"Fir tree" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the dog has anything to do with it, Ned; it is a natural law. Now, if a fir tree is in a sheltered place, where the soil is deep and sandy, it grows to a tremendous size; but if the seed falls in a rocky place, where it has to get its roots down cracks to find food, and cling tightly against the cold freezing winds, it keeps down close to the ground, and gets ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... in the summer morning there floated an exquisite fragrance of pine. If all the angles of the architects could have been put together, nothing could have been designed more utterly opposite to the graceful curve of the fir tree than this red-bricked crass building. Bethel Chapel combined everything that could be imagined contrary to the spirit of nature, which undulates. The largest erection of the kind, it was evidently meant for ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... hops may be strong, and not good. They should be bright, of a pleasant flavour, and have no foreign leaves or bits of branches among them. The hop is the husk or seed pod of the hop vine, as the cone is that of the fir tree; and the seeds themselves are deposited, like those of the fir, round a little soft stalk, enveloped by the several folds of this pod or cone. If in the gathering, leaves or tendrils of the vine are mixed with the hops, they may help to increase the weight, but will give a bad taste to the ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... decorated their churches with evergreens out of respect to the passage of Scripture in Isaiah—"The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee; the fir tree, the pine tree and the box together to beautify the place of my sanctuary"—and the pagans believed them to be omens of good, as the spirits of the woods remained in ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... pane among the coloured pieces of the window through which, now and then, the wind blew powdery snow. She put her eyes to it and looked out upon a great bare moorland, white under a cold winter moon. Here and there sprang a fir tree, but for the most part the land stretched away to the horizon, empty as death—and as chill. So close to her eye that she must hold her head back in order to see it, rose a great square tower with stretches of tiled roof, mostly snow-covered, spreading ...
— In the Border Country • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... has characteristics belonging to its past, its present and its future. In a fir tree, for example, there are the stumps or scars of dead branches, which once represented its foremost growth; there are the branches with their needles spread out to the air; there are the buds at the end of each branch and twig, which carry the still closely packed needles which are the promise ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... beautiful ranges of fertile soil, clothed with every kind of fruit trees, such as the olive and orange; in the plains, vines, and chestnut trees; along the shore, the hazel and the oak; upon the sides and summits of the mountains, the larch and the fir tree, as in the Alps—every where were signs both of a land promising rich rewards to the laborer, and but few inhabitants. The expatriation was decided on; the young, ready to depart, married; proprietors sold their farms; some member of every family prepared for ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... of her; and, large as she was, he made her move with ease, and said, "he thought she go there well, though great blow wind!" He did not know that I meant to make a mast and sail. I cut down a young fir tree for the mast, and then I set to work at the sail. It made me laugh to see my man stand and stare, when he came to watch me sail the boat. But he soon gave a jump, a laugh, and a clap of the hands when he saw the ...
— Robinson Crusoe - In Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... say the Blacks hadn't everything on their side—I ought to explain though that in our district were large forests of a kind of pine—there's one in this garden,' and he pointed to a pyramidal fir tree with spreading branches of small pointed leaves spiked at the ends, and with a cone of nuts about the size of a big man's head, hanging from one of ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... hills against the sky, A fir tree rocking its lullaby, Swings, swings, Its emerald wings, Swelling the ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... cup-shaped 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 at large and nests with eggs ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... Philip came home as usual, and, as there was now no secret about the canoe, went down to look at it with Oliver. They pushed it off, and floated two or three miles down the stream, hauling it on the shore past the fallen fir tree, and then, with a cord, towed it back again. The canoe, with the exception of the trifling deficiency alluded to, was a good ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... quiet below. A woodpecker on a fir tree raps lightly and flies farther on and vanishes; it has hidden, but does not cease to tap with its beak, like a child when it has hidden and wishes to be sought for. Nearer sits a squirrel, holding a nut in its paws ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... One-Ear climbed a fir tree near the edge of a cliff. They were watching a big-nosed rhinoceros. It had just rooted up an oak tree with its twin-tusked snout. Now it was tearing the trunk into strips as we tear a stalk of celery. The boys watched it grinding the wood ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... it was perfectly straight. Ah! that hailstorm has a deal to answer for. We were forced to turn through a hand-gate, and take shelter in a friendly wood. What a ridiculous position, pitch dark, pelting with rain, an elderly gentleman and a young lady on horseback under a fir tree. The Squire had been getting more incoherent for some time; I couldn't think what he ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... heart that comes with an entire acceptance of fate, when she heard the sound of horses' hoofs in the hollow of the canyon. Her heart began to beat to suffocation. She ran to where, standing near a big fir tree, she could look straight down on the trail leading up to Prosper's cabin. Presently the horsemen came in sight—the one that rode first was tall and broad and fair, she could see under his hat-brim his straight nose and firmly ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... supplement the cold page of history with a tale that breathes the very atmosphere of the Quaker persecution of New England, let us open The Twice-Told Tales and read the story of The Gentle Boy, a Quaker child of six, found sobbing on his father's newly-made grave beside the scaffold under the fir tree. Let us enter the solemn meeting house, hear the clergyman inveigh against the Quakers, and sit petrified when, at the end of the sermon, that boy's mother, like a Daniel entering the lion's den, ascends the pulpit, and invokes woe ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... never heard of a stork that when it met with a fir tree demurred as to its right to build its nest there; and I never heard of a coney yet that questioned whether it had a permit to run into the rock. Why, these creatures would soon perish if they were always doubting ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... A Fir Tree said boastingly to the Bramble: "You are useful for nothing at all, while I am everywhere used for roofs and houses." The Bramble made answer: "You poor creature, if you would only call to mind the axes and saws which are about to hew you down, you would have reason to wish that you ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... this story of Susy Parlin on a New Year's day, only it is so hard to skip over Christmas. There is such a charm about Christmas! It makes you think at once of a fir tree shining with little candles and sparkling with toys, or of a droll Santa Claus with a pack full of presents, or of a waxen ...
— Little Prudy's Sister Susy • Sophie May
... people, on the shoulders of her vassals Throned like a queen to her palace on the height, Up the rocky steeps where the fir tree tassels Nod to her, and touch her with a subtle, vague delight, Like a whisper of home, like a greeting and a smile From the fir-tree walks and gardens, the wood-embowered castles In the north among the clansmen of Argyle. Now the sullen ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... and lashed the horse with all his might. The road grew worse and worse every hour. Now he could not see the yoke at all. Now and then the sledge ran into a young fir tree, a dark object scratched the turner's hands and flashed before his eyes, and the field of vision was white ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... into a limpid pool. A score of rivulets from all the mountain side babble hither over rocky beds to join their companions. Thence in rippling current they purl and tinkle down the gentle slopes, through bosky nooks sweet with the odors of fir tree and pine, over meads dappled with the scarlet snap-dragon and purple heath buds, now pausing for a moment to idle with a wood encircled lake, now tumbling in opalescent cascade over a mossy lurch, and then on again in cheerful, ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker |
