"Prairie" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one must always be on the careful lookout for rattlesnakes. In the rough canons and river banks the biggest rattlers are found, and you may jump, tumble or scramble on the back of one and run great chance of being bitten. On the open prairie, where smaller rattlers are very plentiful, they always give you warning with their unique, unmistakable rattle. Once, on stooping down to tear up by the roots a dangerous poison weed, in grasping the plant my hand also grasped a rattlesnake. ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... appears in the capacity of assistant mule-driver, and is to make himself generally useful. I could not help feeling immensely amused at this specimen of a Texan judge. We started again about 3 P.M., and soon emerged from the mosquite bushes into an open prairie eight miles long, quite desolate, and producing nothing but a sort of rush; after which we entered a chaparal, or thick covert of mosquite trees and high prickly pears. These border the track, and are covered ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... was not created in vain. He enjoyed life with the zest of everlasting adolescence; and, though cribbed in an oaken prison, with the turnkey sentries all round him, yet he paced the gun-deck as if it were broad as a prairie, and diversified in landscape as the hills and valleys of the Tyrol. Nothing ever disconcerted him; nothing could transmute his laugh into anything like a sigh. Those glandular secretions, which in other captives sometimes go to the formation of ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... easily to the pitching of the vehicle as it rattled along the trail which, especially where it passed over the round topped ridges, was thickly strewn with stones. Before them, now on the trail and now ranging wide over the prairie, ran a beautiful black and white ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... ask you, I ask you without prejudice an' without favour,—what has Man the Oppressor ever done for you?—Are you not inalienably entitled to the free air o' heaven, blowin' acrost this boundless prairie?" ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... firmly in local option in all things; but there is no reason why New York, or any other great city, should live as Kansas and Idaho live. I prefer New York because a big city gives me a spiritual uplift that a prairie town does not. It is my privilege to live where I desire. I like to hear fine music, to come in contact with intellectuals; to go to plays that are worth while; to read books that satisfy my soul. I find such a life in New York. I have no quarrel with the man who prefers ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... private consumption, of course. Dick had no wish to invite the attention of the predatory; and, in any case, buyers and sellers of dogs do not talk in thousands of dollars on the prairie. ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... France, not those best suited to their own. The physical condition of the humbler emigrant, however, became better than that of his countrymen in the Old World; the fertile soil repaid his labor with competence; independence fostered self-reliance, and the unchecked range of forest and prairie inspired him with thoughts of freedom. But all these elevating tendencies were fatally counteracted by the blighting influence of feudal organization. Restrictions, humiliating as well as injurious, pressed upon the person ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... AMERICA.—Twelve miles from Dubuque, Ia., there stands in grim isolation, upon a blackened and desolate prairie, a monastery of the fifteenth century pattern. Every morning at 2 o'clock the monks who occupy this lugubrious dwelling-place arise from the hard planks which serve them in lieu of beds, and pray in wooden stalls, so constructed as to compel them either to stand or kneel. Their ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... had she sprung from her pedestal to enchant me. The world was open before me; and trite and trifling objects were no more to occupy my time. I felt like one who, after wandering all day through the depths of an American forest, suddenly reaches its border, and sees before him the boundless prairie, with its boundlessness still more striking, from the absence of any distinct object on which the eye could rest. What were horses, dogs, and country dinners, to the world of London and of life which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... in a region pretty densely grown over with timber. I asked him why he did so. He replied that, meaning to establish a sawmill, they wished to use the trees cut down in clearing the land to make into lumber for houses and fences. There was at that time no railroad, and lumber in the open prairie was expensive. "The end proved that we were right," said he; "for, though we had hard work at first, and got ahead slowly, we were soon able to buy out the prairie farmers, who had got into debt and were shiftless, while we prudent Germans were building our place." He ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... dreaming that Winnie was a rattlesnake and Gypsy a prairie-dog, when somebody gave her a little pinch and ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... he mean by 'saints'? Who are these amongst whom the broad acres of that infinite prairie are to be parted out? The word has attracted to itself contemptuous meanings and ascetical meanings, and meanings which really deny the true democracy of Christianity and the equality of all believers in the sight ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... General officers had their tents erected in deep excavations surrounded by embankments of earth, and special duty men had each prepared for themselves burrows in the ground, many of which were creditable specimens of engineering. One was reminded, in riding over the plain, of the colonies of prairie dogs with their burrows and mounds. Although we had but two days' actual fighting at Coal Harbor, our losses were more than thirteen thousand men, while the rebels suffered ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... sees, In desert or prairie vast, Blue lakes, overhung with trees, That a pleasant ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... the immortal gods scourged nations for impieties; and, as we read, we feel the black shadow of inexorable fate moving through the terrific gloom of things. But the smallpox scourge that broke out at Fort Union in 1837, sweeping with desolation through the prairie tribes, moves me more than the storied catastrophes of old. It was a Reign of Terror. Even Larpenteur's bald statement of it fills me with the fine old Greek sense of fate. Men sickened at dawn and were dead at sunset. ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... winter. In the nesting season at the North their voices are most musical. Plumage grayish and brown, in color harmony with their habitats. Usually found in flocks; the first species on or near the shore. Horned Lark. Prairie Horned Lark. ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... interested to know that the alligators' eggs are laid in a nest made of grass on the banks of a stream, and that they often travel for miles across forest or prairie from one stream to another. The nest is raised higher and higher by a fresh layer of grass, cut with the great water-lizard's sharp teeth, every time more eggs are laid, until it is as high as a cock of hay. The ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... the elk, the antelope, and the wild buffalo; the hazardous ride through the wild prairies, expanding away in the distance to kiss the horizon; the stealthy wiles of the revengeful savage; the fierce fight of savage men; the race for very life, when the foe followed; and the bivouac upon the prairie's breast, with the weary horse sleeping and resting by his side. Will he ever forget the speaking of the beaming features of that beautiful creature, when she lifted her head and looked into his face? A frown darkened the ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... on the Kansas prairie in the early fifties. At that time Kansas was the frontier. Near neighbors were twenty miles or more apart. There was no railroad; no stages supplied the vast unsettled region. A few supplies were freighted by wagon. However, little was needed from civilized sources, for the frontier teemed ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... have fun," assented Ruth. "But it was hard work, too,—especially when that prairie fire came a ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... many varied climates and occupations as America it is absurd to talk of an American type. The country is like a vast disorganised undisciplined army, leaderless, uninspired, going in route-step along the road to they know not what end. In the prairie towns of the West and the river towns of the South from which have come so many of our writing men, the citizens swagger through life. Drunken old reprobates lie in the shade by the river's edge or wander through the streets of a corn shipping village of a Saturday evening with grins on their ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... so fresh and life-giving, supplies the place of strong drink. Public-houses, the curse of our own country, have no existence. Pauperism and theft are scarcely known there—income-tax is not yet dreamt of." Free grants of one hundred acres of prairie and meadow land are still being made to immigrants, and the population ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... hoped it couldn't, either; and as she sat, she sang all the songs and hymns she knew, to keep her spirits up,—"Out on an Ocean," "Shining Shore" (how she wished herself on one!), "Rosalie, the Prairie Flower," "Old Dog Tray," and ever so many others. It was a very miscellaneous concert, but did as well for Eyebright and the fishes as the most classical music could have done; better, perhaps, for Mozart and Beethoven might have sounded a little mournful, and ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... resided at the corner of St. Louis and Parloir street, previous to joining the Sulpiciens. In October, 1661, he was roasted alive and partly eaten by the Mohawks at Isle a la Pierre, la Prairie de la Magdeleine, near Montreal. In our day, the judicial and parliamentary heads, and the Bar have monopolized the street. In it have resided at various times, Sir N. F. Belleau, Chief Justice Duval, the Judges Taschereau, Tessier, Bosse, Caron, Routhier; Hon. ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... hautes et bruyantes cascades m'inondoient de leur epais brouillard: tantot un torrent eternel ouvroit a mes cotes un abime dont les yeux n'osoient sonder la profondeur. Quelquefois je me perdois dans l'obscurite d'un bois touffu. Quelquefois, en sortant d'un gouffre, une agreable prairie, rejouissoit tout-a-coup mes regards. Un melange etonnant de la nature sauvage et de la nature cultivee, montroit partout la main des hommes, ou l'on eut cru qu'ils n'avoient jamais penetre: a cote d'une caverne on trouvoit ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... which they in their turn found here. Then along came other forms of life, higher in the cosmic setting, and these, finding encouragement in the presence of the earlier arrivals, fed upon them and remained. And so on up, to the forerunners of our present-day animals—coyotes and prairie-dogs. And after these, primitive man—to find encouragement in the coyotes and prairie-dogs—and to feed upon them and remain. Then after primitive man, the second type—the brown man; and after the brown man, the red man; and after the red man, the white ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... sabers or shot them with their pistols, and behind the cossacks were running the peasants, some with axes, some with pitchforks. After every excursion they brought ten or more prisoners which they drowned in the Protka which runs near the village, or they fusilladed them on the prairie. The unfortunates passed our windows, my mother and I did not know where to hide ourselves in order not to hear their cries and the report of the firearms. My poor husband, Ivan Demitovitch, became quite pale, the fever took ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... or sorrow of the successors the new page seems well nigh bare, though ever there comes faintly through some image or at least blurred suggestion of the fading past. Hence each page of history is a palimpsest. Hence our modern town, even when yesterday but prairie, was no mere vacant site, but was at once enriched and encumbered by the surviving traditions of the past; so that even its new buildings are for the most part but vacant shells of past art, of which now only the student cares ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... P.m. it began to snow hard. Shortly after leaving the small village of Welden, we entered upon that tremendous prairie solitude that stretches its leagues on leagues of houseless dreariness far away toward the jubilee Settlements. The winds, unobstructed by trees or hills, or even vagrant rocks, whistled fiercely across the level desert, driving ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... spreads with vast, broad ripples, extraordinary ocean-like simplicity and grandeur, a long, straight line alone parting it from the sky. At the height of summer all burns and flares on this limitless prairie, then of a ruddy gold; but in September a green tinge begins to suffuse the ocean of herbage, which dies away in the pink and mauve and vivid blue of the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... but to-morrow it will be a bobtail flush. What have we to live for but vengeance on the white man and a little booze now and then? Nothing! Our squaws once were beautiful as the wild flowers of the prairie, but now the prize beauty of our tribe is Malt Extract Maria, whose nose is out of joint, whose eyes are skewed, whose teeth are covered with fine-cut tobacco, and who lost one of her ears last week by accidentally getting it into the mouth of ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... They wore gray jackets and skull-caps, and were armed with rifles and long hunting-knives. They were famous hunters, and could shoot a deer upon the run, or bring down a prairie-chicken upon the wing. They were tough, hearty, jolly, courageous, daring fellows. They were in good spirits, for the rebels had fled in dismay from Fort Henry when the gunboats sent their ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... assigned is selected, it would seem, on the ground of some peculiar skill or other power it is supposed to possess; naturally the reason for the choice is not always apparent. For the Ainu the demiurge is the water wagtail;[458] for the Navahos and in California,[459] the coyote or prairie wolf; among the Lenni-Lenape, the wolf.[460] Various animals—as elephants, boars, turtles, snakes—are supposed to bear the world on their backs. The grounds of such opinions, resting on remote social conditions, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... have not been with us, however, for following the hounds when chasing those fleet animals not only requires the fastest kind of a horse and very good riding, but is exceedingly dangerous to both horse and rider because of the many prairie-dog holes, which are terrible death traps. And besides, the dogs invariably get their feet full of cactus needles, which cause much suffering ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... as a piece of prairie-land," said his friend. "'Gad, it makes me sleepy to look down that street. It's a mile to the hotel, too, Lorry. ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... down or prairie on which I stood I afterwards found to be called the 'Pasturage of Common Right', a very fine name; and, as a gallery will command a great hall, so this field like a platform commanded the wide and ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... experience. This being so, I could wish that her attitude in the matter had been a little less uncompromisingly English. In many ways the language and general outlook of the daughter of an Oxford don will no doubt differ considerably from that of a Canadian-born inhabitant of a prairie township; but that is no good reason for assuming an air of patronage. However, this defect, though it exists, is not so pronounced as to spoil one's enjoyment of an entertaining record, written, as the publishers say, "in high spirits throughout," and having, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various
... familiar and beloved scenery of Weber and Echo canons—the only part of the Union Pacific road which tempts one to look out of a car window, unless one may be tempted by the boundless monotony of the plains or the chance of a prairie dog. Great was my satisfaction, therefore, to find that this part of the new road, parallel with the Union Pacific, but a hundred miles farther south, traverses the same belt of rocks, and exhibits them in forms not less picturesque. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... in all the serenity and lonesomeness of solitude, away off here amid the hush of the forest, alone, or as I have found in prairie wilds, or mountain stillness, one is never entirely without the instinct of looking around, (I never am, and others tell me the same of themselves, confidentially,) for somebody to appear, or start up out of the earth, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... a pioneer Mormon period in Arizona, that might as well be called the missionary period. Then came the prairie schooners that bore, from Utah, men and women to people and redeem the arid southland valleys. Most of this colonization was in Arizona, where the field was comparatively open. In California there had been religious persecution and in New Mexico the valleys very generally ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... and prairie, field and lawn, Their dewy eyes upturning, The flowers still watch from reddening dawn Till western ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... into all the details of this singular journey, further than to say that the Indian, instead of enticing them to his own wigwam, as they expected, halted on the margin of a most beautiful prairie, covered with the richest vegetation, and extending over several thousand acres. In a moment the child was restored to its parents, who, wondering what so strange a proceeding could mean, stood awhile panting for breath, and looking at ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... very much as the Whitney gin had done for the cotton farmers of 1800. Still the transportation of wheat and corn is so difficult that no great revolution would have been possible but for the simultaneous building of thousands of miles of railways which opened to grain production the vast prairie lands remote from the rivers. The manufacture of farm implements and the building of railroads made the Northwest a staple-producing area of greater importance than the South had been, though this was recognized by only a few men before ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... him; whether she talked to some Yankee farmer from the Dakotas, long-limbed, lantern-jawed, all the moisture dried out of him by hot summers, hard winters, and long toil, who had come over the border with a pocket full of money, the proceeds of prairie-farming in a republic, to sink it all joyfully in a new venture under another flag; or to some broad-shouldered English youth from her own north country; or to some hunted Russian from the Steppes, in whose eyes had begun to dawn the first lights of liberty; ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 30th of August a large body of Indians made a bold raid on the post, and succeeded in stampeding and running off nearly two hundred head of cattle and one hundred head of horses and mules which were grazing on the prairie. Some fifty of the cattle afterwards escaped, and were restored to the post by a scouting party. This band of marauders did not, however, attack the fort. No one who has not experienced it can appreciate the mortification of seeing an enemy despoil you of your property when ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... Setting Sun, the prairie schooner is the center of the group of the Nations of the West, on the top a figure of Enterprise, the Spirit of the West. (p. 59.) On either side of her is a boy. These are the Heroes of Tomorrow. Between the oxen rides the Mother of Tomorrow. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... cliffs on the west. Through these cliffs there is a considerable ravine, formed by the flowing of a small rivulet—On the summit, a wide prospect opens to the west, of a country whose base is level, but surface uneven. On this summit lay the French and Indians concealed by the prairie grass and timber, and from this situation, in almost perfect security, they fired down upon Braddock's men. The only exposure of the French and Indians, resulted from the circumstance of their having to raise their heads to peep over the verge of the cliff, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... for trees could not well grow where it was so dry. Grave-yards are not pleasant places at best, but to see one barren of trees or flowers, just the graves, the white marble, the sunshine, rain, and prairie grass, in sight of the pleasant yards and homes of the living, I feel a sense of reproach, as if the dead were complaining of this neglect. The only ground Abraham ever bought was a piece of ground to bury his dead and it had trees on it. I wanted ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... vacant lands in our Northwest which need development, and who is better fitted for settlers than the resourceful Canadians themselves? We have sons and grandsons who have the will, the knowledge, the mettle and the courage to break the prairie sod and bring the virgin soil to successful fruition, and assist in developing our country's resources. They will lie glad to do this, and take particular pride in the patrimony of their military ancestors. Then why not do justice to the ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... in the eastern United States and Canada knows the Robin, Crow, and English Sparrow; in the South most people are acquainted with the Mockingbird and Turkey Buzzard; in California the House Finch is abundant about the towns and cities; and to the dwellers in the Prairie States the Meadowlark ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... of the customers remarked, Miss Bell was in a fine temper that morning, and her tongue raged round like a prairie fire. This bad humour was ascribed by the public to the extra work entailed on her by the sensation caused by the murder, but the true cause lay with Gabriel. He had promised faithfully, on the previous night, to come round and see Mrs Mosk, but, to Bell's anger, had ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... ranch for Portland, where conventional city life palls on him. A little branch of sage brush, pungent with the atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection of a pair of large brown eyes soon compel his return. ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... The wonder was that he had not loved her before; for he had known her since his father brought him home from Paris, a boy of eight, after his mother died there. The passion that awoke in him that day, when he saw her at the gate, swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire, or like anything that drives headlong over ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... flickered out for Adams and Hay when King disappeared from their lives; but Hay had still his family and ambition, while Adams could only blunder back alone, helplessly, wearily, his eyes rather dim with tears, to his vague trail across the darkening prairie of education, without a motive, big or small, except curiosity to reach, before he too should drop, some point that would give him a far look ahead. He was morbidly curious to see some light at the end of the passage, as though thirty years were a shadow, and he were ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... air feels heavy this morning,' said Aunt Frances, as we were starting. 'If a storm comes on, make for cover. Don't try to get home across the prairie ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... that vast tract of unreclaimed prairie known to Londoners as the Aldwych Site there shone feebly, seeming almost to emphasise the darkness and desolation of the scene, ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... the windows, watching the prairie country slide past, now and then passing small herds of cattle, as well as many little towns at which the train did ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope
... times, when Haakon was a flat-capped immigrant boy, he had earned the initial payment on his first eighty acres of prairie land as a hired man on Colonel Woodruff's farm. Now he was a rather richer man than the colonel, and not a little proud of his ascent to affluence. He was a mild-spoken, soft-voiced Scandinavian, quite completely Americanized, ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... boat. One git up in night-time and steal everything. Then was a big fight. Think that what fight was about—about dividing the money. Don't know sure. One man git killed. Rest run into the swamp and prairie. Officer arrest me for witness. Couldn't trust me ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... the bunk house and thought of these things, his eye was attracted by a speck moving toward him across the prairie. He watched it with the interest one might have in a ship at sea; as one watches in a place in which few moving things are seen. The speck was small, and was ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... A washing fluttered on the clothes-line, and the woman who came out of the door carried a round-bottomed hickory-bark basket, such as might hold clothes-pins. Seeing the invasion, she hurried across the prairie, toward the town. She was a tall thin woman, not yet thirty, brown and tanned, with a strong masculine face, and as she came nearer one could see that she had a square firm jaw, and great kind gray eyes that lighted her countenance from a ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... all rested that strange peace of God which is found in the forest or on the prairie, where God is near and ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... early in July, and the sun is going westward through a fleet of white, wind-driven clouds that send a host of deep shadows sweeping and chasing over the wide prairie. Northwards the view is limited by a low range of bluffs, destitute of tree or foliage, but covered thickly with the summer growth of bunch-grass. Southward, three miles away at least, though it seems much less, a similar range, pierced here and there ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... man attacking us two armed sportsmen showed the immense confidence these prairie people feel in themselves, especially in their superior horsemanship. However, the fellow caught a Tartar on ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... cross between the bulldog and the house-fly'—Fort Colville on the Columbia was reached on August 18. Their long horseback ride was over. Favoured by wonderfully fine weather, in the saddle eleven to twelve hours a day, they had made their way through open prairie and rolling plain, tangled thicket and burning forest and rushing river, and had covered the two thousand miles from Fort Garry in six weeks and five days. From Fort Colville they reached the waters ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... sprung, and that is their intense love of Home. Give the Englishman a home, and he is comparatively indifferent to society. For the sake of a holding which he can call his own, he will cross the seas, plant himself on the prairie or amidst the primeval forest, and make for himself a home. The solitude of the wilderness has no fears for him; the society of his wife and family is sufficient, and he cares for no other. Hence it is that the people ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... twelve, when on stretches of prairie the invisible joinder of night and day is a majestic thing, the Moncrieff Follies—twenty-four of them, not counting two specialty acts and a pair of whistling Pierrots—burst forth into frolic with a terrific ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... as young Lochinvar, I came out of the West one summer dawn, and took train for Heartsease. I had resolved to compass in a single week the innumerable landmarks that dot mountain and desert and prairie—to leap as it were from sea to sea, from the present to the past, from manhood ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... possessions, are settlements made by emigrants from New York and the New England States. From Bacon creek to Munfordsville, eight miles, the country is pleasantly undulating, and here, indeed the whole route from Elizabethtown to the Cave, passes through what was until recently a Prairie, or, in the language of the country, "Barrens," and renders it highly interesting, especially to the botanist, from the multitude and variety of flowers with which it abounds during the Spring and Autumn months. Munfordsville, and Woodsonville directly ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... was, and how he would have liked to be here!" the Senator was saying sentimentally, as he held out a glass to be refilled. "Poor fellow!—he never got much out of his life; didn't know how to make the most of things,—went out there to that Iowa prairie after the War. You say he left his ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Big Dipper the Seven Brothers, and they, and also other plains people such as sheep-herders and cowboys, tell the time by the "Last Brother," which is the star in the end of the handle. "The Last Brother is pointing to the east," or "The Last Brother is pointing downwards to the prairie," say the Indians. And by that they mean the hour is so ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... "Sweetheart, it will not be so hard to die together now. Do you know this is all a part of the strange memories, as though I had learned somewhere and somehow what was to be. Either in dreams or a mental phantasy I saw you riding across the prairie through the whirling snow. When you strode with bronzed face, and hard hand on my bridle through the forest, that was familiar too, and—you remember the passage about Lancelot—I knew you were my own true knight. But this is not the last ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... heavy dose of spirits brought the professor through in safety, although the poison remaining in the wound caused considerable swelling and pain in the hand and arm. When this incident was mentioned in the Kansas Academy of Science that year, some one said, "Now we know the effect of the bite of the prairie rattlesnake on the human system. Let some one, in the interests of pure science, try the effect of the timber rattlesnake on the human system." But like the mice in the fable, no one was found who cared to put the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... PRAIRIE. The natural meadows or tracts of gently undulating, wonderfully fertile land, occupying so vast an extent of the great ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... soil Bud followed trail, found them 2 mi. east of here in flat sound asleep about 3 P.M. At 6 went to flat 1/4 mi. N. of camp to tie Pete, leading Monte by bell strap almost stepped on rattler 3 ft. long. 10 rattles & a button. Killed him. To date, 1 Prairie rattler, 3 Diamond back & 8 sidewinders, 12 ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... tract which they occupied comprised some thirty acres, level as a prairie, part of which was under cultivation; the whole being fenced in by a stout palisade of trunks and boughs of trees staked firmly in the ground. This was necessary as a defence against the wild cattle and hogs overrunning ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... found throughout the southern part of the Province from the Coast to Okanagan. Rare on Vancouver Island. It has been taken at Victoria, Sardis, Grand Prairie and Vernon. ...
— Catalogue of British Columbia Birds • Francis Kermode
... vortex of the wildest water; and woe betide the old voyageur whose crew failed of the strong pull into the right current just when the craft took the plunge! Here, where the waters of the vast prairie region are descending over huge boulders and rocky islets between banks not a third of a mile apart, there is a wild river scene. Far ahead the paddlers can hear the roar of the swirl. Now the surface of the river rounds and rises in the eddies of an undertow, and the canoe leaps ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... and the two horses broke into a trot as soon as they attained the more level land beyond. They were slightly above the town now, and could gaze back at the glittering lights in the valley below. The sound of men's voices failed to reach them over the soft pounding of the ponies' hoofs on the prairie sod, but suddenly the distant crackling of a half dozen shots pierced the silence, and their eyes caught the sparkle of the discharges, winking like fireflies in the night. Before they could draw up their mounts, the fusillade had ended, and all ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... a level stretch of prairie, they came to the edge of a woods. Not far off was a shack similar to those to be seen all over this section of ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... fond of fishing and hunting, and while in college I spent all my vacations in camp, on the prairie or in the forest. After I was graduated, I used to devote two or three months of the year to these pursuits. When I was married, I was not willing to forego this luxury,—for such it was to me,—and without going into the painful details, this subject became a source of difference ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... Hinchcliffe through Ghent. In her weeks of work there, she had come to love the beautiful old town. It was strangely unlike her home cities—the brisk prairie "parlor city," where she had grown up inch by inch, as it extended itself acre by acre, and the mad modern city where she had struggled for her bread. The tide of slaughter was still to the east: a low rumble, like surf on ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... something, happened or going to happen. Down by the river an owl hooted dismally. Half a mile away the night-herders were riding round and round the herd. One of them was singing,—faint but distinct came his song: "Bury me not on the lone prairie." Over and over again he sang it. After a short interval of silence he began again. This time it was, "I'm thinking of my dear old ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... you. I wonder you and father don't turn to law books or rulings or something! I want you to take me out plover-shooting this afternoon. Long Prairie is just alive with them. Don't say no, please! I want to try my new twelve-bore hammerless. I've sent to the livery stable to engage Fly and Bess for the buckboard; they stand fire so nicely. I was sure you ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... the truth this time. He said he was. It's a little owl that lives out West on the big sandy plains. And it makes its nest in holes on the ground. It knows how to dig these holes itself, you know; but it can't dig them half, or a quarter, so well as the prairie dogs can. So it gets the prairie dogs to let it live in their big, comfortable burrows; and in return for this hospitality it kills and eats some of the rattlesnakes, the very small ones, I suppose, of course, which come round among the burrows ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... buffaloes was obtained in the latter year, among small bands and scattered individuals, near my ranch on the Little Missouri; I have related it elsewhere. But two of my kinsmen were more fortunate, and took part in the chase of these lordly beasts when the herds still darkened the prairie as far ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... lodges of the Illinois, who, to the number of six thousand, had returned, since their defeat, to this their favorite dwelling place. Scattered along the valley, among the adjacent hills, or over the neighboring prairie, were the cantonments of a half score of other tribes, and fragments of tribes, gathered under the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... regular pony—not one of those cotton-batting things with fat legs that an impressionist slaps on to a canvas and labels a horse. You could smell the lathered sweat on the pony's hide and feel the dust of the dry prairie tickling your nostrils. You could see the slide of the horse's withers and watch the play of the naked Indian's arm muscles. I should like to enroll as a charter member of a league of Americans who believe that Frederic Remington and Howard Pyle were greater painters than any Old ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... village is on the Mississippi, 1800 miles from its mouth. The father of Wabashaw was a noted Indian; and during the past summer, the son has given some indications that he inherits the father's talents and courage. When the Winnebagoes arrived at Wabashaw's prairie, the chief induced them not to continue their journey of removal; offered them land to settle upon near him, and told them it was not really the wish of their Great Father, that they should remove. His bribes and eloquence induced the Winnebagoes ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... wonderful science of ze prairie. I have heard of it, begar, and I shall be one very ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... from the earth. I well remember when a boy upon the fat alluvium of the Illinois prairie, how recklessly the farmers then exhausted the resources of their fields. So opulent was the black soil that little care was taken save to sow the seed and crudely cultivate it; and the simple prudences, such as rotation of crops, differential fertilizing, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... not think it prudent to give him such a commission, though use of these warriors was made during the struggle. Every day the number of the insurgents increased. Between the 3rd and 6th of November, four thousand were concentrated at Napierville, in La Prairie, under the command of Dr. Robert Nelson, Dr. Cote, and one Gagnor. Upon this point Major-general Sir James Macdonnell was directed to march; but before he could arrive the rebels had dispersed, and were beyond pursuit. In their route they were twice attacked and defeated by a small ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... going back by boat. They had very little provisions, but by reducing the number of the party, they managed to subsist on short allowance. On this second trip, he followed the Flinders up, and was rewarded by being the first white man to see the beautiful prairie-like country through which it flows. He named the remarkable isolated hills visible from the river Fort Bowen, Mount Brown and Mount Little. From the upper Flinders he struck south, hoping to come across a newly-formed ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... bit of information on the hardiness of the black walnut and butternut has just come to hand from Col. B. D. Wallace of Portage, La Prairie, Manitoba. Col. Wallace reports the occurrence of a seedling black walnut in his nursery that is quite hardy and which bore fully matured nuts at an early age. He also has a fine grove of butternuts that are entirely hardy and which bear good crops of nuts. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... Hill was in her element. This did not often happen, for in the remote prairie town of the Canadian Northwest, where her husband was stationed, there were few opportunities for match-making. And Mrs. Hill was—or believed herself to be—a ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... right name for these verdant deserts. On all the shores, interminable silent forest. If you land, there is prairie behind prairie, forest behind forest, sites of nations, no nations. The raw bullion of nature; what we call "moral" value not yet stamped on it. But in a thousand miles the immense material values will show twenty or ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... HENLEY,—I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all hands. Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste; then a windmill to pump water. When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and freight travel together, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as to what must be the end of a state of things in which the very courts of law were honeycombed with corruption, and demoralised by the power of drink. His tremendous image of a fierce fire raging across a dry prairie, and burning the grass to its very roots, while the air is stifling with the thick 'dust' of the conflagration, proclaims the sure fate, sooner or later, of every community and individual that 'rejects the law of the Lord of Hosts, and despises the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... economy of nature, and is everywhere expelling and exterminating before him the great herbivores, his predecessors. He needs for his corn and his bananas the fruitful plains which were once laid down in prairie or scrubwood. Hence it seems not unlikely that the elephant, the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and the buffalo must go. But we are still a long way off from that final consummation, even on dry land; while as for the water, it appears highly probable that there are ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Clay soils, however, are not adapted to the plant nor to the grazing for which the plant is generally sowed. For winter rye the land should be broken from four to six inches. Harrows should follow the plows until the land is well pulverized. In some cold prairie lands, however, rye is put in with a grain-drill before a plow removes the stubble from the land. The purpose of planting in this way is to let the stubble protect the young plants from cold, ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... smiling as she spoke, for she was beginning to realise that no disrespect had been meant to herself, and that she had been unduly stern in her denunciations. "It is not the thing for a young lady at school; it is only for wild—how do you call them—'cowboys,' out on the prairie. If you do it at 'ome, it is not my affair, but if your father should see you some day, he ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Where a tribe has made considerable advance and lives on fertile farming soil it is possible to allot the members lands in severalty much as is the case with white settlers. There are other tribes where such a course is not desirable. On the arid prairie lands the effort should be to induce the Indians to lead pastoral rather than agricultural lives, and to permit them to settle in villages rather than ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... frustrated of their object, when one gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, it may be, from a "home" upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting-room and a Bible on its centre-table. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... will now have become strength. Let the pastor of the Alps observe the variations of his mountain winds; let the voyagers send us notes of the changes on the surface of the sea; let the solitary dweller in the American prairie observe the passages of the storms, and the variations of the climate; and each, who alone would have been powerless, will find himself a part of one mighty mind, a ray of light entering into one vast eye, a member of a multitudinous ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... a little past sunrise, but there was no hint of early summer freshness in the noxious air of the sleeping-car as it toiled like a snail over the infinity of prairie. From behind the green-striped curtains of the berths, now the sound of restless turning and now a long-drawn sigh signified the uneasy slumber due ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... to go on sowing wheat, but had not enough Communal land for the purpose, and what he had already used was not available; for in those parts wheat is only sown on virgin soil or on fallow land. It is sown for one or two years, and then the land lies fallow till it is again overgrown with prairie grass. There were many who wanted such land, and there was not enough for all; so that people quarrelled about it. Those who were better off, wanted it for growing wheat, and those who were poor, wanted it to let to dealers, so that they might raise money to pay their taxes. Pahom wanted to sow ...
— What Men Live By and Other Tales • Leo Tolstoy
... was bitter, and the prairie, which rolled back from Lander's in long undulations to the far horizon, gleamed white beneath the moon, but there was warmth and brightness in Stukely's wooden barn. It stood at one end of the little, desolate settlement, where the trail that came up from ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... proportions and harm soon results. The killing off of certain other forms of life that naturally keep still others in check also assists in disturbing the equilibrium further. The cutting down and clearing away of forests removes the shelter and homes of others, as does also the turning under of prairie grasses. Then, too, many of the natural residents of primeval forests and virgin prairies shun the sight of man, hence they gradually withdraw from the region, and their influence for good or evil goes with them. Since the majority of such forms are ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... blue sky, and a graceful drooping flag; nothing but a half-sleepy, half-active fort; nothing but the yellow April floods far up-stream, between wooded banks tenderly gray-green in the spring sunshine. But I did not see any of these things then. Before my eyes there stretched a vast level prairie, with dim mountain heights beyond them. And marching toward them westward, westward, past lurking danger, Indians here and wild beasts there, went three men: the officer on his cavalry mount; Jondo on his big black horse; ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... minute or two he did not speak, and then, as the light evidently increased, he said, almost with a groan, "It is what I feared they would do: they have set the prairie on fire. You need not keep watch any longer. We are as much separated from the Indians as if the ocean ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... degree the intense blue. But here below no alien touch lightened the unnatural homogeneity. No solitary tree broke this endless pasture, now healed of the wounds inflicted by the incendiary bombing, no saltlick, wandering stream or struggling bush enlivened this prairie. There was not even an odd conformation, a higher clump here or there, a dead patch to relieve the unimaginative symmetry. I have read of men going mad in solitary confinement from looking at the same ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the stage-coach that day made a revolution in the taste of Weston; and some climbing plants, from his house afterwards, took root in our rude homes, and have displaced the old glaring colors with soft beauty and grace. Before I left Weston, which happened in time, we had prairie-roses, honeysuckles, and woodbine clambering over half the houses in the place, and bouncing-Bets were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... you so, Margaret," said the former, trying to comfort his wife. "There's nothing to fear for Archie. Nobody ever heard of a man getting lost in a city snow-storm. If he'd been out on a prairie, the case would have been different, but in the streets of the city! The thing's ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... basin. Thus glaciers, streams, and winds laid down ten, twenty, fifty, or even one hundred feet of the finest, most fertile soil. We have already seen how much the soil was improved by glaciation in Wisconsin and Ohio. It was in the prairie States that this improvement reached a maximum. The soil there is not only fine grained and free from rocks, but it consists of particles brought from widely different sources and is therefore full of all kinds of plant foods. In ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... of the Prairie-"Dog" in guarding "towns" is very nearly perfect. A warning chatter quickly sends every "dog" scurrying to the mouth of its hole, ready for the dive to safety far below. No! the prairie-"dog," rattlesnake and burrowing owl emphatically do NOT dwell together in peace and harmony in the burrow ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... crick bottom and start all over again; or when they gits their money they will hop the train cars for Kansas and settle on a government claim twenty miles from a drap of water; then mosey back here in about five years with nothing but their kids, the old woman, two bony horses, a prairie schooner ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... was a tourist sleeper, was filled with goldseekers, some of them bound for the Stikeen River, some for Skagway. While a few like myself had set out for Teslin Lake by way of "The Prairie Route." There were women going to join their husbands at Dawson City, and young girls on their way to Vancouver and Seattle, and whole families ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... even with the establishment of railroads in the Eastern states; farther and farther west it penetrated, ever chosen by emigrants and travellers to the frontiers; and at last in its old age it had an equal career of usefulness as the "prairie-schooner," in which vast numbers of families safely crossed the prairies of our far West. The white tilts of the wagons thus passed and repassed till our ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... Time has not diminished its reputation. We read it to-day not merely for its simple, unpretentious style; but for its clear picture of sea life previous to the era of steam navigation, and for its graphic description of conditions in California before visions of gold sent the long lines of "prairie schooners" drifting across the plains to unfold the hidden destiny of ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... a bit together and have come to the edge of the field where we look off and see the unending stretch of prairie and ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... certainly was until General Jackson closed Bayou Manchac—is a narrow, irregular, flat tract of forest, swamp, city, prairie and sea-marsh, lying east and west, with the Mississippi, trending southeastward, for its southern boundary, and for its northern, a parallel and contiguous chain of alternate lakes and bayous, opening into the river through Bayou Manchac, and into the Gulf through the passes of the Malheureuse ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... great deal of talk of emigration among the people with whom I have travelled since I landed, but have not heard one mention of Canada as a desirable place to emigrate to. The Western States, the prairie lands, seem to be the promised land to everyone. One of these would-be emigrants took a flute out of his pocket and played the Exile of Erin. The talk of emigration stilled and a great silence fell on them all. There were some soldiers on the car, young men, boys in fact, ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... humanity essential to great literature, we are grateful even for the firing of a national joke heard round the world. And when Mark Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted with the divine power to use words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with prairie fire and Western clay, and shows us that we are at one on all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed by Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary self of the Republic shall suffer ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... plain, n. prairie, field, savanna, pampas, steppe, llano, champaign, campagna, heath, moor, camass, downs, tundra, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... classic diction: but I myself never for a moment believed that Ariadne was a particle more unhappy or pitiable than Nancy Bunker, our seamstress, was, when Hiram Fenn went West to peddle essences, and married a female Hoosier whose father owned half a prairie. They would by no means make as lovely a picture; for Nancy's upper jaw projects, and she has a wart on her nose, very stiff black hair, and a shingle figure, none of which adds grace to a scene; and Hiram went off in the Slabtown stage, with ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... factors to one another is necessarily very different in different branches of production. For instance, in the case of cattle-raising on a prairie, labor does very little, land almost everything. Hence an extensive, thinly populated country is best adapted to this species of production. But where land is scarce, as in wealthy and populous cities, human activity should be directed into those branches of industry ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... and over the things they had said. "Cure?"—one of them had scoffed, after telling how brilliant he had been before he "went to pieces"—"why all the cures on earth couldn't help him! He can go just so far, and then he can no more stop himself—oh, about as much as an ant could stop a prairie fire!" ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... Company offer, ON LONG CREDIT, the beautiful and fertile PRAIRIE LANDS lying along the whole line of their Railroad, 700 MILES IN LENGTH, upon the most Favorable Terms for enabling Farmers, Manufacturers, Mechanics and Workingmen to make for themselves and their families a competency, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and king of the south wind. Fat and lazy, listless and easy. Shawondasee loved a prairie maiden (the Dandelion), but was too indolent to ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... people who have been crossing the plains and crawling over the desert behind ox teams in 'prairie schooners' for the last twenty or thirty years, braving all the dangers of the unknown, have really paved the way for progress and civilization. The railroad is being laid along the trail they made. Do you know Richard's out there at the ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... ("'Rosalie the Prairie Flower,' and the 'Christy Minstrels' generally," concludes Marcia, inwardly.) "That is charming," she says out loud: "it is so long since we have had any one here with a talent ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... Houston. Here is one of his vivid, realistic pen pictures of the famous Texan: "We walked towards the President's house, accompanied by the Secretary of the Navy, and as soon as we rose above the bank, we saw before us a level of far-extending prairie, destitute of timber, and rather poor soil. Houses half finished, and most of them without roofs, tents, and a liberty pole, with the capitol, were all exhibited to our view at once. We approached the President's mansion, however, ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... the prairies late one afternoon and watching the slow fading of the day. For three hours, from four until seven o'clock, I saw on the passing landscape one horseman, as lonely as a solitary sail at sea, one prairie wagon with three men gathered about the evening camp fire, and two houses on the far horizon. From seven to eight o'clock came on the darkness, and soon we were riding through impenetrable night; and twice, perhaps three times, at intervals ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... They drove off into the West. The two women stood at the gate, gazing after them with tear-dimmed eyes as long as they were in sight; and when the little train disappeared behind the first swale of the prairie, they burst into tears and went into the house which was ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... highest, the Mocassin Song had suddenly taken America by storm. Sung first in the Empire Theatre on the Broadway by Abe Gideon, the bark-blocks comedian, ten days after the mare's victory and defeat, it had raged through the land like a prairie fire. Cattle-men on the Mexican Border sung it in the chaparral, and the lumber-camps by the Great Lakes echoed it at night. Gramophones carried it up and down the Continent from Oyster Bay to Vancouver, and from Frisco to New Orleans. Every street-boy whistled it, every organ ground ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... moments they were upon us. As we were out on an open prairie, we had a good sight of the Indians before they reached us; I saw by the leader's dress that it was a chief that was leading them. His head dress was composed of eagles' feathers, and he rode some thirty or forty yards ahead of the other warriors. When in gun ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan
... thought as I waded knee-deep among the beautiful flowers of the prairie, starting the sharp pin-tailed grouse, prairie chickens and sage grouse from their retreats and sending the meadow-larks skimming away over flowering billows. Reaching an elevation where I could peer beyond the crests of one of the "ground swells" ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... giving up the care of their safety to one individual, which cannot be done without abdicating some degree of individual independence, dispose around the place which they occupy a certain number of sentinels charged to watch over the common safety. This custom exists among prairie dogs, moufflons, crows, paroquets, and a great many other animals. The sentinels of the crows are not only always on the watch, but they are extremely discriminating; they do not give a warning at the wrong time. ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... carried amazing shifts of inflection, tearing up and down the coyote scale. One after another added his voice to the chorus until it seemed that the swelling volume could be produced by no less than a full thousand musical prairie wolves scattered through the foothills ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... mangling reputations, which seizes on hearts the least wantonly cruel! Let two idle tongues utter a tale against some third person, who never offended the babblers, and how the tale spreads, like fire, lighted none know how, in the herbage of an American prairie! Who ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... met with in every climate, and the first of December brought zero weather. Indeed, it had been unusually cold for several weeks. Then, to make matters worse, a genuine western blizzard came howling across the prairie, and whistled and screamed about the streets, from which it had driven everything that could find a place of shelter. The stores on Broadway were vacant, save a few shivering clerks. In the offices, men sat with their feet on the stove and called to mind the ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... of some hundreds of feet. We turn night into day with the glow of lamps that burn without flame, and almost without heat, whose mysterious glow is fed from some distant place, that hang in clusters, banners, letters, in city streets, and that glow like new stars along the treeless prairie horizon where thirty years ago even the beginnings of civilization were unknown. Yet the mysterious agent has not changed. It is as it was when creation began to shape itself out of chaos and the abyss. Men have changed in ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... ascended from the interior of Lofoden, so that we had caught no glimpse of the sea until it had burst upon us from the summit. As the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American prairie; and at the same moment I perceived that what seamen term the chopping character of the ocean beneath us, was rapidly changing into a current which set to the eastward. Even while I gazed, this current acquired a monstrous ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... don't know?" The cigarette, ready to light as it was, slipped from Billy's fingers and dropped unheeded over the wheel to the brown trail below. He took the reins carefully from between his knees, straightened one that had become twisted and turned out upon the prairie to avoid a rough spot where a mud-puddle had dried in hard ridges. Beyond, he swung back again, leaned and flicked an early horse-fly from the ribs of the off-horse, touched the other one up a bit with his ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... fighting man—they're always giving them leave—but all I got was six weeks at Havre in hospital. Then it was the Dardanelles, and sunstroke and sand; sleeping in sand, eating sand, sand in your boots, sand in your teeth; hiding in holes in the sand like a dirty prairie dog. And then, 'Off to Servia!' And the next act opens in the snow and the mud! Cold? God, how cold it was! And most of us ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... unshaded by a single cloud. Tresler was tired, stiff, and consumed by a sponge-like thirst, for he was unused to long hours in the saddle. And he had found a dreary monotony in riding over the endless prairie lands of the West. ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... and I, who had fallen to the rear, rode leisurely northward athwart the open prairie on a clear trail, which twice crossed the shallow river, and, leaving the main valley, carried us up a narrowing vale on slightly rising ground. On either side and in front rose abrupt mountains some two thousand feet above the plain, and below ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... silt loam prairie soil of the early Wisconsin glaciation is the most common type of the greatest soil area in the Illinois Corn Belt. Two million pounds of this surface soil ...
— The Farm That Won't Wear Out • Cyril G. Hopkins
... them; and Lawry racked his brain for expedients to accomplish the task he had imposed upon himself. He had no money, and he was too proud to ask Mr. Sherwood for the assistance which that gentleman would so gladly have rendered. Ethan French came down to see him every day, and the prairie boy was so kind and considerate that they soon became ...
— Haste and Waste • Oliver Optic
... the Forests of Thy Wonder, where the mighty giants grow, Where we cleave Thy works asunder, and lay the mighty low, From the jungle and the prairie, From the realms of fact and faerie,— Evening brings us home at last, To rest, ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... run very swiftly, but he pretended to the chief that he was a bad runner. So they took him out on the prairie about four hundred yards away from the Indians. There he was turned loose, and ...
— Stories of American Life and Adventure • Edward Eggleston
... more than he helped with the removal of the coat and then stood, with the garment in his arms, peering over the heap of fur like a spectacled prairie-dog ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... appealed to him more keenly than did his prospector's pick and shovel and pan seemed to imply that he was growing old. He was a silent man, by occupation and by nature, so he said nothing about it; but, like the wild things of prairie and wood, instinctively began preparing for the winter of his life. Where he had lately been washing tentatively the sand along Snake River, he built a ranch. His prospector's tools he used in digging ditches to irrigate his new-made ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... to nurse. It was like a wedge, driving us farther and farther apart; and now that it is gone, and you will close up again, when you are kind and yielding to Henry—what a happy peaceful home you may make out in the prairie land!' ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge |
