"Fern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy—and very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like, flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a somber sky of ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... the villages in the valley. Forty miles away, untouched by cloud or storm, the white shoulder of Donga Pa—the Mountain of the Council of the Gods—upheld the Evening Star. The monkeys sang sorrowfully to each other as they hunted for dry roosts in the fern-wreathed trees, and the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine- cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... suited to the comprehension and tastes of the masses, who cared nothing for the higher class periodicals. He proceeded very cautiously, however, and it was not until some time after that he made the Ledger entirely a literary paper, and issued it in its present form. He induced Fanny Fern, who was then in the flush of the reputation gained for her by her "Ruth Hall," to write him a story, ten columns long, and paid her one thousand dollars in cash for it. He double-leaded the story, and made it twenty columns in length, and advertised in nearly every ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... vegetables, and so loose that it sinks under you at every step; and this may be the reason why we meet with so many large trees as we do, blown down by the wind, even in the thickest part of the woods. All the ground amongst the trees is covered with moss and fern, of both which there is a great variety; but except the flax or hemp plant, and a few other plants, there is very little herbage of any sort, and none that was eatable, that we found, except about a handful ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... Turveycombe Sat to sew, Just where a patch of fern did grow; There, as she yawned, And yawn wide did she, Floated some seed Down her gull-e-t; And look you once, And look you twice, Poor old Tillie Was gone in a trice. But oh, when the wind Do a-moaning come, 'Tis poor old ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... formality. Behind its front railings there were no trim laurel bushes—only an uncomfortable bed of equal parts of mould and broken red tiles, in which a withered juniper was dying hard; at the windows were no bright curtain-folds or hanging baskets of trailing fern to give a touch of colour, but dusty wire blinds and hangings ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... sleeping dormouse, from one end of the year to the other; and now I am more like a hare on her form, that dare not sleep unless with her eyes open, and scuds off when the wind rustles among the fern." ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... was at least conscious during this waiting time that life was full of some hidden savour; that his thoughts were never idle, never vacant; that, as he lay flat among the fern in his moments of rest, following the march of the clouds as they sailed divinely over the rich breadth and colour of the commons, a whole brood of images nestled at his heart, or seemed to hover in the sunny air before him,—visions of a slender form fashioned with Greek suppleness and majesty, ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gently along the hollows as the slight breeze touched them. They were queer, those ferns. They were not quite so slender and tapering and gothic as the ferns we see to-day. They were a trifle more lush and ragged, and their tips were sometimes almost rounded. But Ab noted little of fern or bird. It was only the general sensuousness that was upon him. The smell of the pines was a partial tonic to the healthy, half-awakened man, and, though he lay back upon the rugged wooden bed and half dozed ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... recollection of life. I was barely three. I can remember the majestic gum-trees surrounding us, the sun glinting on their straight white trunks, and falling on the gurgling fern-banked stream, which disappeared beneath a steep scrubby hill on our left. It was an hour past noon on a long clear summer day. We were on a distant part of the run, where my father had come to deposit salt. He had left home early ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... Each Monday found Archie more handy with the ax, and neither heat nor mosquitoes caused him to slacken in extending his clearance. Wet days alone made him take rest in his shanty, in a corner of which was his bed of hemlock boughs and fern leaves. When summer waned and the nights grew cold the lack of a chimney in his shanty made living in it intolerable, for the smoke circulated round until it found the hole in the roof intended for its escape. He thought over plans to get a chimney, but could hit on none ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... gracious room, its chintz hangings, four-poster bed, low wicker chair by the fireplace, fresh Cherokee roses on the mantel; a room of cheerfulness and open spaces. He stared into woods where a cool light lay on moss and fern. He did not need to remember Ruth's kisses. For each breath of hilltop air, each emerald of moss, each shining mahogany surface in the room, repeated to him that he had found the Grail, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... angry wolf, or pard with prying head, Until it came to some unfooted plains Where fed the herds of Pan: ay great his gains Who thus one lamb did lose. Paths there were many, Winding through palmy fern, and rushes fenny, 80 And ivy banks; all leading pleasantly To a wide lawn, whence one could only see Stems thronging all around between the swell Of turf and slanting branches: who could tell The freshness of the space ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... a pressed fern," said Winnie. "Do you remember the fad we had for pressed flowers and skeleton leaves? We used to keep ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... House officers and their servants, who hasten to prevent the wreck being plundered. In addition to this, during a storm, horsemen patrol the coast, and rewards are paid for the earliest intelligence of vessels in distress. A flag is always hoisted when any ship is seen in distress on the Fern Islands or Staples; or a rocket thrown up at night, which gives notice to the Holy Island fishermen, who can put off to the spot when no boat from the main can get over the breakers. Life-boats have likewise been added to the establishment. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... Filix-Mas. Polypodium, Linn. MALE FERN. The Roots. L. E. D.—They are said to be aperient and anthelmintic. Simon Pauli tells us, that they have been the grand secret of some empirics against the broad kind of worms called taenia; and that the dose is one, two, or three drams of the powder. Two other kinds of Ferns used to ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... than read his defence of the British Constitution, though I personally disagree with some points in his argument. One sentence from this passage might be addressed to our Allies very appropriately to-day—"Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle reposing beneath the shadow of the British oak chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... beginnings of trees, to the pre-historic times when this bed rock was laid down, when all this region was an inlet or bay from the Atlantic Ocean and the upland was treeless as our rock record shows. Then there were the beginnings of low fern-like growth and clotted mass which gradually increased in size until they assumed the enormous proportions which made the coal beds possible. And then I like to follow the growth of trees on to the broad leaf. We have the beginnings of the broad leaf, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... grass, a dead and brittle last year's growth. She saw two natives in the act of kicking out a dung fire. Rajah headed directly toward them, the fire evidently being in the line of path he had chosen. This rare and unexpected freedom, this opportunity to go whither he listed, was as the giant fern he used to eat in the days when he was free and wild ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... passes over the light picture and changes it. A woodland scene is painted there now. Amid the fern and moss and twigs under the trees, wild flowers are blowing. A pathway intersects the little wood, and across it shadows of the trees fall, with sunlight between. In the foremost patch of sunshine, at the edge of the path, is a sprinkling of anemone leaves. And there amongst them a delicate ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... firs on the summit grew out to the very edge and stretched their dark arms over us. Every cranny of the rock was filled with tufts of white and pink flowers, and the moisture, trickling from above, betrayed itself in long lines of moss and fern. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... would have rejoiced over the trip, for it was carrying them back to the gleam of leaf-dappled streams and waving trees and deep, cool forests. It made their nostrils dilate with pleasure as they whirled past fern-filled ravines, out of which the rivulets stole with stealthy circuits under mossy rocks. They were both forest-born, and it was like getting back home out of a strange desert country to come back ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... river whirl around and about before your eyes. And curious, long-legged flies slip and slide on the surface of the water. At such a time one desires to swim over to the other side—over to where the green flags grow, their yellow and white stalks shimmering in the sun. A green, fresh fern looks up at you, and you go after it, plash-plash into the water, hands down, and feet up, so that people might think you were swimming. I ask you again, what pleasure is it to sit in a little room on a summer's evening, when the great dome of the sky is ...
— Jewish Children • Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich
... were bent down by the weight of the late heavy fall of snow, so that they resembled graceful umbrellas and parasols. So fairy-like was the sylvan scene that I half expected to see the curved branches open softly and disclose naiads or wood-nymphs. I had always been told that these fern-gullies were charming, but I never thought anything could be half so lovely as this romantic ravine. If only the sunlight could have glanced through the trees and thrown some shimmering sunbeams on the bright green leaves, it ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... again and crushed a fern-leaf nervously between her fingers. "Yes, it was lonesome. ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the afternoon we arrived at Lulo Pakko (lulo river; pakko edible fern), situated in a beautiful hilly country. The natives very obligingly helped to make camp in the usual way. Raja Besar, who made himself at home in the gallery of the long communal house, told me that he wanted his "children," as he called ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... appearing to be twice as many. Scape: 4 to 10 in. high. Leaves: Growing in an open rosette on the ground; round or broader, clothed with reddish bristly hairs tipped with purple glands, and narrowed into long, flat, hairy petioles; young leaves curled like fern fronds. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... potatoes are buried in a jungle of autumn burdocks. Our radishes stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes, when last seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of August, and getting greener every week. Our celery looked as delicate as a maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was nine feet high with a tall feathery spike on top of that, but no sign of anything eatable about it from top ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... Squitty in daylight and dark, in sun and storm, for years, and the old instinctive sense of direction, of location, had not deserted him. In a little while he came out abreast of Cradle Bay. The Gower house, all brightly gleaming windows, loomed near. He struck down through the dead fern, ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... like the woods at night. Don't the fern and the needles smell fine? Lyd, what're you going to do after you ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... fashionably at the antlered heads which the great slow deer raised out of a forest of bracken that promised to autumn lovers such cover as was never seen before. And now and again, as the amorous perfume of chestnut flowers and of fern was drifted too near, one would say to the other: "My dear! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... regretfully among the fern-decked rocks before quite finishing the ascent to the actual outside world, the mercury lost little time in ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... and the scarlet balsams; to walk with hushed step through the wide forests, communing with the powerful sylvan spirits that labor there, watching with what miraculous delicacy of touch their unseen fingers weave the rich fantastic shrouds of fern and moss that deck the dead and fallen trees or anon give to the living their faint and mottled tints of green and gray;—to live thus through the summer hours, and through autumn, winter, spring watch the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... turned round and strolled about, loitering among the flowers. They halted with some curiosity before several women who were selling bunches of fern and bundles of vine-leaves, neatly tied up in packets of five and twenty. Then they turned down another covered alley, which was almost deserted, and where their footsteps echoed as though they had been walking through a church. Here they ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... opposite the break in the reef, the artu came in places right down to the water's edge; the breadfruit trees cast the shadow of their great scalloped leaves upon the water; glades, thick with fern, wildernesses of the mammee apple, and bushes of the scarlet "wild cocoanut" all slipped by, as the dinghy, hugging the shore, crept ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... to the fowler's lure, 5 Went back to Granta's cloisters, [A] not so prompt Or eager, though as gay and undepressed In mind, as when I thence had taken flight A few short months before. I turned my face Without repining from the coves and heights 10 Clothed in the sunshine of the withering fern; [B] Quitted, not both, the mild magnificence Of calmer lakes and louder streams; and you, Frank-hearted maids of rocky Cumberland, You and your not unwelcome days of mirth, 15 Relinquished, and your nights of revelry, And in my ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... width, pointed to the higher plant world that was to come. Between these gaunt towering trunks the graceful tree-ferns spread their canopies at heights of twenty, forty, and even sixty feet from the ground, and at the base was a dense undergrowth of ferns and fern-like seed-plants. Mosses may have carpeted the moist ground, but nothing in the nature of grass or flowers ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... background of country life is nature; therefore nature study is fundamental in the new curriculum. Careful observation of natural objects comes first, until the child is able to identify bird and bee and flower. To knowledge is added appreciation. The beauty of fern and leaf, of brookside and hillside, of star-dotted and cloud-dappled sky, is not appreciated by mere observation, but waits on the education of the mind. This is part of the task of the teacher. The economic use of natural objects and natural forces is secondary, and should ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... dead limbs brought down by freshets and left lodged, she climbed, she sprang, she ran. All too brightly her way was lighted now. A ghastly yellow radiance was on every object. The waters sparkled and gleamed as they poured over the dark brown stones. Every slender, delicate fern, every poor little startled wild flower nestled in cool, dim nooks, was glaringly revealed. Little the frightened girl heeded these ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... present frame of mind there is something flat and chilling in this redundancy of verdure that reminds one of death and the grave-yard. The moss-covered rocks jutting from the cold, grassy earth; the dripping fern; the pale, flitting gleams of sunshine struggling through the depths of foliage; the mould that seems to hang in the air—all these strike me as death-like. I long for the vital glow of a more genial sun, whose all-pervading light is reflected ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... warred against the land, tearing and breaking at its rock formation and distributing it in new strata, each buried beneath the next and holding fast within it the fossilized remains that form the record of its history. Huge fern plants spread their giant fronds in the dank sunless atmospheres, to be buried later in vast beds of decaying vegetation that form ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... of a volcano, the amphitheatre quite unbroken, and larger than that of Vesuvius, but covered with wood, and the bottom with very fine trees of various sorts and with fern—very wild and picturesque. There are several little hillocks, supposed to have been small craters; but although it is proved that this was a volcano from the lava under the soil and from its shape, there is no mention ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... slaves had followed this road. For a mile Dick Sand and his companions struck against these scattered bones at each step, putting to flight enormous fern-owls. Those owls rose at their approach, with a heavy flight, and turned ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... To Westminster, my Lord being gone before my coming to chapel. I and Mr. Sheply told out my money, and made even for my Privy Seal fees and gratuity money, &c., to this day between my Lord and me. After that to chappell, where Dr. Fern, a good honest sermon upon "The Lord is my shield." After sermon a dull anthem, and so to my Lord's (he dining abroad) and dined with Mr. Sheply. So, to St. Margarett's, and heard a good sermon upon the text "Teach us the old way," or something like it, wherein he ran over ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... startles us by its horrors: but the rainbow lifts its head in the cloud, and the breeze sighs through the withered fern. No sad vicissitude of fate, no overwhelming catastrophe in nature deforms his page: but the dewdrop glitters on the bending flower, the tear ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... at a light footfall. Whereupon there passed by him the fairest woman he had ever known, and such sudden beauty startled the man and sent his own thoughts flying. It was as though from the desolate waste there had sprung a magical and exotic flower; or that the sunset lights, now deepening on fern and stone, had burned together and became incarnate in this lovely girl. She was slim and not very tall. She wore no hat and the auburn of her hair, piled high above her forehead, tangled the warm sunset beams and burned like ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... universe in the pursuit of knowledge. We read of his walking thirty-two miles in a soaking rain to the top of a mountain, and bringing home only a plant of white heather. On another day he walked thirty-six miles to find a peculiar kind of fern. Again he walked for twenty-four hours in hail, rain, and wind, reaching home at three o'clock in the morning. But at seven he was up and ready for work as usual. He carried heavy loads, too, when he went searching for minerals and fossils. ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... his habitual promenade, had come and parted the branches, how surprised he would have been at this picture! But would he ever have suspected how much passion, how many dreams, what poetry and hope there could be contained in that little green corner, hardly larger than the shadow a fern throws on ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... walked the floor with the little thing in his arms, talking to it that jargon of tender nonsense which fairies bring as love-gifts to all who tend a cradle. Many a day the good little old grandmother called the aid of gossips about her, trying various experiments of catnip, and sweet fern, and bayberry, and other teas of rustic reputation ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... away, and the air grew cold and dark about him. But the distant valley with its houses was all the brighter for that. He came presently to talus, and among the rocks he noted—for he was an observant man—an unfamiliar fern that seemed to clutch out of the crevices with intense green hands. He picked a frond or so and gnawed its stalk ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Maria Cummings, Anna Mowatt Ritchie, Rose Terry Cooke, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Augusta J. Evans, Catharine A. Warfield, and the writers under the assumed names of Fanny Forrester, Grace Greenwood, Fanny Fern, Marion Harland, and Mary Forrest, besides ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... path had been rocky, and she had needed cautious help. Into the thicket of lilacs, with the old scent of the spring blossoms yet hanging on their boughs; along the bank, where her foot had sunk deep into plushy moss, where he had gathered a cluster of fern and put it into her hand. Its pale feathery green was not more quaint or pure than the delicate love in the uncouth man beside her,—not nearer kin to Nature. Did she know that? Had it been like the breath of God coming ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... eyes of fancy turn Where the tumbled pippins burn Like embers in the orchard's lap of tangled grass and fern,— There let the old path wind In and out and on behind The cider-press that ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... benches ranged against the walls and sheltered by tall palms and flowering exotics. The music was heard to better advantage here than in the hall where the company had first been received; and as the Princess moved to a seat under the pale green frondage of a huge tropical fern and bade her two companions sit beside her, sounds of the wildest, most melancholy and haunting character began to palpitate upon the air in the mournful, throbbing fashion in which a nightingale sings when its soul is burdened with love. The passionate tremor that shakes the bird's ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... And swart Work sullen sits in the hillside fern And folds his arms that find no bread to ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... potatoes can scarcely be raised; and from 1000 to 1200 feet is the more common limit of the cereal and the esculent. On this point a statement is made, which may be useful to cultivators in the hill districts: it is, that 'the common brake-fern (Pteris aquilina), distributed throughout Britain, is found to be limited by a line running nearly level with the limit of cultivation, and thus affords a test, when cultivation may be absent, where nature does not ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... patches of bark which curled up like old parchment as they shelled away from the inner bark. The ground beneath the tree was carpeted with a velvety moss with little plots of grass and clusters of maiden-hair fern growing on it. From under an overhanging rock on the bank a spring of crystal water ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... a fragrance of fern in the night air that she had inhaled while walking. Now by the side of Bideabout she smelt only the beer and stale tobacco that adhered ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... thing finished in this hasty world. But ah! this other, this that never ends, Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, As full of morals, half divined, as life, Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise Of hazardous caprices, sure to please, Heavy as nightmare, airy light as fern, Imagination's ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... can quite kill it, thank God! You and I have proved that. It may be smothered under dust and rubbish, and frozen with neglect, but the germ will revive,—just as the brown woolly ball evolves the fine delicate fern-leaf that it has held in its heart through winter storms, you know. Don't blame yourself. Every soul has to fight its own battle somewhere, with no day's-man between but God. We get back to the old truth in spite of the new philosophies, and own in ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... in full leaf stood, its fruit Hidden in a green expectancy; but all His days were rounded with ripe consciousness: While Jerry felt the winter's whitening blight, As when that frosty fern-work and those palms Of visionary leaf, and trailing vines, Quaint-chased by night-winds on the pane, melt off, And naked earth, stone-stiff, with bristling trees, Stares in the winter sunlight coldly through. But yet he rose, and clothed ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... the coals together and threw on some fresh fuel. Next I fastened a large piece of birch bark on two split sticks behind the fireplace; then I sat down on an old log to wait. The rude reflector did very well as the fire burned up. Out in front the fern tops were dimly lighted to the edge of the clearing. As I watched, a dark form shot suddenly above the ferns and dropped back again. Three heavy thumps followed; then the form shot up and down once more. This time there was no mistake. In the firelight ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... studded with groves of huge and vigorous oaks, intersected with those smooth and sunny glades, that seem as if they must be cut for dames and knights to saunter on. Then again the undulating ground spread on all sides, far as the eye could range, covered with copse and fern of immense growth. Anon you found yourself in a turfy wilderness, girt in apparently by dark woods. And when you had wound your way a little through this gloomy belt, the landscape still strictly sylvan, would beautifully expand with every combination and variety of woodland; while ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... water," said Aunt Polly, when each child had told the story. "Put on your shoes and stockings and see if you can't find me a maidenhair fern for ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Brookside Farm • Mabel C. Hawley
... den Albrecht DUerers und Novalis Glorie wirft, im alten frommen Dom. dann denk' ich Ihrer und ich lieg' an Ihrer Seele. Ich fUehle Sie in mir, wie man eine Gottheit fUehlt in geweihter Stunde. 'Liebe denkt in sel'gen TOenen, denn Gedanken stehn zu fern." The quotation should read "sUessen" instead of "sel'gen." See Briefe an Tierk. edited ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... the body. Its nostrils, strange to say, are at the tip of the beak. The toes are strong, and well adapted for digging, the hind one being a thick, horny spur. To add to the singularity of this creature, it has no tail whatever. The kirvi-kirvi conceals itself among the extensive beds of fern which abound in the middle island of New Zealand, and it makes a nest of fern for its eggs in deep holes, which it hollows out of the ground. It feeds on insects, and particularly worms, which it disturbs by stamping on the ground, and seizes the instant they make their appearance. Night is the ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... the bank of the Laughing Brook, only more of them. There were pretty birch-trees and wild cherry-trees. It was still and dark and oh, so peaceful! Peter liked that place and sat down under a big fern to rest. He didn't hear a sound excepting the beautiful silvery voice of Veery the Thrush. Listening to it, Peter fell asleep, for ...
— Mrs. Peter Rabbit • Thornton W. Burgess
... "in the way," for they are always in the open air. Their summer holidays may be things to look back upon all through life. Natural history, and the beauty of solitary nature; the joys of the swimmer in deep river pools shut in with cool grey walls of rock, and fringed with fern; the loveliness of the high table lands, and the intense hush that follows sunset by the trout stream—these things are theirs, and become a part of their consciousness. In later and wearier years these spectacles will flash before their ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... du gruener Wald, Du Rhein mit deinem Schimmer: Dein Glanz ist fern, dein Sang verhallt, Ich bin entflohn ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... delightful. There had been the hay harvest, and the corn harvest, and the cutting of fern on the mountains for winter fodder, and the threshing of the corn on the barn-floor, and the piling up of great heaps of straw in the wide bays on each side ...
— The Christmas Child • Hesba Stretton
... put down the cake and the canned peaches at once, or reserve them for a second course; the stuffed olives drove her to despair, being in a bottle, and refusing to be balanced by anything less monumental in shape. Some wild asters and red leaves and green and yellowing sprays of fern which Kitty arranged in a tumbler were hailed with rapture, but presently flung far away with fierce disdain because they had ants on them. Kitty witnessed this outburst with her usual complacency, and then went on making the coffee. With such blissful pain as ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... many baskets (about twenty) lying on the beach, tied up, we cut them open. Some were full of roasted flesh, and some of fern-root, which serves them for bread. On, farther search, we found more shoes, and a hand, which we immediately knew to have belonged to Thomas Hill, one of our fore-castle men, it being marked T.H. with an Otaheite tattow-instrument. I went with some of the people a little way up the ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... below the spring where the maidenhair fern grew thick and spread out wide, perfect fronds on slender brown stems, shading fairy bowers; and where taller ferns grew high and leaned over like a delicate fairy forest; and where the wild violets grew so thick you could not see the ground beneath them, and the grass was lush and long ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... was repeated, and presently was heard a panting and 'plaining, a snuffling and a shuffling, and into the light of the fire hobbled the old Witch. Beholding Jocelyn sitting cross-legged on his couch of fern, she paused and, leaning on her crooked stick, viewed him with her ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... children, through the wood-path and out upon the moor. Meadows had brought a shawl, and spread it on a rock, full under the moonlight. There they sat, close together, feeling all the goodness and glory of the night, drinking in the scents of heather and fern, the sounds of plashing water and gently moving winds. Above them, the vault of heaven and the friendly stars; below them, the great hollow of the valley, the scattered lights, the ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... pathetic nobility which struck the keynote of her character, writes from Rockferry: "This morning of the New Year was very pleasant. It was almost as good as any day in winter in America. I went out with Mamma and Sweet Fern [Julian]. The snow is about half a foot deep. Julian is out, now, playing. I packed him up very warmly indeed. I wish I could go out in the new snow very much. Julian is making a hollow house of snow by the rhododendron-tree." What not to ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... a good view from "the bridge" as we approach our first port. A great white rock juts up in the bay like a fragment of some Titan's fortress; a lighthouse stares out to sea from a cliff at the harbour's entrance; the tall cocoa palms wave their fern leaves in the blinding sunshine, and red-roofed houses huddle below the dome of the Cathedral ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... structure, composed exteriorly of twigs, grass, and moss, and lined with stalks of maiden-hair fern and fine roots. It is usually placed high up in a fir tree. Colonel Rattray believes that the birds bring up two broods in the year. They lay first in May, and, as soon as the young are able to shift for themselves, a second nest is made. Thus in July both young ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... just wide enough for two, bowered overhead by crossing branches, and gaining sweet woodland scenes of light and shade at every step, as the eye dived into the deep green stillness between the large old trunks, carefully freed from underwood, and with their feet carpeted with moss, and flowers, and fern. It was called the deer's track, from the fact that along it, morning and evening, all the bucks and does which had herded on that side of the park might be seen walking stately down to or from a bright, clear-running trout-stream, that ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... rises on a terrace, from which, on the side opposite to the town, you descend into a well-timbered inclosure, called the Home Park. Further on, the forest again appears; the deer again crouch in their fern, or glance along the vistas; nor does this green domain terminate till it touches the vast and purple moors that divide the kingdoms ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... gathered up stray hats, aprons and handkerchiefs and prepared to go home. We painted each others' cheeks with the red blood of huckleberries and crowned our heads with leaves of the birch and oak, stalks of indigo weed or broad fern fronds that hung down over the face like green veils. Thus freaked and marked, walking in single file, our mothers and elder sisters behind us, shouting, leaping and laughing, we presented something as near a Bacchic procession as could be found in a community enshrouded ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... some tree or herb, and he to whose plant God gave growth should be the owner of the farm. This advice was accepted; for God, both thought, was a safer arbiter than man. One of the brothers, Arne, chose a fern (Ormgrass), and the other, Ulf, a sweet-brier. A week later, they went with the wise man and two other neighbors to the remote pasture at the edge of the glacier where, by common consent, they had made their appeal ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... or Primary Epoch, constitutes the Age of Fishes and Fern Forests, and is made up of the Devonian, ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... for three or four venomous snakes have been killed within a dozen yards of the house, and little G—— is perpetually exploring the long grass all around or hunting for a stray cricket-ball or a pegtop in one of those beautiful fern-filled ditches whose tangle of creepers and plumy ferns is exactly the favorite haunt of snakes. As yet he has brought back from these forbidden raids nothing more than a few ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... The Bamborough peasant raised his head, But slept ere half a prayer he said; So far was heard the mighty knell, The stag sprung up on Cheviot Fell, Spread his broad nostril to the wind, Listed before, aside, behind, Then couched him down beside the hind, And quaked among the mountain fern, To hear that sound ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... sky. They do not stay for question, do not hear Any old human speech: their tongue and ear Seem only thought, for when I spoke they stirred not And their bright minds conversing my ear heard not. —Until I slept or, musing, on a heap Of warm crisp fern lay between sense and sleep Drowsy, still clinging to a strand of thought Spider-like frail and all unconscious wrought. For thinking of that unforgettable thing, The war, that spreads a loud and shaggy wing On things most peaceful, simple, happy and bright, Until the spirit ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... constraint of a standing posture, he was held in the flexure of the rock like some of its fossils,—as unsuspected as a ganoid of the days of eld that had once been imprisoned thus in the sediment of seas that had long ebbed hence,—or the fern vestiges in a later formation finding a witness in the imprint in the stone of the symmetry of its fronds. He listened to the hue and cry for him; then to the sudden tramp of hoofs as a pursuing party went out to overtake him, presumably on his way to Charlestown, maintaining a very high rate ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... of the sentry was heard, and at that moment, the glare of a lantern fell upon the trees, bordering a field opposite the window. Beyond that field the ground was broken and uneven, covered with tall bushes, fern, and masses of rock, and sloping upwards towards the neighbouring hills. The light drew nearer; the sentry challenged. It was the relief. Their heads in the embrasure of the window, Herrera and the gipsy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Alderman is so obliging as to remind me that he has had 'the distinguished honor'—he is very good—of meeting me at the house of our mutual friend Deedles, the banker, and he does me the favor to inquire whether it will be agreeable to me to have Will Fern put down. He came up to London, it seems, to look for employment (trying to better himself—that's his story), and being found at night asleep in a shed, was taken into custody, and carried next morning before the Alderman. The Alderman observes ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... if I may smoke.' And thereafter the hours go idly by. Your friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the fern. You cannot watch your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the trunk beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip through the leaves overhead, and, as a wind goes by and sets ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sweet taste, with a faint smell like that of a mushroom. With the exception of a few berries, chiefly of a dwarf arbutus, the natives eat no vegetable food besides this fungus. In New Zealand, before the introduction of the potato, the roots of the fern were largely consumed; at the present time, I believe, Tierra del Fuego is the only country in the world where a cryptogamic plant affords a staple article ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... brown circle of barren eminences may be discerned toward the horizon. At the end of an hour the desert begins; the climate is inimical to life, even to that of plants. A tarn, the tint of burned topaz, lies coldly and sadly between stony slopes whereon a few tufts of fern and heather grow here and there. Half a league higher is a second tarn, which appears still more dismal in the rising mist. Around, patches of snow are sprinkled on the peaks, and these descending in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... place, Whose wild, green margin, now no more erase Art's works; no more its sparkling waters sleep, Prisoned in marble; bubbling from the base Of the cleft statue, with a gentle leap, The rill runs o'er, and 'round, fern, flowers and ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... over a succession of hills, of which each descent, however steep, leads to a still longer ascent, until you reach the high level of Exmoor. The first six miles are through real Devonshire lanes; on each side high banks, all covered with fern and grass, and topped with shrubs and trees; for miles we were hedged in with hazels, bearing nuts with a luxuriance wonderful to the eyes of those accustomed to see them sold at the corners of streets ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... island run many little streams, sometimes between high banks of rock, covered with moss and magnificent fern, with great pools of clear, deep water at the base of high waterfalls, and in those places where the stream cuts its way through the level plains double rows of the royal palm mark its course. The royal palm is the characteristic feature of ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... come with him at once, and the log huts and fern trees danced before her eyes as the blue spectacles had done before mine; but she did not like to leave me, and Fulk would not encourage it, for we both thought her much too young and too tenderly brought up to be sent ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fern in situ occurs with Sigillaria and Stigmaria, or that the affinities of Calamites and Lepidodendron (supposing that they are found in situ with Sigillaria) are so CLEAR, that they could not have been marine, like, but in a greater degree, than ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... mass; a remarkable conversation about religions and Joan of Arc in which Great Fern gives his ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... lonesomely at morn— Each flag and fern the shrinking stream divides— Uneasy cattle low, and lambs forlorn Creep to their strawy sheds with ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... night, it is not surprising that it or some of its surrogates should in course of time come to be credited with the power of "revealing hidden treasures," the treasures which in the original story were the pearls themselves. Thus the magic fern-seed and other treasure-disclosing vegetables[292] are surrogates of the mandrake, and like it derive their magical properties directly or ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... ich gern, Stuend' ihr Verdienst auch noch so fern; Doch mit den edlen lebendigen Neuen Mag ich wetteifernd ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... and green as they slept. The silence was absolute, the forest's unconscious tribute to the Wonder Worker. Even the trout brook, running black as night among its white-capped boulders and delicate arches of frost and fern work, between massive banks of feathery white and green, had stopped its idle chatter and tinkled a low bell under the ice, as if only the Angelus could express the wonder ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... fruticans) is found in mangrove swamps and flooded marshy lands. It has the appearance of a gigantic fern, and thrives best in those lands which are covered by the sea at high tide. In the same manner as the cocoanut-palm, the sap is extracted by incision made in the fruit-bearing stalk, and is used for distilling a liquid known as nipa wine, which, however, should properly be termed a spirit. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Oh, just anywhere—all about; among the fern, in the long grass, down on the sands, in all the places babies love to ...
— Piccaninnies • Isabel Maud Peacocke
... stream flowed out of a dense fern-brake, slipped down a mossy-lipped stone, and ran across the path at their feet. From the valley arose the mellow song of meadow larks, while about them, in and out, through sunshine and shadow, fluttered ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... boldly; 'and it's going to "continner." Meg, you're a darling in that blue print and pretty hat. I'll fill my fern-basket with flowers, and you can take it, as to have something in your hand to play with. You look nicer than any Phoebe I ever saw, that's a fact. And now, hurrah! we're all ready, and there's the boys' bell, so let us assemble out ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... you into our fern-house, which is just beyond here," she said. "We have got such exquisite maidenhairs and such a splendid Killarney fern. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... little ferns begin to grow and they live a very long time indeed. There is at Rothamsted a bottle of soil that was put up just like this as far back as 1874. For a number of years past a beautiful fern has been growing inside the bottle, and even now it is very healthy and vigorous. If, instead of being kept moist, the rich garden soil is left in a dry shed during the whole of the winter so that it gradually loses its moisture, it will generally ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... part of July when Margaret returned home. The forest trees were all one dark, full, dusky green; the fern below them caught all the slanting sunbeams; the weather was sultry and broodingly still. Margaret used to tramp along by her father's side, crushing down the fern with a cruel glee, as she felt it yield under her light ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... herds are sorry for their master's moan; The nymph heeds not her lover though he die, The lovely nymph, whose heart is made of stone— Nay steel, nay adamant! She still doth fly Far, far before me, when she sees me nigh, Even as a lamb flies fern ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... How still and quiet it was! The Helper had come. Not to the snow-covered old earth, falling asleep in the crimson sunset mist: it did not need Him. Not an atom of its living body, from the granite mountain to the dust on the red sea-fern, had failed to perform its work: taking time, too, to break forth in a wild luxuriance of beauty as a psalm of thanksgiving. The Holy Spirit you talk of in the churches had been in the old world since the beginning, since the day it brooded over the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... surely, the Hemlock spruce of America; which, while growing by itself in open ground, is the most wilful and fantastic, as well as the most graceful, of all the firs; imitating the shape, not of its kindred, but of an enormous tuft of fern. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... long time, during which the sun as it rose had chased away the horrors that had lingered in the gulch, to display all its wondrous glories of light and shade with trickling falls and clumps of dripping lace-like fern. ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... villagers sought high and low for the missing child, and then, on the morning of the third day, to the delight of the distracted parents, their boy was found sleeping peacefully upon a bed of fern within a few yards of the place where his mother had last seen him. He was perfectly well, quite happy, and entirely ignorant of the length of time that had elapsed. And he had a wonderful ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... at dusk, and was so still and lonely that the dart of a squirrel through the fallen leaves was a startling event. Here and there a sturdy young oak that had been newly stripped of its bark lay among the fern, like the naked corpse of a giant. Here and there a tree had been cut down and slung across the track, ready for barking. The ground was soft and spongy, slippery with damp dead leaves, and inclined in a general way to bogginess; but it was ground that Roderick Vawdrey had known ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... has the beauty of moss agate in its liquid floor; the Red Grotto shows a warmer chord of color; and where there is no other charm to notice, endless beauty may be found in the play of sunlight upon roofs of limestone, tinted with yellow, orange, and pale pink, mossed over, hung with fern, and catching tones of blue or green from the still deeps beneath.... After a day upon the water it is pleasant to rest at sunset in the loggia above the sea. The Bay of Naples stretches far and wide in front, beautiful by reason of the long fine line descending from Vesuvius, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... for which they had been searching. Softly and cautiously he commenced to descend. The slope was slippery with green grass, and he finished the last few yards with a run. He came down amongst a lot of bracken and fern, and suffered no worse harm than the shock of a sudden stoppage. Mr. Bradby, he saw, was sitting almost buried in a mass of bracken, and looking much cheerier than his recent utterance ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... his dog. They had just ensconced themselves comfortably on the steps of the cottage when a distressing accent struck upon their ears, and simultaneously they turned in the direction of the sound. There on a tiny verandah, almost hidden behind a large fern growth, a little girl sat on a low chair crying softly and pathetically as though her small heart were broken. The children stood for a moment not knowing just what to do. Then Maizie, the same one, thought Peter satirically (he could see all that ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... native growths vanished. From Kuala Lumpur to Kuala Kubu at the very foot of the mountain backbone of the Malay Peninsula, the same holds true. And where some area appears not under cultivation, the climbing fern and a coarse, useless "lalang" grass covers every inch of ground. One can hardly imagine a more complete blotting out of the native fauna and flora of any one limited region. And ever-extending roads for the increasing motor cars are widening the ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... desolate eerie morasses, The haunts of the snipe and the hern - (I shall question the two upper classes On aquatiles, when we return) - Why, I see on them absolute masses Of filix or fern. ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... Among the seven who, in 1688, signed the invitation to William, were Compton, who had long enforced the duty of obeying Nero; Danby, who had been impeached for endeavouring to establish military despotism; and Lumley, whose bloodhounds had tracked Monmouth to that sad last hiding place among the fern. Both in 1660 and in 1688, while the fate of the nation still hung in the balance, forgiveness was exchanged between the hostile factions. On both occasions the reconciliation, which had seemed to be cordial in the hour of danger, proved false and hollow ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... little space on the floor, and put the papers lightly over one another. Setting a match to them, he watched them light up and curl into brittle tinder, and dissolve from that stage into a heap of charred ashes, which he gathered up with a careful hand and put into the soft earth of a fern-box outside his veranda door. This being done, he sat down and began to think steadily, letting the names drift through his brain, one by one, until they sorted themselves, and he felt for the most ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... happened more quickly than it can be related. Within ten seconds most of the cabin was coated by the yellow stuff; grotesquely formed clumps and feathers hung from the ceiling; fern-like fingers kept spurting everywhere. Friday stepped back, before the advance, but not the Hawk. Useless to try and evade the stuff, he knew, and he was fairly positive that there was no immediate danger: ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... a dark, narrow crack, full of green stalked fern, such as hangs in the basket in the drawing-room, and had crawled down through it, with knees and elbows, as he would down a chimney, there was another grass slope, and another step, and so on, till—oh, dear me! I wish it was all ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... they were for the most part, and here and there, underneath their spreading branches, were open spaces carpeted with wind-flowers and bluebells, primroses and wild orchids, while ferns, large and small, grew in glorious profusion, some as tall as Tony, others as fragile and tiny as a fairy fern might be. In other spots large lichen-covered rocks raised their heads out of a tangle of bracken and bushes, while here and there, down by the river's brink, gleamed little ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... As fern grows in untilled grounds, and all manner of weeds, so do gross humours in an idle body, Ignavum corrumpunt otia corpus. A horse in a stable that never travels, a hawk in a mew that seldom flies, are both subject to diseases; which left unto themselves, are most free from any such encumbrances. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... flourished. The inference is obvious, nor can we reasonably doubt that Moore intended us to draw it; if her plants were the very first to fade away, she was evidently the very first to neglect or otherwise maltreat them. She did not give them enough water, or left the door of her fern-ease open when she was cooking her dinner at the gas stove, or kept them too near the paraffin oil, or other like folly; and as for her temper, see what the gazelles did; as long as they did not know her "well," they could just manage to exist, but when they got ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... speak with trembling voice and gleaming eyes of the grand mountains and the silent corries around Ben-Nevis, the red deer trooping over the misty steeps, and the brown hinds lying among the green plumes of fern, and the wren and the thrush lilting ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Fern. North America, 1714. A North American plant of somewhat straggling growth, growing to about 4 feet high, and with linear, pinnatified, sweet-smelling leaves. The flowers are of no decorative value, being small and inconspicuous, but for the fragrant leaves alone ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... wandered long by streams and wood-ends, every corner that I turned revealing new prospects of delight. I came at last to the edge of the forest, the mouths of little open glades running up into it, with fern and thorn-thickets. There were deer here browsing about the dingles, which let me come close to them and touch them, raising their heads from the grass, and regarding me with gentle and fearless eyes. Birds sang softly among the boughs, and even fluttered to my shoulder, as if pleased to be noticed. ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Banks and Dr Solander walked along the shore of the bay by themselves without anxiety, and collected numerous plants. They visited several huts, and found the inhabitants at dinner, their food consisting, at this time of the year, of fish and the root of a large fern. The roots were prepared by scorching them over a fire, and then beating them till the charred bark fell off. The remainder was a clammy, soft substance, not unpleasant to the taste, but mixed ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston |
