"Orchid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attraction which glass has for the missile of the juvenile thrower, the orchid-house, on the opposite side of the path from the pear-tree, drew the errant stone to its ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... that—not only that. But there'll be thousands of people there, all with gardens of their own, all pointing to things and saying, 'We've got one of those in the east bed,' or 'Wouldn't that look nice in the south orchid house?' and you and I will be quite, quite out of it." I sighed, and helped myself from the ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... Edward was cruising up the Hudson with a yachting party one Saturday afternoon, the sight of Jay Gould's mansion, upon approaching Irvington, awakened the desire of the women on board to see his wonderful orchid collection. Edward explained his previous association with the financier and offered to recall himself to him, if the party wished to take the chance of recognition. A note was written to Mr. Gould, ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... notoriety. Not now, perhaps, but later when she had developed into a woman and knew her own power. Paris loved all things strange, and gave homage to the woman who was among her fellows as the orchid among flowers. ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... pier, where the trees hung right over the sides, the leaves dipping into the water. It was very secluded, very beautiful, and wonderfully reposeful. Our path lay through a lovely wood, where wild flowers grew in profusion, among them a kind of wild orchid with a delicious perfume, and the small wild arum lily. It is strange that such rare plants should grow there, when one remembers that for six or eight months of the year the land is ice-bound. On the island we visited a small church, within the sacred precincts of ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... orchids who make it their business to imitate a fly with their petals. This lie they dispose so cunningly that real flies, thinking the honey is being already plundered, pass them without molesting them. Watching intently and keeping very still, methought I heard this orchid speaking to the offspring which she felt within her, though I saw them not. "My children," she exclaimed, "I must soon leave you; think upon the fly, my loved ones, for this is truth; cling to this great thought in your passage through ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... Mr. Atkinson that year sold the largest half of his country seat—Spencer Wood—to the Government, as a gubernatorial residence for the hospitable and genial Earl of Elgin, reserving the smaller half (now owned by the writer), on which he built conservatories, vineries, a pinery, orchid house, &c., far more extensive than those of Spencer Wood proper. Though the place was renowned for its magnificence and princely hospitality in the days of Lord Elgin, there are amongst the living plenty to testify to the fact that the lawns, walks, gardens, and conservatories were never ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... bayonet spike of florets, this useful and indefatigable bulb, if left to itself and not bound to a stake like a martyr, now produces flower sprays that start out at right angles, curve, and almost droop, with striking, orchid-like effect. ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... with something in it from men to men. "You here?" I said. "Where aren't you nowadays And what's the news you carry—if you know? And tell me where you're off for—Montreal? Me? I'm not off for anywhere at all. Sometimes I wander out of beaten ways Half looking for the orchid Calypso." ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... gymnastics—occupying the space of a few seconds—it came to him with a shock that here was a new specimen of the species. At the same time he comprehended that she was as pure and lovely as the white orchid of Borneo and that she did not carry that ridiculous shield called false modesty. He could talk to her as frankly as he could to a man, that she would not take offence at anything so long as it was in the form of explanation. On the other ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... Boltenia, the scientists call them, tall, queer-shaped things; a stalk six to eight inches in length, with a knob or oblong bulb-like body at the summit, looking exactly like the flower of a lady-slipper orchid and as delicately coloured. This is a member of that curious family of Ascidians, which forever trembles in the balance between the higher backboned animals and the lower division, where are classified the humbler insects, crabs, and snails. The young of Boltenia promises ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... factory hours always drove Amherst forth long before his wife's day began, and in the course of one of his early tramps he met Miss Brent and Cicely setting out for a distant swamp where rumour had it that a rare native orchid might be found. Justine's sylvan tastes had developed in the little girl a passion for such pillaging expeditions, and Cicely, who had discovered that her step-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brent did about flowers, was not ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... silver and glass, around a magnificent orchid in the centre, and a rose by every plate, was spread in the dining-room, sweet sounds and scents coming in through the widely-opened glass doors of the conservatory, while a bright wood fire, still pleasant to look at, shone in ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hot-house flower sent down from a Boston conservatory and wears it in her hair or the bosom of her gown, where it seems to express her exotic beauty. It is characteristic of the romancer that he does not specify whether this symbolic blossom was a gardenia, an orchid, a tuberose, a japonica, or what it was. Thoreau, if we can imagine him writing a romance, would have added the ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... jubilant, ceremonial praises to the sun, or else they moved together on the air in wavering dances intricate and swift, or turned aside to avoid the onrush of some drop of water that a breeze had shaken from a jungle orchid, chilling the air and driving it before it, as it fell whirring in its rush to the earth; but all the while they sang triumphantly. "For the day is for us," they said, "whether our great and sacred father ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... converted to Ogden, and the New-Yorker, on his side, found pleasant and refreshing this democracy of Governors and cow-punchers. Jode received us at the signal-service office, and began to show us his instruments with the careful pride of an orchid-collector. ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... leaf-clasped stem, this orchid attracts us by its flaunted beauty and decorative form from tip to root, not less than the aesthetic little bees for which its adornment and mechanism are so marvellously adapted. Doubtless the heavy, oily odor is an additional ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... The jewel-weed with all its beauty has none that my sense can perceive. But that of Chelone glabra, as modest and withdrawn as the flower itself, seems hardly to belong in the swamp for all the beauty of the place. It should rather be that of some delicately nurtured plant, some rare orchid of sheltered conservatories, it is so ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... four-leaf clover. Peter noticed that whenever the Red Admiral crossed his path now, something pleasant always impended; it meant that he wouldn't be very unhappy in school; or maybe he'd find a thrush's nest, or the pink orchid. Or the meeting might simply imply something nice and homey, such as a little treat his mother contrived to make for him when sewing had been somewhat better-paying than usual, and she could sit by the table and enjoy his enjoyment as only one's mother can. Decidedly, the ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... the orchid house at four o'clock, her arms filled with an unprecedented collection for Conny's book. The big yellow four-in-hand coach was standing outside the stable being washed. She examined ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... altogether, through the park and villages and then along the green glades of the Hickleybrow preserves. The trees were all dusted with the green spangles of high spring, the hedges were full of stitchwort and campion and the woods of blue hyacinths and purple orchid; and everywhere there was a great noise of birds—thrushes, blackbirds, robins, finches, and many more—and in one warm corner of the park some bracken was unrolling, and there was a leaping and ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... fetched from her ample bed on the horse's back, and displayed proudly. Her master, a very large dark man, stuck the dog into the breast of his coat, whence her miniature head protruded like a peculiar orchid. ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... we can learn in nature could no more be covered in a chapter in this book than the same space could cover a history of the world. I have two large books devoted to the discussion of a single kind of flower, the "orchid." It is estimated that there are about two hundred thousand kinds of flowers, so for this subject alone, we should need a bookshelf over a mile long. This is not stated to discourage any one for of course no one can learn all there is to know about any ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... ardent love of beauty had characterized this girl, whose covetous gaze wandered from a gorgeous scarlet and gold orchid nodding in dreams of its habitat, in some vanilla scented Brazilian jungle, to a bed of vivid green moss, where skilful hands had grouped great drooping sprays of waxen begonias, coral, faint pink, and ivory, all ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... brunette, young and very attractive. The line of head, throat, and shoulder was perfect. The delicate, disdainful poise and the gay provocation in the dark, slanting eyes were enough to tell that she was no novice in the game of sex. He judged her an expensive orchid produced in the civilization of our twentieth-century hothouse. Across the bottom of the picture was scrawled an inscription in a fashionably angular hand. Lane moved closer to read it. The words were, "Always, Phyllis." Probably this was the young woman to whom, if rumor were true, ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... exquisite flower that seems too beautiful to be found outside a millionaire's hothouse, it is becoming rarer every year, until the picking of one in the deep forest where it must now hide, has become the event of a day's walk." Nearly 300 of this orchid were found in our wooded ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... Villa Khismet. Anybody will show you the way. You, Denis," he added, "you disappoint me. You look like a boy who is fond of flowers. And yet you have never been to see my cannas, which are the finest in the kingdom, to say nothing of myself, who am also something of a flower. A carnivorous orchid, I fancy." ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... glance around, and was a trifle upset by seeing Mr. Marrin coming straight toward her. He came with his easy, tripping stride, self-satisfied, red-faced, tastefully dressed, an orchid in his buttonhole. Sally ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... route, both of which lead to Luz, if desired. The lower, which is the direct route from Gavarnie to Luz, we abstained from taking, preferring the upper road to the right, which leads past fields resplendent with flowers (among which the "bee" orchid is noticeable), to the ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... his feet were shod in patent-leather boots, in the rack overhead rested a shining silk hat of the newest fashion, an orange-wood walking-stick, and a pair of gray suede gloves. An evening paper lay between his feet, open, as though it had been read, and in his buttonhole there was a single mauve orchid of exquisite beauty and delicacy. The body was quite alone in the compartment, and there was not a scrap of luggage ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... delicate operation of raising money by bills of accommodation. Habit had given him quite an artistic touch for this kind of thing, and he did his work fondly, like some enthusiastic horticulturist who gives his anxious days to the budding forth of some new orchid or the production of a hitherto unobtainable tulip. It is doubtful whether money procured from any other source was ever half so sweet to this gentleman as the cash for which he paid sixty per cent ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... parting presents of fruit, jams, curries, curios, and the most lovely orchids, the latter in such profusion that they were suspended all along the boom, causing the quarter-deck to look more like one of Mr. Bull's orchid exhibitions than part of a vessel. We photographed some of them with great success, and with our gods from the caves in the background, they will make ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... to mount, for the main trunk ended about twelve feet from the ground, and after a little feeling about amongst the dense orchid growth, he soon found a position where he could sit astride, and support his back in a comfortable half-reclining posture, perfectly safe from all risk of falling, so that there was every prospect of ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... cases of anomalous coloring of this kind can be subsequently traced to artificial substances unconsciously introduced. Crocker mentions a woman who on washing her hands constantly found that the water was stained blue, but this was subsequently traced to the accidental introduction of an orchid leaf. In another instance there was a woman whose linen was at every change stained brown; this, however, was found to be due to a hair-wash that she was in ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... corpuscles in the blood stream of a diseased animal. Yes, by the miracles of the camera we may trace the life of nature even in forms which no human observation really finds in the outer world. Out there it may take weeks for the orchid to bud and blossom and fade; in the picture the process passes before us in a few seconds. We see how the caterpillar spins its cocoon and how it breaks it and how the butterfly unfolds its wings; and all which needed days and months goes on in a fraction of a minute. New interest ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... for the benefit of the poor as well as the rich; and the summer exhibition always took place under the trees of a fragment of the old Forest, which still survived at about five miles from Hiltonbury. The day was a county holiday. The delicate orchid and the crowned pine were there, with the hairy gooseberry, the cabbage and potato, and the homely cottage-garden nosegay from many a woodland hamlet. The young ladies competed in collections of dried flowers for a prize botany book; and the subscriptions were so arranged that on this festival ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... step towards it would have been of any use, and therefore would not have been inherited and perpetuated so as to prepare for further completion. But many other plants have a structure so marvellous that this objection is continually applicable. Let me only recall one other case, that of the orchid, called Coryanthes macrantha. In this flower there are two little horns, which secrete a pure water, or rather water mixed with honey. The lower part of the flower consists of a long lip, the end of ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... orchid, and dad buys it, so I guess that's her sachet. Good-night again, girls, and to-morrow we go hunting our wood-nymph; and, girls," with a premonitory perk of her shapely head, "be sure to lock your window because it is right ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... containing the bride drove up, the surge forward to see her was as fierce as though she had been a defaulting bank-president being taken to prison. The police had to intervene. The interior, fern and orchid swathed, very dimly lighted by rich purple stained glass and aristocratic dripping wax candles instead of the more convenient electric imitations, was murmurous with the wonderful throbbing notes of a great organ ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... news of the years between then and now. It was so wonderful that the surly young beginner in vaudeville should have evolved into this orchid of the salons. He was interested in the working of such ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... in the housekeeper's room at Monkland there lived a magpie who had once sought shelter in an orchid-house from some pursuer. As soon as they thought him wedded to civilization, they had let him go, to see whether he would come back. For hours he had sat up in a high tree, and at last come down again to his cage; whereupon, fearing lest the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hills brought us to a wood of oaks, with their branches fringed with the long grey Spanish moss, and a profusion of epiphytes clinging to their bark, some splendidly in flower, showing the fantastic shapes and brilliant colours one sees in English orchid-houses. Cactuses of many species complete the picture of the vegetation in this beautiful spot. This is at the top of the barranca. Then imagine a valley a mile or two in width, with sides almost perpendicular and capped with basaltic pillars, and at the bottom a strip of land where the vegetation ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... subject of what Miss Mitford was to those of her day who knew her; a thousand lovely personalities pass away every year and in a little while are no more remembered than the bright-plumaged bird that falls in the tropical forest, or the vanished orchid bloom of which some one has said that the angels in heaven can look on no more beautiful thing. Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of another generation of ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... orchid in the garden of the states, the warm motherland of genius, the land of enchantment, the land of romance, the land of magic; California, the beautiful courtezan land, whose ravishing form the enamored gods had strewed with scarlet roses and white lilies, and buried ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... The orchid family has a few curious saprophytic representatives on the lower slopes. Mertin's coral-root is one of the most common. This generally grows in clusters in the mossy woods, along the trail or government road above Longmire Springs. It is very common ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... Oregon is wet as Spring, And green, with little singings in the grass, And pheasants flying, Gold, green and red, Great, narrow, lovely things, As if an orchid had snatched wings. There are strange birds like blots against a sky Where a sun is dying. Beyond the river where the hills are blurred A cloud, like the one word Of the too-silent sky, stirs, and there stand Black trees on either hand. Autumn in Oregon is wet and new ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... perish at a very early age and be thus overlooked. Again, it is well known that with many plants the ovarium may be fully developed, though pollen be wholly excluded. Lastly, Mr. Smith, the late Curator at Kew (as I hear through Dr. Hooker), observed with an orchid, the Bonatea speciosa, the singular fact that the development of the ovarium could be effected by the mechanical irritation of the stigma. Nevertheless, from the number of the pollen-grains expended "in the satiation of the ovarium and pistil,"—from the generality of the formation ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... self-esteem for kindly gentleness is but a fancy vain! Thy charms that they can match the olea or orchid, but thoughts inane! While an actor will, envious lot! with fortune's smiles be born, A youth of noble birth will, strange to say, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... purple magnolias, with a few oaks, great Pyri and two rhododendrons, thirty to forty feet high (R. barbatum, and R. arboreum, var. roseum): Skimmia and Symplocos were the common shrubs. A beautiful orchid with purple flowers (Caelogyne Wallichii) grew on the trunks of all the great trees, attaining a higher elevation than most other epiphytical species, for I have seen it at ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... I had while I was in the Islands was Herr Altman, an orchid collector, who had risked his life a hundred times among the savages of the interior in the pursuance of the passion of his life. "One afternoon," he said, "when we were in the forests of Luzon, my native guides approached me with broad grins. I thought, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... believe that the oak, the cedar, the pine and the palm are all the progeny of one ancient seed and that this seed was also the ancestor of wheat and corn, potato and tomato, onion and sugar beet, rose and violet, orchid and daisy, mountain flower and magnolia? Is it not more rational to believe in God and explain the varieties of life in terms of divine power than to waste our lives in ridiculous attempts to explain the unexplainable? ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... occupied about a certain class of bird, that is to say, if he has been dwelling on the mental image of this bird, he will recognize one at a distance more quickly than he would otherwise have done. Such a simple mental operation as the recognition of one of the less common flowers, say a particular orchid, will vary in duration according as we have or have not been recently forming an image of this flower. The obvious explanation of this is that the mental image of an object bears a very close resemblance to the corresponding percept, differing from it, indeed, in degree only, that is to say, through ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... fragrant stillness of the orchid scented glade, Where the blazoned, bird-winged butterflies ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... Jacobi. He was standing by the sun-dial, looking smart and well-groomed in his frock-coat, and a rare orchid in his button-hole. He was contemplating the house with fixed attention. A sudden impulse made Malcolm join him. Mr. Jacobi greeted him with his usual affability, and then, as though by mutual consent, they strolled together in the direction of ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... office; the phone jangled. The burly tenor was tearfully sobbing and moaning over the wire; Tremor and emotion choked his throat. This was his ominous message: A taxicab accident almost had killed him two and one half days ago; He had escaped with his body and orchid-lined voice— And not a line in the mornings or evenings! What could I do about it? ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... in less than a year to the color of dry grass. The janitor grew tired every now and then. He had been markedly diligent at first, but he was already giving up the task of keeping the building clean. It was one of, and typical of, a mile of yellow brick tenements; it was named after an African orchid of great loveliness, and it was filled with clerks, motormen, probationer policemen, and enormously prolific ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... would not have thought from their manner that there were lives at stake. They both sat, he playing with the leaves of an orchid, she opening and shutting her fan absently. But she was so cold she could hardly speak. Her heart seemed to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... The Orchid is a thoughtful plant—it loves the lordly hot-house, And naturally reprobates poor gilliflowers as "pot-house;" 'Tis rich, exotic, somewhat miscellaneously florid; The rough herbaceous annuals it vulgar deems, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... could get them, sweet williams, pansies, pinks, wallflowers, white violets, stocks, Canterbury bells. Sometimes she came home with wild flowers, and had once given a little dinner with foxgloves for a table decoration. An orchid, a gardenia, even a hyacinth, was never to be seen in the little house. Rosamund confessed that hyacinths had a lovely name, and that they suggested spring, but she added that they smelt as if they had always lived ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... it must perforce duly manifest itself from time to time. Beatrice realized that Trudy felt a greater joy and satisfaction in displaying this not-paid-for cheap machine—having sat up half the night to make the shirred curtains—than Beatrice ever could feel in her tapestry-lined, orchid-adorned limousine. So she began to envy Trudy just as Trudy envied her. Trudy had done nothing but struggle to be able to live, as she termed it; Beatrice had never been ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... garden what the Orchid is to the greenhouse. Its colors are of the richest—blue, purple, violet, yellow, white, and gray. It blooms in great profusion, for weeks during the early part of summer. It is a magnificent flower. It will be found most effective when grouped, ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... world we could be rid of all the drawling erotics of the modern theatre, we could give up the orchid for the lotus and the heavy egotism of Europe for the self-forgetful gaiety of the East. It may be only an ideal world, empty of the horrors of reality, but it is one which the art of China makes ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... appeared at the Gordons' house. He had managed to borrow a dress-suit, and wore an orchid in his buttonhole. It was probably the first time that Jocelyn had seen him in this garb of civilisation, which is at the same time the most becoming and the most trying variety of costume left to sensible men in these days. A dress-suit finds ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... met Grexon Hay. Turning the corner of the street leading to his Bloomsbury attic, the author was tapped on the shoulder by a resplendent Bond Street being. That is, the said being wore a perfectly-fitting frock-coat, a silk hat, trousers with the regulation fold back and front, an orchid buttonhole, grey gloves, boots that glittered, and carried a gold-topped cane. The fact that Paul wheeled without wincing showed that he was not yet in debt. Your Grub Street old-time author would have leaped his own length at the touch. But Paul, ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... regard to Tom's share in the disaster at Lowndes Square; and the more so because Geraldine's visit to Dawes Road had not been a dazzling success. Geraldine in Dawes Road had somehow the air, the brazen air, of an orchid in a clump of violets; the violets, by their mere quality of being violets, rebuked the orchid, and the orchid could not have flourished for any extended period in that temperature. Still, Mrs. Knight and Aunt Annie said to Henry ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... his head, and standing wringing his hands 'cause the prize roses have got bugs on 'em he sets to work and kills the bugs; sprays the plants same's he would ordinary bushes, and they go to growing again like any other civilized flowers. An orchid ain't no more to him than a buttercup. He's too used to 'em. He's used to dogs as well, and with the shifting fashions he's seen during his fifty years with the family he's had experience with most every ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... evidences of creative design, have received at the hands of Mr. Darwin a very different interpretation. The lobster's powerful claw, the butterfly's gorgeous tints, the rose's delicious fragrance, the architectural instinct of the bee, the astonishing structure of the orchid, are no longer explained as the results of contrivance. That simple but wasteful process of survival of the fittest, through which such marvellous things have come into being, has little about it that is analogous to the ingenuity of human art. ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... reflected the mayor. "Well, seems I've sort of lost the habit of being surprised now. I tell you, Lou, we're breaking into the orchid division up here." ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... ultimate 'e.' Amye Sinclair on the program; Minnie Schottman in the Hoboken family Bible. She's a nice girl but a trifle unintellectual. She threw me a papier mache orchid once in Boston." ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... air. It was then, side by side, and six feet apart, that they dived straight under the over-curl even then disintegrating to chaos and falling. Like insects disappearing into the convolutions of some gorgeous gigantic orchid, so they disappeared, as beard and crest and spray and jewels, in many tons, crashed and thundered down just where they had disappeared the moment before, but ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... semi-tailored black hat, but when Isabel tripped down the stairs the daughter of the house was quite eclipsed. Isabel's dark hair was puffed out becomingly about cheeks that had added pink applied to them. In an airy orchid organdie dress and hat to match, white silk stockings and white buckskin pumps, she looked ready for a garden party. According to all the ways of human nature more than one little Mennonite maid in that meeting-house must have cast sidelong glances at the beautiful vision, and older members ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... obnoxious by the newer European importation, happily a plant not true to the American soil. We strangers too often see but the cut flowers, showy, glaring, to-day; jaded, gone to-morrow. We do not see the cultured orchid or the natural wild flowers of America, for the simple reason we do not look for them in seeing that wonderful country in ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... only shrugged his shoulders, and said to his nephew, "Your aunt must feel that I give her diamonds from love and not from vanity, as she never lets me have the pleasure of seeing them." The sole ornament of Adriana was an orchid, which had arrived that morning from Hainault, and she had presented its fellow ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... and being filled with importance too, showed it to the doctor and to Mr. Fenton. It was withered and faded in hue, but it was unmistakably an orchid of the rarest description. ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... heart-hungered as ever, and never seemed to thaw or warm, clinging to no one but to Miles for counsel, and to Rosamond for the fellow-feeling it was not always easy to give—when it was apparently only about an orchid or a churn—and yet Rosamond tried, for she knew ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... personally with the evil one may be mentioned the henbane, which is known in Germany as the "devil's eye," a name applied to the stich-wort in Wales. A species of ground moss is also styled in Germany the "devil's claws;" one of the orchid tribe is "Satan's hand;" the lady's fingers is "devil's claws," and the plantain is "devil's head." Similarly the house-leek has been designated the "devil's beard," and a Norfolk name for the stinkhorn is "devil's horn." Of further plants related to his Satanic majesty is the clematis, termed ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... the Surrey sun Spread cowslips far and gay, Lit wide the orchid's purple flame, The ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... keen-eyed doctor,[44] glanced quickly through the trees and occasionally turned aside to pick some strange orchid and to slip it into his collecting case. The other strode steadily along with that curious, "resolute forward tread" of his.[45] He was David Livingstone. Behind them came a string of African bearers carrying in bundles on their heads the tents ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... row of pots of the former on my balcony, and the united efforts of Stenson, Antoinette, and myself have not yet succeeded in making them bloom; but I love the unassuming velvety leaves. Carlotta is a flaring orchid and produces on my retina a sensation ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... half a dozen of the best imitators of the rural dub in the city. She declares she won't set a foot on the stage unless 'Haytosser' is the best that can be raked up. She was raised in a village, you know, and when a Broadway orchid sticks a straw in his hair and tries to call himself a clover blossom she's on, all right. I asked her, in a sarcastic vein, if she thought Denman Thompson would make any kind of a show in the part. 'Oh, no,' says she. 'I don't want him or John Drew or Jim Corbett or ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... have something to live for. Orchids are ordinary flowers spiritualized. They have a glamor over them. We have good orchid shows sometimes at Kingsdene. I will take you to ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... high, her green-and-gold wings spread broad like a butterfly's, floated Clara. Her body was sheathed in green vines, delicately shining. Her hair was wreathed in fluttering yellow orchid-like flowers, her arms and legs wound with them. She was flying lower than usual. And, under her wreath of flowers, her eyes ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... "Can you not tell when a warning is for your own good? Go back to London! Start tonight! Get away from this place at all costs! Hush, my brother is coming! Not a word of what I have said. Would you mind getting that orchid for me among the mare's-tails yonder? We are very rich in orchids on the moor, though, of course, you are rather late to see the beauties of ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... remained intact; but the gardens of the first house, being rambling and old-fashioned, had been done away with, to make room for others on a larger and more imposing scale; and vineries and pineries, orchid-houses, and hot-houses of every description arose rapidly all over the site of the old bowling-green and the wilderness, half kitchen garden, half rosary, that had served to content the former owners of Shadonake, now all lying dead ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... the quaint, sweet dance called "The Orchid," and Hargrave was leaning on the piano beside her watching Cecil and Athalie drifting through the dusk to the music's rhythm, when the door opened and somebody ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... many thousand homes, impoverished two whole lands, and brought death and disablement to fifty thousand men, was presented as a quite comical quarrel between a violent queer being named Chamberlain, with an eyeglass, an orchid, and a short temper, and "old Kroojer," an obstinate and very cunning old man in a shocking bad hat. The conflict was carried through in a mood sometimes of brutish irritability and sometimes of lax slovenliness, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... (somewhere he defends the snob in an essay): rich food ("half-mourning" [artichoke hearts and truffles], "filet of reindeer," a cygnet in its plumage bearing an orchid in its beak, "heron's eggs whipped with wine into an amber foam," "mashed grasshoppers baked in saffron"), rich clothes, rich people interest him. There is no poverty in his books. His creatures do not toil. ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... orchid, it was perhaps natural and excusable that popular prejudice should have associated the subject of cross-fertilization with the orchid alone; for it is even to-day apparently a surprise to the average mind that almost any casual wild flower will ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... happy, eating my breakfast with a hearty appetite, thinking my cup of afternoon tea nectar for love of the dear hand that gave it. And so, and so, till the new love, the purer and better love, grew and grew into a mighty tree, which was as an oak to an orchid, compared with that passion flower of earlier growth. Mary, will you trust your life to me, as I trust mine to you. I say to you almost in the words I spoke last year to Lesbia,' and here his tone grew grave almost to solemnity, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... I not in mere gratitude to bring myself to say "color"?); his picture of Linda's amazing mother and the rest of the luxurious brainless company of her hotel existence has the exotic brilliance of the orchid-house, at once dazzling and repulsive. Later, in the course of her married life, inspiring and inspired by the sculptor Pleydon (in whose fate the curious may perhaps trace some echo of recent controversy), the story of Linda becomes inevitably less vivid, though its grasp of the reader's sympathy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... has just done a history of the Semitic nations. He took me down to dinner last night, and we talked in the most intelligent manner about the various ways of preparing crabs. He liked them in five styles; I wouldn't subscribe to more than three. That little man with the orchid that daddy has just seized is the author of the last of the 'Rulers of India' series—Sir Somebody Something, K.C.S.I. My unconscionable humbug of a parent probably wants to get something approaching a fact out of him. Daddy's ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... Great, jagged leaves covered with prickles and stained all over with blotches as of spilt poison, . . thick brown stems glistening with slimy moisture and coiled up like the sleeping bodies of snakes, . . masses of purple and blue fungi, . . and blossoms seemingly of the orchid species, some like fleshy tongues, others like the waxen yellow fingers of a dead hand, protruded spectrally through the matted foliage,—while all manner of strange, overpowering odors increased the swooning oppressiveness of the sultry, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... satisfactory for such a purpose. So he traveled to Germany and found the house where lived the famous glass-maker; and it was while waiting alone in the parlor that he saw on a shelf a vase containing what seemed to be a very beautiful fresh orchid." ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... music consists of that marvellously developed series of drum tunes—the attempt to understand which has taken up much of my time, and led me into queer company—and the many tunes played on the 'mrimba and the orchid- root-stringed harp: they are, I believe, entirely distinct from the song tunes. And these peaceful tunes my men were now singing were, in their florid elaboration very different from the one they fought the rapids ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... inconsistent character, spiritually minded, but selfish; loving humanity when it is spelled with a capital, but knowing nothing of the individual. The flower of holiness in her heart was like the haughty orchid that blooms in the hothouse, untouched by wind or cold, beautiful to behold but comforting ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... dizzy ascent of elevators, in buildings twenty stories high, immense wheat-fields of the West, its ranches, mines, colossal slaughter-houses,—all the formidable traffic of this country of effort and struggle, all its labor,—these are what have made possible this woman, this living orchid, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... sometime. But papa asked her some questions once in the Sunday class, and her ideas about God and the way people ought to live are beautiful. She has been to see me several times, and she always brings me a lovely flower of some kind—a rose or lily, and once the sweetest orchid; only one at a time, but always such a beauty. I love to look at it when she is gone, and it almost seems as if she had left part ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... she can be nothing which it has thus far entered into the heart of man to call beautiful; and she could only serve to remind us of certain vague longings and aspirations now proved to be as false as they were vain. Art is not an orchid: it cannot grow in the air. Unless its root can be traced as deep down as Yggdrasil, it will wither and vanish, and be forgotten as it ought to be; and as for the cowslip by the river's brim, a yellow cowslip it shall be, and nothing ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... Bess had stopped to look at a beautiful orchid, in shape itself not unlike some bird of ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... May 15th: Orchid book published. Working at Variation. Paper on Catasetum (Linnean Society). Contribution to Chapter III. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... "That orchid-collector was only thirty-six—twenty years younger than myself—when he died. And he had been married twice and divorced once; he had had malarial fever four times, and once he broke his thigh. He killed ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the orchid-house, we went through it, and she explained all its beauties, its singularities, and its rarities. When we came out again, I asked myself: "Is she in the habit of doing all this to chance visitors? Would she treat a Brown or a Robinson in ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... lower branches, dead and brittle, and creep over the soft brown carpet of fallen needles, dry and slippery, in order to reach a little open glade, moist with springs, where the red wood-lily and the purple-fringed orchid grew,—the high steep rock that jutted out from the woods about half-way up the slope of the Dome, as if to make a narrow view-point of surprise where two people could stand close together and look down upon ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... the south and south-east; and which are found in no other spots in these islands. I mean the lovely Gladiolus, which grows abundantly under the ferns near Lyndhurst, certainly wild but it does not approach England elsewhere nearer than the Loire and the Rhine; and next, that delicate orchid, the Spiranthes aestivalis, which is known only in a bog near Lyndhurst and in the Channel Islands, while on the Continent it extends from southern Europe all through France. Now, what do these two plants mark? They give us a point in botany, though not ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... vitality sufficient to produce the secretions necessary to carry them safely through the dull days of winter. Look over all growing plants, and see that they do not suffer for want of water. Look to every Orchid, even the smallest growing on blocks or in baskets, they all require attention. Repot or surface dress any that require it. A favourable day to be chosen to wash the lights for the more free admission of that agent most indispensable for their ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... women, but we have skill. Being part women, we know how to approach women. We are not blundering and crude. Men want a certain thing from you. It is delicate and easy to kill. Love is the most sensitive thing in the world. It's like an orchid. Men try to pluck orchids with ice tongs, ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... your hands (that never took mine) your hands that I could see drift over the orchid heads so carefully, your hands, so fragile, sure to lift so gently, the fragile flower stuff— ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... character. Though he had, as he had confessed to her, gone down into hell, she could not talk to him for an hour without recognizing that he had never lost a natural chivalry of mind beside which the cultivated chivalry of manner appeared as exotic as an orchid in a hothouse. Even Arthur, she was aware, would have lied to her for her own good; but she would have trusted O'Hara to speak the truth to her at any cost. In this, as well as in his practical efficiency, and his crude yet vital optimism, he embodied, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... organs, peculiar and highly specialized, yet constant throughout the whole of each family, has been driven to the belief that each of these three families, at least, has "sported off" from one common ancestor - one archetypal Palm, one archetypal Orchid, one archetypal Euphorbia, simple, it may be, in itself, but endowed with infinite possibilities of new and complex beauty, to be developed, not in it, but in its descendants. He has asked himself, sitting alone amid the boundless wealth of tropic forests, whether even then and there the great ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... behind her. "Guess," she said. "Oh, guess which hand? My my! Once on a time I knew a lovely way to tell for certain By looking in the ears. But I forget it. Er, let me see. I think I'll take the right. That's sure to be right even if it's wrong. Come, hold it out. Don't change.—A Ram's Horn orchid! A Ram's Horn! What would I have got, I wonder, If I had chosen left. Hold out the left. Another Ram's Horn! Where did you find those, Under what beech tree, on what woodchuck's knoll?" Anne looked at ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... and the green merging into the blue distance became symbols of the vast external world which recks so little of the happiness, of the marriages or deaths of individuals. In order to give her examples of what he was saying, Denham led the way, first to the Rock Garden, and then to the Orchid House. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Mr. CHAMBERLAIN wouldn't bid, having mistaken "Mendelli" for "Mundella." But to have entered the house in a careless fashion, with a "glass (with care)" in his eye, and a two-hundred-and-twenty-guinea Orchid in his button-hole, would have been a great ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... God, no Babylon is so Babylonish but that a Church of God may be found planted in it. No circumstances are so unfavourable to the creation and development of the religious life but that the religious life may grow there. An orchid will find footing upon a bit of stick, because it draws nourishment from the atmosphere; and they who are fed by influx of the Divine Spirit may be planted anywhere, and yet flourish in the courts of our God. So 'the church that is in Babylon' gives encouragement as to the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... upon occasion, across a Sunday-noon, lace-spread breakfast table, when she was slim and cool fingered in orchid-colored draperies, and his newest gift of a six-carat, pear-shaped diamond blazing away on her right hand. "Say, aren't these Yvette ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... winding path between banked masses of softly radiant blooms, groups of feathery ferns whose plumes were starred with fragrant white and blue flowerets, slender creepers swinging from the branches of the strangely trunked trees, bearing along their threads orchid-like blossoms both ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... smashed the Scotsman's knuckles; and the instant he loosed his grip, Corliss carried the canoe up in a mad rush, Frona clinging on and helping from behind. The rainbow-wall curled up like a scroll, and in the convolutions of the scroll, like a bee in the many folds of a magnificent orchid, Tommy disappeared. ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... treatment it was receiving. If Miss Blake heard her she gave no sign. Sometimes when they passed a florist's window she would stop and look wistfully in at the bewildering display, and Nan would know that she was longing to go in and buy some especially fascinating orchid or unusually rare crysanthemum. But she would not yield to her impulse, for on one occasion the girl had said with ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... been founded. His book is a repository of the most startling facts of this description. Take the marvellous observation which he cites from Dr. Krueger, where a bucket, with an aperture serving as a spout, is formed in an orchid. Bees visit the flower: in eager search of material for their combs, they push each other into the bucket, the drenched ones escaping from their involuntary bath by the spout. Here they rub their backs ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the comfort as an orchid to cloying tropic airs, she drew on her sheerest chemise, her most frivolous silk stockings. In a dreaming enervated joy she saw how smooth were her arms and legs; she sleepily resented the redness of her wrists and the callouses ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... Winfree said. "You don't understand. Potlatch is a wonderful day for children, a glorious introduction to the science of economics. The boys light Roman candles, shooting crimson and orchid and brass-flamed astonishers into the clouds. A soft fog of snow makes fuzzy smears of the pinwheels, of the children racing, sparklers in both hands, across the frozen lawn. Dad lights the strings of cannon-crackers—at ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... done, as an exceptional case. The lever-like action of the stamens of Salvia (described by Hildebrand, Dr. W. Ogle, and others), by which the anthers are depressed and rubbed on the backs of bees, shows as perfect a structure as can be found in any orchid. Papilionaceous flowers, as described by various authors—for instance, by Mr. T.H. Farrer—offer innumerable curious adaptations for cross-fertilisation. The case of Posoqueria fragrans (one of the Rubiaceae), is as wonderful as that of the most ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... lorneto. operate : funkciigi; (med.) operacii. opinion : opinio; ("be of—"), opinii. opium : opio. opportunity : okazo. oppress : subpremi. or : aux. oracle : orakolo. orange : orangx'o, -kolora. orbit : orbito. orchard : fruktarbejo. orchestra : orkestro. orchid : orkideo. order : ordo; klaso; ordoni; mendi; (postal) posxtmandato, (decoration) ordeno. ore : minajxo, mineralo, metalo. organ : organo, -ilo; (music) orgeno. organic : organika. organise : organizi. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... to welcome her guest, and Rochester exchanged greetings with some callers who had just arrived. To Saton he merely nodded, but when a little later Lois rose, and announced that she was going to show Mr. Saton the orchid ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... while everywhere is the twining, tangled lianas, making the forest a dark labyrinth of devious ways. Here and there are patches of tropical blossoms, towering ferns, fungoid growths, or some rare and beautiful orchid whose parasitical roots have attached themselves to a tree trunk. And there is always the subdued confusion that betokens ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... covered with moss; tables are bedded with violets; tall vases overflow with roses and heliotropes, with cold camellias and burning geraniums; the orchestra is hidden with latticed bloom and bud; and yellow acacias and scarlet passion-flowers and a great white orchid with a honeyed breath encircle the fern-filled basin where a fountain plays. The murmur of music, the wealth of perfume, make the atmosphere an enchantment. A crowd of gorgeous hues and tissues, bare bosoms and blazing jewels, ascend and descend the stairs: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... Glancing upwards, however, we could see that the neck of the journey was broken, and, encouraged by this, we went ahead merrily. But our pride was destined to have a fall. L. and I were proceeding alone, H. having stopped behind to secure an orchid, when, on turning a corner, we were brought up "all standing." About ten paces in front of us was an enormous landslip. It had commenced about 150 feet above the track, and, carrying huge rocks and trees with it, had swept down to the base ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... presence, rather than to consider them merely for the timber value. But the point of view differs immensely with one's occupation. I remember finding in the depths of an Alleghany forest a comparatively rare native orchid, then new to me—the round-leaved or orbicular habenaria. While I was gloating over it with my camera a gray-haired native of the neighborhood joined me, and, to my surprise, assisted in the gloating—he, ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... it into the moat must be at least twenty feet. Whether the child managed to scramble out by means of the rope, or whether she was carried out, I don't know. Peet insists that Thomas has had a hand in the matter. A very valuable orchid, which he had been cultivating in that inner room, has disappeared, and Peet feels sure ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... flesh was all girlhood in one flower of lithe stem, leaf, petal, sepal, and perfume. There was nothing of the opiate poppy, the ominous orchid, or even that velvet voluptuary, the rose. She was like a great pink, sweet, shy, ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... mother-plant before it perished at a very early age. Again, it is well known that with many plants the ovarium may be fully developed, though pollen be wholly excluded. And lastly, Mr. Smith, the late Curator at Kew (as I hear through Dr. Hooker), observed the singular fact with an orchid, the Bonatea speciosa, the development of the ovarium could be effected by mechanical irritation of the stigma. Nevertheless, from the number of the pollen-grains expended "in the satiation of the ovarium and pistil,"—from the generality of the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... have had the advantage. And checks of a similar nature to these no doubt have acted in other parts of the world, and have prevented such an extraordinary development of nectary as has been produced by favourable conditions in Madagascar only, and in one single species of Orchid. I may here mention that some of the large Sphinx moths of the tropics have probosces nearly as long as the nectary of Angraecum sesquipedale. I have carefully measured the proboscis of a specimen of Macrosila cluentius from South America, in ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Melles, "exists within the mind of every one. Sometimes its existence is unrealized, but it is there. It is there to be developed and brought forth, like the culture of that obstinate but beautiful flower, the orchid. To allow it to remain dormant is to place one's self in obscurity, to trample on one's ambition, to smother one's faculties. To develop it is to individualize all that is best within you, and give it to the world. It is by an absolute knowledge of yourself, the proper estimate ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden |
