"Backwoods" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one line," Jim replied. "This thing cannot be talked about. Lance knows we know I cannot punish him in any lawful way; but if he stops at Dryholm, I'll use the backwoods plan. Well, I give him ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... after almost ten years of separation, just the same careless, happy, dare-all do-no-goods that we were when we parted in St. James's street,—he for the West, I for the Eastern World—he to fell trees, and build log huts in the backwoods of Canada,—I to shoot tigers and drink arrack punch in the Carnatic. The world had wagged with us as with most others: now up, now down, and laid us to, at last, far enough from the goal for which we started—so that, as I have said already, on ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... They'll work their brains till they haven't got any more backbone than a caterpillar, but as for manual labor, it's old-timey and out of fashion. I wonder how these farms would ever have been carved out of the backwoods, if the old Puritans had sat down on the rocks with their noses in a lot of books, and tried to figure out just how little work they could do, and ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... farmer in his isolated homestead was more cut off from the world than the settler at the present time in the backwoods or on the prairies. The telegraph wires span the continent of America, and are carried across the dry deserts of Australia. Wherever the settler may be, he is never very far from the wires or the railway; the railway meets the ocean steamer; and we can form no conception of the utter lack of ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... is made to stand out as a light shining in the darkness. In Germanic eyes Ottokar's fault was that of being a Slav, successful and of great ability. I cannot agree with the German chronicler's estimate of Rudolph. We are expected to accept him as a modest sort of backwoods peer, the kind that wears flannel next its skin and keeps its small estates unencumbered. We have also a pretty picture in verse of this Rudolph. He is described as meeting a priest carrying the Host, on the bank of a foaming mountain torrent somewhere among the Alps where the ruins of the ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... overflows its banks in the spring, the wind from the meadows is laden with a strong scent of musk, and by its freshness advertises me of an unexplored wildness. Those backwoods are not far off then. I am affected by the sight of the cabins of the musk-rat, made of mud and grass, and raised three or four feet along the river, as when I read of the barrows of Asia. The musk-rat is the beaver of the settled States. Their number has even increased within a few years ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... Johnson he lived on the Western border, Where he went to escape from 'law and order,' For Tom was a terrible fellow, was he, He drunk, and he swore, and he fou't[B] like the Old Harry—and Tom he had a wife: Fit partner she was of his backwoods life. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... at once. It would have been an advantage if the Reform of the House of Lords could also have been disposed of in the present Parliament, but it is not one of the questions upon which the welfare of the country will immediately depend. Everyone admits the need for reform; the abolition of the "backwoods-man" must come; but it is the men of most experience in public affairs who regularly attend sittings of the House of Lords, and they contribute even now a valuable element in promoting useful legislation as well as in revising and amending the Bills initiated in another place. ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... us out into the cleared backwoods to visit some of our children. The country was charming; woods and green valleys, with every now and then rich orchards laden with rosy apples; the long Concession roads, forming at times magnificent avenues, in which here and there a maple, which ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... together with costly foreign rugs. The same strange mixture of rudeness and refinement was to be seen everywhere throughout the room. The table standing in the centre of the floor, ready for the evening meal, was made of unplaned boards, rudely put together by the unskilled hands of the backwoods. Yet it was set with the finest china, the rarest glass, and the richest silver that the greatest skill of the old world could supply. The chairs placed around the table were made of unpainted wood from the forest, with seats woven out of the coarse rushes from ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... murder of their leader, but their impulse was checked by a stern command from behind. Glancing in that direction, they saw themselves covered by a long, brown rifle-barrel, held by a white man clad in the leathern costume of the backwoods. At the same time half a dozen laborers who, home-returning from the fields, had noticed that something unusual was taking place, came hurrying to the scene of disturbance. Wisely concluding that ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... There are heaps and heaps of railway sleepers down in the wood heap, and we could pile them up into a hut. It's only what people do out in Canada. Gibbie's always telling us tales of women who emigrate to the backwoods, and build colonies of log-cabins. Ave, you're not going to sleep ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... the poor woman scarcely knew what she was doing; but she had the fighting instinct of all backwoods people, and her first motion was to snatch 30 off the wall, where it lay in a deer's-horn rest, a large horse pistol. With this in hand she ran to meet her children. Some hunter had broken the bear's fore leg with a bullet a few ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... things occurred at a Chicago hotel during the conclave that is so near a fight and yet so ridiculously laughable that you don't know whether you are on foot or a horseback. Of course some of the Knights in attendance were from the backwoods, and while they were well up in all the secret workings of the order, they were awful "new" ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle's, and muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of his life made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any kind, and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... couldn't guess. People who live in the backwoods and miles from a railroad are not apt to be leaders of fashion. Doubtless her hands will be red and her face will be red and her hair will be ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... poor curates, and, when met with, were equally as small; and so it happened, that as the landowners usually resided, like Mr. Honeywood, among their own people, a gentleman would occasionally be as badly off for a neighbour, as though he had been a resident in the backwoods of Canada. This evil, however, was productive of good, in that it ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... out a little packet. There was a certain intonation of his voice which, at first made me think that he was not an American, but in that intonation there was really nothing foreign. He was certainly a stranger, he might be from the backwoods, and both his manner and speech appeared odd to me; but soon I had no doubt about his being my countryman. In fact, there was something in his general appearance which seemed to me ...
— Amos Kilbright; His Adscititious Experiences • Frank R. Stockton
... he said at length, "you're goin' to have a great time at this little backwoods school—you're going ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... "the thing is for all of us to fall into line and forge ahead, Colonel. If we don't, we'll be left behind; and in these times to lag is to take to the backwoods." ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... way, invoked the saints, and cursed his director for his medley of directions many a time, before he stumbled at length on Mr. Boone's house. He was invited to sit down and dine, in the simple backwoods phrase, which is still the passport ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... the fence corner? Ye're a fine lot of jays up here in th' backwoods! Do I know him? Full well I do! An' that shows, ye what honest workin'men has got to come to, these days. Didn't ye see him sittin' there on that castin'? Th' bosses put him there to keep tricks ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... was. There was no one belonging to me, or associated with me in any way, who had literary tastes or ideas, the nearest I can make to it is that my great-grandfather was a circuit writer, a Welshman, known as "Priest" Jones in the backwoods, where his enthusiasm led him ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... the best chances now for intensive cultivation are in New Jersey, in the backwoods of the Middle states now made accessible by cheap ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... beat men I over knew," said Phoebus. "He was a remarkable instance of energy combined with softness of disposition. In my opinion, however, he ought never to have visited Europe: he was made to clear the backwoods, and govern man by the power of his hatchet and the mildness of his words. He was fighting for freedom all his life, yet slavery made and slavery destroyed him. Among all the freaks of Fate nothing is more surprising ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... to explain that I had been in the backwoods for months, and for the last two months in the foreign colony of Louisiana, in the village of St. Louis, where little of the doings of the ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... drawled out with a superior air: "Wal, sonny, you come from the backwoods shore ef you never heerd tell of a ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... part of the country. If we inquire what the world thought of it, we have still more to raise our wonder; for, not to mention the excitement it caused in England, the movement and its party-names were known to the police of Italy and to the backwoods-men of America. And so it proceeded, getting stronger and stronger every year, till it came into collision with the Nation and that Church of the Nation, which it began by professing ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... at the door. He was dressed plainly, and, with his reddish-brown hair and mud-bespattered face, looked like a hard- working countryman just in from the backwoods. ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... since in the backwoods of America. His fate seemed still to follow him, and his good temper appeared immortal—his situation was more peculiar than pleasant. He was seated on a log, three hundred miles from any civilised habitation, smiling blandly at a broken axe (his only one), the half ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... going to Florida—the land of the palms!" announced the manager. "You know I spoke of tentative plans for a drama down there when we were in the backwoods. Now I have everything arranged, and we will leave on a steamer for St. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... when he determined to tell the fresh story of the backwoods and the prairies, found a pattern ready to his hand in the Waverley novels, so Ibsen availed himself of the "well-made play" of Scribe when he wrote the 'League of Youth,' which is his earliest piece in prose presenting contemporary life and character in Norway. There is obvious significance ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... which this country was the scene in the summer of 1848 extended far beyond the shores of Ireland. Away beyond the Atlantic the news from Ireland was watched for with glistening eyes by the exiles who dwelt by the shores of Manhattan or in the backwoods of Canada. Amongst the Irish colony in England the agitation was still greater. Dwelling in the hearts of the monster towns of England, the glow of the furnace lighting up their swarthy faces; toiling on the canals, on the railways, in the steamboats; filling the ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... has to do after getting possession of his lease is to clear the land and get ready for planting. The outlay for this is considerable, and not much unlike clearing up a farm in New England, or in the backwoods of Canada. Then the young plants are set out; after this has been done, the ground must be kept clear of weeds, just as in raising corn or potatoes. It must be frequently stirred, so that the plant can get as much nourishment ...
— Harper's Young People, July 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... lived the Widow Baisley, alone with her son Paddy, a lad under ten years old, and little for his age. One midwinter night she was taken desperately ill, and Paddy, reckless of the terrors of the midnight solitudes, ran wildly to get help. The moon was high and full, and the lifeless backwoods road was a narrow, bright, white thread between the silent black masses of the spruce forest. Now and then, as he remembered afterwards, his ear caught a sound of light feet following him in the dark beyond the roadside. But his plucky ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... Delaware; in 1842, in Boston, Charlestown, Beverly, Florence, Springfield, and other points in Massachusetts, and in Hartford, Connecticut; in 1844, in Cincinnati, Dayton, Zanesville, Springfield, Cleveland, Toledo, and several settlements in the backwoods of Ohio, and also in Richmond, Indiana; in 1845 and '46, I lectured three times in the Legislative Hall in Detroit, and at Ann Arbor and other places in Michigan; and in 1847 and '48, I spoke in Charleston ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... were well-to-do, he swung the cradle in his rye and wheat, rejoicing in the sweep of the knife and the fulness of the swathe. Then, too, there was the driving of the rivers, when the young men ran the logs from the backwoods to the great mills near and far: red-shirted, sashed, knee-booted, with rings in their ears, and wide hats on their heads, and a song in their mouths, breaking a jamb, or steering a crib, or raft, down ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... respectful, appreciative buzz of voices that followed the speech, General Montero raised a pair of heavy, drooping eyelids and rolled his eyes with a sort of uneasy dullness from face to face. The military backwoods hero of the party, though secretly impressed by the sudden novelties and splendours of his position (he had never been on board a ship before, and had hardly ever seen the sea except from a distance), understood ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... A Backwoods Boyhood, in Moores, Abraham Lincoln; Choosing Abe Lincoln Captain, in Schauffler, Lincoln's Birthday; Following the Surveyor's Chain, in Baldwin, Abraham Lincoln; His Good Memory of Names, in Gallaher, Best Lincoln Stories; Lincoln and the ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... to this is, that you cannot give your man as much soil as he has on the prairies or in the Canadian lumber lands. This, no doubt, is true, but the squatter who settles in the Canadian backwoods does not clear his land all at once. He lives on a small portion of it, and goes on digging and delving little by little, until, after many years of Herculean labour, he hews out for himself, and his children after him, a freehold estate. Freehold estates, I admit, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... the latter the next morning at breakfast—"to think that the backwoods of America should have turned us out ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... you have read a deal more than have we who come from the backwoods," said he. "You have studied natural science and much else, still I wonder if any of you can tell me what the stones in ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... BACKWOODS BOY Or, The Parkhurst Treasure Depicts life on a farm of New York State. The mystery of the treasure will fascinate every boy. Jerry is a ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... as if it had been built the day before yesterday. Everything was new and shiny, and we had our supper at a long table with about twenty other people, just like a boardinghouse. Some of their ways reminded me of the backwoods, and I suppose there is nothing more modern than backwoodsism, which naturally hasn't the least alloy of the past. When the people got through with their cups of coffee or tea, mostly the last, two women went around the table, one with a big bowl for us to lean back and empty our slops into, ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... and "barbaric"—something which one might expect from an "uncivilised Goth," a rough backwoods-man who had no respect for the established rules of classical art and who built his "modern horrors" to please his own low tastes without a decent regard for the examples of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... democracy detected in him no taint of the patronizing or supercilious, and if he was new to the backwoods, he paid his arrears of knowledge with the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... village in the backwoods of Michigan or Minnesota, and transport it to a quiet spot by a well sheltered harbor of Lilliputian size. Cover the roofs of some buildings with iron, shingles or boards from other regions. Cover the balance with thatch of long grass, and erect chimneys that just peer above the ridge ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... them was a boy of about nine. In the background was a miserable hovel made of crude lumber and patched windows. This couple and their baby had been discovered by a geological survey outfit living in the backwoods hills. Relief, aid, and help were being rushed, and the legislature was considering ways and means of their schooling. Neither of them could read ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... drafted militia company in guarding Continental stores here [Fort Burd] in 1778." The term "Big Knives" or "Long Knives" may have had reference either to the long knives carried by early white hunters, or the swords worn by backwoods militia officers. See Roosevelt's Winning of the West, I., ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... morning of the 22nd of September, 1827, the Angel of the Lord delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr., an ignorant farmer-youth in a "backwoods" part of New York State, some plates which had "the appearance of gold". As we know from the scriptures, it is the habit of the Angel of the Lord to appear in unexpected places and to make miraculous revelations to men in humble walks of life; so, as ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... located in the middle of a ten-acre lot. It was approached by a straight walk, paved with a mixture of sand and tar, similar to that which the reader may have seen in the Champs Elysees. I do not know whether my backwoods friend or the Parisian pavior was the first inventor of this composition; but I am satisfied the corn-cracker had not stolen it from the stone-cracker. The walk was lined with fruit-bearing shrubs, and directly in front of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... path, and one path only, leads to what all men desire—peace and happiness. One path, and one path only, leads to what all men know they ought to seek—purity and godliness. We are like men in the backwoods, our paths go circling round and round, we have lost our way. 'The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them, for he knoweth not how to come to the city.' Jesus Christ has cut a path through the forest. Tread you in it, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... my eyes and almost fancy I see your home in the backwoods. There are your two sisters running about ...
— Our American Cousin • Tom Taylor
... matter, only she's poky, and doesn't seem to fit in somehow. You would understand if you had seen her the day she came. Mrs. Gray has dressed her up, as you might be sure she would; but then she looked like the backwoods, didn't ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... Womanhood," and other ethical works of the day, that a sister's influence is illimitable, and she felt besides an added weight of responsibility towards her motherless sister and brothers. "I don't know, papa," she said at last, "unless we all take to the backwoods, live in a wigwam, and feast on the fruits of the chase. Edward chafes a good deal under the ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... an apple having a slightly different flavour to what it had in this country. You could always distinguish an American apple by its peculiar piquancy—a sub-acid piquancy, a wild strawberry piquancy, a sort of woodland, forest, backwoods delicacy of its own. And so on, and so on—"talk, talk, talk," ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Not without abundant New Testament antecedents, it naturalized itself at once on our soil as a natural expedient for scattered frontier populations unprovided with settled institutions. By a natural process of evolution, adapting itself to other environments and uses, the backwoods camp-meeting has grown into the "Chautauqua" assembly, which at so many places besides the original center at Chautauqua Lake has grown into an important and most characteristic ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Clark is coming," said the schoolmaster thoughtfully. "It is wonderful what the energy and directing mind of one man can do. That name alone is enough to change the nature of a whole campaign. 'Tis lucky that we have this Caesar of the backwoods to defend us. What is your ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... indicated high cultivation. She had evidently mingled in refined society in this country and in Europe, and it was a strange freak of fortune that had reduced her to a menial condition in the family of a backwoods planter. ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... blood-curdling scenes or nothing startling or sensational in the plot or characters. The story, however, may be regarded as a biting sarcasm on a hypocritical society in which a gang of instructors of dark character at a middle school in a backwoods town plays a prominent part. The hero of the story is made a victim of their annoying intrigues, but finally comes out triumphant by smashing the petty red tapism, knocking down the sham pretentions and by actual use of the fist on the Head ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... family, emigrated from Scotland about the year of 1843, and settled upon a new farm in the backwoods, in the township of R. in Eastern Canada. I can say but little regarding his early life, but have been informed that he was the eldest of quite a large family of sons and daughters; and also that he was a dutiful son as well as a kind and affectionate ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... fall into excessive raptures over the barbarian's kindness. Emboldened by my sympathy, she told me how she had given up, little by little, what she imagined to be the weakness of her early education, until she found that she acquired but little strength in her new experience. How, translated to a backwoods society, she was hated by the women, and called proud and "fine," and how her dear husband lost popularity on that account with his fellows. How, led partly by his roving instincts, and partly from other circumstances, he started with her to California. ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... boundary, bounds, confine, enclave, term, bourn, verge, curbstone^, but, pale, reservation; termination, terminus; stint, frontier, precinct, marches; backwoods. boundary line, landmark; line of demarcation, line of circumvallation^; pillars of Hercules; Rubicon, turning point; ne plus ultra [Lat.]; sluice, floodgate. Adj. definite; conterminate^, conterminable^; terminal, frontier; bordering. Adv. thus far, thus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... rattlesnake of extraordinary size. They experienced inconvenience from musquitoes in a few damp spots, just as they would have done from gnats in England. In their late expeditions in the Illinois, where they led the lives of thorough backwoods-men, if they were so unfortunate as to pitch their tent on the edge of a creek, or near a swamp, and mismanaged their fire, they were teased with musquitoes, as they would have been in the fens of Cambridgeshire: ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... enough to breed yaller fever and could be felt just as easy as cotton velvet! A cross old woman came next, and whose look would have given any reasonable man the double-breasted blues before breakfast; alongside of her was a rale backwoods preacher, with the biggest and ugliest mouth ever got up since the flood. He was flanked by the low comedian of the party, an Indiana Hoosier, 'gwine down to Orleans to get an army contract' to supply the forces ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the sea-board. The Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau fetches his Indian Student not from the outskirts of the settlement, but from the remote backwoods of the State: ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... In the backwoods of Cambodia live two mysterious sovereigns known as the King of the Fire and the King of the Water. Their fame is spread all over the south of the great Indo-Chinese peninsula; but only a faint echo of it has reached the West. Down to a few years ago no European, so far as is known, had ever ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... little corner called New England, which is Yankee land. The English themselves planted it there, two hundred and fifty years ago, and there it remains; it has never spread. But England talks through her nose yet; the Londoner and the backwoods New-Englander pronounce 'know' and 'cow' alike, and then the Briton unconsciously satirizes himself by making fun of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... reason, the only reason, for your coming to me with your impertinent question?" Miss Treville laughed oddly. "Really! Do you know, I have always suspected that the little savage whom he brought from somewhere in the backwoods regarded him as rather more than a guardian, or a brother ... that was the pretty fiction, wasn't it?" she added, with honey coating the ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... young mother, did not complain. She, too, had grown up among the rude scenes of the backwoods. She had never known ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... beyond all earthly scenes. Only those who have learned thus to look beyond the material horizon of our little day have that beautiful inner light which shone in the eyes of Auntie Sue—the teacher of a backwoods school. ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... the right principle," said Stover, assuming a deliberate look; "but crude, very crude, backwoods, primitive, and all that sort ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... a coach, in hope of seeing the scenery, and the day turns out hopelessly rainy, no gentleman in the coach below ever thinks of offering to change seats with her, though it pour torrents. In America, the roughest backwoods steamboat or canal-boat captain always, as a matter of course, considers himself charged with the protection of the ladies. 'Place aux dames' is written in the heart of many a shaggy fellow who could not utter a French word ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... first united efforts of human industry were made. The tongue of arid land was the cradle of those English colonies which were destined one day to become the United States of America. The centre of power still remains here; whilst in the backwoods the true elements of the great people to whom the future control of the continent belongs are gathering ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... "There was a rough backwoods bunch always drifting about Clinch's place in those days. There were fights. And not so many miles from Clinch's there was highway robbery and a ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... festal dances, and funeral dances, and military dances, and "mediatorial" dances, and bacchanalian dances. Queens and lords have swayed to and fro in their gardens; and the rough men of the backwoods in this way have roused up the echo of the forest. There seems to be something in lively and coherent sounds to evoke the movement of hand and foot, whether cultured or uncultured. Men passing the street unconsciously keep ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... the floor, passing her little hand-shuttle through the cotton-woof. Now she sang—and sweetly she sang—some merry air of the American backwoods that had been taught her by her mother; anon some romantic lay of Old Spain—the "Troubadour," perhaps—a fine piece of music, that gives such happy expression to the modern song "Love not." This "Troubadour" was a favourite with Rosita; and when she took up ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... It was herself who walked and moved, yet all the time she seemed to stand aside and let another self think and feel and act. A composite odour of groceries, bacon, tobacco, and cheap clothes met her as she entered the rough, homely shed, which was a typical emporium of the backwoods; but she had no time to analyse the odours, being at once attracted by Katherine, who stood at a tall desk by the window, entering items in a ledger. At the same time Katherine glanced up and saw the visitor entering the door. She flushed at the sight, ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... as much unknown to us as the backwoods. My father alone had been born and bred to village life and habits, for my mother had spent her youth in a succession of seaport towns, frequented by men-of-war. We heard, too, that Chantry House was very secluded, with only a few cottages ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... very fair roads toward the rising sun. I am not long out before meeting with that characteristic feature of a scene on the Western plains, a "prairie schooner;" and meeting prairie schooners will now be a daily incident of my eastward journey. Many of these "pilgrims" come from the backwoods of Missouri and Arkansas, or the rural districts of some other Western State, where the persevering, but at present circumscribed, cycler has not yet had time to penetrate, and the bicycle is therefore to them a wonder to be gazed at and commented on, generally - it must be ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... satisfy our consciences, with single-loading rifles; but along came the inventive Yankee and produced revolvers and repeaters, and Gatling guns, and magazine guns—guns that carried a dozen shots at a time. I didn't wonder at the curiosity exhibited in this direction by a backwoods Virginian we captured one night. The first remark he made was, "I would like to see one of them thar new-fangled weepons of yourn. They tell me, sah, it's a most remarkable eenstrument. They say, sah, it's a kind o' repeatable, which you can load it up enough on Sunday to fiah it ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... the determination to seek his fortune in the then almost unknown Canadian West had been growing upon him, and as it grew he shrank more and more from disclosing his plans to his fiancee. Had she been one of the country girls of the neighbourhood, a daughter of the sturdy backwoods pioneers, bred to hard work in field and barnyard, he would have hesitated less. But she was sprung from gentler stock. It seemed almost profane to think of her in the lonely life of a homesteader on the bleak, unsettled plains—to see her in the monotony and ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... lips, that were continually curving into the sunniest smiles. His voice, deep and musical, instantly attracted attention; and his address, though not without soldierly brusqueness, was sincere and courteous. There was one thing his backwoods detractors could never forgive: he always dressed well; and sometimes wore the military insignia presented to him by different organizations. One of these, a gold circle, inscribed with the legend, NON NOBIS, SED PRO PATRIA, was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... 1742, Robertson was ten years younger than Washington. But this boy's early life was very different from young George Washington's, for little James was born in a backwoods cabin, and his father and mother were too poor to send him to school. So he grew up to manhood without being able to ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... It didn't take a hundred years after Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines, in Haiti, for the blacks to shuck off French civilization and go back to grass huts and human sacrifice—to make another little Central Africa out of it, in the backwoods districts, at any rate. And we—have had a thousand, Beatrice, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... He had a harsh untunable voice, his father's, but harsher, and he spoke the drawling dialect of the backwoods. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... at your feet! The nephew and heir of the great Firm voluntarily surrendering consideration, ease, riches, unbounded luxury for the sake of the heathen—choosing a wigwam instead of a West End palace; parched maize rather than the banquet; the backwoods instead of the luxurious park; the Red Indian rather than the club and the theatre; to be a despised minister rather than a magnate of this great city; nay, or to take his place among the influential ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her say, as if in self-argument. "It wouldn't stand many wearings before it would look a sight. It wouldn't wash—man as you are, Mr. Mostyn, you know it wouldn't wash. I'm going to take it off and try to have some sense. I'm in no position to try to make a show. School-teachers here in the backwoods have no right to excite comment by the gaudy finery they wear. I'm paid by people's taxes. Did you know that? I might find myself out of a job—out of employment, I mean. Some of these crusty old fellows that believe it is wrong to have an organ in church had just as soon as not enter ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... of seventeen he began to earn his own living as a surveyor. It was no light work in those days, for the country where he had most to do was in the backwoods. Many a day he trudged through the forest from dawn to sunset, and lay down at night with nothing but a blanket between him and the stormy sky. But he was faithful and careful, ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... way. Lucy Marsh and I had a long talk over her that night, and we put our heads together to concoct a nice little bit of punishment for her. You know she's horridly shy, and as gauche as if she lived in the backwoods, and we meant to 'send her to Coventry.' We had it all arranged, and a whole lot of girls would have joined us, for it's contrary to the spirit of a place like this to allow girls of the Priscilla Peel type to become ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... hoped that Mr. AUGUSTUS JOHN will be able to accompany Lord BEAVERBROOK to Canada this summer, so that his lordship may gratify his lifelong ambition to be painted by Mr. JOHN, with the primeval backwoods for a setting, in the character of a coureur-des-bois, of the type immortalized by Sir GILBERT PARKER ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... mountains. As mountain people go she was, already, a rich woman, but now dreams of mightier wealth swept through her brain tumultuously. Ah, she would buy happiness for all her friends when she had, later on, unearthed the secret treasures of her backwoods clearing! Maybe she would, sometime, have a ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... society, and never again recovered any real zest for it. He sometimes thought of imitating his grandfather under like circumstances with a difference—he thought of flying, not to London, but to the backwoods of America, or some place where he should never see a white face, and becoming a "wild man," a savage—a personage of whom he always believed himself to share many of the characteristics. Only consideration for his little girls deterred him from such a course. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Rights Democrats. Rising from humble beginnings, he was animated by the most intense dislike of the "slavocracy," as he called the political aristocracy of the South. Like many other American leaders he was proud of his humble origin, but unlike many others he never sloughed off his backwoods crudeness. He continually boasted of himself and vilified the aristocrats, who in return treated him badly. His dislike of them was so marked that Isham G. Harris, a rival politician, remarked that "if Johnson were a snake, ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... hunter and a trapper in the backwoods of New Brunswick, where his instinctive knowledge of the wild kindreds had won him a success which presently sickened him. His heart revolted against the slaughter of the creatures which he found so interesting, and for a time, his occupation gone, he had drifted aimlessly about the settlements. ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... numerous packs of skins. We would then make the best of our way home from our distant hunting-grounds; transporting our spoils, sometimes in canoes along the rivers, sometimes on horseback over land, and our return would often be celebrated by feasting and dancing, in true backwoods style. I have given you some idea of our hunting; let me now give you ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... and they were soon seated in an alehouse, which, as it was very new, and stood in an exposed and solitary station, was less crowded than those nearer to the centre of the port. It was but a shed of timber, much like a block-house in the backwoods of to-day, and was coarsely furnished with a press or two, a number of naked benches, and boards set upon barrels to play the part of tables. In the middle, and besieged by half a hundred violent draughts, a fire of wreck-wood blazed and vomited ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... people, as a hardy woman who could make herself one of them. William, who did not suspect the presence of the dog, grew faintly alarmed, but I persevered till the last man staggered surfeited from the feast. It was my first and, I may add, almost my only triumph as a minister's wife on a backwoods circuit. ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... Almighty, He would hunt this ravening evil that had scathed and torn him so; He would seize it by the vitals; he would crush it day and night; he Would so pursue its footsteps, so return it blow for blow, That Old Brown, Osawatomie Brown, Should be a name to swear by, in backwoods or ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... long-legged, sallow-looking backwoodsman talk of having come lately from Paris, or Mecca, when instead of meaning the capital of La grande nation, or the city of "the holy prophet," he spoke of some town containing a few hundred inhabitants, situated in the backwoods of Kentucky, or amidst the gloomy forests of Indiana. The Americans too speak in prospective, when they talk of great places; no doubt "calculating" that, one day, all the mighty productions of the old world will be surpassed by their ingenuity ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... big, rawboned and serious, is a product of the backwoods and a crack rifle shot. Quick thinking and pluck bring him a scholarship to Clarkville School where he is branded "grind" and "dub" by classmates. How his batting brings them first place in the League and how he secures his appointment to West Point make CRACKER STANTON an up-to-the-minute ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... a queer-looking thing! Her frock comes down to her shoe-tops like an old woman's and that sun-bonnet! Why she must have just come in from the backwoods!" ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... God. In one of these meetings of public thanksgiving Brigham had said from the tabernacle pulpit: "What is the strength of this man Lincoln? It is like a rope of sand. He is as weak as water,—an ignorant, Godless shyster from the backwoods of Illinois. I feel disgraced in having been born under a government that has so little power for truth and right. And now it will be broken in pieces like ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... these dwellers in the backwoods that but a small percentage of tigers are man-eaters, perhaps not five per cent., otherwise village after village would be depopulated; as it is the yearly tale of lives lost ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... backwoods Ohio boy who rose to prominence. Everyday humor of American rustic life permeates ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... again. Do you know why Uncle Grid lived so poor and scrimped and yet left no money? He'd been taking care of a whole family grandfather had beside ours; and paying back some people grandfather did out of a lot of money on a timber deal fifty years ago; and making it up to a little village in the backwoods that grandfather persuaded to bond itself for a railroad that he knew ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... G. A. R. veteran was dying. He had come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods. He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey's readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... was Menehwehna who, with inscrutable face, helped John ashore, suffering the others only to hold the canoe steady. John tried hard to collect his thoughts to face this new situation. He had dreamed of falling among savages in these backwoods; but he had fallen among folk gentle in manner and speech, anxious to show him courtesy; folk to whom (as in an instant he divined) truth and uprightness were dearer than life and judged as delicately as by his own family at home in Devonshire. How came ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Israel was at the beginning of its long training, that not even a divine revelation could produce harvest in seedtime, and that to look for a final and complete deliverance from the 'veil that was spread over all nations,' at this stage, is like expecting a newly reclaimed bit of the backwoods to grow grass as thick and velvety as has carpeted some lawn that has been mown and cared for for a century. Grave condemnation is the due of these short-memoried rebels, who set up their 'abomination' in sight of the fire on Sinai; but that should not prevent our recognising the evidence which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... high-pitched voice of the balmy weather and the sweet profusion of birds and flowers, when there was more like to be a "sweet profusion" of Indians; and I nigh stifled with laughter to see this lumbering, free-voiced forest-runner transformed to a mincing, anxious, backwoods macaroni at the ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... not been for the cross old aunt, Rebecca would still have been at Sunnybrook; and from the standpoint of educational advantages, or indeed advantages of any sort, she might as well have been in the backwoods," returned Adam. ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... overnight here they took a stage, and for a whole day travelled over pleasant roads, through sweet-scented forests of spruce and balsam, broken here by clearings and thrifty farms, until at last the journey ended in the pretty little backwoods settlement of ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... C. Busler, near Collomsville, Lycoming County, have had arms loving pilgrims of note from all over the State to learn the last dying secrets of the Kentucky rifles, which, despite their name, were mostly made in Pennsylvania. Often the backwoods arms enthusiast would insist that the shutters be closed and the smith's work carried on by candle-light, lest a passing hechs cast a glance upon the barrel, which would ever afterward be deprived of the ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... an ornary lot of backwoods fellers, livin' away out here in the mountains and the brush, but God Almighty 'ain't forgot us, all the same. He sent a little youngster once to put a heartful of happiness into men, and He's sent this ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... or drive cattle, or chop down trees in the backwoods," she replied, lifting demure eyebrows. "Oh, Dick, don't be foolish. ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke |
