"Acorn" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... native mead, The golden acorn lay; And watch with care the bursting seed, And guard the tender spray; England will bless us for the deed, In ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of the guardians was to give the birdlets drink; so Twinkle and Chubbins flew to the brook and by hunting around a while they found an acorn-cup that had fallen from one of the oak trees. This they filled with water, and then Twinkle, who was a trifle larger than the boy-lark, clutched the cup firmly with her toes and flew back to the orphans without spilling more than ...
— Policeman Bluejay • L. Frank Baum
... year," said Uncle Solon, reflectively. "I dunno, but ye all know how bitter a red-oak acorn is. I shouldn't wonder a mite ef your cows had taken to eatin' them oak acorns. Critters will, sometimes. Mine did, once. Fust one will take it up, then the rest ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... of worth or goodness—then it is much more correct to say that we must interpret the less developed by the more developed. If you wish to trace the growth of the oak-tree from its earliest beginnings to maturity, then study the acorn and the soil; but if you wish to know what the capacity and the function of the acorn are, then you must interpret the less developed by the more developed, you must see what an oak is like when it spreads its ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... would, the grass was always under him, and the crackling of last autumn's leaves and last summer's twigs—minute dead of the infinite greatness—troubled him. Something portentous seemed connected with the patient noises about him. An acorn dropped, striking a thin fine powder out of a frail oak pod. He took it up, tossing it. He had never ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of his wit and his reason, Sat him under an oak in a hot summer season. On the oak grew an acorn or two, it is said: On the ground grew a pumpkin as big ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... rectifies the mistakes of mankind. The value of the discoveries of all these great men has long since been acknowledged by the world; and the day will and must surely arrive, when the little acorn of Truth, planted by Hahnemann, which has already taken deep root, and is lifting high its vigorous stem, shall tower far above all other giants of the medical forest, and its wide-spreading branches cast their beneficent ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... Listen to me, then. 'Twas in the olden time, long, long ago, And long before the great oak at our door Was yet an acorn, on a mountain's side Lived, with his wife, a cottager. They dwelt Beside a glen and near a dashing brook, A pleasant spot in spring, where first the wren Was heard to chatter, and, among the grass, ...
— The Little People of the Snow • William Cullen Bryant
... foul or green stools it must be stopped. Dr. Koplik, of New York, recommends stopping the feeding of breast and bottle-fed infants in severe diarrhea or cholera infantum and to use the following:—Albumin water, acorn cocoa, or beef juice expressed and diluted with barley water. The white of one egg is equal in nourishing value to three ounces of milk and is well borne by infants. The albumin water can be used alternately with the solution of acorn cocoa or ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Glands, looked exquisitely charming in a creation carried out in green mercerised silk, moulded on an underslip of gloaming grey, sashed with a yoke of broad emerald and finished with a triple flounce of darkerhued fringe, the scheme being relieved by bretelles and hip insertions of acorn bronze. The maids of honour, Miss Larch Conifer and Miss Spruce Conifer, sisters of the bride, wore very becoming costumes in the same tone, a dainty motif of plume rose being worked into the pleats in a pinstripe and repeated capriciously in the jadegreen toques in the form ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... very ugly cap, and I used to think when I saw her here as it was nonsense for her to dress different t' other people; but I never rightly noticed her till she came to see mother last week, and then I thought the cap seemed to fit her face somehow as th 'acorn-cup fits th' acorn, and I shouldn't like to see her so well without it. But you've got another sort o' face; I'd have you just as you are now, without anything t' interfere with your own looks. It's like when a man's ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... "loft-dried" writings. The region in the vicinity of Holyoke is dotted with paper-mills, and within a few miles of the city is made about one-half of all the "loft-dried" writings produced in the United States. The tiny acorn planted two centuries ago has waxed with the years, gaining strength and vigor with the increasing strength of the nation, till now it has become a giant oak, whose branches extend to the ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... economy, an enjoyer, not an acquirer—one who despises the slow and patient virtues—who wants the superstructure without the foundation, the result without the previous operation, the oak without the acorn and the three hundred years of expectation. The Irish are irascible, prone to debt and to fight, and very impatient of the restraints of law. Such a people are not likely to keep their eyes steadily upon the main ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... the termination of our view opposite the North Dome. Here the precipice rises to the height of nearly one sheer mile with a parabolic sky-line, and its posterior surface is as elegantly rounded as an acorn-cup. From this contour results a naked semi-cone of polished granite, whose face would cover one of our smaller Eastern counties, though its exquisite proportions make it seem a thing to hold in the hollow of the hand. A small pine-covered glacis of detritus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... on Sun, and Sun started up the trail in the sky. The trail was marked off into steps like a ladder. As Sun went up he counted "one, two, three," and so on. By and by Coyote became very thirsty, and he asked Sun for a drink of water. Sun gave him an acorn-cup full. Coyote asked him why he had no more. About noontime, Coyote became very impatient. It was very hot. Sun told him to shut his eyes. Coyote shut them, but opened them again. He kept opening and shutting them all the afternoon. At night, when Sun ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... painting for example—avoids this law of organic evolution, arrests development at the fairest season of growth, averts the decadence which ends in death, no more than does an oak. The oak, starting from an acorn, nourished by earth, air, light, and water, offers indeed a simpler problem than so complex an organism as Italian painting, developed under conditions of manifold diversity. Yet the dominant law ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... and the pepperidge tall, Where the birds and the squirrels tirelessly call, Where in autumn the flowers of the gentian blue Look up with their eyes so dark and true, Up into the hazy sky, Dreaming away as the red leaves drop, And the acorn falls from its deep brown cup, And the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... this morning going down the path with her acorn basket," said Granpa Tobackyworm as he blew a few rings of smoke in the air. "Perhaps she has gone to the Katydid grocery store to buy something," Granpa Tobackyworm added as he bounced up and down on his blade ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle
... the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being?[212] Whence, then, this worship of the past?[213] The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Elihu, even if he would, cannot keep silence? Is it not a wrong to find pearls unprized, because many a modern, like his Celtic progenitors, (for I must not say like swine,) would sooner crush an acorn? to know your estimation among men ebbs and flows according to the accident of success, rather than the quality of merit? to be despised as an animal who must necessarily be living on his wits in some purlieu, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... SEED within its slender rind Life's golden threads in endless circles wind; Maze within maze the lucid webs are roll'd, And, as they burst, the living flame unfold. 385 The pulpy acorn, ere it swells, contains The Oak's vast branches in its milky veins; Each ravel'd bud, fine film, and fibre-line Traced with nice pencil on the small design. The young Narcissus, in it's bulb compress'd, 390 Cradles a second nestling ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... extends into them,—sometimes only to the eyes, then to the rest of the features, afterwards to the limbs and extremities. Evidently the artist's conception left much outside of it, to be added by way of label or explanation. In the trees, the care is to give the well-known fruit, the acorn or the apple, not the character of the tree; for what is wanted is only an indication what tree is meant. The only tie between man and the material world is the use he makes of it, elaborating and turning it into something it was not. Hence the trim orderliness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Sanitary arrangements were very bad and disinfectants unknown. We were allowed to buy a little extra bread and some turnip jam at exorbitant prices, which helped us considerably, as breakfast consisted only of luke-warm acorn coffee, lunch of a weird soup containing sauerkraut or barley, supper of soup or tea alternate days. We amused ourselves by carving our names on the table, or by drawing regimental crests or pictures of Hun aeroplanes descending in flames, in out of the way corners. On ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds. What else have the Hindoos, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... barely audible and the quality of the silence which followed it drew John Wollaston's gaze which had been straying over the lake, around to the speaker. She had been occupying her hands while she talked, collecting tiny twigs and acorn cups that happened to be within reach but now she was tensely still and paler than her wont, ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... taught, He gathered the brown acorn in its shade, And ere he slept, still gazing upward, caught Sweet glimpses of the night, in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... The acorn's not yet Fallen from the tree, That's to grow the wood, That's to make the cradle, That's to rock the bairn, That's to grow to the man, That's to lay me. ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... they must be considered as cousins to one another, and as forming a single tree-like animal, every individual plant or animal of which is as truly one and the same person with the primordial cell as the oak a thousand years old is one and the same plant with the acorn out of which it has grown. This is easily understood, but will, I trust, be made to appear ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... lance, his throat sparkling with angry fire, to warn me off from a Missouri-currant whose honey he was sipping. And many a time he has driven me out of a flower-bed. This summer, by the way, a pair of these winged emeralds fastened their mossy acorn-cup upon a bough of the same elm which the orioles had enlivened the year before. We watched all their proceedings from the window through an opera-glass, and saw their two nestlings grow from black needles with a tuft of down at the lower ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... arboreal vegetation is comparatively slow, and we are often told that, though he who buries an acorn may hope to see it shoot up to a miniature resemblance of the majestic tree which shall shade his remote descendants, yet the longest life hardly embraces the seedtime and the harvest of a forest. The planter of a wood, it is said, must be actuated by higher motives than those of ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... in Italy or Germany. But as a weapon of defence it leaves much to be desired. The man of whom I am telling you had grown so much used to using it in this way, that whenever he saw anything coming in the shape of a carte he thrust it forward as naturally as a pig does when he sees an acorn. After a couple of semesters the cartes sat on his nose from bridge to tip, one after the other, like the days of the week in a calendar. But when the third semester began, and the cartes began to fall too near together, and sometimes ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... table-cloth we spread; A grain of rye, or wheat, Is manchet, which we eat; Pearly drops of dew we drink In acorn cups fill'd ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... likeness of Himself. He who is the eternal life of men will nourish us, body, soul, and spirit, with that everlasting life of His, even as our bodies are nourished by that bread and wine. And if you ask me how? When you can tell me why a wheat grain cannot produce an oak, or an acorn a wheat plant; when you can tell me why our bodies are, each of them, the very same bodies which they were ten years ago, though every atom of flesh, and blood, and bone in them has been changed; when, in short, you, or any other living ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... then an acorn fell from among the serrated chestnut leaves, striking upon the fence with a sounding thwack, and rebounding in the weeds. Those chestnut-oaks always seem to unaccustomed eyes the creation of Nature in a fit of mental aberration—useful freak! the mountain swine fatten on the plenteous mast, and ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... music of his sleeping hours. Day hath another—'tis a melody He trips to, made by the assembled flowers, And light and fragrance laughing 'mid the bowers, And ripeness busy with the acorn-tree. Such strains, perhaps, as filled with mute amaze— The silent music of Earth's ecstasy— The Satyr's soul, the Faun of ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... affecting more rusticity than was natural to him, (for his frequent intercourse with Sir Henry Lee had partly softened and polished his manners,) "I think the oak is like to bear a lusty acorn—that ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... along, when, all of a sudden, she stumbled on an acorn, and fell down, basket and all, and she hurt her paw on a thorn, so she couldn't carry ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... indeed! Striped Chipmunk would have gone his way and thought no more about it, had it not happened that there was a hole in the bag and from it something dropped at his feet. Striped Chipmunk picked it up and it wasn't a potato. It was a fat acorn. Striped Chipmunk said nothing but slipped it into ...
— Mother West Wind's Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... objects in our world into the two elements of matter and form. He argued as follows: nothing in the material world is permanent as an individual thing. It changes its state from moment to moment and finally ceases to be the thing it was. An acorn passes a number of stages before it is ripe, and when it is placed in the ground it again changes its form continually and then comes out as an oak. In artificial products man in a measure imitates nature. ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... a nut or a fir-cone. Why, it's just the same noise as you hear in the country at home when they drop an acorn." ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... glorious sheen of topaz, sapphire and gold. Down in the valley the mist still hung in thick patches, but the sun's rays were piercing it in many directions, and there was every promise of a hot day, such as would make the shade of the great forest with its acorn-laden oaks welcome, and the whole place tempting to one who cared to fill pocket or basket with the bearded hazelnuts, already beginning to show colour in the pale green husks, while the acorns, too, ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... shameful—"and that's the precise effect I was after"—could the composer triumphantly answer, and he would be right. What kind of music is this, without melody, in the ordinary sense; without themes, yet every acorn of a phrase contrapuntally developed by an adept; without a harmony that does not smite the ears, lacerate, figuratively speaking, the ear-drums; keys forced into hateful marriage that are miles asunder, or else too closely related ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... very oldest of the old oaks in the copse, dear, is his grandchild. If you go into the copse you will find an oak which has only one branch; he is so old, he has only that branch left. He sprang up from an acorn dropped from an oak that grew from an acorn dropped from the oak the lightning struck. So that is three oak lives, Guido dear, back to the time I was thinking of just now. And that oak under whose shadow you are now lying is the fourth of them, and he is ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... The sea-squirt has in its early youth the line of cartilage through the body which, in embryonic development, represents the first stage of the backbone; the lancelet and the Appendicularia have a rod of cartilage throughout life; the "acorn-headed worm" shows traces of it. These are regarded as surviving specimens of various groups of animals which, in early times, fell between the Invertebrate and Vertebrate ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... flow from seemingly insignificant causes!" said Sir Christopher. "A spark shall light a conflagration of a mighty city; an acorn shall bear an oak to waft armies over oceans to conquest; and the conversion of a child to the true faith may change the destinies of nations. It may be thy blessed lot, Celestina, to plant a seed which shall grow into a tree, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... mental faculties. With a glorified body, then, truly it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but the thought itself is rapture, that our souls at present may be as disproportioned to their future expansion, as the acorn is to the oak of a century's growth, which is infolded now, ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... raised for flight. Again, she can show us a bee lodged in one bead that looks like solid honey, and a little bright-winged beetle in another. This one holds two slender pine-needles lying across each other, and here we see a single scale of a pine-cone; while yet another shows an atom of an acorn-cup, fit for a fairy's use. I wish you could see the beads, for I cannot tell you the half of their beauty. Now, where do you suppose they came from, and how did little Scotch Jeanie come into possession of such ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... to feed a linnet And linnets are plenty, thistles rife— Or an acorn-cup to catch dew-drops in it There's ample promise of further life. Now, mark how ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... by stray accidents to cross the ocean with a fair chance of sprouting or hatching out on the new soil, and which were totally unable by original constitution to survive the ordeal of immersion in the sea. For instance, I looked anxiously at first for the arrival of some casual acorn or some floating filbert, which might stock my islands with waving greenery of oaks and hazel bushes. But I gradually discovered, in the course of a few centuries, that these heavy nuts never floated ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Where dropp'd the acorn that gave birth to thee? Can'st thou trace back thy line of ancestry? We're match'd, old friend, and let us not repine, Darkness o'erhangs thy origin and mine; Both may be truly honourable: yet, We'll date our honours from the day we met; When, of my worldly ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... as literally 'grown' as has an oak tree; and probably there is no more likeness between the Bible as we know it to-day and its earliest beginning, than we find between the mighty tree, and the acorn ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... and growing edifice, a page to a sacred volume, a chapter to a Bible, a Bible to a literature. We may be insects; but like the coral insect we build islands which become continents: like the bee we store sustenance for future communities. The individual perishes; but the race is immortal. The acorn of today is the oak of the next millennium. I throw my stone on the cairn and die; but later comers add another stone and yet another; and ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... as she wandered here and there, every now and then turning to look for the pond, and make sure that she was not losing herself, there were acorn-cups, lovely mosses, beautiful autumn leaves—red, orange, golden and green; there were wild grapes too, and hazel-nuts, brown and ripe. Of all these she gathered eagerly until her basket was full, thinking that some ...
— Grandmother Elsie • Martha Finley
... the pheasants, I gets them mostly about acorn-time; they comes out of the plantations then. I keeps clear of the plantations, because, besides the men a-watching, they have got dogs chained up, and alarm-guns as goes off if you steps on the ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... Mr. James Elverson for his weekly journal, published at his great establishment, Ninth and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia. In this early part of its tenth volume, it shows, as every number of the past has done, a steady growth in vigor. The acorn sprout has gradually to expand and shoot upward in the air and light before it becomes the majestic oak of the forest; but all the while it is growing, it is putting forth new beauties and fastening ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... plow-handle, and mounted the panel of the fence next to the one on which Bushie was sitting, and squared himself for the confab, which the little master opened thus; "Burl, just look at them crows up there on the dead limb of that big acorn-tree; what ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... looking out of the window, as he spoke, at the queer-shaped, jumped-together, lack-lustre-looking vehicle, with a turnover seat behind, now in charge of a pepper-and-salt attired youth, with a shabby hat, looped up by a thin silver cord to an acorn on the crown, and baggy Berlin gloves—'and I'll just see what there is in the way of stabling; and if I think it will do, then I'll give a boy sixpence or a shilling to come over to Leather, here,' jerking ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... came to Craigyburnwood, The Queen of the Fairies spoke: "Come, bind your steeds to the rushes so green, And dance by the haunted oak: I found the acorn on Heshbon Hill, In the nook of a palmer's poke, A thousand years since; here it grows!" And they danced till the greenwood shook: But oh! the fire, the burning fire, The longer it burns, it ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... the connecting part has finally died out, I see no reason why in another fifty years each one of the two may not again have spread and divided, giving us at least four grubs, or clusters of sprouts, all originally coming from one acorn; and so the matter might go on. This is slow traveling, I admit, but there is nothing to hinder nature from taking all the time ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... society are to walk, in a few days, from the townhall to the cathedral, in procession, to hear a sermon. They walk in linen gowns, and each has a stick, with an acorn; but for the acorn they could give no reason, till I told them ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... open sea. From the shore come nutritive contributions and minute organisms which multiply quickly in the open waters. But not less important is the fact that the open waters afford a safe cradle or nursery for many a delicate larva, e.g. of crab and starfish, acorn-shell and sea-urchin, which could not survive for a day in the rough-and-tumble conditions of the shore and the shallow water. After undergoing radical changes and gaining strength, the young creatures return to the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... the dramatic form of the other. In other words, the body of the Classic Drama was not big enough nor strong enough to contain the soul of Christian England. The thing could no more be, except in a purely mechanical and arbitrary way, than an acorn could develop itself into a violet, or the life of an eagle build itself into the body of a trout, or the soul of a horse put on the organism of a dove. Moreover the Greek religion was mythical or fabulous, and could nowise stand the historic method: the Christian religion ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... horizontal than the other, and terminates in a curved way about three feet high and twice as long." Half a dozen such houses make an Indian village, with the addition of a "dome-shaped assembly or dance house" in the middle space. "One or more acorn-granaries of wicker-work stand around each lodge, much like hogsheads in shape and size, either on the ground or mounted on posts as high as one's head, full of acorns and capped with thatch." [Footnote: Powers' Tribes ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... trees, where the bees make it. The wax is worth sixteen or twenty reals an arroba, and a jar of honey one real. I saw a tree which had many honeycombs hanging on the branches. The mountains are fuller of wild boars than are the commons of Espana of swine and cattle in acorn time. One of those swine, if it is fat, is worth two reals, but only one if not fat; and a deer is worth the same sum. There are almost no fruits of Espana. There are melons, cucumbers, pumpkins, and radishes of the country, and quantities ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XXII, 1625-29 • Various
... to make up for the rest that he was as hoarse as a crow the next morning. The blackleg fairies had a hard time too. They hadn't a minute to gossip with the flowers, as they usually did when they flew round with their acorn-cups of dew and thistledown sponges and washed their faces and folded up their petals and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... all my life upside down. At seven o'clock in the morning I drink tea in bed—for some reason it must be in bed; at half-past seven a German by way of a masseur comes and rubs me all over with water, and this seems not at all bad. Then I have to lie still a little, get up at eight o'clock, drink acorn cocoa and eat an immense quantity of butter. At ten o'clock, oatmeal porridge, extremely nice to taste and to smell, not like our Russian. Fresh air and sunshine. Reading the newspaper. At one o'clock, dinner, at which I must not taste everything but only the things Olga chooses for me, according ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... was as large—as large—but, in short, I am afraid to say how immeasurably large it was. To speak within bounds, it was ten times larger than a great mill wheel; and, all of metal as it was, it floated over the heaving surges more lightly than an acorn cup adown the brook. The waves tumbled it onward, until it grazed against the shore, within a short distance of the spot where Hercules ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... were happy? Then remember day by day Just to scatter seeds of kindness As you pass along the way; For the pleasures of the many May be ofttimes traced to one, As the hand that plants an acorn Shelters armies from ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... to believe that work never fails to those who seek it in good earnest. It was said of some man, famous for keeping his word, that 'if he had promised you an acorn, and all the oaks in England failed to produce one, he would have sent to Norway for an acorn.' If I wanted work, and there was none to be had in the Old World, I would find my way to the New. But to the point: I have found ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... areca palm, which stands about every kampong, supplies the natives with their great luxury—an acorn, known as the betel-nut, which, when crushed and mixed with lime leaves, takes the place of our chewing tobacco. In fact, the bright-red juice seen oozing from the corners of a Malay's mouth is as ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... know? They are the fairies' tables. They come out and spread them with lily tablecloths at night, and have acorn cups for dishes, with honey in them. And they dance and play there. Well, couldn't Mr. Edward go and sit under the beech-tree at the edge till ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cage, but unfinished work, which half-clothed the egg, as it left the ovaries, and then, when the dress-material ran short, or something went wrong with the machinery, allowed it to cross the outer threshold in the likeness of an acorn ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... thy repentance. But believe The spark divine dwells in thee: let it grow. That which the upreaching spirit can achieve The grand and all-creative forces know; They will assist and strengthen as the light Lifts up the acorn to the oak tree's height. Thou hast but to resolve, and lo! God's whole Great universe shall fortify ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... their most courageous foragers. In a day the Indian camp would have taken on the character of the forest; in a month, an ancient ruin, it would have fitted as accurately with its surroundings as an acorn in the cup. ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... before daybreak he perceived that Skrymir was again fast asleep, and again grasping his mallet, he dashed it with such violence that it forced its way into the giant's skull up to the handle. But Skrymir sat up, and stroking his cheek said, "An acorn fell on my head. What! Art thou awake, Thor? Methinks it is time for us to get up and dress ourselves; but you have not now a long way before you to the city called Utgard. I have heard you whispering to one another that I am not a man of small dimensions; ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... acorn year," said Uncle Solon, reflectively. "I dunno, but ye all know how bitter a red-oak acorn is. I shouldn't wonder a mite ef your cows had taken to eatin' them oak acorns. Critters will, sometimes. Mine did, once. Fust one will take it up, then ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... the graceful negligence, Which, scorning art and veiling sense, Achieves that conquest o'er the heart Sense seldom gains, and never art; This lady, 'tis our royal will Our laureate's vacant seat should fill: A chaplet of immortal bays Shall crown her brow and guard her lays; Of nectar sack an acorn cup Be at her board each year fill'd up; And as each quarter feast comes round A silver penny shall be found Within the compass of her shoe; And so we bid you ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... bank and was a "tripper," looking at us through a telescope; for when the elder-stems cracked and wouldn't do for flutes, he made them into telescopes. And before we went down to the brook we made jam of hips and haws from the hedge at the top of the field, and put it into acorn cups, and took it with us, that the children might not be short of ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... but there are also numerous little Ostracodes, especially in the fresh-water strata of the Wealden. It should further be noted that there occurs here a great development of the singular Crustaceous family of the Barnacles (Lepadidoe), whilst the allied family of the equally singular Acorn-shells (Balanidoe) is ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... too, that by living out the suggestions she had made to him in the cabin—the Argentine—Stephens and Jarrott—"the very good firm to work for"—he had never got beyond her influence, no more than the oak-tree gets beyond the acorn that has been its seed. The perception of these things would have been enough to puzzle a mind not easily at home in the complex, even if the reintroduction of Judge Wayne ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... love, a higher power Than Fancy gave assurance of some work Of glory there forthwith to be begun, Perhaps too there performed. Thus long I mused, 80 Nor e'er lost sight of what I mused upon, Save when, amid the stately groves of oaks, Now here, now there, an acorn, from its cup Dislodged, through sere leaves rustled, or at once To the bare earth dropped with a startling sound. 85 From that soft couch I rose not, till the sun Had almost touched the horizon; casting then A backward ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... humbly desire your good leave to gather the green plant which grows between your roots. If an acorn falls into this my right hand" (which I held out) "I will count it that you answer yes—and give you thanks." The acorn fell straight into the palm of my hand. I said, "I thank you, Oak: good growth to you. I will lay this your acorn in the ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... birds, he learned their actions better and so knew better how to have roast bird for supper. So perhaps they were right about the good luck. Besides, both of them were growing up. Sptz had learned to make acorn bread and found a hollow on the top of the Iron Star which was just the thing to grind up nuts in. Umpl was two feet taller than when the star fell, and could draw a bow and send an arrow right through a stag. And one great day he met a Cave Bear and sent his flint-headed shaft whistling ...
— The Iron Star - And what It saw on Its Journey through the Ages • John Preston True
... means sully his lineage, he went first of all to the oldest creatures in the world in order to obtain information about her age. First he went to the stag of Ferny-side Brae, whom he found sitting by the old stump of an oak, and inquired the age of the owl. The stag said: 'I have seen this oak an acorn which is now lying on the ground without either leaves or bark: nothing in the world wore it up but my rubbing myself against it once a day when I got up, so I have seen a vast number of years, but I assure you that I have never seen the owl older or younger than ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... said of the dream that the stone which was despised by the architect has become the corner-stone. The acorn of the dream, of the ephemeral and inconsiderable product of our soul, dates from the earliest times. Before that, men saw in the dream a prophecy for the future, a warning spirit, a comforter, a messenger of the gods. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... direct rays of the sun would burn their delicate wings; they hunt chiefly in the shade. The linnets will suddenly sweep up into the boughs and converse sweetly over your head. The sunshine lingers and grows sweeter as the autumn gives tokens of its coming in the buff bryony leaf, and the acorn filling its cup. They are so happy, the birds, yet there are few to listen to them. I have often looked round and wondered that no one else was about hearkening to them. Altogether, perhaps, they lead safer lives ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... effects?" replied Lorenzo. "We have tried in our crucibles the acorn which produces the oak, and the embryo from which grows a man; from this tiny substance results a single principle, to which some force, some movement must be given. Since there is no overruling creator, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... altogether satisfactory to Charles' mind; but where to find a more secure retreat he could not,—dared not venture to ascertain that day. It occurred to him, however, that he would be much safer up a tree than hid in the bushes and undergrowth. He therefore climbed up a large acorn tree and there passed an entire day in deep meditation. No gleam of hope appeared, yet he would not suffer himself to think of returning to bondage. In this dilemma he remembered a poor washer-woman named ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... among the medicine men," Secotan went on slowly, "that many, many moons ago, long before this oak tree grew upon this hill, before its father's father had yet been planted as an acorn, our people came hither across just such a sea as that. Far to the westward it lay, and they came, a mere handful of bold spirits in their canoes, across a wide water from some land that we have utterly forgotten. Some settled down at once ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... from their forms, such as the Trefoil, because it is three-leaved; Pentaphylon, for having five leaves; Serpolet, because it creepeth along the ground; Helxine, Petast, Myrobalon, which the Arabians called Been, as if you would say an acorn, for it hath a kind of resemblance thereto, and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... down a hill by a transverse lane into the small town or village of Evershead, being now about halfway over the distance. She made a halt here, and breakfasted a second time, heartily enough—not at the Sow-and-Acorn, for she avoided inns, but at a ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... long and winding that he can easily escape almost any enemy, except the weasel, which is not easily outwitted. His nursery and living-room is quite pretentious, but his lateral storeroom is a marvel! He is a miser indeed, and stores up every acorn and nut he can find, even many times more than he can ever eat. His variety of food is almost unending—he loves buckwheat, beaked nuts, pecans, various kinds of grass seeds, and Indian corn. In carrying food to his home ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... seed, the grain of corn, The acorn on the hill, Each for some separate end is born In season fit, and still Each must in strength arise to work ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... fairies are curiously youthful compared with these hoary infants, which is all the more remarkable when the daring exaggerations of Cambrian story-tellers are considered. It is a modest claim only to have seen the acorn before the oak and the egg before the hen, yet that is all that is put forward. In one of the Lays of Marie de France the wood of Brezal is indicated as the spot where the oak was seen.[85] The formula thus ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... big strong man, one Bobby Maurice, a good-natured giant, nearly three inches high and over two ounces in weight, who among other feats would eat a whole pea at a sitting, and hold out an acorn at arm's-length, and throw a pepper-corn over two yards—which has ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... and queen of sprites there happened, at this time, a sad disagreement: they never met by moonlight in the shady walks of this pleasant wood, but they were quarreling, till all their fairy elves would creep into acorn-cups ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... monks so foolish. For whatsoever the Church guards is all for the folk that ask it in God's name, not for one's kindred, or for another more vile. The flesh of mortals is so soft that a good beginning suffices not below from the springing of the oak to the forming of the acorn. Peter began without gold and without silver, and I with prayers and with fasting, and Francis in humility his convent; and if thou lookest at the source of each, and then lookest again whither it has run, thou wilt see dark made of the white. Truly, Jordan turned ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... the world, a New Zealand paddle on the wall, opposite to a couple of Australian spears. Hanks of sea-weed hung from nails. There was a caulking hammer that had been fished up from the bottom of some dock, all covered with acorn barnacles, and an old bottle incrusted with oyster-shells, the glass having begun to imitate the iridescent lining of the oyster. Under the side-table was a giant oyster from off the coast of Java. Over the chimney-glass the snout of a sword-fish. A cannon-ball—a thirty-two ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... Protestantism opened a very wide avenue to infidelity. Protestantism introduced the principle, "There is no divinely-commissioned authority to teach infallibly." Now infidelity exists in this principle of Protestantism, as the oak exists in the acorn, as the consequence is in the premise. On the claim of private judgment, Protestants reject the authority of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ. The Calvinists, going, as they do, by the same principle, reject the Real Presence of our ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... to her line of march. In her owner's part of the grove, there was too much competition, in the food-hunt, from other and equally greedy pigs of the herd. These she could fight off and drive from the choicest acorn-hoards. But it was ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... Harcourt?) Size medium, short, slightly acorn-shaped; cracking qualities medium; Shell rather thick, but very smooth inside; kernel short, very plump; meat yellow; very tender; rich; very good. (Report ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... on its summit spread A wide extended plain, with herbage green: Shade to the place was wanting; hither came The heaven-born poet; seated him, and touch'd His sounding strings, and straight a shade approach'd. Nor wanted there Chaoenian trees; nor groves Of poplars; nor the acorn's spacious leaves: The linden soft, the beech, the virgin bay, The brittle hazle, and spear-forming ash; The knotless fir; ilex with fruit low-bow'd; The genial plane; the maple various stain'd; Stream-loving willow; and the watery lote; Box of perpetual green; slight ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... The diameter of the interior of the cell is about one-quarter of an inch, contracting a little at the mouth. When the cell is taken out, the dirt adheres for a line in thickness, so that it is of the size and form of an acorn. ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... learn very soon that this gesture might have been avoided, and that, in her place, we should have refrained. The friends of the man around whom all fell into ruins, and of the neighbour who ever was able to build up his life anew, will have observed before that the acorn sometimes will fall on to rock, and sometimes on fertile soil. And though poverty, sickness, and death still remain the three inequitable goddesses of human existence, they no longer awake in us the ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... acorn, Just thrusting out its shoot, Ye giants of the forest, That strike the deepest root? Will ye despise the streamlets Upon the mountain side; Ye broad and mighty rivers, On ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... the fly-leaf. It was at once sent to Francis Bedford for binding, with instructions to have the "inlaying, repairing etc. done over in the very best manner, by the best restorer in France or England." Bound in brown morocco, richly blind-tooled, with Tudor rose, fleur-de-lis and acorn emblems. Leaf 10-1/4 x 7-1/2 in. The Smets fly-leaf and the original instructions sent to Mr. Bedford with the volume and returned by him with an added note over his own ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous
... eternal ways of looking at this twilight world of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... still a little girl,—when long talks banished turkeys and apples and sliding,—when new books or sleigh-rides crowded out the old games,—when the two days of John's yearly visit were half-spent in the leafless, sunny woods, gathering mosses and acorn-cups, delicate fern leaves, and clusters of fire-moss, and red winter-green berries, for the pretty frames and baskets Lizzy's skilful fingers fabricated,—when he shook hands at coming and going, instead ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... plane, we have analogies illustrating this fact. It is said that in every acorn rests and exists, in miniature, the form of the future oak. And, some go so far as to say that the oak is the "ultimate cause" of the acorn—that the idea of the oak caused the acorn to be at all. In the same way, the "idea" of the man must be in the infant boy, ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... the Yokuts, [Footnote: Contributions to North American Ethnology, Vol. III, p. 377.] a Californian tribe which lived in the San Joaquin valley near Tulare Lake, had a similar game. Each die was half a large acorn or walnut shell filled with pitch and powdered charcoal and inlaid with bits of bright colored abaloni shell. Four squaws played and a fifth kept tally with fifteen sticks. There were eight dice and they scooped them up with their hands and dashed them into the ...
— Indian Games • Andrew McFarland Davis
... and nightfall that this silence was most intense. On a still night one could almost hear the earth move, and fancy that the stars diffused a gentle crackling noise as of rushing flame. The fall of an acorn in a pine wood startled the ear like an explosion. The river also was discerned as having a definite rhythm of its own. It ran up and down a perpetual scale, like a bird singing. What had seemed a heavy confused sound of falling water resolved itself into ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... not until the sun had already run nearly half his course, for he never dared to leave his timber observatory before, le pauvre diable dropped down from his perch like an acorn—and, marching off with weary steps, and scarcely a hope that ere another night fell he should gain the shelter of some cottage, he dragged himself along. On he rolled from side to side, torn with the thorns and bitten by the gnats that swarmed around him, sometimes calling upon his mother, ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... ought to!" said the earth-worm. "Why it was I who dragged him into the ground a couple of years ago. He was joined on to a leaf and stalk and I ate up both the leaf and the stalk, but I couldn't manage this chap. That wasn't so odd either, for he was an acorn. Now he has sprouted, he's a ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... it at a distance. On the branches were hanging the great mameis, just like the inside of cocoa-nuts when the inner shell has been cracked off. It appeared that Nature was not acquainted with M. De La Fontaine's works, or she would probably have got a hint from the fable of the acorn and the pumpkin, and not have hung mameis and cocoa-nuts at ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... plumped down on my head, and as I looked up, there sat, on a limb not ten feet above me, an impudent rogue of a gray squirrel, half as big as a rabbit, erect upon his haunches, working away at the twin brother of the acorn he had dropped upon my hat to break my reverie, rasping it audibly with his chisel-shaped teeth, and grinning at me just as coolly as though I were ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... he see In the wood or in the mead, Or in any company Of the rustic mortal maids, Her with acorn-colored braids; Never came she to his need. Never more the lad was merry, Strayed apart, and learned to dream, Feeding on the tart wild berry; Murmuring words none understood,— Words with music of the wood, And with ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... before, Ferdinand Brandeis had bought a large bill of Christmas fancy-goods—celluloid toilette sets, leather collar boxes, velvet glove cases. Among the lot was a photograph album in the shape of a huge acorn done in lightning-struck plush. It was a hideous thing, and expensive. It stood on a brass stand, and its leaves were edged in gilt, and its color was a nauseous green and blue, and it was altogether the sort of thing to grace the chill and funereal best room in a Wisconsin farmhouse. Ferdinand ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... dead Love in a dream. These thoughts, which you have sung In the vernacular, Should be, as others of the Church's are, Decently cloak'd in the Imperial Tongue. Have you no fears Lest, as Lord Jesus bids your sort to dread, Yon acorn-munchers rend you limb from limb, You, with Heaven's liberty affronting theirs!' So spoke my monitor; but I to him, 'Alas, and is not mine a ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... that old oak, and kissed the place where I had carved our names with many vows. Tell me, you little witch, who were you thinking of all that time?' 'All the while of you,' she sighed. 'And do you, oh, do you remember that you fell asleep under the oak, and that a little acorn fell into your bosom and you tossed it out in a pet? Ah, Olive dear, I found that acorn, and kissed it twice, and kissed it thrice for thee! And do you know that it has grown into a fine young oak?' 'I know it,' she answered softly and sadly, 'I often go to it!' This was ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... potentialities that lie hidden in the soul of a child! Just as the acorn contains the whole of the great oak tree enfolded in its heart, so the child-life has hidden in it all the powers of heart and mind which later reach full fruition. Nothing is created through the process of growth and development. Education is ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts |
