"Midwinter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... October. The monthly average for November was 73 deg., and for December 25 deg., which was also the average for January. Then the readings for February showed an average of 26 deg., for March 32 deg., and 43 deg. for April. A more equable and gradual transition from midsummer heat to midwinter cold cannot be shown by any locality on this continent. Seldom does the mercury rise above ninety during our warmest summers, or fall below zero in our most severe winters. In J. Disturnal's work, entitled "The Influence of Climate in North and South America," ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... 29th. A fresh wind; it rattles and pipes in the rigging aloft. An enlivening change and no mistake! The snow drifts as if it were midwinter. Fine August weather! But we are bearing north again, and we have need to! Yesterday our latitude was 80 deg. 53.5'. This evening I was standing in the hold at work on my new bamboo kayak, which will be the very ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... to the miserable Salaminians of Cyprus at 48 per cent, and to recover his money under the bond.[187] Writing to his brother in December 57, Cicero speaks of business done in a senate full for the time of year, which was midwinter, just before the Saturnalia, when only two hundred were present out of about six hundred. In February 54, a month when the senate had always much business to get through, it was so cold one day that the few members present ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... otherwise irreproachable conduct will lose all sense of truthfulness when they speak of physical culture and fresh air. They will exaggerate the number of inches they keep their bedroom windows raised in midwinter; they will quote ridiculous estimates of the doctors' bills they have saved; they will represent themselves as being in the most incredibly perfect health. I know one sober, intelligent business-man who not only habitually understates, by ten degrees, ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... to take the boat ashore, and carry her past the last Cataract. When this was reported, the carriers were called from the various shady trees under which they had taken refuge from the sun. This was midwinter, but the sun is always hot by day here, though the nights are cold. Five Zambesi men, who had been all their lives accustomed to great heavy canoes,—the chief recommendation of which is said to be, that they can be run against a rock with the full ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... that the septum of a child's nose was pierced at the right time, and their tribal marks cut on them. The nose was pierced at midwinter when ice was about, with which to numb the place to be pierced; ice was held to the septum, then prod through it went ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... which claimed some hours of my attention on five days of the week. On holidays my father used to take me on the most delightful fishing excursions to the then unpolluted waters of Coney Island Creek and Sheepshead Bay; and on Monday afternoons in midwinter it was a regular thing that I should go with him to New York to ramble among the old book-shops in Nassau Street and eat oysters at Dorlon's stall, with wooden tables and sawdust-sprinkled floor, in Fulton Market. Say what you please about the friendship of books: it was worth a thousand times more ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... midwinter when the Ten Thousand Greeks who had followed their leader so loyally through the plains of Asia Minor found themselves friendless and in great danger in the very ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... One midwinter I cleared away the snow under an apple-tree near the house and scattered some corn there. I had not seen a blue jay for weeks, yet that very day one found my corn, and after that several came daily and partook of it, holding the kernels under their feet ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... surrounding Chilblains Base was just so much white hell, and his analysis was perfectly correct. Mike wished that it had been January, midsummer in the Antarctic, so there would have been at least a little dim sunshine. Mike the Angel did not particularly relish having to visit the South Pole in midwinter. ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Poschiavo; and when, as usual, we started on our journey next day at sunrise, it was in a carriage upon wheels. Yet even here we were in full midwinter. Beyond Le Prese the lake presented one sheet of smooth black ice, reflecting every peak and chasm of the mountains, and showing the rocks and water-weeds in the clear green depths below. The glittering floor stretched away for acres of untenanted ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... is very beautiful, as you say," she said, in answer to our admiring comments. "It came from Paris, from my daughter. She sent it to me; she is always making me gifts; she is one who remembers her old mother! Figure to yourselves that last year, in midwinter, she sent me no less than three gowns, all wool! What can I do with them? C'est pour me flatter, c'est sa maniere de me dire qu'il faut vivre pour longtemps! Ah, la chere folle! But she spoils me, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... of the sun in two directions, namely, north and south, and east and west. You know, of course, that the sun moves north in the summer and south in the winter, and that the extreme southern point is in midwinter, Dec. 20: that in the spring, or March 20, it is directly above the equator, and in midsummer, or, on June 20, it is as far north as it ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... high seas. An open boat, overcrowded with refugees, hastily provisioned as the ship to which it belonged was careening to its fate, and tossing on the open sea two or three hundred miles from shore in the icy nights of midwinter was no place of safety or of comfort. Yet the Germans so construed it, holding that when they gave passengers and crew of a ship time to take to the boats, they had fully complied with the international law providing that in the event of sinking a ship its people must first be given an ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... comprehend, so he lay close, and restrained his impatient appetite, and kept his white fur dry and warmly fluffy. Had the night been fine, he would have been leaping gaily hither and thither over the deep, midwinter snow, and browsing on the tender, aromatic shoots of the young birches which ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the Yosemite trees. Some of them are 150 feet high, from six to ten feet in diameter, and they are never out of sight as you saunter among the yellow pines. Their bright brown shafts and towers of flat, frondlike branches make a striking feature of the landscapes throughout all the seasons. In midwinter, when most of the other trees are asleep, this cedar puts forth its flowers in millions,—the pistillate pale green and inconspicuous, but the staminate bright yellow, tingeing all the branches and making the trees as they stand ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... One midwinter day, Father Champreau, a Jesuit missionary, pulled into Twenty Mile. Bonner fell upon him and dragged him into the post, and clung to him and wept, until the priest wept with him from sheer compassion. Then Bonner became madly hilarious and made lavish entertainment, ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... in odor. In sweetness it excels even sweet peas and roses. Mixed with the brilliant red berries of barberry and multiflora rose, and the dark-green branches of the hardy thyme, which continues fresh and sweet through the year, a handsome and lasting bouquet may be made for a midwinter table decoration, a fragrant reminder of Shakespeare's lines in "A ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... words of mine can describe the glory of these winter days. It is only of late years that people have discovered that Switzerland is infinitely more beautiful in winter than in summer; some day they will discover the same truth about the Lake District. It happened one day in midwinter that business took me as far as Keswick, and I shall never forget the astonishment and delight of that visit. Skiddaw was a pure snow mountain, a miniature Mont Blanc; Derwentwater was blue as polished steel, covered with ice so clear that it was everywhere ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... mountain roofs on lofty gold pillars and celebrated the midwinter festival. The brownies danced around the Christmas porridge in new red caps. Old gods wandered about the heavens in gray storm cloaks, and in the Oesterhaninge graveyard stood the horse of Hel [Note: The goddess of death]. He pawed with his hoof on the frozen ground; he was ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... barn, for they had resolved to drown the sorcerer; but he was not there. All they found was the dead body of Elisinde, and a little baby lying on some straw. The body of Elisinde was covered with roses. And this was strange, for it was midwinter. The fiddler had disappeared and was never heard of again, and an old wood-cutter, who was too old to know any better, took ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... stepped from the door and spread a prodigiously big umbrella—an umbrella striped in dingy colors and of the size of the canopies seen over the drivers of delivery wagons. The employment of such a shield from the sun in midwinter indicated that the Prophet was rather more than eccentric; his garb conveyed the same suggestion. He wore a frayed purple robe that hung on his heels when he came striding across the street. On a broad band of cloth that once had been white, reaching from shoulder to waist, ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... were meetings held four times a year— in October, midwinter, spring, and midsummer—at which all the justices of the peace of the county were supposed to be present. There were, besides, occasional irregular sessions, or meetings of the regular sessions adjourned from one time to another. In corporate towns the city ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... engaged himself to this party as assistant chain-bearer, little thinking that the day was to come when he should clank the king's chains in a dungeon, even as now he trailed them a free ranger of the woods. It was midwinter; the land was surveyed upon snow-shoes. At the close of the day, fires were kindled with dry hemlock, a hut thrown up, and the party ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... about the end of October. Two months later, in midwinter, the mining fever came upon him ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... duties. What chance for any one, and a woman especially, to make a career for herself, tied down to a lot of precious babies, or lassooed by ten thousand galloping cares! As well expect a rose to blossom in midwinter hedges, or a lark to sing in a snowstorm, as to look for bloom and song in such a life! But just bend down your ear a minute, poor, tired, overworked and troubled sister, I have a special word ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... It was midwinter, and a cold drizzle was falling when she waited for him at the prison gates. Three years had passed since they had parted. She took him in her arms and kissed him silently. Her heart was too full for words. A carriage was waiting for them, and she drove to the lodging-house; breakfast ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... animals had gone into comfortable winter quarters, while the performers, less fortunate than the beasts, were scattered far and near, "some in rags and some in tags, and some" (a very few) "in velvet gowns." But one small group had found midwinter employment, a party of Japanese men and women, who were jugglers, contortionists, and acrobats; and as their work was pretty as well as novel, they found a place on the programme of some ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... folk used in those days—was a woman, weaving. She had no loom, and shuttle she had none. All with her hands she wove a wondrous cloth. Stooping and bending, rising and swaying with motions beautiful as those the Northern Lights make in a midwinter sky, she wove a cloth. The warp was blue and mystical to see, the woof was white, and shone with its whiteness, so that of all the webs the stepmother had ever seen, she had seen none like ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... attributed. Now, though I know that this opinion is supported by an assertion of Justus Lipsius, "Thomam illum Thumbum non alium quam Herculem fuisse satis constat," yet shall I venture to oppose one line of Mr Midwinter ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... (our Geographical friend) had gone with him, as Excellency's Chaplain, in this Russian Journey; which is a memorable one to Busching; and still presents vividly, through his Book, those haggard Baltic Coasts in midwinter, to readers who have business there. Such a journey for grimness of outlook, upon pine-tufts and frozen sand; for cold (the Count's very tobacco-pipe freezing in his mouth), for hardship, for bad lodging, and extremity of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... is so full of woolmen's brasses, for often they knelt there, and often the village hummed with the buyers and sellers, exchanging orders and examining samples. The Celys bought chiefly from two Northleach wool dealers, William Midwinter and John Busshe. The relations between dealers and sellers were often enough close and pleasant: Midwinter even occasionally tried to provide a customer with a bride as well as with a cargo, and marriageable young ladies were not unwilling to be examined over a gallon ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... his brother, James, and Hosea, the son of John, a neighbor and kinsman of ours. On that year, as on this year and often, there came in the midwinter a dry and warm season between the early and the latter rain. We had driven forth our flocks from Bethlehem and were dwelling by night in the shelter of the tower on the hillside yonder, watching and sleeping two and two. My father and I were wont to keep the early watches. At midnight ...
— Christmas Stories And Legends • Various
... how short a time that lonely meal lasted, and how very far from jovial the feast was? As for me, that I might rest my eyes from reading between dinner and tea (a thing much to be desired in the case of every scholar), I hardly ever, failed, save for a few weeks of midwinter, to go out in the twilight and have a walk—a solitary and very slow walk. My hours, you see, were highly unfashionable. I walked from half-past five to half-past six: that was my after-dinner walk. It was always the same. ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... as many of the books for children published by John Newbery as I could procure (and they are as scarce as blackberries in midwinter, for what among books has so brief a life as a nursery book?), I was struck while perusing them with a certain distinct literary flavour, so to speak, which appeared to be common to a group of little volumes, ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... his camp, visited his guards, and ordered the assault for the morrow. "The great chances of our destiny," said he to his troops, "have brought us hither to the place where we desired to be, after traversing so many bad roads, in midwinter, with snows and frosts so great, with rain, and mud, and encounters of the enemy, in hunger and thirst, and without a halfpenny. Now is the time to show courage, manliness, and the strength of your bodies. If this bout you are victorious, you will be rich lords ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... he imagined that the great sum of money he knew him possessed of, was spoil of some sort; and he believed that Northwick's hesitation to employ it in any way was proof of an uneasy conscience in its possession. Why had he come to that lonely place in midwinter with a treasure such as that; and why did he keep the money by him, instead of putting it in a bank? Pere Etienne talked these questions over with Bird and the doctor, and he could find only one answer to them. He wondered if he ought not to speak to Northwick, and ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... material with growing seasons and intervals between; but the results indicate a very decided increase during the autumn storing season, and continuing large well into the winter, since some outside material can still be obtained until midwinter. From about February to April a decrease may be noted, followed, if the spring growth of annuals be good, by a slight increase; and we can very nearly predict the general character of the increases and decreases by the precipitation and ...
— Life History of the Kangaroo Rat • Charles T. Vorhies and Walter P. Taylor
... warned of his sentiments; but the royal governor, M. de Jarnac, supported his claims, and Truchares received the requisite confirmation.[491] Still La Rochelle hesitated to espouse the Protestant side. It was not until midwinter,[492] that Conde, returning from Lorraine, commissioned M. de Sainte-Hermine to assume command of the city in his name; and on the tenth of February, 1568, the mayor and echevins of La Rochelle opened their gates to their new friends, with protestations of their purpose to devote their ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... earlier or later, according to the season of the year, the hours vary of course, and the same period of the day that is indicated by the twelfth hour at the time of equinox, is indicated by the eleventh hour in midsummer, and the thirteenth hour in midwinter. This is very annoying to travellers from the north of Europe. "What o'clock is it?" you ask; and are told in reply, "It is the eighteenth hour and three quarters." To find the time of day from this answer, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... out was a pleasant surprise for all on board who had made up their minds to a disagreeable winter passage. The air was clear, the sky blue as if it were spring-time, instead of midwinter. They were in the Gulf Stream. The sun shone brightly and the temperature was mild. Nevertheless, it was an uncomfortable day for those who were poor sailors. Although there did not seem, to the casual observer, ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... 1814 found the American coast still rigidly blockaded by the British men-of-war. Two or three of the enemy lay off the mouth of every considerable harbor, and were not to be driven from their post by the icy winds and storms of midwinter on the American coast. It was almost impossible for any American vessel to escape to sea, and a matter of almost equal difficulty for such vessels as were out to get into a home port. The frigate "President" had put to sea early ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... accustomed stand at "The Corner." They form a circle of acquaintances—a couple of artists, a couple of authors, a business man, an undefinable—comrades all. They are dressed variously: some have already dispensed with their overcoats, others wear long ulsters with turned-up collars as in midwinter. Everybody knows ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... mostly heavy colds, were the rule. He was a strong man and had taken pride in being able to do things which few other men could do without harm coming to them; for instance, to chop a hole in the ice and go swimming in midwinter. But exposure to the chill, damp air of that North Sea country and the heavy fogs that drifted in from the ocean at night, when he rode alone, often many miles over the moor on his tours of inspection, had undermined his splendid constitution, and before the summer ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... Gray addressed his wife and their two guests, his nieces, Roberta and Ruth Gray. It was the midwinter vacation at the school where Roberta taught and at the equally desirable establishment where Ruth was taking a carefully selected course of study. Uncle Rufus and Aunt Ruth had invited them to spend the four days of this vacation at their ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... hard and cruel to leave him here in the bleakness of midwinter, Doris thought. And he was not really dead to her until the bearers turned away with empty hands, and the friends with sorrowful greeting passed out of the inclosure and left him alone to the coming evening and the requiem ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Midwinter was upon them with its bitter cold and drifting snows; but with abundant stores of food and fuel, Mrs. D. was thanking God nightly for his many mercies, little dreaming that a new calamity impended over ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... and timber. They were, however, in no condition to settle, or even to tarry. Their health and strength were impaired, ammunition was practically exhausted, and there were no supplies. They would come back, but now they must reach civilization. It was midwinter and raining almost constantly. They had little idea of distance, but knew there were settlers to the south, and that they must reach them or starve. So they turned from the bay they had ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... some twenty bushels of fruit, that tasted like our apples, but resembled a pear in shape and color, which was very hard and tough, not fit to eat then, but which, the chief said, would be good in midwinter. They had taken the precaution to gather them by his advice—he having made some large baskets of the pliable twigs of willow, in which they were conveyed from the trees to the temple, where they were deposited in the room ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... cottage which stood alone, close to the towing-path of the canal, and close also to a forlorn corner of the muddy, watery, ugly, disordered brick-field. It was now just past six o'clock, and the men would be rising, as in midwinter they commenced their work at seven. The cottage was an unalluring, straight brick-built tenement, seeming as though intended to be one of a row which had never progressed beyond Number One. A voice answered from the interior, inquiring who was the visitor, to which Mr Crawley replied ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... morning, in midwinter, Jumbo called without his master, and walked into the back parlor without being announced; there was no living creature there except himself and Fluff, and when the family entered the room there was only Jumbo. ...
— Harper's Young People, December 23, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... upon this mixture he has grafted peaches, apples, hazels and hickories successfully in midwinter as well as in midsummer. Many other kinds of trees have been grafted successfully out of the so-called grafting season but these four kinds which represent two of the "easiest grafters" and two of the "hardest grafters" will suffice for ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... to the profit of building fire-proof houses by reminding her that pecuniary loss is not the sole objection to being burned out of house and home whenever the fire fiend happens to crave a flaming sacrifice, in the daytime or in the night, in summer or in midwinter, in sickness or in health; that not only heir-looms, but hearthstones and door posts, endeared by long associations, have a value beyond the power of insurance companies to restore, and that protection against fire means also security against many other ills to ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... Angel Trail it is three hours on a mule to the plateau, where there are green summery things growing even in midwinter, and where the temperature is almost sultry; and it is an hour or so more to the riverbed, down at the very bottom. When you finally arrive there and look up you do not see how you ever got down, for the trail has magically disappeared; and you feel ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... account of its every natural and social condition, her questions would have wholly gathered them in. She asked if our climate was very hard on negroes; what clothing we wore in summer, and how we kept from freezing in midwinter; about wages, the price of food, what crops were raised, and what the "patarolers" did with a negro when they caught one at ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... think of him, at midnight and in midwinter, thrown from a frail raft into the deep and angry waters of a wide and rushing Western river, thus separated from his only companion through the wilderness with no aid for miles and leagues about him, buffeting the rapid ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... family had a flock, and their clanking was heard all day and sometimes all night. They roamed the streets all summer, eating grass by the highways and wallowing in the puddles. Sometimes they were yoked with a goose-yoke made of a shingle with a hole in it. In midwinter they were kept in barnyards, but the rest of the year they spent the night in the street, each flock near the home of its owner. It is said that one old goose of each flock always kept awake and stood watch; and it was told in Hadley, Massachusetts, ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... the diamond-sparkling crust. Happy, too, is he, when the storm rages, and the snow is piled high against the windows, if he can sit in the warm chimney-corner and read about Burgoyne, and General Fraser, and Miss McCrea, midwinter marches through the wilderness, surprises of wigwams, and the stirring ballad, say, of the Battle ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... are therefore at a distance of one hundred and eighty-six million miles. Imagine that on Midsummer Day, when standing on the earth here, I measure with a piece of card the angle between the star and the sun. Six months later, on Midwinter Day, when the earth is at the opposite point of its orbit, I again measure the angle between the same star and the sun, and we can now determine the star's distance by making a triangle. I draw a line a foot long, and we will take this foot to represent one hundred and eighty-six ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... that he shot at. But at sixty, when he was still hated by many, loved by a very few and feared by every one, he died,—crushed under his horse when it fell on the Devil's Tooth trail one sleety day in midwinter. ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... "You're the tenderfoot that old Hank was trundling, ain't you?" I admitted that I was. A good many years later, after I had been elected Vice-President, I went on a cougar hunt in northwestern Colorado with Johnny Goff, a famous hunter and mountain man. It was midwinter. I was rather proud of my achievements, and pictured myself as being known to the few settlers in the neighborhood as a successful mountain-lion hunter. I could not help grinning when I found out that they did ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... was, especially in those long, dark evenings in midwinter, when the ruddy, dancing flames went laughing up the great throat of the chimney, chasing the venturesome, wayward sparks, as they hurried out into the untried darkness of the winter's night. With what a genial glow they lighted up the bare, unplastered ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... of such a bounty stimulated Captain John Lovewell, of Dunstable, who started with eight men. It was midwinter, but the snow, cold, and hardship did not deter the intrepid men, who made their way up the valley of the Merrimac, and eastward to the country of the Pigwackets. The sun was going down, on the 20th of February, when Captain Lovewell discovered a smoke ...
— Harper's Young People, September 21, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... attire this person was not altogether engaging. But for this season, which was midwinter, a careless observer might have looked upon him as a clever device of the husbandman indisposed to share the fruits of his toil with the crows that toil not, neither spin—an error that might not have been dispelled ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Gilberto of Friu'li, but amorously loved by Ansaldo. In order to rid herself of his importunities, she vowed never to yield to his suit till he could "make her garden at midwinter as gay with flowers as it was in summer" (meaning never). Ansaldo, by the aid of a magician, accomplished the appointed task; but when the lady told him that her husband insisted on her keeping her promise, Ansaldo, not to be outdone in generosity, declined to take advantage ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... the Teutonic year were held at Midsummer and Midwinter. May-Day, the very beginning of spring, was celebrated by May-ridings, when winter and spring, personified by two warriors, engaged in a combat in which Winter, the fur-clad king of ice and snow, was defeated. It was then that ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... gold lace, and tinsel strung upon her ample form than would set a theatrical costumer up in business, but the star feature of her costume was her turban. It was a gorgeous creation, and would have been a comfortable piece of headgear in midwinter, although slightly heating for a hot June day, but it came near being the talk of the Carnival, for in the center of the front, just above her forehead, Mrs. Phillipetti had pinned the celebrated brooch containing ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... deliverance from the hated Bernois. Postponing his Italian campaign, Duke Charles, deaf to his advisers and eager to chastise the cruel depredations of the "insolent cowherds" he so despised, started from Nancy with his magnificent army in midwinter of the year 1476 as for a brief pleasure excursion, and laid siege to Grandson which had been captured by the Bernois. After a stubborn resistance the Bernois garrison, promised pardon by a venal German volunteer of the Burgundian cause, surrendered only to suffer the same cruel ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... have made me myself. Now therefore shall they and I together earn the merry days to come, the winter hunting and the spring sowing, the summer haysel, the ingathering of harvest, the happy rest of midwinter, and Yuletide with the memory of the Fathers, wedded to the hope of the days to be. Well may they bid me help them who have holpen me! Well may they bid me die ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... reputation for enterprise—and I fancy the love of adventure to be far less common than the love of being thought adventurous—must have recourse to some such forlorn hope as going up the mountain on the ice in midwinter, or coasting down on a hand-sled. But I have no inclination in that direction. I am willing to encounter risks, if there is no other way of attaining objects. But risks in and of themselves are a nuisance. If there is no more excellent way, of course you must clamber along steep, rugged stairways ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the leaves which have been wafted on to it so many successive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter. ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... are exceedingly smooth and level, Each being crossed by others at intervals; On either side perambulate men and females, In the centre, career along the carriages and horses; The mingled sound of voices is heard in the shops at evening. During midwinter the accumulated snows adhere to the pathway, Lamps are displayed at night along the street sides, Their radiance twinkling like the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... a great blessing. A man cannot go about in midwinter in Chicago with no overcoat and not pay for it, and Jurgis had to walk or ride five or six miles back and forth to his work. It so happened that half of this was in one direction and half in another, necessitating a change ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... freed off Cape Walsingham, June 5, 1851, after drifting in eight and a half months a distance of ten hundred and fifty miles. It is impossible to adequately describe their physical discomforts and dangers, the mental depression of the sunless midwinter of eight weeks, and the even harder experiences of the Arctic spring-tide, when excessive cold and increasing lassitude made steady inroads on their impaired constitutions. Kane tells us they were continually harassed by uncertainties as to their ultimate fate. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... admitted none to the familiarity of intimacy but men of high breeding and unquestioned honor. In many things he was peculiar and somewhat eccentric. In dress, especially so—often appearing in midwinter in light, summer apparel; and again, in summer, with a winter cloak wrapped carefully about him. When he appeared first before the assembled Legislature, and many of the first citizens of the State, to take the oath of office, it was a raw, cold day in November; his dress ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... passing westwards, I was at Colac. It was the month of June (midwinter), but the country, with its lake, was not the less beautiful in the universal green. Excepting the partial post-and-rail barricade of my friend William Robertson's 5,000 acres of purchased land, there was nothing all around but free and open squatting. On every side was the hardly ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... than a week ago. There have been easterly wind, continual cloudiness, and occasional rain for a week. This morning opened with a great snow-storm from the northeast, one of the most earnest snow-storms of the year, though rather more moist than in midwinter. The earth is entirely covered. Now, as the day advances towards noon, it shows some ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Asters, Carnations, Geraniums, Coleus, Petunias, Verbenas, Pansies, Primulas, Pink and Yellow Callas, Burbank's Giant Amaryllis, Caladiums, Begonias, Gladiolus. Dahlias, Cannas, Lilies, Azaleas, Midwinter Chrysanthemums, New Shrubs, Vines and Rare ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... Hardin arrives, in the gayest midwinter of a rejuvenated Paris. The time for decisive action has arrived. Natalie revolves every clause of Hardin's proposition in ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... election of officers, and the fight, matters ran along swiftly until the midwinter holidays. During those days many of the boys visited their homes. Captain Putnam spent his time in trying to clear up the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the things from the Hall, but without success. The detective he had hired unearthed nothing ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... and its superb vegetation. The mean annual temperature is from 54 deg. to 60 deg. F. Winter sets in about the 1st of December and the snow is gone save in the mountains by the 1st of May. The thermometer rarely registers below zero F. or above 75 deg. F.; the difference between the midwinter and midsummer averages is seldom more than 25 deg. . The summer is relatively dry, the autumn and winter wet. The vapour-laden sea air blowing landward against the girdle of snow and glaciers on the mountain barriers a few miles inland drains its moisture ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... consequently contracts for labor could be more safely made if they began and ended at times corresponding with contracts made with their customers. The workmen opposed this change in the duration of the contract on the ground that in midwinter they would be less able to resist any disposition on the part of the company to cut down their wages, and that in the event of a strike, it would be more difficult to maintain their situation than it would be in summer. They claimed, therefore, that the change in time would be ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... still remained at Monterey, but, with the few soldiers, we had next to nothing to do. In midwinter we heard of the approach of a battalion of the Second Dragoons, under Major Lawrence Pike Graham, with Captains Rucker, Coutts, Campbell, and others, along. So exhausted were they by their long march from Upper Mexico that we had to send relief to meet them as they approached. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... for board and lodging would have been sacrificed also. It happened, too, to be exceptionally cold—not the weather in which any one would lightly set out on a journey. We must remember that the calendar had not yet been rectified, and that they were about ten days nearer to midwinter than ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... said the city editor, dryly, "that Gallegher's reasoning has impressed you; and I also see that before the week is out all of my young men will be under bonds for assaulting innocent pedestrians whose only offense is that they wear gloves in midwinter." ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... change from the heat of midsummer to the cold of midwinter, and all within something near twenty-four hours, was hard indeed to bear. The professor calculated that the drop in temperature from high noon was, two hours after ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... got on the train and rode up to London. She said to herself over and over: "This is England. I am really in England." But it did not remove the sense of unreality. Even the English grass, bright green in midwinter, only added to the sense ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... that so late was beating warmly. Most of the birds have gone down below the snow-line, the plants sleep, and all the fly-wings are folded. Yet the sun beams gloriously many a cloudless day in midwinter, casting long lance shadows athwart the dazzling expanse. In June small flecks of the dead, decaying sod begin to appear, gradually widening and uniting with one another, covered with creeping rags of water during the day, and ice by night, looking as hopeless ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... to the early start which the chauffeur wanted, and the sun was nearly overhead when many a huge shoulder of glittering marble still walled us away from our journey's end. The cold was the pitiless cold of northern midwinter, and I remembered with a shiver that Millau and Clermont-Ferrand were separated from one another by nearly two hundred and fifty kilometres of such mountain roads as these. Oh yes, it was an experience, a splendid, dazzling experience; nevertheless, my cowardly thoughts would turn, sunflower-like, ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the sweet, clean smell of its burning, and, hanging everywhere throughout the clearing, its thin blue smoke. The little frogs began to pipe to each other again in every wet place, the grass began to freshen, and almost in the calendar's midwinter the smiles of ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... army filed off to the right in perfect silence and order. The baggage and some spare artillery were sent off to Burlington, to still further mystify the enemy. By one of those sudden changes of weather, not uncommon even in midwinter, the soft ground had become hard frozen during the early part of the night, so that rapid marching was possible, and rapid marching was the only thing that could save the movement from failure, as Cornwallis ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... and transport by land was almost as difficult as it was between the head of the Persian Gulf and Kut. The Russian communications were better, but theirs was an adventurous enterprise across mountain passes under the arctic conditions of midwinter; and few people had any inkling of its inception when Yudenitch began to move on 11 January. By the 16th he was at Kuprikeui where the road crosses the Araxes, and in a two days' battle he broke the Turkish army, driving its remnants ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... hat, all right," said Bill Ward, rising in his wrath. "Nelly, my infant, I tell you Gila never fails. If she gets on the job Court'll be dead in love with her before the midwinter exams.!" ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... ceremonials, but briefer, are observed on the occasion of the great midwinter tribal hunts, the times for which are fixed by the Keeper of the Deer Medicine, the master and warrior priests of the Sa-ni-a-k'ia-kwe; and the religious observances accompanying and following which would form one of the most interesting chapters ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... though," returned Jim, firmly. "Asked him at midwinter what he'd have, and he grinned and said, 'Allee same hat!' So he got it—a lovely ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Midwinter number, contains a remarkable list of attractions, including a richly illustrated paper on "Winter Sports in Canada," an illustrated story by Mark Twain, entitled "Royalty on the Mississippi," etc., etc. In this issue appears THE FIRST OF GENERAL GRANT'S ARTICLES in the war series, being his long-looked-for ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... Redruff and Graytail fully recovered, but food and rest in plenty are sure cure-alls, and a bright, clear day in midwinter had the usual effect of setting the vigorous Redruff to drumming on the log. Was it the drumming, or the tell-tale tracks of their snowshoes on the omnipresent snow, that betrayed them to Cuddy? He came prowling again and again up the ravine, with dog and gun, intent to hunt the partridges down. ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... avalanches; midwinter windstorms; drought; forest fires in south near the Mediterranean overseas departments: hurricanes (cyclones), flooding, volcanic activity ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... thongs of bull's hide; in winter the carriole, or sledge, with or without {20} covered top, also holding two passengers and a driver. The drivers were bound to make two leagues an hour over the indifferent roads, and in midwinter and midsummer the dexterous, talkative, good-humoured driver, or marche-donc, usually exceeded this rate for most of the journey of three days. From Montreal onward no one travelled in winter except an occasional Indian messenger. Even in summer few thought ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... things went on further out in the surrounding darkness. Indeed, popular report gave to these external phases of the camp-meeting an even more evil fame than attached to the later moonlight husking-bees, or the least reputable of the midwinter dances at Dave Randall's ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... buildings as fast as they came into the market, and filled them with a class of tenants before whom charity recoils, helpless and hopeless. When the houses were filled, the crowds overflowed into the yard. In one, I found, in midwinter, tenants living in sheds built of odd boards and roof tin, and paying a dollar a week for herding with the rats. One of them, a red-faced German, was a philosopher after his kind. He did not trouble himself to get up, when I looked in, but ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... any further than that pole you see sticking up yonder. We had the worst of it back there across the swamps—working up to our waists in water most of the time, in midwinter too—and at eighteenpence ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... was a riot of flowers—hollyhocks and giroflees, dahlias and phlox, poppies and huge daisies, and roses everywhere, even climbing old tree trunks, and sprawling all over the garden front of the rambling house. The edges of the paths had green borders that told of Corbeil d'Argent in Midwinter, and violets in early spring. He leaned out and looked along the house. It was just a jumble of all sorts of buildings which had evidently been added at different times. It seemed to be on half a dozen elevations, and no two windows were of the same size, while here and ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... Saxons, the midwinter festival lasted twelve days, during which time light, fire, the sun, huge stones and other similar manifestations of the Deity were adored. Christian and pagan alike worshipped these objects. They called Christmas "the birthday of the god who is light." The Savior, ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... provinces of Canada east of Lake Huron, the considerable covering on the ground is not so important, relatively, to protect the plants against the coming winter, but it is also of considerable importance, as sometimes the early snows melt so completely that the fields are left bare in midwinter. The warm temperatures which melt the snow may be followed by a cold wave, which may be greatly injurious to the plants. There may be instances, as where the snow usually falls very deeply, in which the covering left would prove excessive, and so tend to smother the plants; hence, sometimes ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... clans, described by Scott in "The Fair Maid of Perth." I used to wonder at their folly, when I was stumbling over the rough hassocks, and sinking knee-deep in the black mire, raking the sharp sickle-edged grass which we used to feed out to the young cattle in midwinter when the bitter cold gave them appetite for even such fodder. I had an almost Irish hatred of snakes, and these meadows were full of them,—striped, green, dingy water- snakes, and now and then an ugly spotted adder by no means pleasant to touch with bare feet. There were great black snakes, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... It was midwinter, when the old man brought the gifts, the time of the pale, cold moon. From that time, the maiden watched, with a heavy heart, the ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... rough plank stairway, and entered the basement. It was a damp, mouldy, dismal place, and even then—in hot July weather—as cold as an ice-house. What must it have been in midwinter! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... It was midwinter, and the river was frozen over. The boats had not been running for many days, and the happiest time of all the happy days for the young people of the river towns had come. The ponds and creeks were forgotten in the great event of skating on the river, and for ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... Then in midwinter came the Seaboard smash. As a matter of fact, that crazy enterprise had been tottering upon the brink of failure from its inception, and Archie was merely one of the stool pigeons on whom the shrewd promoters ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... in one of the houses. Strong poles were extended from side to side, and on these sat or perched the company, party facing party, while two players struck the bowl on the ground between. Bets ran high; and Brbeuf relates, that once, in midwinter, with the snow nearly three feet deep, the men of his village returned from a gambling visit, bereft of their leggins, and barefoot, yet in excellent humor. [ Brbeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 113.—This game is still a favorite among the Iroquois, some of whom hold to the belief that they will ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... 38. Midwinter, and provisions low. Seven already buried in the ocean. Sickness setting in with more severity, women and children to be somehow cared for, two tiny babies to be shielded from all harm, their only home the inhospitable shore. No time to lose! The 16th they began to build the first ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... into February, the animals ceased to venture far from their lairs in search of food, and the harvest of the trails was therefore light. With the disappearance of rabbits, the fox and lynx had also disappeared. The rabbit is the chief prey of these animals during the tight midwinter months, and as the wolf follows the caribou, so the fox follows ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... consider what might have been the result had not the gallantry of the army and the manoeuvring during the early disaster saved us from ultimate defeat. We had started out from Nashville on an offensive campaign, probably with no intention of going beyond Murfreesboro', in midwinter, but still with the expectation of delivering a crushing blow should the enemy accept our challenge to battle. He met us with a plan of attack almost the counterpart of our own. In the execution of his plan he had many advantages, not the least of which was his intimate ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... of brownness. Midwinter never saw the passing of the tan from her cheek; her vigorous young fists were always brown; when permitted a choice she chose brown clothes: she was a ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... the nerves I speak of, many apply themselves to drink; some rush to drugs; for myself, I take to music. It was midwinter, and grand opera was here. This was fortunate. I buried myself in a box, and opened my very pores to those nerve-healthful harmonies. In a week thereafter I might call myself recovered. My soul was cool, my ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... enforcing discipline have been unnecessarily severe and have given dissatisfaction. As recently as the year 1903 the children of this inoffensive and harmless people were forcibly taken from their homes and put into the schools. The time selected for doing the dastardly deed was during the night in midwinter when the weather was cold and the ground covered with snow. Under the orders of the superintendent the reservation police made the raid without warning or warrant of any kind. While the people slept, the police entered their houses, dragged the little children from their comfortable beds ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... and in ways, especially from the swimmer's standpoint, it is wonderful water. It is cool enough to be comfortable, while it is warm enough to permit a swimmer to stay in all day without experiencing a chill. Under the sun or the stars, at high noon or at midnight, in midwinter or in midsummer, it does not matter when, it is always the same temperature—not too warm, not too cold, just right. It is wonderful water, salt as old ocean itself, pure and crystal-clear. When the nature of the water is considered, it is not ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... busy grinding wheat. There were few mills in the Wilderness, and nearly every day until midwinter settlers were coming and going from the mill, bringing bags of wheat or corn on horseback over the rough trail and carrying back flour or meal. When Mr. Carew had tied up the bag of meal and his customer had ridden away, he came ...
— A Little Maid of Ticonderoga • Alice Turner Curtis
... directions of a fresh bustling landlady, but still seizing an occasional moment to exchange a flippant word and have a rallying laugh with the group round the fire. The scene completely realized Poor Robin's humble idea of the comforts of midwinter: ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... In midwinter of this third year, Jan returned to Lac Bain, and, hugging the delighted Melisse close in his arms, he told her that never again would he go away without her. Melisse, tightening her arms around his neck, made his promise sacred by offering her little rosebud of a mouth for him to kiss. Later, ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... Midwinter brought out-of-door amusements, though the season seemed short, for spring came early, and in March parties were out hunting for trailing arbutus and hardy spring flowers, exchanging tulip bulbs and dividing rose bushes, as well as putting out trees ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... now midwinter, and for six weeks they remained in harbour till August came, and with three ships they emerged to continue their way to the Straits of Magellan. At last it was found and boldly they entered. From the towering mountains that guarded ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... intensives, to add a little to the signification, and make it more emphatical. Ol, or Ale, did not only signify the liquor then made use of, but gave denomination to the greatest festivals, as that of zehol, or Yule, at Midwinter; and as is yet plainly to be discovered in that custom of the Whitsun ale at the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... uttered. "Say, it was fine, wasn't it, Christmas? We allus had firecrackers then. And eat! Why, man!" This allusion to the firecrackers would have determined that Curly had come from the South, which alone has a midwinter Fourth of July, possibly because the populace is not content with only one annual smell of gunpowder. "We had trees where I came from," said I. ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... Self-made exiles, not only from the accustomed comforts of home, but cut off from communication with their absent ones and harrowed by vague stones of wrong and violence about them—it would have been natural had they yielded to the combined strain on mind and matter. At midwinter I had occasion to visit Evansport and Acquia creek. It had been bitter cold; a sudden thaw had made the air raw and keen, while my horse went to his girths at every plunge. More than once I had to dismount in mire girth-deep to help him on. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... And beyond the heart stretching there was always the House. He could seldom get away to it in his waking hours, but he knew it was there for him, and visiting it in dreams he kept in spite of the anxiety and Mr. Croker, his young resiliency. Along in December, about two weeks before his midwinter holiday, Ellen sent ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... wherein they were wrong. I came into this country with a partner six years ago—a white man, if ever one lived—about the only real man friend I ever had. He was known to have over three thousand dollars on his person. He took sick and died the second year, at the head of the Peace, in midwinter. I buried him; couldn't take him out. Somehow the yarn got to going in the Meadows that I'd murdered him for his money. The gossip started there because we had an argument about outfitting while we were there, and roasted each other as ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... With apparent indifference he crosses your path, or walks in your footsteps in the field, or travels along the beaten highway, or lingers in the vicinity of stacks and remote barns. Carry the carcass of a pig, or a fowl, or a dog, to a distant field in midwinter, and in a few nights his tracks cover ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... possessed a human consciousness of the dreary scene. This is a sad time for the shrubs that do not perish with the summer; they neither live nor die; what they retain of life seems but the chilling sense of death. Very sad are the flower shrubs in midwinter! The roofs of the houses are now all white, save where the eddying wind has kept them bare at the bleak corners. To discern the real intensity of the storm, we must fix upon some distant object,—as yonder spire,-and observe ...
— Snow Flakes (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of that year Emil Gluck made a clean sweep of the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Florida. Nothing escaped. Forts, mines, coast defences of all sorts, torpedo stations, magazines— everything went up. Three months afterward, in midwinter, he smote the north shore of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Greece in the same stupefying manner. A wail went up from the nations. It was clear that human agency was behind all this destruction, and it was equally clear, through Emil Gluck's impartiality, ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... he said wearily. "I could have written a sermon in keeping with that text in November or midwinter, but now, when the whole world is reawakening in a miracle of beauty and love, I can't do it. If a northeast rainstorm doesn't set in before next Sunday, Mr. Trewin will not have his sermon. I shall take as my text instead, 'The flowers appear on the earth, the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... certain stated intervals, for a goodly number of coming years! What annual the horticulturist can show will bear comparison with this product of auricultural industry, which has flowered in midsummer and midwinter for twenty successive seasons? And now the last of its blossoms is to be plucked, and the bare stem, stripped of its ever maturing and always welcome appendages, is reduced to the narrowest conditions of reproductive ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... nearly twenty-six years ago, had broken to him, with a blushing circumlocution that would have caused the young women of the new generation to smile, the news that she was to have a child; and there their eldest boy, Dallas, too delicate to be taken to church in midwinter, had been christened by their old friend the Bishop of New York, the ample magnificent irreplaceable Bishop, so long the pride and ornament of his diocese. There Dallas had first staggered across the floor shouting ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... keeping. The settlers saw no choice but to abandon a place which they were too few to defend, and accordingly withdrew to the older settlements, after burying such of their effects as would bear it, and leaving others to their fate. Six men, a dog, and a cat remained to keep the fort. Towards midwinter the human part of the garrison also withdrew, and the two uncongenial quadrupeds were ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... and bright, is the tracery of the illuminated streets, through which the people go to and fro. Save for an occasional stirring, or a passing voice speaking out of the dimness beneath me, the night is very still. Not a cloud is to be seen in the dark midwinter sky to hide one speck of its broad smears of star dust and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... departure to the country; a house that Cardailhac, a declared enemy of nature and the country, endeavouring always to keep Parisians in Paris till the latest possible date, has succeeded in crowding and making as brilliant as in midwinter. Fifteen hundred heads are swarming beneath the great central chandelier, erect—bent forward—turning round—questioning amid a great play of shadows and reflections; some massed in the obscure corners of the floor, others in a bright light reflected through the open doors ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... ship was to be at flood-tide, eleven o'clock in the forenoon. Though in midwinter, the air was mild, as if a warm breath had been wafted landward from the Gulf Stream. There was a fever of excitement and preparation in the Brandon home. Dinah in the kitchen was taking pots of baked beans and loaves of brown bread smoking hot from ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... In midwinter Evan's employer left a couple of axes with the blacksmith for repairs, the job to be done within a week. At this time the weather was what is termed "settled," with deep snow, and good "slipping" ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various |
