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More "Thorn" Quotes from Famous Books



... death from us has torn, We did not think so soon to part; An anxious care now sinks the thorn Still deeper ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... June had lured her rose To mask the sharpness of its thorn; Knocked yet again, heard only yet Thee singing of ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare

... being so greedy she forgot to be afraid, and actually flew to a neighbouring thorn tree to meet the Cardinal, coming with food, before she realized what she had done. For once gluttony had its proper reward. She not only missed the bite, but she got her little self mightily well scared. With popping ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter

... a day—that is, we did not start again until the evening, husbanding our strength for the worst part of the way, which was yet to come. From this point the water-holes became less frequent, and the landscape particularly cheerless—monotonous stony expanses alternating with hideous thorn-thickets. Yet both men and beasts held out bravely through those three miserable days, and on the 12th of May we reached in good condition, though wetted to the skin by a sudden and unexpected downpour of rain, the charming ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... potatoes and young beets separately till tender; then peel and slice. Put thorn in alternate layers in a vegetable dish, with salt to taste, and enough sweet cream nearly to cover. Brown in the ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... did come a visitor in the night, as evidenced by a scrawled warning, on a dirty piece of paper, fastened to a stubby tree by a long, sharp thorn. ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

... shillings, three watercolour paintings, "Spring," "The Banjo Player," and "Windsor Castle," for five shillings; a tiny fender, half-a-crown; a toilet set, five shillings; another very small square-topped table, three and sixpence. Whenever I bid for anything, Whitehall thrust his black-thorn up into the air, and presently I found him doing so on my behalf when I had no intention of buying. I narrowly escaped having to give fourteen and sixpence for a stuffed macaw in a ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... no error, the Bible was true, more or less; Faith was not built on running water or on sand. Life was not a mere hellish mockery, where tiaras turned to crowns of thorn and joy was but an inch rule by which to measure the alps of human pain. Life was a door, a gateway. The door dreadful, the gate perilous, if you will, but beyond it lay no dream, no empty blackness. Beyond ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard

... prey. For if we do not utterly fail, which is the lot of so many of us, still partial success has little power of bringing perfect satisfaction to a human spirit. One loss counterbalances any number of gains. No matter how soft is the mattress, if there is one tiny thorn sticking up through it all the softness goes for nothing. There is always a Mordecai sitting at the gate when Haman goes prancing through it on his white horse; and the presence of the unsympathetic and stiff-backed Jew, sitting stolid at the gate, takes the gilt ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... depth being from two to three fathoms. At the fourth hour, imagining our cattle to be far behind, we pulled in, and walked up a well-cultivated hill to Yaragonjo's, the governor of these parts. The guide, however, on first sighting his thorn-fenced cluster of huts, regarding it apparently with the awe and deference due to a palace, shrank from advancing, and merely pointed, till he was forced on, and in the next minute we found ourselves confronted with the heads of the establishment. The father of the house, surprised at our unexpected ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke

... and the aik and the thorn (Sweet fruits are sair to gather) He's laid his brother to lie forlorn: And the wind ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... have I kept for thee. And the Beloved to know and to have peace in the remembering. But what doth be the peculiar sorrow of they that have gone over-lightly, when that they shall meet the Beloved; for then shall there be a constant and inward regret, as a thorn in the heart, that they not to have observed alway that holy care of all which doth pertain unto love; and they nigh to moan in the spirit, if they had but known, if they had but known. Yet, in the end, of their pain, shall they ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... That I shall ravish you! Your arms are languorous lilies— There is not a thorn In all your slender greenness, And you are sweet to ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert

... Ilion's city came by stealth A spirit as of windless seas and skies, A gentle phantom-form of joy and wealth, With love's soft arrows speeding from its eyes— Love's rose, whose thorn doth pierce the soul in ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus

... psychological fact of long standing we know that other elements may be injected into that system so as to change it, or that one system may be destroyed and another system built up to take its place. This is the secret of cures of this nature—of mental troubles—the irritating factor, the thorn in the ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... Thorn—', no, 'Thorndyke, Lawton and Dwight.' I'm too excited—convicts must feel like that when they tunnel a hole and get out. It will be ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... song, Voluptuous soul of the amorous South! Oh! whence the wind, the rain, the drouth; The dews of eve; the mists of morn; The bloom of rose; the thistle's thorn; Whence light of love; whence dark of scorn; Whence joy; whence grief; Death, born of wrong— Ah! whence is life ten-thousand passions throng?— Thence ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe

... been the awakening of a new life within her; it marked her off from the criminals whose only regret is failure in securing their evil wish. Deronda could not utter one word to diminish that sacred aversion to her worst self—that thorn-pressure which must come with the crowning of the sorrowful better, suffering because of the worse. All this mingled thought and feeling kept him silent; speech was too momentous to be ventured on rashly. There were no words of comfort that did not carry ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... descending to the high-road in parallel lines, their back gardens (which are somewhat longer) climbing to a little wood of secular elms, traditionally asserted to be the remnant of a mighty forest. The party hedge is heightened by a thick screen of white-thorn on which the buds were just showing pink when I took up my lodging in the left-hand cottage (the 10th of May by my diary); and at the end of it are two small arbours, set back to back, their dilapidated sides and roofs ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... account of me above that which he seeth me to be, or heareth from me. And by reason of the exceeding greatness of the revelations—wherefore that I should not be exalted overmuch, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... charmed them with the prospect of a fete, which, as he said, he was to give in my honor, and they believed the mockery, and allowed themselves to be touched by that noble condescension, and felt not the cruel boasting with which he solemnizes the return of him who is a thorn in his flesh, a thorn which he is firmly determined to pluck out, and tread under foot! I came here humble, poor, and empty-handed, and he solemnizes my return by offering presents to my mother and my sisters! And they accept them, feel not at all the degradation, and will appear at the ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach

... cut him off ere he win to the Tongue of Jagai. 5 But if he be passed the Tongue of Jagai, right swiftly turn ye then, For the length and the breadth of that grisly plain is sown with Kamal's men. There is rock to the left, and rock to the right, and low 10 lean thorn between, And ye may hear a breech bolt snick where never ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... he climbed the lava to the topmost cone, and never slipped on a ragged crust nor touched a choya thorn. A voice called to him. He saw Nell's eyes in the stars, in the velvet blue of sky, in the blackness of the engulfing shadows. She was with him, a slender shape, a spirit, keeping step with him, and memory was strong, sweet, beating, beautiful. Far down in the west, ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey

... Vladika had certainly expressed to me a hope that he should visit England some time. There can be no doubt that it is well worth while thus to secure the alliance of the Montenegrians, for they would prove a bitter thorn in any collision either with Turkey or Austria. The country is divided into twelve military jurisdictions, under so many captains, and every man is bound to serve, though by what power, except inclination, I am sure I do not know. I do not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... hoarsely. "You've said the wrong thing." He peered round earnestly at the door, to make sure Joan had not returned. "Baxter—the man she's going to marry—is a perfect martyr to indigestion. It is the one thorn in the rose. A most suitable match in every other way, but he lives"—and the old gentleman tapped Vane on the shoulder to emphasise this hideous thing—"he lives on ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... because he splashed mud all over me. Old Peter brought me one day an immense pair of boots large enough for me to jump into when going from one place to another, and to jump out of and leave at the entrance of the sick wards. With these, an army blanket thrown over my shoulders and pinned with a thorn, and my dress kilted up like a washerwoman's, I defied alike the liquid streets and the piercing wind. My "nursery" was at this time filled to overflowing. My mind's eye takes in every nook and corner of that large room. It is very ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers

... but the first time that she looked at him be became as red as a carrot; for nothing in the world would he have looked a second time—he wriggled on his chair for an hour afterward as if he had been seated on a thorn; he told me afterward that the look had recalled to his mind all the histories of that impudent Bradamanti about the savagesses, which made him blush so much, my old prude ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... did, and I had never, to my knowledge, felt just so about Agnes Anne. Indeed, I don't think I had ever held Agnes Anne's hand so long in my life, except to pick a thorn out of it with a needle, or to point out ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett

... country called Red Russia, the palatinate of Belz, and a portion of the province of Volhynia. But even this did not satisfy the spoliators. The treaty was scarcely signed when Frederick extended the limits of his acquisitions in the neighbourhood of Thorn, and to the east of the Devenza, while Austria seized on Casimir, part of the palatinate of Lublin, and some lands lying on the right bank of the Bog. Were not these three powers actuated by a spirit of revenge and envy, as well ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... have no thorn To lean my breast on. I've been happy all day, And happiness ever made a ...
— The Lamp and the Bell • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... did, and tied their horses to a thorn-bush growing thereby; and Waywearer took the bundle off his horse and said to Osberne: "Hast thou any guess at what this good thing is?" Osberne reddened and said: "That is the sword which thou didst promise me last spring." Waywearer laughed and ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris

... the gnarled thorn, Prattles upon his frolic flute, or flings, In bounding flight across the golden morn, An azure gleam from off his splendid wings. Here the slim-pinioned swallows sweep and pass Down to the far-off river; the black crow With wise and wary ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman

... the secret of his taste when he wrote in "Wenderholme": "For the present we must leave him (Captain Eureton) in the tranquil happiness of devising desks and pigeon-holes with Mr. Bettison, an intelligent joiner at Sooty thorn, than which few occupations can be more delightful." About the pigeon-holes, a friend of my husband once made a discovery which he declared astounding. "I well knew that Mr. Hamerton was a model of order," he said to me; "but I only knew to what extent when, having to seek ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... than Peter? and yet by repentance (saith Curysologus) they got both Magisterium et ministerium sanctitatis, the Magistery of holiness. The prodigal son went far, but by repentance he came home at last. [6774]"This alone will turn a wolf into a sheep, make a publican a preacher, turn a thorn into an olive, make a debauched fellow religious," a blasphemer sing halleluja, make Alexander the coppersmith truly devout, make a devil a saint. [6775]"And him that polluted his mouth with calumnies, lying, swearing, and filthy tunes and tones, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... whether he could keep his hold on the Belgian coast. About thirty miles along the coast from Ostend, and forty or more miles from Zeebrugge, lay the port of Dunkirk, occupied in strength by the navies of France and Great Britain, and by the Royal Naval Air Service. Dunkirk was a thorn in the side of the Germans. The docks and harbours at Bruges, Zeebrugge, and Ostend were incessantly bombed from the air. Ships and works were seriously damaged, but the effect on the morale of the German forces was ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... its own. Everything is all buddy-buddy now. Purges are something from the past. However, those on the very top sometimes find this unfortunate. One manner that has been devised to remove such Party members who have become a thorn in the side of the powers that be, is to have them challenged by such as ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... poured forth money to create a Paradise out here, and, when it was nearly finished, had suddenly repented of his whim and refused to spend another farthing. The thousands upon thousands of mighty trees were bounded by long, irregular walls of hard earth, at the top of which were stuck distraught thorn bushes. These walls gave the rough, penurious aspect which was in such sharp contrast to the exotic mystery they guarded. Yet in the fierce blaze of the sun their meanness was not disagreeable. Domini even liked it. It seemed to her as if the desert had thrown up waves to ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... Goodie She trots betimes Over the meadows To Farmer Grimes. And never was queen With jewelry rich As those same hedges From twig to ditch; Like Dutchmen's coffers, Fruit, thorn, and flower - They shone like William And Mary's bower. And be sure Old Goodie Went back to Weep, So tired with her ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare

... Alexandria slept in a marsh, and exposed his naked body to the stings of venomous flies.... His disciple, St. Eusebius, carried one hundred and fifty pounds of iron, and lived for three years in a dried-up well.... St. Besarion spent forty days and nights in the middle of thorn bushes, and for forty days and nights never lay down when he slept.... Some saints, like St. Marcian, restricted themselves to one meal a day, so small that they continually suffered the pangs of hunger.... Some of the hermits lived ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... over hills and over dales he fled, As if the wind him on his wings had borne; Nor bank nor bush could stay him, when he sped His nimble feet, as treading still on thorn; Grief, and Despite, and Jealousy, and Scorn, Did all the way him follow hard behind; And he himself himself loath'd so forlorn, So shamefully forlorn of womankind, That, as a snake, still lurked in ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt

... bright-winter's day? She told them of the fairy-haunted land Away the other side of Brittany, Beyond the heaths, edged by the lonely sea; 155 Of the deep forest-glades of Broce-liande, deg. deg.156 Through whose green boughs the golden sunshine creeps Where Merlin by the enchanted thorn-tree sleeps. For here he came with the fay deg. Vivian, deg.158 One April, when the warm days first began. He was on foot, and that false fay, his friend, 160 On her white palfrey; here he met his end, In these lone sylvan glades, that April-day. This tale of Merlin and the lovely fay deg. deg.163 ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold

... Quarles. "Now, here are the letters. This one is dated eighteen months ago, postmark Liverpool, written at Thorn's Hotel, Liverpool. 'Dear Jack,—Back again like the proverbial bad penny. Health first class; luck medium. Pocket full enough to have a rollick with you. Shall be with you the day after to-morrow.—Yours, C.M.' Your friend Parrish was ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner

... in one of his Cornish stories exactly this conception. Rags were offered. "Just a rag tored off a petticoat or some such thing. They hanged 'em up around about on the thorn bushes, to shaw as they'd 'a' done more for the good saint if they'd ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... New villanies on the part of this most perverted man came to my ear: but he is dead; let us spare his memory. For you—oh, still let me deem myself your friend,—your more than brother; let me hope now that I have planted no thorn in that breast, and that your affection does not shrink from the cold word ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... was in these days a thorn in our hero's side; but Mr. Hart was a scourge of scorpions. Mr. Hart never ceased to talk of Mr. Walker, and of the determination of Walker and Bullbean to go before a magistrate if restitution were not made. Cousin George of course denied the foul play, but admitted that he would repay the money ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope

... had been escorted on horseback as far as Eerste Fabrieken on the North-east Railway, when they had nearly run into the enemy's lines. They altered their course and rode to Irene, hiding themselves and fastening their horses in a clump of thorn trees, ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt

... host, and was off, and already out of the town, just as the Duke and Dr. Joel reached the inn, to try and get him back again. So they return raging and swearing, while Jobst crouches down behind a thorn-bush with his little daughter, till the coach comes up. And they have scarcely mounted it, when Dr. Cramer, of Old Stettin, drives up; for he was on his way to induct a rector (I know not whom) into his parish, as the ecclesiastical ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... celebrated in the present. Susan was that thing. It was said of her that she had kept her husband, an elegant soft old gentleman, in Congress for a quarter of a century and up to the very day of his death by being a thorn in the side of the political life of the state. She kept scrapbooks in which she pasted dangerous and damaging information about politicians and prominent men generally. Whenever one of them became a candidate ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris

... inventive handling of rhythmical language, from what Keats called the 'sensuous life of verse.' The element of song in the singing accompanied by the profound joy of motion, is so sweet that, while the incomplete lives of ordinary men bring no healing power with them, the thorn-crown of the poet will blossom into roses for our pleasure; for our delight his despair will gild its own thorns, and his pain, like Adonis, be beautiful in its agony; and when the poet's heart breaks ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... formation secured to Greece as a whole, was at its utmost in these minute reflexions of the national character, with all the relish of local difference—new art, new poetry, fresh ventures in political combination, in the conception of life, springing as if straight from the soil, like the thorn-blossom of early spring in magic lines over all that rocky land. On the other hand, it was just here that ancient habits clung most tenaciously—that old-fashioned, homely, delightful existence, to which the refugee, pent up in Athens in the years of the Peloponnesian ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... The natural strength of his Countrey. Watches and Thorn-gates. None to pass from the King's City without Pasports. His Soldiery. All men of Arms wait at Court. The Soldiers have Lands allotted them insted of Pay. To prevent the Soldiers from Plotting. The manner of sending them out on Expeditions. Requires all the ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox

... come out to ramble The hilly brakes around, For under thorn and bramble About the hollow ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman

... Williams himself was not long in coming to the Baptist position and passing beyond it. The Quakers found Rhode Island a safe asylum from persecution, whether Puritan or Dutch. More disorderly and mischievous characters, withal, quartered themselves, unwelcome guests, on the young commonwealth, a thorn in its side and a reproach to its principles. It became clear to Williams before his death that the declaration of individual rights and independence is not of itself a sufficient foundation for a state. The heterogeneous population failed to settle into any stable polity. After two generations the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... sure you want me? Are you not tired of the thorn that has fretted you so long? Remember, I am so young, so ignorant, and unfitted for a wife. Can I give you real happiness? make home what you would have it? and never see in your face regret that some wiser, better woman was not in ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott

... species of the thorn distributed throughout the United States. All the Northern species, so far as I know, have white flowers. In the South they are more inclined to be pink or roseate. If Columbus picked up at sea a spray ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... child-laughter rang out, and there appeared in the doorway, illuminated by the afternoon sunbeams, the vision of Miss Roxy's tall, lank figure, with the little golden-haired, blue-robed fairy, hanging like a gay butterfly upon the tip of a thorn-bush. Sally dropped the sheet and clapped her hands, unnoticed by her mother, who rose to pay her respects to the "cunning woman" ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... to Washington "from many official and consular sources that the late British agent at this capital [presumably Mr. Green] was always a thorn in the side of this Government, and that he is, in part, responsible for this present war."[8] It was pointed out that since this was the attitude of the Republican Government there existed at Pretoria a decided aversion to the recognition of any one who might ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell

... her betrothed, and turned from him, and hardened at his tenderness, and made her sweet shape as a thorn to his caressing, and his heart was charged with anguish for her. So at the last, when he had wept a space in silence, he cried, 'Thou hast willed it; the Jewel shall be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... for breaking up quarters at St. Louis, and the young fortune-hunters started up the river in good spirits. It was only the second time either of them had been upon a Mississippi steamboat, and nearly everything they saw had the charm of novelty. Col. Sellers was at the landing to bid thorn good-bye. ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... that li'l nest finished time began to hang heavy on his hands. Yes, Suh, it cert'nly did. Just because he didn't have anything else to do he began to add a little more to his house. One day he stepped on a thorn. 'Ouch!' cried Brer Rat, and then right away forgot the pain in a new idea. He would cover his house with thorns, leavin' just a little secret entrance for hisself! Then he would be safe, wholly safe from his big ...
— Mother West Wind "Where" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess

... commiseration. The level rain-storm smote walls, slopes, and hedges like the cloth-yard shafts of Senlac and Crecy. Such sheep and outdoor animals as had no shelter stood with their buttocks to the wind, while the tails of little birds trying to roost on some scraggy thorn were blown inside out like umbrellas. The gable end of the cottage was stained with wet, and the eaves-droppings flapped against the wall. Yet never was commiseration for the shepherd more misplaced. For that cheerful rustic was ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various

... factiousness, and were especially kind to a poor little brown baby, which they handed round and nursed by turns, but the heat, the filth, and the stench of the ship defied description. At Mahar, one of the places where they landed, Burton injured his foot with a poisonous thorn, which made him lame for the rest of the pilgrimage. Presently the welcome profile of Radhwa came in view, the mountain of which the unfortunate Antar [119] sang ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... his wife, eagerly, "that would be a blessing! And though Tibby would be a thorn in every inch of grandmamma's body, if they were alone together, I have no doubt they would get on very well ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald

... clinching of his fist, a knitting of his brows, and a gathering blackness in his eyes as he listened while Katy, rousing partially from her lethargy, talked of the days when she was a little girl, and Morris had built the playhouse for her by the brook, where the thorn apples grew and the waters fell over ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... manner to view her betrothal with such a man as Frank? Her mother's remarks depressed her more than she could have thought it possible; the excitement of the morning was having its reaction, and she longed to go up to the solitude under the thorn-tree, where she had hoped to ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... The girl's thorn-scarred, sun-blistered hands clasped together almost convulsively. But she met his look of ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet

... and fair, They knew I could have for the asking, and so they went on with their fun, Till the "Senior Partner" gave a cough, and then all their mirth was done. But I asked from Heaven though I know the way is mingled flower and thorn, That not one from partner to porter may bear all I have borne. So Jasper thinks I am sad; how the wintry winds whistle to-night! Heaven grant no poor woman or children are out in this sleety blight. I cannot read this eve; what ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins

... need not murmur, though you are sorry.' MURISON. 'But St. Paul says, "I have learnt, in whatever state I am, therewith to be content."' JOHNSON. 'Sir, that relates to riches and poverty; for we see St. Paul, when he had a thorn in the flesh, prayed earnestly to have it removed; and then he could not be content.' Murison, thus refuted, tried to be smart, and drank to Dr. Johnson, 'Long may you lecture!' Dr. Johnson afterwards, speaking of his not drinking wine, said, 'The Doctor spoke of lecturing (looking to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... the cabin so near the road. So he put her up on his horse and bade her follow. The rain had ceased for the time being, though evidently the storm was not yet over. The tracks led up a wash to a wide flat where mesquite, prickly pear, and thorn-bush grew so thickly that Jennie could not ride into it. Duane was thoroughly concerned. He must have her horse. Time was flying. It would soon be night. He could not expect her to scramble quickly through that brake on foot. ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey

... appeared. The man gave himself up for lost: but, to his utter astonishment, the Lion, instead of springing upon him and devouring him, came and fawned upon him, at the same time whining and lifting up his paw. Observing it to be much swollen and inflamed, he examined it and found a large thorn embedded in the ball of the foot. He accordingly removed it and dressed the wound as well as he could: and in course of time it healed up completely. The Lion's gratitude was unbounded; he looked upon the man as his friend, and they shared the cave for some time together. A day came, ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop

... night nor shadow of earthly care. I come not to bid you forget; I come to bid you remember. Remember all that is past, treasure it in the secret storehouse of the soul where the few flowers culled from life's abundant thorn are laid in their fragrance and garnered up. Remember also the future. Think that your time is short, and that the labour shall be sweet; so that in a few quick years you shall reap a harvest of unearthly blooming. Fear not to tread boldly in ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford

... century of years and dreary wastes of sea and land lay between 'em, but these cow-slip blows and daisies took them back to their youth and the sunny fields they wandered in with the young lover whose eyes wuz as blue as the English violets, while their own cheeks wuz as rosy as the thorn flowers. ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley

... Alfred's own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons, as they did at the Alma. "The Christians led up their line from the lower ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree, marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our very own eyes have seen)." Bless the old chronicler! Does he think nobody ever saw the "single thorn-tree" but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day, just on the edge of ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... Ronsard. His writings were epical, lyrical, tragical, satirical, and especially elegiacal. He is a classic in Poland. Grochowski left a volume of diversified poems, hymns on various texts of Thomas a Kempis, The Nights of Thorn, etc. Martin Bielski, who was an historian too, but in Latin, left two political satires on the condition of Poland, and his son Joachim wrote a history of ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet

... satisfactory: she hates learning, sewing, washing up the dishes, all equally. I am sorry to say she shows no natural piety. Her companions detest her, and the nuns, although they admit that she is not exactly naughty, seem to feel her as a dreadful thorn in the flesh. She spends hours and hours on the terrace overlooking the sea (her great desire, she confided to me, is to get to the sea—to get back to the sea, as she expressed it), and lying in the garden, under the big myrtle-bushes, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... doctor. Brought him over from Africa. He didn't like his master, 'cause he was mean. So he make a little man out of mud. An' he stick thorns in its back. Sure 'nuff, his master got down with a misery in his back. An' de witch doctor let de thorn stay in de mud-man until he thought his master had got 'nuff punishment. When he tuck it ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration

... wives have not been good ones. Jerome Cardan was so unfortunate as to have a wife who was proverbial for her ill temper and arbitrary conduct. John Knox said of Lord Erskine, "He has a very Jezebel to his wife." Salmasius, the opponent of Milton, was made perpetually uneasy by a similar thorn. The unfortunate husband was a Frenchman, and Milton said (as Dr Johnson observes,) "Tu es Gallus, et, ut aiunt, nimium gallinaceus." Milton himself seems to have suffered from a similar cause, for he evinces so much hostility ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous

... Brahma, saw that ascetic with knotted hair, clad in rags, and his flesh, skin, and sinews dried up owing to the hard penances he was practising. And the Grandsire addressing him, that penance-practising one of great fortitude, said, 'What is that thorn doest, O Sesha? Let the welfare of the creatures of the worlds also engage thy thoughts. O sinless one, thou art afflicting all creatures by thy hard penances. O Sesha, tell me the desire implanted in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... in the bush and blazed apace, The thorn-leaves crackled and twisted and sweated in anguish; Then God left ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence

... for slaughter now; he lusted blood—the blood of the Anthropoid pack which from the beginning had hung upon his flank and been as a thorn ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... full moon, but a young crescent. I saw her through a space in the boughs overhead. She and the stars, visible beside her, were no strangers where all else was strange: my childhood knew them. I had seen that golden sign with the dark globe in its curve leaning back on azure, beside an old thorn at the top of an old field, in Old England, in long past days, just as it now leaned back beside a stately spire in this ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... day was the day of St. John, the longest in all the year, and they travelled far, till at last in the long afternoon they arrived in sight of a cluster of little homesteads, clay huts thatched with bracken and fenced about with bushes of poison-thorn, and of tilled crofts sloping down the hillside to a clear river wending ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton

... to kill instead protects. Last September I watched two larvae of the rather common moth, Protoparce sexta, the tomato sphinx. Great fat green fellows as large as one's thumb, they were, each with a spine-like thorn cocked jauntily on his rear segment. They had fattened on my tomato vines until they had reached their full growth and were ready to go into the cocoon stage, in winter quarters. They dropped from the vines and began to wander hastily, but seemingly aimlessly, on the ground beneath. But ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... and looked upon the river, which was not more than a couple of hundred yards from the terrace or platform on which it stood. The ground here sloped rapidly to the banks, and, like that in the front, was a wilderness with rock and patches of tall fern and thickets of thorn and bramble, with a few trees of great size. Nor was wild life wanting in this natural park; some deer were feeding near the bank, while on the water numbers of wild duck and other water-fowl were disporting ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson

... sink in mats of clover sweet, Or see before us from the lawn The lark go up to greet the dawn! All birds that love the English sky Throng round my path when she is by: The blackbird from a neighboring thorn With music brims the cup of morn, And in a thick, melodious rain The mavis pours her mellow strain! But only when my Katie's voice Makes all the listening woods rejoice, I hear—with cheeks that flush and pale— The passion ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... our lips met. We were near a handy bowery alcove at the end of a walk, in the most retired part of the garden, so that we could easily hear anyone approaching, and it was so closed in all round by a thick thorn fence, with a wall behind, that no one could creep close enough to spy ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous

... view of these two opposite influences of the forms of destruction of the group symbol upon the solidity of the group by reference to the consequences of the destruction of the Jewish temple by Titus. The hierarchal Jewish state was a thorn in the flesh of the Roman statecraft that aimed at the unity of the empire. The purpose of dissolving this state was accomplished, so far as a certain number of the Jews were concerned, by the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... mintery, cutery-corn, Apple seed and apple thorn; Wire, brier, limber-lock, Five geese in a flock, Sit and sing by a spring, O-u-t, and ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various

... one who had never appeared in this parlour was the captain's wife. That had been a thorn in Abramka's flesh. He had spent days and nights going over in his mind how he could rid this lady of the, in his opinion, wretched habit of ordering her clothes from Moscow. For this ball, however, as she herself had told him, she had ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... amorous head To kiss those matchless feet, Checked thy career too fleet, And all heaven's host of eyes Entranced, but fearful all, Saw thee, sweet Hebe, prostrate fall Upon the bright floor of the azure skies; Where, mid its stars, thy beauty lay, As blossom, shaken from the spray Of a spring thorn, Lies mid the liquid sparkles of the morn. Or, as in temples of the Paphian shade, The worshippers of Beauty's queen behold An image of their rosy idol, laid ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... felt his heart oppressed with a new and more bitter emotion. The company thought him happy in exclusive possession of the lovely girl's society—his side was pierced with a cruel, rankling thorn. ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous

... inflamed the gray, No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn, No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray; Worn horses mused: "We are not whipped to-day"; No weft-winged engines blurred the moon's ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy

... which hung from his girdle he drew a small twig and handed it to La Mothe. It was spray of wild sloe cut from a thicket and trimmed to the shape of a cross, with one stiff thorn, broad based and sharp at the point as a needle, projecting at right angles from the intersection. The marks of the knife were still fresh upon it, the bark so soft and sappy that it must have been cut from the living plant within the hour. La Mothe shook his head as he turned it ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond

... would have chosen. It was forced upon him. To travel through the jungle itself was next to impossible with a girl, especially as they were dressed for city streets and not at all for battling with dense and thorn-studded undergrowth. And to stay with the plane was obviously absurd. Sooner or later they had to abandon it, though the moment they did desert it they would be encountering not only the impersonal menace of the jungle, but the actual enmity of all the human ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... cottage gardens saluted him as he passed, and the occasional whiteness of a face at the back of a window indicated an interest in his affairs on the part of the fairer citizens of Seabridge. At the gate of the first of an ancient row of cottages, conveniently situated within hail of The Grapes, The Thorn, and The Swan, he paused, and walking up the trim-kept garden path, knocked ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs

... always had a warm side to the English and Scottish poor—his own order, indeed. If twenty or thirty families would come out as an experiment, he was ready to give L2000 without saying from whom. He bids Mr. Young speak about the plan to Thorn of Chorley, Turner of Manchester, Lord Shaftesbury, and the Duke of Argyll. "Now, my friend," he adds, "do your best, and God's blessing be with you. Much is done for the blackguard poor. Let us remember our own class, and ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... earth. At last he came to where another road crossed the way he followed, and about the crossway was the ground clearer of trees, while beyond it the trees grew thicker, and there was some underwood of holly and thorn as the ground fell off as towards ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris

... she came to have such a spirit, and whom she took after, for her mother was as quiet and meek a little woman as ever was born, and always had been; while her father was a stern, silent man, who looked upon his flighty daughter as a thorn in his side, a cross laid upon him for his good. But the fact remains that Anne was the most daring of all the young people in the parish, doing things that even the boys were afraid to do, for she had no fear, nothing awed her, and there ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... managed to tie a bundle of chaparral thorn to the bull's tail, so that the huge creature had literally lashed ...
— Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac • Ernest Thompson Seton

... foot-way tread, For all the bloomy flush of life is fled. All but yon widow'd, solitary thing That feebly bends beside the plashy spring; 130 She, wretched matron, forc'd in age, for bread, To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread, To pick her wintry faggot from the thorn, To seek her nightly shed, and weep till morn; She only left of all the harmless train, 135 The sad historian of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... and the growth was very slow, but it certainly increased, and the boy stretched out his hand to reach over an intervening gooseberry-bush so as to touch David, but he touched an exceedingly sharp thorn instead and winced, ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn

... the dialogues are those between the male occupant of the dingle and the popish propagandist, known as the man in black. More fascinating still, perhaps, are the word- master's conversations with Jasper; most wonderful of all, in the opinion of many, is his logomachy with Ursula under the thorn bush. We shall not readily forget Jasper's complaints that all the 'old-fashioned, good-tempered constables' are going to be set aside, or his gloomy anticipations of the iron roads in which people are to 'thunder along in vehicles pushed ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow

... see the end of it, How fair the well-lov'd land appears; I see September's misty heat Laid like a swooning on the corn; I see the reaping of the wheat, I hear afar the hunter's horn, I see the cattle at the ford, The panting sheep beneath the thorn! The burden of the years is scor'd, The reckoning made, Hodge walks alone, Content, contenting, his own lord, Master of what his pain ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett

... blossom, for my pain; But only at the wicket gaze I here: Old scents creep into mine inactive brain, Smooth scents of things, I may not come anear; I see, far off, old beaten pathways they adorn; I cannot feel with hands the blossom or the thorn. ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman

... dear, at midnight, or at morn, In vain exhausted nature strives to rest, Thy absence plants my pillow with a thorn, And bids me hope no more, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent

... large-flowering currant, thimbleberry, blackberry, elder, snowberry, dwarf bilberry, blueberry, black haw, hobblebush, and arrow-wood. In the way of fruit-bearing shade trees he recommends sugar maple, flowering dogwood, white and cockspur thorn, native red mulberry, tupelo, black cherry, choke cherry, and mountain ash. For the same purpose he especially recommends the planting of the following vines: Virginia creeper, bull-beaver, frost grape, ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson

... that scene in my memory; and, I doubt not, were the period ten times multiplied, it would be as vivid still to us—the surviving actors in that drama! The touch of time, which blunts the piercing thorn, as well as steals from the rose its lovely tints, is powerless here, unless to give darker shades to that picture engraven on our souls; and tears—ah, they only make ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous

... took the unruly sprite out into the desert and gave him a sound beating with thorn branches. The blood ran down the poor little creature's arms and legs, and the teats down the man's cheeks. But the only words that he said were: "You must learn to want what she wishes —do you hear?—you ...
— The Unruly Sprite - The Unknown Quantity, A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... rich in the bones of martyrs and in the relics of Christ and His apostles, it was within the ambition of the pilgrims to possess a hair of the Virgin, a thread from the seamless coat, a nail which had pierced His hand, a splinter from the cross, or a thorn which had torn His brow. All these were believed to possess powers of healing, and their possession permanently increased the dignity of families and the wealth ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell

... concluded at Hanover in the month of September. It implied a mutual guarantee of the dominions possessed by the contracting parties, their rights and privileges, those of commerce in particular, and an engagement to procure satisfaction to the protestants of Thorn, who had lately been oppressed by the catholics, contrary to the treaty of Oliva. The king having taken these precautions at Hanover, set out on his return for England; embarked at Helvoetsluys in the middle of December; and after having ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... the thorn of penitence, That of all other things the one which turned me Most to its love became the most ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante

... Aspiring to equestrian distinctions, he wrought upon maternal indulgence, until, not without misgivings, maternal anxiety was stifled, and, with injunctions that we should hover protectingly near him, he was sent forth, a thorn in our sides. In half an hour he was accidentally remembered, and was found to be nowhere within view; so we pursued our way, well pleased. He had dropped quietly off, at the first canter, into a miry slough, and had returned sobbingly, covered with mortification and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... produced by the penetration of a sharp or blunt-pointed substance, such as a thorn, fork, nail, etc., and the orifice of these wounds is always small in proportion to their depth. In veterinary practice punctured wounds are much more common than the others. They involve the feet most frequently, next the legs, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... can be used successfully as phonograph needles. These substitutes will reproduce sound very clearly and with beautiful tone. The harsh scratching of the ordinary needle is reduced to a minimum, and the thorn is not ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... brighter and brighter, until it hurt one's eyes to look at it, as though it had been the blessed sun itself. Angel Gabriel's hand was as white as silver, and in it he held a green bough with blossoms, like those that grow on the thorn bush. As for his robe, it was all of one piece, and finer than the Father Abbot's linen, and shone beside like the sunlight on pure snow. So I knew from all these things that it ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle

... characteristic feature is its beak, the upper mandible having two sharp processes and a sharp hooked point. It cannot fly away to any distance with the bird it kills, nor hold it in its claws to feed upon it. It usually impales its victim upon a thorn, or thrusts it in the fork of a limb. For the most part, however, its food seems to consist of insects,—spiders, grasshoppers, beetles, etc. It is the assassin of the small birds, whom it often destroys in pure wantonness, ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... especially as the United States had suffered an alarming decrease of specie, and as no one save a few individuals, inspired solely by cupidity, had asked for a new bank. Spencer, however, relied principally in his attack upon affidavits of Obadiah German, the Republican leader of the Assembly, and Stephen Thorn of the same body, charging that Senator Ebenezer Purdy, the father of the measure, had offered them large rewards for their votes, German having Purdy's admission that he had become convinced of the propriety of incorporating the bank after a confidential conference ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... district of Memel. Napoleon demands the Polish provinces of Prussia for the new kingdom of Poland to be organized; but your majesty is to keep Pomerelia and the districts of Kulm, Elbing, and Marienwerder. The district of the Netze, as well as the canal of Bromberg and Thorn, will be taken from Prussia; Dantzic, with its surroundings, is to be constituted a free—I believe, a free German city, under the joint protection of Saxony and Prussia. Russia is to cede the island of Corfu to France. This is Napoleon's 'ultimatum,'" said Alexander, laying the ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach

... growing thick and strong, and it was full of flowers, as the cowslip and the oxlip, and the chequered daffodil, and the wild tulip: the black-thorn was well-nigh done blooming, but the hawthorn was in bud, and in some places growing white. It was a fair morning, warm and cloudless, but the night had been misty, and the haze still hung about the meadows of the Dale where they were wettest, and the grass and its ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris

... fight for Ireland better in London than in Dublin. And again, the Irishman in England can make havoc in his turn; he can harry the English, he can spite, and irritate and triumph and get his own back in a thousand ways. Living in England he would be a thorn in ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair

... their juices. The smell of the sagebrush is such that very few animals will touch it. Other plants are protected by thorns. In fact, the drier the region, the more thorny are its plants. A little shrub called the crucifixion thorn has no leaves at all, nothing but long, sharp spines. Besides the straight thorns there are curved and also barbed ones, for every conceivable form is represented among the ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks

... a topographical suffix denotes a wild uncultivated tract of hilly or common land, more often than not quite bare of trees. The great expanse of Radnor Forest is well known to the writer and not even a thorn bush comes to the mind in picturing its ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... before, when the race began, That first of the jumps had maimed a man; His horse, the Turk, had been killed and buried There in the ditch by horse-hoofs herried; And over the poor Turk's bones at pace Now, every year, there goes the race, And many a man makes doctor's work At the thorn-bound ditch that hides the Turk, And every man as he rides that course Thinks, there, of the Turk, ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield

... She, and her son too, must have been a thorn in the flesh of the Masseys. They were all rigid Puritans I understand, especially ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... Alice!" Lady Arthur said. "That reaping-machine does its work very well, but it will be a long time before it gathers a crust of poetry about it: stopping to clear a stone out of its way is different from a lad and a lass on the harvest-rig, the one stopping to take a thorn out of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... and somebody else named Krassin was Commissar of Commissars for the Com-Pubs. Newspapers were printing flat pictures in three colors only, and deploring the high cost of stereoscopic plates. And ... Thorn Hard was a high-level flier ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... same pale yellow wash, their front gardens descending to the high-road in parallel lines, their back gardens (which are somewhat longer) climbing to a little wood of secular elms, traditionally asserted to be the remnant of a mighty forest. The party hedge is heightened by a thick screen of white-thorn on which the buds were just showing pink when I took up my lodging in the left-hand cottage (the 10th of May by my diary); and at the end of it are two small arbours, set back to back, their dilapidated sides and ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... yard, where the whole troop squatted down on the ground. The teaching of Mrs. Bullimore did not make much impression upon little John, except a slight fact which she accidentally told him, and which took such firm hold of his imagination that he remembered it all his life. There was a white-thorn tree in the school-yard, of rather large size, and the ancient schoolmistress told John that she herself, when young, had planted the tree, having carried the root from the fields in her pocket. The story struck the boy as something marvellous; it was to him a sort of revelation ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin

... iron chains, took a seat with the driver; a little drizzling rain; the button trees[31] again; apples more plentiful; the drive beautiful along the river (Delaware), high hills on each side; the woods a little tinted; some thorn hedges; a good many walnut trees. Had coffee and pancakes, paid 30 cents. The land generally better cleared and the houses more substantially built. Passed a funeral of a woman who burned herself to death yesterday by smoking. A long range of stabling shut up, and the hotel changed into a private ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood

... Austria was forced, when peace was concluded, to yield Venetia to Italy retaining only a small part of its former possessions on the Adriatic so as not to be cut off entirely from a maritime outlet. This small remnant of its former Italian possessions, however, proved to be a thorn in the body politic of the Dual Monarchy. The inhabitants of this province were preponderately Italian in language and Italian in feeling and ever since the formation of the kingdom of Italy a strong propaganda was carried on with the object of finally accomplishing ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various

... dirtied carpets, torn sofa-covers, squealing brats, cross husbands, would ever discompose either of you. You ought never to marry a good-tempered man, it would be mingling honey with sugar, like sticking white roses upon a black-thorn cudgel. With this very picturesque metaphor I close my letter. Good-bye, and ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... a little bit of all right," and taking his hand, led him down the slope and posted him in the shadow of a thorn-bush. ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... selected the finest rose in his bunch and handed it to him, moving off toward the door leading into the hall as he did so. Colin lifted his head and grasped the rose rudely. As his big hand closed upon it, a thorn that hid under the white petals pierced deep into the ball of his thumb. In an instant the sleeping demon of insanity awoke. With eyes blazing and frame trembling with fury, he sprang to his feet, seized the knife, and with a hoarse, inarticulate ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley

... by the jerk of his fall. He opened the single blade it contained at once, and went back to the hedge to cut a stick. As he walked along the hedge, he thought the briar was too prickly to cut, and the thorn was too hard, and the ash was too big, and the willow had no knob, and the elder smelt so strong, and the sapling oak was across the ditch, and out of reach, and the maple had such rough bark. So he wandered along a great way through ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies

... later he lay in a dead sleep, motionless as a stone image, while the man who dragged him from his hell rested upon two chairs and grimly reviewed the problem which he had created for himself. There was no denying the fact that young Guy had been a thorn in his side almost ever since his arrival in the country. The pity of it was that he possessed such qualities as should have lifted him far above the crowd. He had courage, he had resource. Upon occasion he was even brilliant. But ever the fatal handicap existed that had pulled ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell

... never told her, unless perhaps he had told some tale against him, and made him the butt of a great joke. Well, if he had she had cared enough to defend him and help him out without ever giving away the fact that she knew. But here, too, lay a thorn to disturb him. Why had Ruth Macdonald not told him the plain truth if she knew? Was she trying to shield Harry Wainwright? Could she really care for that ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill

... foregoing conduct on the part of the post master will have shown already that Ursula, poor and resigned, was destined to be a thorn in the side of the rich Minoret. The bustle attending the settlement of an estate, the sale of the property, the going and coming necessitated by such unusual business, his discussions with his wife about the most trifling details, the purchase of the doctor's house, where ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac

... wealth may be invested. We need that One to be an undying and perpetual possession. There is One to whom our love can ever cleave, and fear none of the sorrows or imperfections that make earthward-turned love a rose with many a thorn, One for whom it is pure gain to lose ourselves, One who is plainly the only worthy recipient of the whole love and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... thorns enough!" Patricia laughed. "Mamma says I'm selfish and careless and, oh, I don't know what! So, you see, they scratch her. What's your thorn, David?" ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd

... Good water," he continued, pointing to the slight tracts of grass which had sprung up where a stream rising among the rocks was losing itself in the dry soil, but which looked brighter and greener as it was nearer to the kopje, which was fairly furnished with thorn-bush and ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn

... neighb'ring woods, and trust themselves to night. The speedy horse all passages belay, And spur their smoking steeds to cross their way, And watch each entrance of the winding wood. Black was the forest: thick with beech it stood, Horrid with fern, and intricate with thorn; Few paths of human feet, or tracks of beasts, were worn. The darkness of the shades, his heavy prey, And fear, misled the younger from his way. But Nisus hit the turns with happier haste, And, thoughtless of his friend, the ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil

... next, with dirges due in sad array Slow thro' the church-way path we saw him borne. Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay 115 Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn." ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various

... foreign rule; its strength was exhausted, and its leaders and priesthood were scattered and bankrupt. Elam was now almost the only civilised kingdom of western Asia which remained independent. It was, moreover, a perpetual thorn in the side of the Assyrians. It was always ready to give the same help to the disaffected in Babylonia that Egypt was to the rebels in Palestine, with the difference that whereas the Egyptians were an unwarlike race, the Elamites ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce

... them—his mothers and sisters!" Bessie dramatized an excess of anguish. "Oh, Mary, that is the very thorn I have been trying not to press my heart against; and does your hand commend it to my embrace? His folks! Yes, they would be folks; and what folks! I think I am getting a realizing sense. Wait! Don't speak don't move, Molly!" Bessie dropped her chin into her hand, and stared straight forward, gripping ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... reason, yet it was soon a sufficient and at last an overwhelming reason, against returning to the East. The pertinacity of the attacks made on me, and on all who dared to hold by me in a certain connexion, showed that I could no longer be anything but a thorn in the side of my friends abroad; nay, I was unable to predict how they themselves might change towards me. The idea of a Christian Church propagating Christianity while divided against itself was ridiculous. Never indeed had I had the most ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... have leisure now on shipboard to set tie that question of atomic pitches, which is still a thorn in my ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy

... habitation, not one woman, not one decent tavern; and in those days I was young, strong, hot-headed, giddy, and foolish. The only distraction I could possibly find was in the windows of the passenger trains, and in the vile vodka which the Jews drugged with thorn-apple. Sometimes there would be a glimpse of a woman's head at a carriage window, and one would stand like a statue without breathing and stare at it until the train turned into an almost invisible speck; or one would drink all one could of the loathsome vodka till one was stupefied ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... chimney smokes so. Mr. Percombe, you look as unnatural out of your shop as a canary in a thorn-hedge. Surely you have not come out ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... pins and needles, yarn and thread, that have taken the place of the wilder thorn and fibre; all kinds of small hardware; looking-glasses in lacquered frames; beads of sorts, cowries and reels of cotton; pots of odorous pomatum and shea-butter nuts; feathers of the plantain-bird ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... good answer," said Quarles. "Now, here are the letters. This one is dated eighteen months ago, postmark Liverpool, written at Thorn's Hotel, Liverpool. 'Dear Jack,—Back again like the proverbial bad penny. Health first class; luck medium. Pocket full enough to have a rollick with you. Shall be with you the day after to-morrow.—Yours, ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner

... he hesitated; then, hardening himself, he plunged the sword into her heart and a great moan was heard, and the fire disappeared, and only a withered rose-tree stood before him. Then he heard the voice say that he must pierce his own heart with a thorn from the tree and let the blood fall upon its roots. This he did, and as he did so he felt the sharpness of Death, as though the last dreadful moment had come; but as the drops of blood fell on the roots the beautiful maiden with veiled eyes, whom ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring

... seat in the Senate (1793) he offended Hamilton, and aroused the hostility of the friends of the secretary by a call for information as to the condition of the Treasury. As member of Congress in 1796 he questioned Hamilton's policy, and during Adams's entire administration was a perpetual thorn in the sides of Hamilton's successors in the department. The day after his election, February 18, 1801, Mr. Jefferson communicated to Mr. Gallatin the names of the gentlemen he had already determined upon for ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens

... the Gascoignes of another age. Lord Christobel had shown on more than one occasion that all ranks, even the highest, were equal in the eye of the law as administered by him. He was the scourge of truckling magistrates, and a thorn in the side of those petty tyrants whom our peculiar system allows to flourish in rural districts in ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward

... close to the sting, The rose is fenced by the thorn, Shall we leave to others their gathering, And turn from clustering fruits that cling To the garden wall in scorn? Albeit those purple grapes hang high, Like the fox in the ancient tale, Let us pause and try, ere we pass them by, Though we, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon

... revives just in time, is lifted on to his saddle-bow, and "they need swift steeds that follow" the fugitive pair. The sleeping beauty, who is thrown into so long a swoon by the prick of the fairy thorn, is another very old example, while "Snow-white," in her glass coffin, in the German nursery ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang

... little fawn, thy foster-child, Poor helpless orphan! it remembers well How with a mother's tenderness and love Thou didst protect it, and with grains of rice From thine own hand didst daily nourish it; And, ever and anon, when some sharp thorn Had pierced its mouth, how gently thou didst tend The bleeding wound, and pour in healing balm. The grateful nursling clings to its protectress, Mutely imploring leave ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa

... not unacquainted with fallen gentlemen, "beach-combers," "remittance men," and vagrants who had known better days, and there had been something winning in this vagrant's smile, and, moreover, he had reported that thorn in his flesh, the consular ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... morning Colonel Quinnox and a company of soldiers, riding from the city gates toward the north in response to a call for help from honest herders who reported attacks and robberies of an alarming nature, came upon the stiff, foot-sore, thorn-scratched Mr. Hobbs, not far from the walls of the town. The Colonel was not long in grasping the substance of Hobbs's revelations. He rode off at once for the Witch's hovel, sending Hobbs with a small, instructed escort to the Castle, where Baron ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... not seen Sara for a day or two, she was hastily summoned to their usual trysting-place, a spot by the river-side, where the two gardens met, and where an over-arching thorn-tree made a complete bower. Therein Sara stood, looking so pale and serious, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... the cup of the volcanic plain, and another half-hour or so to climb the edge on the farther side. Once there, however, the view was a very fine one. Before us was a long steep slope of grassy plain, broken here and there by clumps of trees mostly of the thorn tribe. At the bottom of this gentle slope, some nine or ten miles away, we could make out a dim sea of marsh, over which the foul vapours hung like smoke about a city. It was easy going for the bearers down the slopes, and by midday we had reached the borders of the dismal swamp. Here we halted ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... a species of Eucalyptus. Among the various kinds of fishes which abound in these latitudes is the thorn-back skate, one of which, even after cleaning, weighed ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... through the bush with his rod and a few troutlings, dry-shod and immaculate in a jacket that fitted him like a uniform, and Ida went back to camp with him. She fancied, however, that her father or Weston, who sat still and filled his pipe again, would have come back with a heavy fish, or at least thorn-rent and dripping wet. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... heaped The pieces of his armour in one place, All to be there against a sudden need; Then dozed awhile herself, but overtoiled By that day's grief and travel, evermore Seemed catching at a rootless thorn, and then Went slipping down horrible precipices, And strongly striking out her limbs awoke; Then thought she heard the wild Earl at the door, With all his rout of random followers, Sound on a dreadful trumpet, summoning her; Which was the red cock ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... bore the blush of May, Down towards the dark December Pass'd like the thorn-tree's bloom ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... slashed for the ease of his feet; his stockings of green yarn had been much worn, were darned at the knees, and without feet; and an old grey steeple-crowned hat, without band or lining, with a crooked thorn stick, completed the royal habiliments. The six brothers attended him with arms; two kept in advance, two followed behind, and one walked on each side. He had not gone far before he complained to Humphrey of the heavy jolting pace of the horse. ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc

... crook-beaked shrike His back may spike And pierce him with a thorn; The humble bee A tramp is he And there is none ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various

... the Master, "If thou break off a twig from one of these plants, the thoughts thou hast will all be cut short." Then I stretched my hand a little forward and plucked a branchlet from a great thorn-bush, and its trunk cried out, "Why dost thou rend me?" When it had become dark with blood it began again to cry, "Why dost thou tear me? hast thou not any spirit of pity? Men we were, and now we are become stocks; truly thy hand ought ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... had a faint resemblance to the heads of the drivers we had seen used on the links. Any elaborate splicing operations were out of the question, so we agreed that we must bore a hole in the centre of the head. The shaft sticks that we chose and trimmed were made of good thorn, white or black, and when we had prepared them to our satisfaction we put the poker in the fire and made it red hot, then bored a hole with it through the head, and tightened the shaft with wedges until the club was complete. With this ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon

... de bark offen de thorn tree and bile it with turpentine for de toothache. She used herbs for de medicine and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... Wort reappeared in a sort of furtive hurry. She gave a timid, sidelong glance at the doctor, and then addressed Bessie. Mr. Carnegie had his eye upon her: she was the thorn in his professional flesh. She meddled with his patients—a pious woman for whom other people's souls and internal complaints supplied the excitement absent from her own condition and favorite literature. She had some superfluous income and much unoccupied ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... be sure!" said Tam relieved. "A' thocht maybe the Kaiser had sent me droogged seegairs—A'm an awfu' thorn in the puir laddie's side. Ye may laugh, Mister Carter, but A' reca' a case wheer a bonnie detective wi' the same name as ye'sel', though A' doot if he wis related to ye, was foiled by the machinations o' Ferdie the Foorger at the moment ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace

... him, mounted his horse and continued his journey. He rode on and on until he came to another jungle, and there he saw a tiger who had a thorn in his foot, and was roaring loudly from ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs

... The driver turned in the saddle to see if there were any chance of capturing the revolver and ending the ride. Dick roused, struck him over the head with the butt, and stormed himself wide awake. Somebody hidden in a clump of camel-thorn shouted as the camel toiled up rising ground. A shot was fired, and the silence shut down again, bringing the desire to sleep. Dick could think no longer. He was too tired and stiff and cramped to do more than nod uneasily from time ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling

... maid-of-honour), yet there was a tinge of Jacobitism about her, such as made her extremely dislike to hear Prince Charles Edward called the young Pretender, as many loyal people did in those days, and made her fond of telling of the thorn- tree in my lord's park in Scotland, which had been planted by bonny Queen Mary herself, and before which every guest in the Castle of Monkshaven was expected to stand bare-headed, out of respect to the memory and misfortunes of the ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell

... the mynas perked and pricked, The seven sisters chattered in the thorn, The pied fish-tiger hung above the pool, The egrets stalked among the buffaloes, The kites sailed circles in the golden air; About the painted temple peacocks flew. ARNOLD, The Light ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar

... the name of Montluc meant absolutely nothing to him, it was not the same with the direct and brutal allusion which his interlocutor had made to the war of 1859. It is always a thorn in the flesh of those of our neighbors from beyond the Alps who do not love us. The pride of the Garibaldian was not far behind the generosity of the former zouave. With an abruptness equal to that of Montfanon, he ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget

... right to deliver from hell all she could carry, and carried away multitudes clinging with worn fingers to the hem of her dress; and it was she who endured dumbness for a year because of the little thorn of enchantment the fairies had thrust into her tongue; and it was a lock of her hair, coiled in a little carved box, which gave so great a light that men threshed by it from sundown to sunrise, and awoke so great a wonder that kings spent years in wandering or fell before unknown armies in ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats

... by deep and broad ditches; a few pollard willows, so old that the trunk was, in some, riven asunder, whilst in others nothing but the mere shell remained, together with here and there a stunted thorn, alone relieving the monotony of ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford

... the pallid moon, Vi'let-wing'd Zephyr fann'd each opening flower, And brush'd from fragrant cups the limpid shower; A distant huntsman fill'd his cheerful horn, The vivid dew hung trembling on the thorn, And mists, like creeping rocks, arose to meet the morn. Huge giant shadows spread along the plain, Or shot from towering rocks o'er half the main, There to the slumbering bark the gentle tide Stole soft, and faintly beat against its side; Such is that sound, which fond designs convey, ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe

... every point of their respective faiths, and when they would either make the dervish turn Mohammedan, by producing conviction in his mind, or they would become Christians, if his arguments prevailed. To this he immediately assented; but we determined beforehand, amongst ourselves, that such a thorn in the side of our Ullemah should no longer exist in Persia, and that the overwhelming truth of our belief should not be left to the chances of vain words and uplifted voices, but show itself in the zeal and numbers of its adherents. Accordingly every turbaned head, and every beard that wagged, ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... Mrs. Mary Hickman, at least she had him in her possession and reaped the benefit of his hire and enjoyed the leisure and ease thereof while he toiled. For some time prior to his leaving, this had been a thorn in his side, hard to bear; so when an opening presented itself by which he thought he could better his condition, he was ready to try the experiment. He, however, felt that, while she would not have him to look to for support, she would not be without ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... I have been several times to the Capitol, I have somehow missed seeing the Palazzo dei Conservatori, containing the famous wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, in bronze, said to have been struck by lightning (of which it bears all the marks) the day Julius Caesar was killed; the boy picking the thorn from his foot; the statue of the first Brutus; the geese of the Capitol (which are more like ducks); and the Fasti Consulares. It just occurred to me in time, and I went there yesterday morning. After dinner ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... the teeth of the shark. Armlets of small white shells were worn by the men above the elbow-joint. Some pierced their ears with a thorn, and wore a small flower for an earring; but this was not very common. A long comb, made from the stem of the cocoa-nut leaflet, was a common ornament of the women, and worn in the hair behind the ear. For a looking-glass, they sometimes used ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner

... dear Honora, that the rhododendrons will not exhaust themselves; at this moment yours opposite the library window are in the most beautiful profuse blow you can conceive, and at the end of my garden indescribably beautiful, and scarlet thorn beside. The peony tree has happily survived its removal, and is covered ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... tell you. Look, there is a quiet place in yon corner under the thorn-trees by that piece of water. See, they are leaving off work: I will go for a can of beer, and then, pray, let me ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... next day such certain signs of land were seen that the most faint-hearted took courage. The men had already noticed great flocks of land-birds flying toward the west, as if to guide them. Now some of the men on one vessel saw a branch of a thorn-bush float by. It was plain that it had not long been broken off from the bush, and it was full of ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery

... was asked by a man who knew more than any one else, and he knew very well what the answer would be. We should suspect a man of insanity who looked for grapes on a thorn bush. And yet we see numbers of both men and women looking for happiness and comfort in the Public House, and judging from their appearance afterwards, we feel sure they went for grapes and found ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness

... three watercolour paintings, "Spring," "The Banjo Player," and "Windsor Castle," for five shillings; a tiny fender, half-a-crown; a toilet set, five shillings; another very small square-topped table, three and sixpence. Whenever I bid for anything, Whitehall thrust his black-thorn up into the air, and presently I found him doing so on my behalf when I had no intention of buying. I narrowly escaped having to give fourteen and sixpence for a stuffed macaw in a ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... full sorely my skin though these briers may rend, Yet they keep off the dogs, and my life will defend: For the sake of the good, then, let evil be borne— For each sweet has its bitter, each bramble its thorn." ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park

... it finds every rose has a thorn, comes back loaded with honey from his rambles, and why should not other tourists ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... best of the situation, I remove my quarters from the cold and draughty bala-khana to the stable, and send the shagird-chapar out in quest of camel-thorn, bread, eggs, and pomegranates, thinking thus to obtain the luxury of a bit of fire and something to eat in comparative seclusion. This vain hope proves that I have not even yet become thoroughly acquainted with the Persians. No sooner does ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... its after-pang; the most beautiful rose its latent thorn. So, too, I see, is it with those who undertake to narrate facts. This day marks the loss of another shipmate, from one of those suddenly awful deaths to which the sailor is, above all other men, perhaps, ever ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... why love you Earl Godwin? He hath changed sides from party to party, and in each change won lordships and lands. He is ambitious and grasping, ye all allow; for the ballads sung in your streets liken him to the thorn and the bramble, at which the sheep leaves his wool. He is haughty and overbearing. Tell me, O Saxon, frank Saxon, why you love Godwin the Earl? Fain would I know; for, please the saints (and you and your Earl so permitting), I mean to live ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... cherish, while yet the taper glows, And the fresh flow'ret pluck ere it close; Why are we fond of toil and care? Why choose the rankling thorn to wear? ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... he with some slight embarrassment. "Stop at Ryan's," mentioning a low tavern on the borders of the reservation, which was a terrible thorn in the side of all the missionary's efforts. "Stop a minute light my pipe, but no drink one drop," he added with great earnestness; "but they ask me ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.

... Government sunk, that Lucchesini actually signed a convention at Charlottenburg (November 16), surrendering to Napoleon, in return for an armistice, the entire list of uncaptured fortresses, including Dantzig and Thorn on the Lower Vistula, Breslau, with the rest of the untouched defences of Silesia, Warsaw and Praga in Prussian Poland, and Colberg ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... exercises." Even when women ventured to hold formal religious meetings there was at first little or no protest. According to Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts Bay, when Anne Hutchinson, that creator of religious strife and thorn in the side of the Elders, conducted assemblies for women only, there was even praise for the innovation. It was only when this leader criticised the clergy that silence was demanded. "Mrs. Hutchinson thought ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... Against this thorn in the side of the realm the new emperor sent his ablest commander, and a fierce campaign ensued, in which the brigand band stubbornly fought for life and license. In the end they suffered a crushing defeat, and for the time ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... — N. sharpness &c. adj.; acuity, acumination[obs3]; spinosity[obs3]. point, spike, spine, spicule[Biol], spiculum[obs3]; needle, hypodermic needle, tack, nail, pin; prick, prickle; spur, rowel, barb; spit, cusp; horn, antler; snag; tag thorn, bristle; Adam's needle[obs3], bear grass [U.S.], tine, yucca. nib, tooth, tusk; spoke, cog, ratchet. crag, crest, arete[Fr], cone peak, sugar loaf, pike, aiguille[obs3]; spire, pyramid, steeple. beard, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... incessantly about the ship, and was full of curiosity, wanting to hear and see everything, and made herself hated exceedingly. Her husband was a decent man, and for his sake many held their tongues; but had he not been there, it would have gone hard with her. This woman was a thorn in the eyes of us all.' His delight was great, when she was left behind at Rhodes, having strayed away to some church outside the town. 'Except her husband, no one was sorry.' But their peace was short-lived, ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen

... with respect to the fieldfare (turdus pilaris) which I think is particular enough; this bird, though it sits on trees in the daytime, and procures the greatest part of its food from white-thorn hedges, yea, moreover, builds on very high trees, as may be seen by the fauna suecica; yet always appears with us to roost on the ground. They are seen to come in flocks just before it is dark, and to settle and nestle among the heath on our forest. And besides, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White

... frieze mantle, the thieves knew what lances were good for, and whether swords had edges or no. There were some three hundred of their best bonnets, besides that of their chief, Donald Cormac, left on the moor of Thorn and in Rochinroy Wood; and as many were gibbeted at Houghmanstares, which has still the name from the hangman work that was done there. This is the way men deal with thieves in my country; and if gentler methods will succeed better with these Earish knaves, do not blame Douglas for speaking his ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... was shelled by the British fleet, April 25, 1916, the city sustaining one of the longest and heaviest bombardments which it had suffered since its capture by the Germans. As a convenient base for submarines it was a particularly troublesome thorn to the Allies, and the bombardment was directed mainly at buildings suspected of being submarine workshops, and the harbor defenses. Several vessels were sunk and much damage wrought, the German batteries at Heyst, Blankenberghe, and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... a visitor in the night, as evidenced by a scrawled warning, on a dirty piece of paper, fastened to a stubby tree by a long, sharp thorn. ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

... to him, and since the trail there was narrow and thorn-hedged, she strode on ahead of him. Jerry was content, for through the midsummer woods, still dewy with morning freshness, he could follow no lovelier guide, and Jerry could be silent as ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck

... "Perfect. 'Dwight, Thorn—', no, 'Thorndyke, Lawton and Dwight.' I'm too excited—convicts must feel like that when they tunnel a hole and get out. It will be our real, ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... fables true, If true, here only, and of delicious taste: Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks Grazing the tender herb, were interposed, Or palmy hillock; or the flowery lap Of some irriguous valley spread her store, Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose: Another side, umbrageous grots and caves Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling vine Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps Luxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fall Down the slope hills, dispersed, or in a lake, That to the fringed bank ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... above the dead quarry workings of Foggintor. Underneath him opened a cavity with sides two hundred feet high. Its peaks and precipices fell, here by rough, giant steps, here stark and sheer over broad faces of granite, where only weeds and saplings of mountain ash and thorn could find a foothold. The bottom was one vast litter of stone and fern, where foxgloves nodded above the masses of debris and wild things made their homes. Water fell over many a granite shelf and in the desolation lay ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing) with my breast against this thorn of a Desk, with the only hope that some Pulmonary affliction may relieve me. Vide Lord Palmerston's report of the Clerks in the war office (Debates, this morning's Times) by which it appears in 20 years, as many Clerks ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... followed, or its consequences. It is sufficient for the proper development of our tale to say that they met at an island in North More named Solskiel, where a pitched battle was fought, and gained by Harald. The two kings were slain, but Solve Klofe escaped, and afterwards proved a great thorn in Harald's side, plundering in North More, killing many of the King's men, pillaging some places, burning others, and generally making great ravage wherever he went; so that, what with keeping him and similar turbulent characters in check, and establishing law and order in the districts of ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne

... wretchedness, Aurelia's youthful spirits had begun to revive, and the novel scenes to awaken interest. The Glastonbury thorn was the first thing she really looked at. The Abbey was to her only an old Gothic melancholy ruin, not worthy of a glance, but the breezy air of the Cheddar Hills, the lovely cliffs, and the charm of the open country, with its strange islands of hills dotted about, raised her spirits, as she ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... bring a blush to the seasoned cheek of Don Francesco himself who, unaware of her condition at one particular moment, politely ventured to enquire why she always wore black and was told that she was in mourning, as everybody ought to mourn, for his lost innocence. Being an Englishwoman, she was a thorn in the side of her moral ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... Past marshes went the painted canoes; they swam the singing shallows; they glided under shading willow; they sped by wild grape-vine and spreading elm. The stream was embroidered with a thousand grasses, dying daisies, paling goldenrod, berry bushes, and wild-rose thorn. A thousand elusive perfumes rose to greet them, a thousand changing scenes. October, in all her gorgeous furbelows, sat upon her throne. The Chevalier never uttered a word, but studied madame's half-turned ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... moist place, or near water, for he is rather proud of himself as a swimmer. He has a handsome coat, and gets a new one two, three, four, or five times in a season, if his growth require it. When the new coat is quite hard and fit for use under the old, he strips the old one off among the thorn-bushes. He and his lady hybernate. The lady leaves her sixteen or twenty eggs, all glued together, for the sun to vivify. The snake's tongue, as we have said, is forked, the jaws dilatable; he prefers frogs for his dinner, but is satisfied with mice, or little birds, or lizards. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... I want to give up every thing, every thought, every affection, in short, my whole self, to my offered Saviour. Then would His kingdom come, and His will be done. Instead of the thorn would come up the fir-tree, and instead of the brier the myrtle-tree. How precious, how holy, how peaceful, that kingdom! Oh! if I may yet hope; if mercy is left, I beseech Thee, hear and behold me, and bring me "out of the miry clay, and set ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall

... then dropped safely. No one seemed to be about upon this side of the house. He dodged low, and skimmed swiftly across the yard to the low fence. It was an easy matter to vault this, for a terror urged him such as lifts the gazelle over the thorn bush when the lion pursues. A crash through the dew-drenched weeds on the roadside, a clutching, slippery rush up the grassy side of the levee to the footpath at ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... my ordinary, when no other passage of Scripture attracts my particular attention. This is the third morning I have opened the New Testament on the 14th chapter of John, and have fed delightfully on the first three verses. There is at all times a thorn in my heart, keeping me in continual remembrance of my vile, ungrateful backslidings, so that I eat my sweetest morsels with bitter herbs. It was particularly painful to me this morning; nevertheless; the Lord God, merciful and gracious, ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham

... modern to its finger-tips, was all but complete and perfect now. Only Miss Quincey remained. St. Sidwell's in the weeding time had not been a bed of roses for Miss Cursiter, and Miss Quincey, blameless but incompetent, was a thorn in her side, a thorn that stuck. Impossible to remove Miss Quincey quickly, she was so very blameless and ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair

... man, he set off gallantly on his new commission. After waiting a time, which in our state of suspense might almost be called a period, he leisurely returned, significantly saying, that neither man nor beast could pass that way! rubbing his thorn-smitten cheek. Now came the use of the syllogism, in its simplest form. "If the right road must be A, B, or C, and A and B were wrong, then C must be right." Under this conviction, we marched boldly on, without ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... as soon as April bringeth Unto her rested sense a perfect waking, While late bare earth proud of her clothing springeth, Sings out her woes, a thorn her song-book making; And mournfully bewailing, Her throat in tunes expresseth, While grief her heart oppresseth, For Tereus' force ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various

... finds still sleeping, and lies down again beside them. Presently they all awake and rouse Mak, who still pretends to sleep. He, after some talk, goes home, and the shepherds go off to seek and count their sheep, agreeing to meet again at the "crooked thorn." ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... morning floods The purple east with light, When the zephyr sweeps from a thousand buds The pearly tears of night. There's joy when the lark exulting springs To pour his matin lay, From the blossomed thorn when the blackbird sings, And the merry month ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie

... hear in woodlands dim Their unarticulated hymn, Now walk through rippling waves of wheat, Now sink in mats of clover sweet, Or see before us from the lawn The lark go up to greet the dawn! All birds that love the English sky Throng round my path when she is by: The blackbird from a neighboring thorn With music brims the cup of morn, And in a thick, melodious rain The mavis pours her mellow strain! But only when my Katie's voice Makes all the listening woods rejoice, I hear—with cheeks that flush and pale— The ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... deny it.—The writers of the first four, or of the first seven centuries, have an authority, just as the scholiasts and ancient commentators have: some of them, and in some points, are of weight singly; the agreement of many of thorn has much weight; the agreement of almost all of them would have great weight. In this sense, I acknowledge their authority; and it would be against all sound principles of criticism to deny it. But if, by authority, is meant a decisive authority, a judgment which ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... words they were, for they came straight from a rock not a quarter of a mile from Yew Nook, but only to be reached, on account of its precipitous character, by a round-about path. Thither she steered, defying wind and snow; guided by here a thorn-tree, there an old, doddered oak, which had not quite lest their identity under the whelming mask of snow. Now and then she stopped to listen; but never a word or sound heard she, till right from where the copse-wood grew thick and tangled at the base of the rock, ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell

... were the dishes, And long and curved were the spoons of thorn-wood. The way to Kau was like a whetstone, And straight as an arrow. (So) the officers trod it, And the common people looked on it. When I look back and think of it, My tears run down ...
— The Shih King • James Legge

... may not intermeddle with the joy of authorship. Spoken praise carries off the rose and puts a thorn in its place. One of our famous novelists, whom we will call Brown, happened to catch sight in a strange city of the sign, "Autographs of distinguished authors for sale," He thought to himself he would test his own market value, and accordingly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various

... upon her most secret lair in a dense thicket of thorn-myrtle and wild smilax, a little bower she had made, where was hidden a horrible-looking image formed of the rough pieces of saw-palmetto grubbed up by old Bartolo from his garden. She must have dragged these fragments thither one by one, and with infinite ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... the Divine gifts of a keener conscience and a more loving heart than his fellows, there inevitably comes with such gifts the obligation of suffering for them. Every degree in which love stands above her brethren means pain and shame to love though as yet she bear no thorn or nail in her flesh. This spiritual distress Jeremiah felt for the people long before he shared with them the physical penalties of their sins. Just there—in his keener conscience, in his hot shame for sins ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... few trout, when just as I was coming in this direction I caught sight of your nephew, the gray-hound. He slipped cautiously into the garden, and after remaining there for a few minutes, came out again. Meanwhile I perceived that the young nobleman was watching him from amongst the thorn-bushes by the side of the ditch; but what was my astonishment when I saw that my good old friend Charles Hawermann was following them on the hill-side. I brought up the rear, and so we all went on in single file quite ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... itself could totally extinguish. No Filipino, at that period, dreamed of absolute independence, but the few who had been taught by their masters to hope for equal laws, agitated for their promulgation and became a thorn in the side of the Monastic Orders. Only as their eyes were spontaneously opened to liberty by the Spaniards themselves did they ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... had always been a thorn in the old man's flesh. Horse-racing, gambling, theatres, and music-halls were, in the old pork-butcher's eyes, so many deadly sins which his son committed every day of his life, and all the Fitzwilliam Place household could testify ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy

... for the status of those creatures that have hands! We covet hands as eagerly as you covet riches. There is no acquisition that is more valuable than the acquisition of hands. Behold, O Brahmana, I cannot extract this thorn that has entered my body, or crush these insects and worms that are biting and afflicting me greatly! They that have bestowed upon them two hands with ten fingers, succeed in throwing away or crushing the worms (by scratching) ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... herself perceives. Oft hath the poet's magic tongue The rose's fair luxuriance sung; And long the Muses, heavenly maids, Have reared it in their tuneful shades. When, at the early glance of morn, It sleeps upon the glittering thorn, 'Tis sweet to dare the tangled fence To cull the timid floweret thence, And wipe with tender hand away The tear that on its blushes lay! 'Tis sweet to hold the infant stems, Yet dropping with Aurora's gems, And fresh inhale the spicy sighs That from ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... whip!" sounds from the elms; "Whip! quip!" Redwing thrushes threaten with the "whip" those who advance towards them; they spend much of the day in the elm-tops. Thick tussocks of old grass are conspicuous at the skirt of a hedge; half green, half grey, they contrast with the bare thorn. From behind one of these tussocks a hare starts, his black-tipped ears erect, his long hinder limbs throwing him almost like a grasshopper over the sward—no creature looks so handsome or startling, and it is always a pleasant surprise to see him. Pheasant or partridge do not surprise in the ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... above the height of a shrub; but its trunk is rather thick for its height. This shrub is in great esteem among the Natches; but I never could learn for what reason. Its leaf resembles that of the black thorn; and its wood while it is green is not very hard. Its prickles are at least two inches long, and are very hard and piercing; within half an inch of their root two other small prickles grow out from them so as to form a cross. The whole trunk is covered {231} with these prickles, so that you ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz

... narrower; the tops of the hills on the north exhibits some scattered pine and cedar, on the south the pine has not yet commenced, though there is some cedar on the sides of the hills and in the little ravines. The chokecherry, the wild hysop, sage, fleshy-leafed thorn, and particularly the aromatic herb on which the antelope and hare feed, are to be found on the plains and hills. The soil of the hills has now altered its texture considerably: their bases, like that of the river plains, is as usual a rich, black loam, while from the middle to the summits they ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

... between two cakes of floating ice that jammed my nose out of its former perfect contour. In Yucatan I tumbled into a hedge of poisoned cactus and had to operate on myself—quickly, too—to save my life. Wild with pain, I slashed my face to get the poisoned tips of thorn out of the flesh. Parts of my body are like my face, but fortunately I can cover them. It was bad surgery. On another I could have operated without leaving a scar, but I was frantic with pain. Don't stare at that big eye, sir; it's glass. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne

... public at all times and seasons, having to do, as it were, the work of two rather than one. No, the wonderful thing was that Joan suddenly realised that her terror of Mrs. Sampson—a terror that had always been a real thorn in her flesh—was completely gone. It was as though a charm, an Abracadabra, had been whispered over Mrs. Sampson and she had been changed immediately into a rabbit. It had never been Mrs. Sampson's fault that she was alarming ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole

... Mr. Houghton—nay, the very way she addressed herself to him—"What do you think, Mr. Houghton?"—then there seemed to be assumed an immediacy of correspondence between the two, and an unquestioned priority in their unison, his and hers, which was a cruel thorn in Miss Frost's outspoken breast. This sort of secret intimacy and secret exulting in having, really, the chief power, was most repugnant to the white-haired woman. Not that there was, in fact, any secrecy, or any form of unwarranted correspondence ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... all seasons, but autumn offers some charming variations. The brilliant scarlet berries of the mountain ash or red thorn mingled with the deep, rich green of feathery asparagus, make a delicious color symphony most appropriate to ...
— Vaughan's Vegetable Cook Book (4th edition) - How to Cook and Use Rarer Vegetables and Herbs • Anonymous

... or level downs, and flocks Grazing the tender herb, were interpos'd, Or palmy hillock, or the flow'ry lap Of some irriguous valley spread her store, Flowers of all hues, and without thorn the rose. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... the Sierras de los Organos, or Organ Mountains, from which he swept down at frequent intervals, first upon one town in the neighbourhood and then upon another, harassing and cutting up the Spanish garrisons in them, and generally making of himself a thorn in the flesh of Weyler. The spot in which he had established himself was distant only some ten miles, as the crow flies, from the hacienda Montijo; and he had no sooner made himself comfortable in his new quarters than he surprised and slightly discomposed ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood

... the voice of peace shall speak, Nor placid zephyr fan their fever'd cheek; Sleep ne'er shall seal their hot and blood-stain'd eye, But conscious visions ever haunt them nigh; Grandeur to them a faded flower shall be, Wealth but a thorn, and power a fruitless tree; And, as they near the tomb, with panting breast, Shrink from the dread ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... the fighting monk for his master!' Sir Henry said, laughing. 'Truly he must have been a good pupil, if he has come out of it without having his head broken, a dozen times. The friar is a thorn in the abbot's flesh, and more than once I have had to beg him off, or he would have been sent to the monastery of Saint John, which is a place of punishment for refractory monks. But in truth he ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty

... your old friend Dangerfield, I hear, who is the thorn in our pillow now. He hath first feigned to discover a Covenanting plot against His Majesty; and then turned it into a Popish one. There has been much foolish talk about a meal-tub, and papers hidden in it, and such-like: and ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson

... day, Count Bernard of Senlis (who boasted himself a forty-second grandson or something of Charlemagne) quarrelled with King Louis IV of France. To spite him, Bernard adopted the baby son of William Longsword, Duke of Normandy, killed in battle; for Normandy was a "thorn in the eye" of France. Thanks to Bernard's help Normandy gained in riches and importance. By the time William, son of Robert the Devil and Arlette of Falaise, appeared on the scene, the dukedom was a power in the world, and William was able to dare ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... tore her hands breaking off little faggots of tall dry weed stems, a very few bits of wild thorn and fragments of a plum thicket in the nearest shallow coulee. She ran to her hillock, stooped and broke a dozen matches, knowing too little of fire-making in the wind. But at last she caught a wisp of dry grass, a few ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough

... glow of satisfaction possessed her. She felt she had not failed, that she had, in truth, done very well. But later, when Mary Warner rose to deliver the Valedictory, Phoebe felt her own efforts shrink into littleness. The dark-eyed beautiful Mary was a sad thorn in the flesh for the fair girl who knew she was always overshadowed by the brilliant, queenly brunette. Involuntarily the country girl looked at David Eby—he was listening intently to Mary; his eyes never seemed to ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers

... May. The roads were dry. The thorn trees had thatched their shapely roofs with vivid green. The maple leaves were bigger than a squirrel's foot, which meant as well, I knew, that the trout were jumping. The robins had returned. I had entered my seventeenth year and the work of the ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller

... had never appeared in this parlour was the captain's wife. That had been a thorn in Abramka's flesh. He had spent days and nights going over in his mind how he could rid this lady of the, in his opinion, wretched habit of ordering her clothes from Moscow. For this ball, however, as she herself had ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... marks the pallid moon, Vi'let-wing'd Zephyr fann'd each opening flower, And brush'd from fragrant cups the limpid shower; A distant huntsman fill'd his cheerful horn, The vivid dew hung trembling on the thorn, And mists, like creeping rocks, arose to meet the morn. Huge giant shadows spread along the plain, Or shot from towering rocks o'er half the main, There to the slumbering bark the gentle tide Stole soft, and faintly beat against its side; Such is that sound, which ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe

... Conservatori, containing the famous wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, in bronze, said to have been struck by lightning (of which it bears all the marks) the day Julius Caesar was killed; the boy picking the thorn from his foot; the statue of the first Brutus; the geese of the Capitol (which are more like ducks); and the Fasti Consulares. It just occurred to me in time, and I went there yesterday morning. After dinner to the Villa Ludovisi with the Dalbergs and Aldobrandinis, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... milkman (who was a big puppy dog) came along and said he was sorry he was late, but he couldn't help it, because he had stepped on a thorn and had a lame foot and couldn't go fast, so they ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis

... than those of the pheasant or grouse. the habits of this bird are much the same as those of the grouse. only that the food of this fowl is almost entirely that of the leaf and buds of the pulpy leafed thorn; nor do I ever recollect seeing this bird but in the neighbourhood of that shrub. they sometimes feed on the prickley pear. the gizzard of it is large and much less compressed and muscular than in most fowls; in short it resembles ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... to shew it. Our eye, when we read Scripture, (like his,) "is fixed on the form of One like the Son of Man; or of the Prophet who was girded with a garment of camel's hair; or of the Apostle who had a thorn in the flesh." (p. 338.) We are only unlike Mr. Jowett we fear in this,—that we believe ex animo that the first-named was the Eternal SON, "equal to the FATHER," and "of one substance with the ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... literally not a scrap of sound skin upon them anywhere. Even the beaters, a stolid lot, had roared when old VELVETEENS the second keeper had brought up to poor COODENT a lump of flesh from his right leg, which he had found sticking on a thorn-bush in the centre of the high covert. Suddenly Sir HENRY stopped and shaded his eyes with his hand anxiously. We all imitated him, though for my part, not being a sportsman, I had no notion what ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various

... C.B., has shown the liveliest interest in the book from its inception, and I owe him most grateful recognition for his kindly encouragement and aid. Nay, more, he did not spare to lend me treasured items from his library so rich in first, and boasting unique, editions of Mrs. Behn. Mr. G. Thorn Drury, K.C., never wearied of answering my enquiries, and in discussion solved many a knotty point. To him I am obliged for the transcript of Mrs. Behn's letter to Waller's daughter-in-law, and also the Satire on Dryden. He even gave of his valuable time to read through the Memoir and from the superabundance ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn

... happens in the Pomaceae. In some cases in this sub-order, the calyx becomes detached from the carpels, so that the latter organs become more or less "superior," and distinct one from the other. This happens constantly in the double-flowered thorn, Crataegus Oxyacantha, in some blossoms of which the hollowed end of the peduncle still invests the base of the carpels, leaving the upper portions detached. In apples flowers are occasionally met ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... fact of long standing we know that other elements may be injected into that system so as to change it, or that one system may be destroyed and another system built up to take its place. This is the secret of cures of this nature—of mental troubles—the irritating factor, the thorn in the mind, ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... you are suddenly awakened by a severe pain in your lower limb; consciousness tells you that you are suffering pain, but it does not tell you what produced that pain. This must be decided by reason or faith. If you find a thorn in the grass where your limb was resting, reason says the thorn stuck you; if you find a bumblebee mashed in the grass, reason will say the insect stung you; or, if some one near you says a boy with a ...
— The Spirit and the Word - A Treatise on the Holy Spirit in the Light of a Rational - Interpretation of the Word of Truth • Zachary Taylor Sweeney

... start again until the evening, husbanding our strength for the worst part of the way, which was yet to come. From this point the water-holes became less frequent, and the landscape particularly cheerless—monotonous stony expanses alternating with hideous thorn-thickets. Yet both men and beasts held out bravely through those three miserable days, and on the 12th of May we reached in good condition, though wetted to the skin by a sudden and unexpected downpour of rain, the charming country ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... for State and not for Church, Paolo mio, not for our Holy Church—I could not stay, because I love thee! I must have been ever chiding thee had I remained, as if God had made me for no use but to be a thorn in thy ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... Grand Duchy of Posen, the existence of which was announced at a meeting of the Anthropological Society of Berlin.[228] Many of these defensive works, notably those of Potzrow and of Zabnow, bad been erected on piles. In the district between Thorn and the Baltic are numerous mounds of the shape of a truncated cone, the platform of which is surrounded by an embankment some 590 feet in diameter.[229] Near many of these were picked up many broken human bones, mixed together in the greatest confusion with ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... capital who executed the famous Golden Bull and commenced the grand Wenzel Bible were a select band of Frenchmen and Italians; the combined result of whose designs and labours was this very mixture of Gothic ivy leaf and thorn with the softer Othonian and Roman foliages and a new scheme of colour. Charles IV., son of that famous John of Luxembourg, the blind king of Bohemia, who perished at Crcy, was himself King of Bohemia as well as Emperor, and a man of ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... in each hand, Rachel followed the deputation, and had scarcely disappeared before the light gracious figure of Rose glanced through the thorn trees. "Aunt Ermine, you must come nearer; it is so wonderful to see Mr. Clare teaching ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... hill, we descended the slopes on the south, which fell gently in terraces, and travelled until dark, when we reached a deep nullah, here called Mukur, in which we found our vanguard safely encamped in a strong ring-fence of thorn bushes. ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke

... psychologists and know how to win without material force. Hence has arisen the curious after-the-Paris-conference situation. Italy has been despised by France; Italy, therefore, has renounced that war-after-the-war, dear to the French heart; Italy has communed with Dr. Benes and planted another thorn in the side of the Hapsburgs; she has secretly opposed French policy in Hungary. With Germany she has made a commercial entente—not a political or military one, but a pacific laissez-faire for the purposes of trade. France envisages the complete ruin ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... nightfall from her father's house, in a chariot drawn by a pair of mules or oxen, and escorted by persons carrying the nuptial torches. Among the Romans she proceeded in the evening to the bridegroom's house; preceded by a boy carrying a torch of white thorn, or, according to some, of pine-wood. To this custom reference is indirectly made in ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... to him fairer than he had ever known it to look before. He had a sense of delight in the soft elasticity of the wet grass under his feet and in the shy, wondering eyes of the wild spring flowers by the roadside. In a thorn-acacia bush at the edge of a little strip of wood a bird was building a nest, and flew up as he passed with a startled cry and a ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich

... that they feel as if babies were very much of the same nature. The abrupt seizure frightened me; I sprang from her arms in my terror, and fell over the railing of the balcony. I should probably enough have been killed on the spot but for the fact that a low thorn-bush grew just beneath the balcony, into which I fell and thus had the violence of the shock broken. But the thorns tore my tender flesh, and I bear to this day marks of the deep ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Crittendon. As she was a very fine lady, and resides in a very aristocratic street, I was glad to be obliged to refuse, because my brocade was not yet appointed, and I could wear nothing less in state. At the Waterloo we received a call from Mrs. William Rathbone and her daughter, Mrs. Thorn. It was a sister-in-law, Mrs. Richard Rathbone, who wrote that exquisite book, "The Diary of Lady Willoughby." She resides in London. Mr. William Rathbone is a millionaire. His wife is a cordial and excellent lady, who seemed to take us right ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... their way, under the rows of miraculous white thorn- blossom, and through the green billows, at peace just then, though the war still blazed or smouldered along the southern banks of the Loire and far beyond, and it was with a delightful sense of peril, of prowess ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... discovered a trail which led towards the north, and that two white men were with the party, they were from the first certain. That this was the case was confirmed by a slip of paper which had been found fastened to a tree by a thorn. It contained but a few words, signed by Gilbert; Vaughan eagerly took it. "We are both alive, but our captors glance at us unpleasantly. We will try to escape; follow if you can, ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston

... assembly and did not falter just when I would be most eloquent. But the old saying is true, that heaven never blesses any man with unmixed and flawless prosperity; even in the keenest joys there is ever some slight undertone of grief, some blend of gall and honey; there is no rose without a thorn. I have often experienced the truth of this, and never more than at the present moment. For the more I realize how ready you are to praise me, the more exaggerated becomes the awe in which I stand of you, and the greater my reluctance to speak. I have spoken to strange ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... drains might be more durable. In the English books, we have descriptions of drains filled with thorn cuttings from hedges and with gorse. When well laid in clay, they are said to last about 15 years. When the thorns decay, the clay will still retain its form, and leave a ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French

... careful; he was a warm man; but he had no one to leave his money to. There it was! He didn't know! And there was that fellow Chamberlain! For James' political principles had been fixed between '70 and '85 when 'that rascally Radical' had been the chief thorn in the side of property and he distrusted him to this day in spite of his conversion; he would get the country into a mess and make money go down before he had done with it. A stormy petrel of a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... gamblin' with the rustlers when I cornered them.... I offered to keep Jack's secret if he'd swear to give Collie up. He swore on his knees, beggin' in her name!... An' he comes back to bully her, an' worse.... Buster Jack!... He's the thorn in your heart, Belllounds. He's the rustler who stole your cattle!... Your pet ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey

... his life and the lives of many other gallant Highlanders. Afraid lest dawn should find his Brigade too far away from the position to rush it, he hesitated to deploy, and when at last he was about to give the order, a further delay was caused by a line of thorn bushes. The Brigade passed through or avoided the obstruction and was at the halt on the point of changing formation when the Boers in the advanced trenches, which had been so stealthily excavated that no one ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... self-disapproval which had been the awakening of a new life within her; it marked her off from the criminals whose only regret is failure in securing their evil wish. Deronda could not utter one word to diminish that sacred aversion to her worst self—that thorn-pressure which must come with the crowning of the sorrowful better, suffering because of the worse. All this mingled thought and feeling kept him silent; speech was too momentous to be ventured on rashly. There were no words of comfort that did not carry some sacrilege. If he ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... varieties of thorn outcropped in Elvira's daily walk. So small a point as a new stock collar, sober gray though ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various

... now enter a wild forest, which occupies the second division of the seventh circle, where Virgil declares each barren thorn-tree is inhabited by the soul of a suicide. In the gnarly branches perch the Harpies, whose uncouth lamentations echo through the air, and who greedily devour every leaf that sprouts. Appalled by the sighs and wailings ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... reached, Mr. D. P. Wood, of Onondaga, presented in the Assembly a petition signed by 5,931 men and women, praying for the just and equal rights of women, which, after a spicy debate, was referred to the following Select Committee: James L. Angle, of Monroe Co.; George W. Thorn, of Washington Co.; Derrick L. Boardman, of Oneida Co.; George H. Richards, of New York; James M. Munro, of Onondaga; Wesley Gleason, of Fulton; Alexander ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... rending of clothes, Drusie was hastening to the rescue. She had not been able to come sooner, because she had penetrated so far into the dense thicket that she could not readily extricate herself. However, by leaving scraps of her clothing on every sharp thorn, and getting her hands and legs terribly scratched, she forced her way out at last; and keeping a wary outlook on the fort, she tried to unloose the ...
— A Tale of the Summer Holidays • G. Mockler

... trust thee yet again; but it shall be the last time; therefore take heed to what I say. Between Stargard and Pegelow there stands an old thorn upon the highway; there, to-morrow evening, by seven of the clock, my servant Caspar, whom thou knowest, shall bring thee three hundred florins; but on this one condition, that thou dost now swear solemnly to abandon this villainous robber-band, and seek an honourable ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold

... House, Osborne, St. James, Victoria, and Albert houses, Tank Villa, Poplar Villa, Rose, Brake, and Thorn Villas, as well as Hawthorn, Gorse, Fern, Shrubbery, and Providence Cottages. All had apartments, but many were taken, and many more had rooms either dark and stuffy or without view. Holly House was my first stopping-place. ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... malice and impiety, and shed darkness over their minds and corruption in their hearts, which hurry them into an abyss of disorder and misfortune. The demon tempted Job[219] by the permission of God. The messenger of Satan and the thorn in the flesh wearied St. Paul;[220] he asked to be delivered from them; but he was told that the grace of God would enable him to resist his enemies, and that virtue was strengthened by infirmities ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... Paris life pierced Dinah's heart like a thorn; she repented of having tempted Etienne into the extravagances of love. It is so difficult to pass from pleasure to work, that happiness has wrecked more poems than sorrows ever helped to flow in sparkling jets. Dinah, happy ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... was black, The green grass was not seen, The birds did rest on the bare thorn's breast, Whose roots, beside the pathway track, 10 Had bound their folds o'er many a crack Which the frost had ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... evidently did not make stir or noise enough to disturb anything. Beside this rustic highway, bounded by old mossy stone walls, and within a stone's throw of the farmer's barn, the quail had made her nest. It was just under the edge of a prostrate thorn-bush. ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... paced together a garden alley, between a row of quince-trees and a hedge of Christ's-thorn; at one end was a fountain in a great basin of porphyry, at the other a little temple, very old and built for the worship of Isis, now an oratory under the invocation of the Blessed Mary. The two young men made a singular contrast, for Basil, who was in his twenty-third ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing

... of the thorn tribe, for hedge, in this country. It never suffers from those enemies that destroy so much of the hawthorn. This is also used for ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden

... accredited this handsome young gentleman—Sir Abel's youngest son—with tastes expensive rather than profitable, liberal socially, rather than estimable ethically, declaring him to be distinctly of the nature of the proverbial thorn in the banker's otherwise very prosperous side. He had, so said rumour, the fortune or misfortune, as you chose to take it, of being at once a considerably bad boy and a distinctly charming one. Be all that as it might, the young man had certainly presented a grimly anxious countenance when, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... dying, but they can have lots of nice adventures first. But here are the 'Feats on the Fiords' and the 'Crofton Boys' and 'Water Babies,' and all the volumes of 'Aunt Judy,' if you like the younger sort. Or the dear, dear 'Thorn Fortress;' that's ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge

... gardens at the back, was the house that poor Mr. and Mrs. Ward had bought and beautified; 'because it was so much better for the children to be out of the town.' The tears sprang into Mary's eyes at the veiled windows, and the unfeeling contrast of the spring glow of flowering thorn, lilac, laburnum, and, above all, the hard, flashing brightness of the glass; but tears were so unlike Ethel that Mary always was ashamed of them, and disposed ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... to sober itself, and rushing unsummoned into the workaday fields of an aimlessly frantic world. They are houses, and the stone boundaries are walls. This tree stump is an armchair, this board a velvet sofa. Not more truly is "this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown

... selfish interests of the great trades unions and with the taint of Miller retarding all progress, had nothing in it of the real spirit of freedom. It was every man for his own betterment and the world in which he lived might go hang. I stayed with the Coalitionists, though I was often a thorn in their side, but because I was also useful to them I bent them often towards the light. Then they began to fear me, or rather my principles. It was out of my principles, although I was not nominally one of them, ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... eland antelope, they remained stationary for some time, seeking for those animals among the varieties which were scattered in all directions. At last Omrah, whose eyes were far keener than even the Hottentots', pointed out three at a distance, under a large acacia thorn. They immediately rode at a trot in that direction, and the various herds of quaggas, gnoos, and antelopes scoured away before them; and so numerous were they, and such was the clattering of hoofs, that you might have imagined that it was a heavy charge of cavalry. The objects of their pursuit ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat

... pass down that vale of tears; His head was circled with a crown of thorn, His form was bowed as by the weight of years, His wayworn feet by stones were cut and torn. His eyes were such as have beheld the sword Of terror of ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... The germ of Union many see, And through the hedge of thorn, Like to a bee that dawn awakes, On, Progress strides o'er shattered stakes, With ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... reached under her cap for a hairpin, looked quickly at Barry as though to ask him whether he could stand pain, then pressed a recalcitrant thorn into a position where it could be extracted. "I think the best description of Lost Wing is that he's an admirable fiction writer. Ba'tiste says he has more lies than a dog ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... were separated from each other by dense hedges of thorn, or by high walls, so that it was impossible to pass from one to another except by ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... joyless and a gloomy morn, Wet was the grass, and hung with pearls the thorn; When Damon, who design'd to pass the day With hounds and horns, and chase the flying prey, Rose early from his bed; but soon he found The welkin pitch'd with sullen clouds around, An eastern wind, and dew upon the ground. Thus ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... when I say she says very improper things. What is one to do with such a thorn in the flesh?" Mrs. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... had lured her rose To mask the sharpness of its thorn; Knocked yet again, heard only yet ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare

... the "fine Isaac Walton mornings, careless as a beggar, and walking, walking, and dying walking;" but he says, "the hope is gone. I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing), with my breast against this thorn of a desk." ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall

... little ridge, topped with a dense growth of long grass, thorn and trees, when an exclamation burst from the Sikh. Out from the thicket broke a long, tawny shape, barely a hundred yards away. It was a magnificent black-maned lion, who stood lashing his sides and watching them as they ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney

... forth his artless strains. "Cruel Alexis, heed you naught my songs? Have you no pity? you'll drive me to my death. Now even the cattle court the cooling shade And the green lizard hides him in the thorn: Now for tired mowers, with the fierce heat spent, Pounds Thestilis her mess of savoury herbs, Wild thyme and garlic. I, with none beside, Save hoarse cicalas shrilling through the brake, Still track your footprints 'neath the broiling sun. Better have ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil

... and he has let his readers into the secret of his taste when he wrote in "Wenderholme": "For the present we must leave him (Captain Eureton) in the tranquil happiness of devising desks and pigeon-holes with Mr. Bettison, an intelligent joiner at Sooty thorn, than which few occupations can be more delightful." About the pigeon-holes, a friend of my husband once made a discovery which he declared astounding. "I well knew that Mr. Hamerton was a model of order," he said ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... wooden spoon. Having mixed equal weights of the prepared fruit, and of powdered sugar, put these together in pots, and cover the mixture up, setting them in a dry place, and having sifted some powdered sugar over the top of each pot. Among the Italians the Barberry bears the name of Holy Thorn, because thought to have formed part of the crown of thorns made ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... so to Ilion's city came by stealth A spirit as of windless seas and skies, A gentle phantom-form of joy and wealth, With love's soft arrows speeding from its eyes— Love's rose, whose thorn doth pierce ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus

... many different kinds of seeds of herbs and trees came travelling with the winds, and wanted to take root on it. It was a long time before anything but sedge could grow there. Then came sheep sorrel, and the rock-rose and thorn-brush. But even to-day there is not so much growth on Alvaret, that the mountain is well covered, but it shines through here and there. And no one can think of ploughing and sowing up here, where the earth-crust is so thin. But if you will admit that ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof

... hedge of prickly thorns prevented passers-by on the narrow village street from peeping in. At one end a heavy grapevine clambered over a trellis, while at the other there were several rich clumps of myrtle that showed dark against the surrounding grass. Below the thorn hedge stood a row of bold flaunting tulips, and there were two flower-beds, one of white, the ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips

... frame of mind. There was a clinching of his fist, a knitting of his brows, and a gathering blackness in his eyes as he listened while Katy, rousing partially from her lethargy, talked of the days when she was a little girl, and Morris had built the playhouse for her by the brook, where the thorn apples grew and the waters fell over ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in his heaven— All's right ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson

... these we used for bathing-places. No Roman lady, with her baths of porphyry or alabaster, could have had a more delicious spot to bathe herself than we found within fifty yards of our skerm, or rough inclosure of mimosa thorn, that we had dragged together round the cart to protect us from the attacks of lions. That there were several of these brutes about, I knew from their spoor, though we had neither heard nor ...
— A Tale of Three Lions • H. Rider Haggard

... subdues man to the level of nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth and coolness and solemnity. The leech-gatherer on the moor, the woman "stepping westward," are for him natural objects, almost in the same sense as the aged thorn, or the lichened rock on the heath. In this sense the leader of the "Lake School," in spite of an earnest preoccupation with man, his thoughts, his destiny, is the poet of nature. And of nature, after all, in its modesty. The English ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... muskets, and the explosion of the grenades, made the path no comfortable place for those without arms. The Bailie, however, had only been able to scramble about twenty feet above the path when, his foot slipping, he would certainly have fallen into the lake had not the branch of a ragged thorn caught his riding-coat and supported him in mid-air, where he hung very like a sign in front of a hostelry. Andrew Fairservice had made somewhat better speed, but even he had only succeeded in reaching a ledge from which he could neither ascend nor yet come down. On ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... well make the grass beneath the wild sycamore, the cork-tree, the long reeds, the willows, above all, the sound of the flowing water, absolute ecstasy. There was an instant rush for the river, impeded by many a thorn-bush and creeper; but almost anything green was welcome at the moment, and the only disappointment was at the height and steepness of the banks of rock. However, at last one happy man found a place where it was possible to climb down to the shingly bed ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge

... hillside, Through the mosses bare, They have planted thorn-trees, For pleasure here and there. Is any man so daring As dig them up in spite, He shall find their sharpest thorns ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant

... that it was almost a pain to remember. But he must remember, and following after a glimpse of the synagogue and himself preaching in it there came upon him a vision of a tall, grave woman since known to him as a thorn in his flesh, but he need not trouble to remember his sins, for had not God himself forgiven him, telling him that his grace was enough? Why then should he hesitate to recall the grave, oval face that he had loved? He could see it as plainly in his memory as if it were ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... my daughter, for I am not religious myself, and he was always too fond of holy words, which I thinks brings ill-luck. But his voice was as sweet as a thrush that sits singing in a thorn-bush, and between that and a something in the verses which had a tendency to make you feel uncomfortable, I feels more disturbed than I cares to show. But oh, my ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing

... planted. He had always had a warm side to the English and Scottish poor—his own order, indeed. If twenty or thirty families would come out as an experiment, he was ready to give L2000 without saying from whom. He bids Mr. Young speak about the plan to Thorn of Chorley, Turner of Manchester, Lord Shaftesbury, and the Duke of Argyll. "Now, my friend," he adds, "do your best, and God's blessing be with you. Much is done for the blackguard poor. Let us remember our own class, and do good while we have opportunity. I hereby authorize ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... succeeded badly, and stood before her, with downcast eyes, poking his thorn-stick into the mass of pebbles. Annie waited in silence, and that ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... lifted hands and thorn-crowned head, Still conquers Death, though life itself be ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham

... part of my life which gives me more intense satisfaction than another, it is my friendship of more than forty years' standing with Susan B. Anthony. Ours has been a friendship of hard work and self-denial.... Emerson says, "It is better to be a thorn in the side of your friend than his echo." If this add weight and stability to friendship, then ours will endure forever, for we have indeed been thorns in the side of each other. Sub rosa, dear friends, I have had no peace for forty years, since the day we started together on the suffrage ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... however, widened to nearly a mile in breadth two hours after leaving Kanowit, and we made better way, the mouth of the Katibus stream being passed at mid-day. This, which has evoked the cognomen in Sarawak of the "accursed river," is rightly so called, for it has always been a thorn in the side of the Government, and the tribe (Katibus) living on its banks have given more trouble than any in the country, for although closely allied in manners and customs to the Kanowits, the Katibus are a far braver ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt

... wife towards her travell to London to get cure of his Majestie for the disease called the Evill, which her s. d. Sonen Thorn is ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield

... it, ran over a small island, passed the other branch amidst a shower of bullets, and, though numbers of his eager enemies were in close pursuit of him, he got to a bramble swamp, and in that naked, mangled condition, reached his own country. He proved a sharp thorn in their side afterwards, to the day ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... see the full moon yonder, and not the man in it? why, methinks 'tis too-too evident: I see his dog very plain, and look you, just under his tail is a thorn-bush ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... were suffered to cast gleams of light upon the saint's gloomy and thorn-strewn path. But nevertheless the text of which we are most often reminded in reading his pages is the verse of Amos: "Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?" It is a terrible ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... of the jal, known as pilu, is liked by the people, and in famines they will even eat the berries of the leafless caper. Other characteristic plants of the Panjab plains are under Leguminosae, the khip (Crotalaria burhia), two Farsetias (farid ki buti), and the jawasa or camel thorn (Alhagi camelorum), practically leafless, but with very long and stout spines; under Capparidaceae several Cleomes, species of Corchorus (Tiliaceae), under Zygophyllaceae three Mediterranean genera, Tribulus, Zygophyllum, ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

... thine have I kept for thee. And the Beloved to know and to have peace in the remembering. But what doth be the peculiar sorrow of they that have gone over-lightly, when that they shall meet the Beloved; for then shall there be a constant and inward regret, as a thorn in the heart, that they not to have observed alway that holy care of all which doth pertain unto love; and they nigh to moan in the spirit, if they had but known, if they had but known. Yet, in the end, of their pain, shall they grow unto ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... fortresses counterfeited in various cars, with an infinity of trophies borne on spears, and a variety of helmets and body-armour, head-dresses, and ornaments and vases innumerable; and in the multitude of spectators is a woman holding the hand of a boy, who, having pierced his foot with a thorn, is showing it, weeping, to his mother, in a graceful and very lifelike manner. Andrea, as I may have pointed out elsewhere, had a good and beautiful idea in this scene, for, having set the plane on which the figures stood higher than the level ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari

... the tropical steaming coast belt to and across the high scrub desert, and then through lower rounded hills to the plains. On the desert is only dense thorn brush—and a possibility that the newcomer, if he looks very closely, may to his excitement see his first game in Africa. This is a stray duiker or so, tiny grass antelopes a foot high. Also in this land is thirst; so that alongside the locomotives, ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... their producers, was to be the scene of many a hard-fought fight and many weary nights of outposts. Indeed, it never really succumbed to the very end; the happy hunting-ground of the gallant De la Rey, it was a thorn in the side of our leaders up to the day the ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring

... "Leguminous" plants, all of them having flowers like butterflies, seeds in (frequently pendent) pods, —"laetum siliqua quassante legumen"—smooth and tender leaves, divided into many minor ones; strange adjuncts of tendril, for climbing (and sometimes of thorn); exquisitely sweet, yet pure scents of blossom, and almost always harmless, if not serviceable seeds. It is of all tribes of plants the most definite, its blossoms being entirely limited in their parts, and not passing into other forms. It is ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin

... them use a long rule, and a lead pencil or piece of chalk. Welting-cords should be covered with bias-pieces; and it saves time, in many cases, to baste on the welting-cord at the same time that you cover it. The best way, to put on hooks and eyes is to sew thorn on double broad tape, and sew this on the frock lining. They can be moved easily, and do not show where ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... imagine that after such an Acknowledgment, there may be a variety of Ways by which Great Brittain may enslave us besides taxing us without our Consent. The possibility of it should greatly awaken our Apprehensions. Let us take Care lest America, in Lieu of a Thorn in her foot should have a Dagger in her heart. Our united Efforts have hitherto succeeded. This is not a Time for us to relax our Measures. Let us like prudent Generals improve upon our Success, and push ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams

... road was long and rough and, though by good fortune they met no one, since the few who dwelt in these wild parts had gone up to Bonsa Town to be present at the great feast, the sun was sinking before ever they reached the place. Moreover, this promontory proved to be covered with dense thorn scrub, through which they must force a way in the gathering darkness, not without hurt and difficulty. Still they accomplished it and at length, quite exhausted, crept to the very point, where they hid themselves between some stones at the ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard

... visitor in the night, as evidenced by a scrawled warning, on a dirty piece of paper, fastened to a stubby tree by a long, sharp thorn. ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

... direct objective of the Russians was Berlin, there were many reasons why a bee-line course could not be followed. Germany had prepared an elaborate defense system to cover the direct approaches to Berlin, and the fortresses of Danzig, Graudenz, Thorn, and Posen were important points in this scheme. The nature of the country also adapts itself to these defensive works and would make progress slow ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... cannot blame you," the duke said, when Fergus had finished. "The man has given me a great deal of trouble, ever since he joined us with his force. He is always slow in obeying orders. Sometimes he seems wilfully to misunderstand them, and altogether he is a thorn in my side. I am glad, indeed, that the British infantry division are entirely under my control. With them I have no difficulty whatever. He was entirely in the wrong in this matter; and I certainly should address a remonstrance to him, on the subject of ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty

... a quarter of a mile long and somewhat less in breadth. It was a marshy wilderness, and had the character of being "a terrible place," and amongst its swamps and thickets the huge red deer, with his immense antlers, and the wild ox found a refuge. When it received a name, it became known as Thorn-Ey, that is, Isle of Thorns; in later days people called it Thorney Island. Tradition says that in the midst of the wilderness there was erected, in the year 154 A.D., a Temple of Apollo. We are next ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... meet in less than twenty years, but before then your glad light eyes will be dim with tears, and the easy path you have striven to walk will be thickly strewn with thorn; and whether you deserve it or not, life will have for you a mournful earnestness, but notwithstanding all your frivolity and flippancy there is fine gold in your character, which the fire of affliction only ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

... shelter afforded by a rugged ravine, has enabled the flora of north and south so to be brought together that, twined about with sinuous hop-tendrils, the oak, the spruce fir, the wild pear, the maple, the cherry, the thorn, and the mountain ash either assist or check one another's growth, and everywhere cover the declivity with their straggling profusion. Also, at the edge of the summit there can be seen mingling with the green of the trees the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... the bridge; and at the outlets of the town, where the streets came down to the waterside among the weeds, little knots of men and serving-maids stood looking into the south and listening. Some had waited for an hour, some for two; yet still there was no sound but the piping of the birds in white-thorn hedges, the hollow lowing of kine knee-deep in grassy meadows, and the long rush of the river through the sedge beside the pebbly shore; and naught to see but quiet valleys, primrose lanes, and Warwick orchards white with bloom, stretching ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett

... Tremouille cry 'Back!' and in the meantime Orleans will fall, and the Dauphin may fly whither he will, for France is lost. But, for myself, I would to the saints that I and my lass were home again, beneath the old thorn-tree at Polwarth on the green, where I have ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang

... the bosom of your wedded Julia, you may lull your keen regret to slumbering; while virtuous love, with a cherub's hand, shall smooth the brow of upbraiding thought, and pluck the thorn from compunction." ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... rest and feed, and about three o'clock started on again. Another hour or so passed, and still there was no sign of elephants. Evidently the herd had travelled fast and far, and I began to think that we should have to give it up, when suddenly I caught sight of a brown mass moving through the thorn-trees on the side of a slope about a quarter of a mile away. My heart seemed to jump into my mouth. Where is the hunter who has not felt like this at the sight ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard

... is no man doth a wrong for the wrong's sake; but thereby to purchase himself profit, or pleasure, or honor, or the like. Therefore, why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me? And if any man should do wrong merely out of ill-nature, why yet it is but like the thorn or brier, which prick and scratch because they can do no other. The most tolerable sort of revenge is for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy; but then, let a man take heed the revenge be such as there is no law to punish, else a man's enemy is still ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... want to tell you a fable too, to match yours about Melanion. Once there was a certain man called Timon,[447] a tough customer, and a whimsical, a true son of the Furies, with a face that seemed to glare out of a thorn-bush. He withdrew from the world because he couldn't abide bad men, after vomiting a thousand curses at 'em. He had a holy horror of ill-conditioned fellows, but he was mighty tender ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... destined to put forward the theory of the earth's motion in a way to command attention was born in 1473, at the village of Thorn, in eastern Prussia. His name was Nicholas Copernicus. There is no more famous name in the entire annals of science than this, yet posterity has never been able fully to establish the lineage of the famous expositor of the true doctrine of the solar system. The city of Thorn lies ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... his share of the general result," they attacked with reasoning based upon premises drawn from the book of Genesis. De Maistre especially excelled in ridiculing the philosophic or scientific theory. Lamennais, who afterward became so vexatious a thorn in the side of the Church, insisted, at this earlier period, that "man can no more think without words than see without light." And then, by that sort of mystical play upon words so well known in the higher ranges of theologic reasoning, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... looking charmingly for all that," Constance went on; "so charmingly, that I feel a morbid sensation creeping all over me while I sit regarding you. Really, when you come to us next winter, if you persist in being by way of showing your superiority to ordinary human nature a rose without a thorn, the rest of the flowers may all shut up at once. And the rose reddens in my very face, to ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell

... prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be to the LORD for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... companion, an old woman, who had fallen with her bundle of sticks, upon her legs again, and of carrying the said bundle to her cottage, and of lighting her fire for her; with releasing two sparrows which a boy had made captive; and, last of all, with releasing the Assessor himself from a thorn-bush, which, as it appeared, would have held him with such force as vexed even himself. Petrea's hands bled in consequence of this operation, but that only ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer

... curious of Barbara and her horse, stole up, and stood at a safe distance, with their noses dubiously stretched out, swishing their lean tails. And suddenly, far up, following their own music, two cuckoos flew across, seeking the thorn-trees out on the moor. While she was watching the arrowy birds, she caught sight of someone coming towards her from a clump of beech-trees, and suddenly saw that it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... can't be," said Jack, vehemently. "What, that ugly, disagreeable woman, Ida's mother! I won't believe it. I should just as soon expect to see strawberries growing on a thorn-bush. There isn't the least ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger

... door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he For number or proportion. Mockingly, On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths; A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn; Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall, Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate A tapering turret overtops the work. And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... then, that I should leave my beloved woods, and betake myself to a barren country road, where, in a lonely thorn-tree, a bird of another sort than these had set ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller

... twain, whom watching has made wise, A spell has fallen—a prophetic dream; Their upward-gazing and far-seeing eyes, Like stars reflected in a tranquil stream, To look beyond the Child and Mother seem; A twisted thorn-branch and a cross to them Are manifest—His throne ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney

... way to a transport of anger. He caught up a handful of roses and extended them, trembling. "What's this?" he asked. His finger bled from a thorn, as once it had bled from a ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells

... independent of the great powers in its neighborhood as it was when the Assyrian armies first penetrated its recesses. Nature seems to have constructed it to be a nursery of hardy and vigorous men, a stumbling-block to conquerors, a thorn in the side of every powerful empire which arises in this part of the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson

... her two cubs were pursued by dogs, when one of the cubs got a thorn in his foot, and could go no farther. Setting the other to watch for the pursuers, the mother proceeded, with much tender solicitude, to extract the thorn. Just as she had done so, ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... Another thorn that wounded our Polly in her first attempt to make her way through the thicket that always bars a woman's progress, was the discovery that working for a living shuts a good many doors in one's face ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott

... met with some hooks made from the part of the solid wood of a prickly tree, or shrub, whence the thorn grows, and which process formed the ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman

... captain and I rested, and drank some camels' milk. This the Bedaween consider very strengthening. There were several tul'hh-trees in a torrent-bed beside us, and some neb'k. With some twine that we gave him, and a stout thorn of tul'hh, one of our Arabs mended his sandal, which was in need of repair. We, having preceded the beasts of burthen over the slippery rock, sat watching them and the men creeping slowly down, in curved lines, like ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn

... with him, step by step, over the ground that is already familiar. Felix Page had ever been the thorn in his flesh. ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk

... of the vine. And high above our heads waved many a poplar, while close at hand the sacred water from the nymphs' own cave welled forth with murmurs musical. On shadowy boughs the brown cicalas kept their chattering toil. Far off the little owl cried; in the thick thorn-brake the lark and finches sang; the ringdove moaned; the yellow bees were flitting round the springs. All breathed the scent of opulent summer, of the season of fruits. The pears at our feet and apples by our side were rolling plentiful; ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... wife, eagerly, "that would be a blessing! And though Tibby would be a thorn in every inch of grandmamma's body, if they were alone together, I have no doubt they would get on very ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald

... a little after midnight, a quiet passing, so that only Sidney and the two men knew when she went away. It was Harriet who collapsed. During all that long evening she had sat looking back over years of small unkindnesses. The thorn of Anna's inefficiency had always rankled in her flesh. She had been hard, uncompromising, thwarted. And now ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... dissension and strife wherever it remained and to the direct injury of whomsoever chanced to possess it for the time being. It had been the cause of serious disaster to the porter in the first instance, it had next represented to Fischelowitz a dead loss in money of fifty marks, it had become a thorn in the side to Akulina, it had led to one of the most violent quarrels she had ever engaged in with her husband, its limp and broken form had cost much broken crockery and some broken furniture to the host of the "Green Wreath Inn," ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford

... as he strode away from the place later. "So that pair of boobs are going to try for the Army. Oh, I daresay they'll get in. But so will I—and in the same company with them. I wouldn't have missed this for anything. I'll be the thorn in Hal Overton's side the little while that he'll be in the service! I've more than to-day's business to ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock

... be taken very literally. There should be no floor cases, no alcoves in the room, no arrangements by which a knot of small mischief makers can conceal themselves from the librarian for she will find such an error in planning, a thorn in the flesh as long ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine

... or 1103,' he says, in his Life of St. Guy Valdescus of The Thorn, as he Anglicises San Guido Valdeschi della Spina, 'when the Saint was returning from the Holy Land, where he had been a crusader, he was shipwrecked, by the Providence of God, upon the island of Ilaria, in the Adriatic Sea; and he was greatly afflicted by the ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... as in the beautiful year that followed the Cold-Seasons. Plenty returned to abide there, and Prosperity re-appeared, leading Hope, Comfort, Peace, and Joy in her jocund train. Still that continued a land of the earth, bearing the thorn as well as the rose, having briers as ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee

... soaked. He then took them out, and brought them into the house. First he took one, and undoing the lacing which confined one side, he drew out a flaccid bladder. "This is the sort of football we use here," he said, holding it up to Selby. "It cannot be easily rendered unserviceable by thorn, nail, or spike of any sort. If the bladder is injured, its place can be supplied for a few pence, and the leather casing will last for years. This is my blow-pipe," he added, producing a piece of tobacco-pipe. Undoing the mouth of the bladder, round which a piece of string was tightly fastened, ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... was conjuring it tantalizingly further and further from them. The tall feathery palms, seen through the shimmering heat haze, took an exaggerated height towering fantastically above the scrub of bushy thorn trees. ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... Dorobornensis [Gervais of Dover], Chronica, etc. (burning and repair of Dover Church; contentions between the monks of Canterbury and Archbishop Baldwin; and lives of the archbishops of Canterbury); (8) Thomas Stubbs (a Dominican), Chronica Pontificum ecc. Eboraci [i.e. York]; (9) Guilielmus Thorn Cantuariensis [of Canterbury], Chronica; and (10) Henricus Knighton Leicestrensis [of Leicester], Chronica. (The last three are ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... there the cedar of Lebanon, patriarch of all trees that bear cones, reared his royal crown above the rest; in and out, too, amongst the great boulders that strewed the park, the sharp-leaved holly stood out boldly, and the exquisite white thorn, all in flower, shot up to three and four times a man's height; below, the heather grew close and green to blossom in the summer-time; and in the deeper, lonelier places the blackthorn and hoe ran wild, and the dog-rose in wild confusion; the alder and the gorse too, the honeysuckle ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford

... but also a thorn in the flesh, the signs of an apostle, how he and Titus had dealt with the ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... whole works to you. I do this for a number of reasons—the first being that you will thus be induced to return to this section of California. Not knowing the country, you will doubtless perish, and thus from the placid bosom of society a thorn will be removed. Secondly, if you should survive long enough to get in, you could never find your way out without me for a guide—and it wouldn't be safe to hire this Indian. He dislikes you. The third reason is that I believe this is just a phenomenally rich pocket and that ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... others. But that was not enough. Jan was so hungry, what with his strivings in the traces and the novelty for him of this life of tense unceasing effort and alertness, that his appetite was as a thorn in his belly and as a spur to his ingenuity ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson

... the very topmost pinnacle of a thorn-bush; halfway down he had leapt four feet on to a neighbouring hazel; he had looked back in self-congratulation at the abyss, and, when he had turned ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English

... five o'clock. Let the cold be never so great or the sky so clouded, the mysterious influence of the light, as the sun slowly rises higher on the meridian, sinks into the earth like a magic rain. It enters the hardest bark and the rolled-up bud, so firm that its point will prick the finger like a thorn; it stirs beneath the surface of the ground. A magnetism that is not heat, and for which there is no exact name, works out of sight in answer to the sun. Seen or unseen, clouded or not, every day the sun lifts itself an inch higher, and let the north wind shrivel ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... river a friar was walking, armed like Robin, but without a bow. At this sight Robin jumped from his horse, which he tied to a thorn, and called to the friar to carry him over the water, or it would cost him ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck

... By the thorn with inoculated good fruit is signified those natures which of themselves were not disposed towards virtue, but by the aid of their preceptors they have the repudation ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci









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