as well as the most graceful, of all the firs; imitating the shape, not of its kindred, but of an enormous ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... left, close to the public house, and then go straight on; it is the third house past Poret's. There is a small spruce-fir close to the gate; you cannot make ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... galleries for the Household, peeresses and their daughters, &c. The simplest pew below belongs to the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward, peers and their sons, or members of Parliament, &c. The Chapel Royal, like the State-rooms, is fresh and spruce from renewal. It has, however, wisely avoided all departure from the original character of the building, which has nothing but the carved roof and the great square window to distinguish it from any other chapel of the same size and style. It is difficult to realise that it ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... in Southern Michigan at an elevation of forty feet. In all cases the nests are placed high in hemlocks or pines, which are the bird's favorite resorts. From all accounts the nests of this species are elegantly and compactly made, consisting of a densely woven mass of spruce twigs, soft vegetable down, rootlets, and fine shreds of bark. The lining is often intermixed with horse hairs and feathers. Four eggs of greenish-white or very pale bluish-green, speckled or spotted, have usually ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... shore, and that probably was the reason I had hitherto neglected it. There was a strip of woodland belonging to the Oaklands estate through which a part of the road lay. There had been a recent fall of snow and this was still clinging heavily to the trees, especially to the spruce and hemlocks, bringing strangely to mind the muffled, mysterious figures of the Sisters of Charity and Nuns, as I used to see them gliding about the streets of the old world cities. Here and there interspersed with the ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... readers of Amateur Mechanics may desire to build a box kite, a simple method of constructing one of the modern type is given in detail as follows: The sticks should be made of straight grained wood, which may be either spruce, basswood or white pine. The longitudinal corner spines, A A, should be 3/8 in. square by 42 in. long, and the four diagonal struts, B, should be 1/4 in. by 1/2 in., and about 26 in. long. Two cloth ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... before noon next day, and was over in little more than half an hour. Soames—pale, spruce, sad-eyed in the witness-box—had suffered so much beforehand that he took it all like one dead. The moment the decree nisi was pronounced he left the Courts ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... tooth simply has got to be filled by someone, and the only person who can fill it with anything permanent is a dentist. You wonder if you might not be able to patch it up yourself for the time being,—a year or so—perhaps with a little spruce-gum and a coating of new-skin. It is fairly far back, and wouldn't have to be a ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... road with the buggy," said the man, "if we could of took things easy." They were riding almost straight away from the sun. His dress had been changed again, and in a suit of new, dark brown homespun wool, over a pink calico shirt and white cuffs and collar, he presented the best possible picture of spruce gentility that the times would justify. "'What day of the month,' did you ask? I'll never tell you, but I ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... fringing the land within, and another dark strip fringing the barren Eilean Chaisteil outside,—lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully diminutive, but evidently a little thing of high spirit, taut-masted, with a smart rake aft, and a spruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her triangular flag of blue in the sun. I pointed first to the manse, and then to the yacht. The minister shook ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... be"—undoubtedly suit him, that dainty, military, very English kind of pride, in seeming precisely what one is, neither more nor less. And the first mention of Uthwart's purpose defines also the vague outlooks of James Stokes, who will be a soldier too. Uniforms, their scarlet and white and blue, spruce leather and steel, and gold lace, enlivening the old oak stalls at service time—uniforms and surplices were always close together here, where a military garrison had been established in the suburbs for centuries past, and there were always ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... there, however, and up the hill toiled, and to the door of a sort of spruce-looking lanthorn of a house, without tree or shrub near it. But still it might be good to sleep in; and, nothing daunted by the maid's prophecies and ominous voice, we determined to try our fate. Sir Culling got down and rubbed his hands; while, after his man's knocking at the door several times, ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... so doing! Upside down or wedged across a channel under water, trees were all the same to Hervey Willetts. He lived in trees. He knew nothing whatever about the different kinds of trees and he could not tell spruce from walnut. But he could hang by one leg from a rotten branch, the while playing a harmonica. He was for the boy scout movement, because he was for movement generally. As long as the scouts kept moving, he was with them. He had a lot ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... stone to put in the bow of my canoe. That was to steady the little craft by bringing her nose down to grip the water. Then the secret was out, and there it was in a little dome of dried grass among some spruce ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... departure we started work on the canoe. A strip of spruce 1 inch thick, 3 inches wide and 12 feet long served as the keelson. At the stern a post 1-1/2 inches thick, 3 inches wide and 13 inches high was secured to the keelson with brass screws. This was braced as indicated in Fig. 104. At the bow a stem piece was attached to the keelson. This stem was cut ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... on the veranda, and aunt Helen led me into the dining-room, where a spruce maid was making a pleasant clatter in laying the table. Caddagat was a very old style of house, and all the front rooms opened onto the veranda without any such preliminary as a hall, therefore it was necessary ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... said Dapplegrim; "make haste, now, and throw the ox-hides, with the spikes in them, over me, and throw down the tar-barrel on the plain; then climb up into that great spruce-fir yonder. When it comes, fire will flash out of both nostrils, and then the tar-barrel will catch fire. Now, mind what I say. If the flame rises, I win; if it falls, I lose; but if you see me winning, take and cast the bridle—you must take it off me—over its head, ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... it is, although we did not think to see him again so soon," replied Happy Tom Langdon, "and the other—I do not allude to de Langeais— is that spruce and devout young man, Lieutenant George Dalton, also of the staff ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Paul's reverence for Mr. Augustus Tomlinson increased by a sight of his abode. He found him settled in a polite part of the town, in a very spruce parlour, the contents of which manifested the universal genius of the inhabitant. It hath been objected unto us, by a most discerning critic, that we are addicted to the drawing of "universal geniuses." We plead Not Guilty in former instances; we allow the soft impeachment in ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Vermont,—abundant, filling swamps acres in extent, alone or associated with other trees, mostly black spruce; growing depressed and scattered on Katahdin at an altitude of 4000 feet; Massachusetts,—rather common, at least northward; Rhode Island,—not reported; Connecticut,—occasional in the northern half of the state; reported as far south ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... wrong— No, no! What should you see? I startled you. Happen I look a wee bit muggerishlike— A ragtag hipplety-clinch: but I've been travelling Mischancy roads; and I'm fair muggert-up. Yet, why should that stagnate you? Where's the sense Of expecting a mislucket man like me To be as snod and spruce as a young shaver? But I'm all right: there's naught amiss with Jim, Except too much of nothing in his belly. A good square meal, and a pipe, and a decent night's rest, And I'll be fit as a fiddle. I've hardly slept ... Well, now I'm home, I'll make ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... she was halted. She plunged around a sharp turn in the ravine, trying to step on the dryer places, and found herself confronted by a man standing under the shelter of a wide-armed spruce. ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... when Blake and Harding led two packhorses through a thin spruce wood, with Benson lagging a short distance behind. They had spent some time crossing a wide stretch of rolling country, dotted with clumps of poplar and birch, which was still sparsely inhabited, and now they had reached the edge of the timber belt that cuts off the prairie from the desolate ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... unlet building ground outside the stagnant town, with the larger ring where the Circus was last week. The temperature changed, the dialect changed, the people changed, faces got sharper, manner got shorter, eyes got shrewder and harder; yet all so quickly, that the spruce guard in the London uniform and silver lace, had not yet rumpled his shirt-collar, delivered half the dispatches in his shiny little ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... side of the front step. A servant threw open the door of the breakfast room, and Delme mechanically entered it. It was filled with strangers; on some of these the spruce undertaker was fitting silk scarfs; while others were busy ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... sixteen gallons of warm water into a barrel, with twelve pounds of molasses, and half a pound of the essence of spruce. When cool, add a pint of yeast, stir it well for two or three days, and put it into stone bottles. Wire down the corks, pack the bottles in saw dust, and the liquor will ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... came to a high arch, fashioned from boughs of fir and spruce trees. The wains were ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... Miss Prue was right about her own house. Two coats of paint outside gave it a decidedly spruce appearance, while, inside, that lady's vision as to its capabilities had been more than realized. The blending of roughness and luxury, of camp and home characteristics, gave the large central apartment a quaintness ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... I declared. So I did, through the spruce woods and over the field as fast as my feet could carry me, thanking my stars that there was a Max to go to ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to the stairs, smiling to himself. Christmas at Spindrift was fun. The entire scientific staff and their families joined in, first in cutting their own trees from the stand of spruce at the back side of the island, then in decorating the big tree in the Brant library. On Christmas Eve there was a Yule log to be brought in and presents to be exchanged, although the Brants waited until morning to open their ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... through a fat and flourishing rejuvenated land, stopping at the towns of Willows, Red Bluff and Redding, crossing the counties of Colusa, Glenn, Tehama, and Shasta, went the spruce wagon drawn by the dappled chestnuts with cream-colored manes and tails. Billy picked up only three horses for shipment, although he visited many farms; and Saxon talked with the women while he looked over the stock with ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... one consent. "Really!" they exclaimed, "this isn't our Pao-yue. But his looks too are spruce and nice; and he is as precocious too with ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... that meandered among the spruce and pine, skirting the edges of the mountain meadows and keeping within the timber, Cheyenne finally reached the main ridge of the range. Occasionally he dismounted and examined the ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... a rich golden gloom, the result of the constant rotting of the brown and yellow bark, not only of the prostrate trees, but of the many killed by crowding and unable to seek the earth with the natural instinct of death. And above, the green of hemlock and spruce was perennially fresh and young, glistening and fragrant. Here and there was a small clearing where the clans had erected their ingenious and hideous totem poles, out of place in the ancient ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... few of the decoys were of pine wood, rudely carved out and burnt to something like the natural coloring of the bird they were intended to represent; but a large proportion of them were "sea-weed" or "spruce" decoys; that is, bunches of the weather-bound sea-wrack, or bundles of evergreen twigs, made about the shape and size of the ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... sure of it. Only look at him. He is as spruce as if he had only just come out of a band-box. But hush, not a word. There, that's a dear. Lean your head against ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... beyond the little village, which did not seem to contain more than seven or eight cottages, each half-buried in trees, or overgrown with creepers, except one red brick house, that flared in all the pride of newness, and of the gaudy flowers in its spruce little garden. In the middle of the irregular square, or rather of the wide part of the village road, for it could not be called a street, stood a tall May-pole, still adorned with two or three faded remnants of the streamers which had decorated it a month before. On an eminence beyond ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... Interviewer: Mrs. Bernice Bowden Person interviewed: Julia Grace 819 N. Spruce Street, Pine ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... water. Haught said he had never seen Beaver Dam Creek dry until this season. We traveled on until we came to a wide, open space, where three forks of this canyon met, and where in the middle of this glade there rose a lengthy wooded bench, shaded and beautified by stately pines and silver spruce. At this point water appeared in the creek bed, flowing in tiny stream that soon gathered volume. Cold and clear and pure it was all that was needed to make this spot an ideal camp site. Haught said half a mile below there ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... continuity of the dry season is broken by a rainy fit commencing a few days after the autumnal equinox, and called el Cordonazo de San Francisco. "Throughout South America (observes Mr. Spruce) the periodical alternations of dry and rainy weather are laid to the account of those saints whose 'days' coincide nearly with the epochs of change. But if the weather be rainy when it ought to be fair, or if the rains ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... Canal Street on the north to Wall Street on the south; but Edison soon realized that this territory was too extensive for the initial experiment, and he decided finally upon the district included between Wall, Nassau, Spruce, and Ferry streets, Peck Slip and the East River, an area nearly a square mile in extent. One of the preliminary steps taken to enable him to figure on such a station and system was to have men go through this district on ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... not troubling us: we went dutifully every Sunday to the green-and-white schoolhouse under the tall spruce trees, and heard a sermon preached by a young man from the college, who had a deep and intimate knowledge of Amos and Elisha and other great men long dead, and sometimes we wished he would tell us more about the people who are ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... swaggering, proud and vain, They seem to think they may well disdain With the peasant a glass of his wine to drain But, soft—to the left o' the fire I see Three riflemen, who from the Tyrol should be Emmerick, come, boy, to them will we. Birds of this feather 'tis luck to find, Whose trim's so spruce, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... such good time that Kit had rubbed down the pony and made him as spruce as a race-horse, before Mr Garland came down to breakfast; which punctual and industrious conduct the old lady, and the old gentleman, and Mr Abel, highly extolled. At his usual hour (or rather at his usual minute ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... high that for an instant I saw the treetops beneath it. But it came back to earth with awful force, and I felt the ground tremble as it crushed a wide way through the woods. It finally brought up at the bottom of a gulch with a wreckage of hundreds of noble spruce trees that it had crushed ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... massive of living things, furnished most of them. But the largest happen to be the two giant incense cedars, which stand on either side of the main entrance. These are eight feet and ten inches in diameter. Then there are two columns on the south side, both cut from a spruce that was four feet seven inches through at ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the merits of the different animals he meets with there. These important duties being done, he strolls to an exhibition, or to a print-shop, and looks over a portfolio of caricatures; thence he keeps on moving to a fashionable hotel, to take white spruce beer(!) and sandwiches; here, after arranging his parties for the evening, be returns home to dress. After looking over the cards which have been left for him, he proceeds to his toilette with his valet, and is dressed about seven, when his chariot ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... of matters journalistic, Marrineal lapsing tactfully into the role of attentive listener again, until there appeared in the lower room a dark-faced man of thirty-odd, spruce and alert, who, upon sighting them, came confidently forward. Marrineal ordered him a drink and presented him to the two journalists as Mr. Ely Ives. As Mr. Ives, it appeared, was in the secret of Marrineal's journalistic connection, the talk was resumed, becoming ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... made. Just before the fifteen minute time allowance had expired, the two girls stepped out into a glorious forest morning. Great trees towered above them, the forest birds were raising their voices in a melodious chorus, fresh, pungent odors from spruce and hemlock trees filled the air and somewhere near at hand, a ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge
Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
