"Overgrown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... summer time, to enjoy these exquisite surroundings, where he could write happily on philosophical subjects, without much danger of interruption. Dr. Bacmeister informed us that the poor little pit close by was in fact one of the noted quarries, with the sides fallen in and the debris overgrown with herbage. A short distance away we were shown the others, in the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... close to the pavement a plain close carriage, apparently waiting for some person who was purchasing inside. Christopher would hardly have noticed this had he not also perceived, pressed against the glass of the shop window, an unusual number of local noses belonging to overgrown working lads, tosspots, an idiot, the ham-smoker's assistant with his sleeves rolled up, a scot-and- lot freeholder, three or four seamstresses, the young woman who brought home the washing, and so on. The interest of these ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... sir. Nothing but a dinghy, or the like of that, has ever gone in very far. Leastwise, I don't think so. The islands are just a lot of oyster-shell bars covered with sand and overgrown with red mangrove trees. I've been told the channel between 'em sometimes isn't more'n a foot deep; but in other places there may be good water. What I mean to say is that they're not charted, and I doubt if any man living could ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... crossed on his breast, Lavretsky watched the furrowed fields unfolding like a fan before him, the willow bushes as they slowly came into sight, and the dull ravens and rooks, who looked sidelong with stupid suspicion at the approaching carriage, the long ditches, overgrown with mugwort, wormwood, and mountain ash; and as he watched the fresh fertile wilderness and solitude of this steppe country, the greenness, the long slopes, and valleys with stunted oak bushes, the grey villages, and scant birch trees,—the ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... grown quite dusk. They were now come to a very wild and desert place, overgrown with shaggy bushes, and so silent and solitary that nobody seemed ever to have dwelt or journeyed there. All was waste and desolate, in the gray twilight, which grew every moment more obscure. Perseus looked about him rather disconsolately, ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the Sycamore Ridge men had been hurried into Missouri to meet General Price, who was threatening Springfield, and no word had been left for him about the boys. As he left the gate at the Fort, a troop of cavalry rode by gaily, and a boy, a big overgrown fourteen-year-old boy in a blue uniform, passed and waved his hand at the befuddled old man, and cried, "Good-by, Mr. Lane,—tell 'em you saw me." He knew the boy was from Sycamore Ridge, but he knew also that he was not one of ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... opened, and straightway found himself in the library, a long, low, silent-looking room, every foot of the walls of which was occupied with books in varied and rich bindings. The lozenge-paned windows, with thick stone mullions, were much overgrown with ivy, throwing a cool green shadowiness into the room. One of them, however, had been altered to a more modern taste, and opened with folding-doors upon a few steps, descending into an old-fashioned, terraced garden. To approach this window he had to pass a table, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... in this book like flocks of memories that come upon us pell-mell, and in which insignificant details occupy a larger place than the most important events; our memory is, in fact, an overgrown child, and what it retains of a man is generally a feature, a word, a gesture. Scientific history is trying to react, to mark the relative value of facts, to bring forward the important ones, to cast into shade that which is secondary. Is it not a mistake? Is there such a thing as the important and ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... meditation and prayer, and doing good in the district round; but when the soil became so swampy as to give them the ague as often as they paid a visit to these cells, the monks left off their practice of retiring hither; and their little dwellings stood empty, to be gradually overgrown with green moss and lank weeds, which no ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... view of it under this circumstance in its finished state, I was astonished to find that the account given by Mr. Winstanley did not appear to be at all exaggerated. At intervals of a minute, and sometimes two or three, I suppose when a combination happens to produce an overgrown wave, it would strike the rock and the building conjointly, and fly up in a white column, enwrapping it like a sheet, rising at least to double the height of the house, and totally intercepting it from sight; and this appearance being momentary, both as to ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... out a weird old wicket, overgrown with shaggy hair Like a weird and wicked eyebrow round a weird and wicked eye, Two great eyeballs and a beard For one ghastly moment peered At our faces with a sudden stealthy stare: Then the door was open wide, And a hideous hermit ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the Island City, Galveston, to live with Aunt Nanny and Uncle David. We thought ourselves quite grown-up now. Since we came to our island home we had never been away from it. It was forlorn enough, though it was a pretty place, all overgrown with oleanders and cape-jessamines. We used to get so tired watching the sea, hearing the restless beat, beat of the waves against the shore, and seeing the far-off birds dip their wings into the water! There was an old book in Uncle ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... and know that their lovely homes will be wrecked eventually, and left desolate: that this country of theirs will become a wilderness of ruin, such as Egypt is, but rank and overgrown, its beauty of sweet grass and stately trees, and all its rich luxuriance of flowers and fruits and foliage plants, only accentuating the ruin—bearing witness to the neglect. No, our greatness shall not depart. The decay may ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it, the record of its years, written so vividly, yet without sign of weakness or decay; its stern vastness and gloom, eaten away by the Channel winds, and overgrown with bitter sea-grass. I cannot tell half the strange pleasures and thoughts that come about me at the sight of the old tower.' Most interesting of all is the grim, rusted, and gaunt watch-tower, before alluded to, which rises out of a block of modern ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... with the dreariness of decay superadded. A few paces from the cabin there was a rough inclosure, which, in the brief days of Tennessee's Partner's matrimonial felicity, had been used as a garden, but was now overgrown with fern. As we approached it, we were surprised to find that what we had taken for a recent attempt at cultivation was the broken soil ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... defiling between the forest and the river, the Spaniards opened on them with culverins from a projecting bastion. The French took cover in the forest with which the hills below and behind the fort were densely overgrown. Here, ensconced in the edge of the woods, where, himself unseen, he could survey the whole extent of the defences, Gourgues presently descried a strong party of Spaniards issuing from their works, crossing the ditch, and advancing to reconnoitre. On this, returning to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... in a strange fashion. On the morning after their arrival in the country of the Cyclops, they were on the shore, when they were surprised to see a man emerge from the woods, and approach them with suppliant gestures. His appearance was wild and emaciated, his beard overgrown, his garments ragged; but nevertheless it was easy to perceive that he was a Greek. When he saw that the voyagers wore Trojan dress and arms, he paused in fear, but the next moment he hurried toward them with tears ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... on at a pace that permitted the cyclist to keep alongside, and presently, turning sharply to the right, picked their way along a narrow roadway which, overgrown with grass and flanked by densely-wooded country, was as desolate and lonely a spot as could be conceived. The car bumped and swayed over ruts and hummocks, and Green touched his companion's sleeve to bid ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... up to the bundle rack. He took off his cap, and stuffed it into his pocket. He was grinning like a schoolboy. Fanny turned from the window and smiled at what she saw in his face. At that he gave an absurd little bounce in his place, like an overgrown child, and reached ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... lunch Sanin was about to take leave, but they told him that on such a day the best thing was to stay where one was, and he agreed; he stayed. In the back room where he was sitting with the ladies of the household, coolness reigned supreme; the windows looked out upon a little garden overgrown with acacias. Multitudes of bees, wasps, and humming beetles kept up a steady, eager buzz in their thick branches, which were studded with golden blossoms; through the half-drawn curtains and the lowered blinds this never-ceasing hum made its way ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... southern edge of the woods were overgrown with raspberry-bushes. When Filippo's daily stint about the camp was finished, he visited these spots with his pail; and while the season lasted, heaping bowls of red, dead-ripe fruit or saucers ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... barter all freedom but the name. Where one succeeds a thousand fail. Those with higher aims count themselves happy, indeed, to possess a few square feet of canvas, that truly represents the beauty dear to them, before weeds had undermined and overgrown and choked the temple of the soul. That any one should exchange gilded chains for freedom to give manhood shoulder swing, to be and to do—without infringing on the liberty of others to be and to do—is to such ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... one point I wish to speak of in tomato culture. The great trouble in cultivating comes in the overgrowth of vines. Each plant becomes a large, overgrown, unwieldy sort of affair unless looked out for. Use a stake for each vine. Tie the main stalk of the plant to this. Let the development of fruit come from the top of the plant. So pinch back the lateral branches and remove these. In this way the tomato garden is a neat and pretty one. This treatment ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... fellow Satan is always busy going to and fro even in colleges, and in the unrestrained, overgrown, secularized colleges of the East they have actually been teaching this doctrine openly for many years. Indeed, I am told that right at the University of Chicago, though it is a Baptist institution, they teach this same silly twaddle of ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... rather unnecessary duties, seeing the same people, listening to the same chatter, the same jokes, the same chaff. And added to the incurable dulness of the mess was the irksome feeling of being merely an overgrown schoolboy at the beck and call of every incompetent and foolish senior. Life was too short to waste in such solemn trifling, masquerading in a ridiculous costume which had to be left at home when any work was to be done. ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... Cross, to the extent we have shown, is referable to the philanthropic Howard, who, in a visit to Eyam, about the year 1788, or 44 years since, particularly noticed the finest part of the relic lying in a corner of the churchyard, and nearly overgrown with docks and thistles. "The value this hitherto unregarded relic had in the estimation of Howard," says Mr. Rhodes, "made it dearer to the people of Eyam: they brought the top part of the cross from its hiding-place, and set it on the still dilapidated shaft, where it has ever ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... cairns, the second and the third in order, were so torn up and overgrown that no investigation of them was attempted; the ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... Kodaks, and Begglely went everywhere slung on to a thing that looked like an overgrown missionary box, and that bore a legend to the effect that if Begglely would pull the button, a shameless Company would do the rest. Life became a misery to Begglely's friends. Nobody dared to do anything for fear of being taken ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... had not heard of him when we rode out that morning. Fez Eldjid, the "New Fez" of palaces and government buildings, was founded in the fourteenth century by the Merinid princes, and probably looks much as it did then. The palaces in their overgrown gardens, with pale-green trellises dividing the rose-beds from the blue-and-white tiled paths, and fountains in fluted basins of Italian marble, all had the same drowsy charm, yet the oldest were built not more than a century or two ago, others ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... scarcely elevated above the plain, are partially covered with lichens and mosses, together with succulent plants and tufts of evergreen shrubs with shining leaves. The horizon is bounded with mountains overgrown with forests of laurels, among which clusters of palms rise to the height of more than a hundred feet, their slender stems supporting tufts of feathery foliage. To the east of Atures other mountains appear, the ridge ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... out of his capital accompanied by his wife. And entering with his wife the solitary woods the king began to wander about. And one day while the king under the influence of the curse was wandering through that forest abounding in several kinds of deer and various other animals and overgrown with numerous large trees and shrubs and creepers and resounding with terrible cries, he became exceedingly hungry. And the monarch thereupon began to search for some food. Pinched with hunger, the king at last saw, in a very solitary part of the woods, a Brahmana and his wife enjoying each ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... Greek in it. And what made the sense of resemblance the more striking was the sea, which one feels to be always near, though one may not see it, and which any turn of the valley may bring into view. We found out a little tower with an overgrown garden, of which the owner might have been taken for a husbandman of the Odyssey. He could scarcely speak any French, but was not without a certain grave dignity. I translated to him the inscription on his sun-dial, "Hora est benefaciendi," ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... upland pastures, sown with gold, and sweet With the keen perfume of the ripening grass, Where wings of birds and filmy shadows pass, Spread thick as stars with shining marguerite; To haunt old fences overgrown with brier, Muffled in vines, and hawthorns, and wild cherries, Rank poisonous ivies, red-bunched elderberries, And pied blossoms to the heart's desire, Gray mullein towering into yellow bloom, Pink-tasseled milkweed, breathing dense perfume, And ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... his hoary head Conspicuous many a league, the mariner, Bound homeward, and in hope already there, Greets with three cheers exulting. At his waist A girdle of half-withered shrubs he shows, And at his feet the baffled billows die. The common overgrown with fern, and rough With prickly gorse, that, shapeless and deformed And dangerous to the touch, has yet its bloom, And decks itself with ornaments of gold, Yields no unpleasing ramble; there the turf ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... "Scat!" The pitcher's arm is a new disease, the outgrowth of base-ball; the lawn-tennis elbow is another result of a popular open-air amusement, and it begins to look as though the coming American would hear with one overgrown telephonic ear, while the other will be rudimentary only. He will have an abnormal base-ball arm with a lawn-tennis elbow, a powerful foot-ball-kicking leg with the superior toe driven back into the palm of his foot. He will have a highly trained biceps muscle over his eye ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... so busy in exploring woods and fields and lanes were quite so thorough when it came to the private examination of their own lofts and outhouses. Stories were afloat of a mysterious figure being occasionally seen in some old overgrown trackway or other, remote from turnpike roads; but when a search was instituted in any of these suspected quarters nobody was found. Thus the days and weeks ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... stone church, all overgrown with ivy, that the Chadwicks had built generations ago. The high arched door was never opened of late years, except at long intervals, when some one came out from the city to hold services. But the side ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... having stayed at Bath on the way down; and now he had got his face burnt in that parti-coloured way peculiar to the faces of those who have been too long in London. As he came along the narrow, rather overgrown avenue, the sound of a waltz thrummed out on a piano fell on his ears, and he smiled, for music was the greatest passion he had. His dark grizzled hair was pushed back off his hot brow, which he fanned with his straw hat. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... where the dews were shed; On the worn features of the weariest face Some youthful memory leaves its hidden trace, As in old gardens left by exiled kings The marble basins tell of hidden springs, But, gray with dust, and overgrown with weeds, Their choking jets the passer little heeds, Till time's revenges break their seals away, And, clad in rainbow light, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... something very pathetic about the lonely little churchyard of Father Point, with its borders of overgrown raspberry bushes straggling in untidy clusters round the graves. At one end of the ground were five graves, marked each by plain wooden crosses, painted a dull black, with the Christian names in white of those who slept beneath. These rough crosses marked ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... considered that the greatest danger of the Union was in the overgrown extent of its territory, combining with the slavery question. The want of slaves was not in the lands, but in their inhabitants. Slavery had become in the South and South-western states a condition of existence. On the falling off of the revenue, which occurred ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... Captain's youngest son. A poor idiot, who, thirty years of age, had the appearance of an overgrown boy. The other members of the Captain's large family were all married and settled prosperously in the world. Flora felt truly ashamed of the old man's meanness, but was glad to repay his trifling services ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... it, though, until that two-pound roast is put before Westy. Not such a whale of a roast, it ain't. It's a one-rib affair, like an overgrown chop, and it reposes lonesome in the middle of a big silver platter. It's done, all right. Couldn't have been more so if it had been cooked in a blast-furnace. Even the bone was ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... they searched to and fro, but without result. There were plenty of likely looking places overgrown with ivy, and sheltered by the willows, alders, and birches, but not one showed a sign of having been built up with rough blocks of stone, or presented a hole such as they had seen from ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... for—he knew not what; and in the process of the ages one by one the true marks upon the ways had been shattered, or buried, or the meaning of the words had been slowly forgotten; one by one the signs had been turned awry, the true entrances had been thickly overgrown, the very way itself had been diverted from the heights to the depths, till at last the race of pilgrims had become hereditary stone-breakers and ditch-scourers on a track that led to destruction—if it led anywhere at all. Darnell's ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... and from the summit of the short ascent looked out upon an elevated tableland in the midst of the morass. Before them, encircled by a little brook, which shortly afterwards swelled the waters of the morass, stood a large rustic dwelling, overgrown with ivy; and not far distant rose many houses or huts—in fact, to their no small amazement, they beheld a village, and one, too, that no individual amongst them had ever seen or heard ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... abolition of slavery gave the death blow to open vice, overgrown and emboldened as it had become. Immediate emancipation, instead of lifting the flood-gates, was the only power strong enough to shut them down! It restored the proper restraints upon vice, and supplied the incentives to virtue. Those great controllers of moral ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... it is merely an overgrown porcupine, but here in Oz they consider Chiss an evil spirit. He's different from a reg'lar porcupine, because he can throw his quills in any direction, which an American porcupine cannot do. That's what makes old Chiss so dangerous. If we get too near, he'll fire those ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... pitch now widened out, and the whole ground looked like an asphalt pavement, half overgrown with marsh-loving weeds, whose roots feed in the sloppy water which overlies the pitch. But, as yet, there was no sign of the lake. The incline, though gentle, shuts off the view of what is beyond. This last lip of the lake has surely overflowed, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... swords upon their shoulders; the Spaniards glittering in their purple-bordered tunics of snowy linen. The waving pikes of phalanges told of more Africans who seemed to lie in echelon beyond, while far away, toward the low hills overgrown with copsewood that formed the eastern horizon, clouds of swift-moving dust, amid which shadows darted hither and thither at seeming random, marked the presence of the wild riders of Numidia who ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... members of one family. At Burbach they met with an English landlord, thirty-five years resident in Germany; he was delimited to see his fellow-countrymen, and exerted himself to give them the best entertainment his house afforded. The country they passed through was very hilly, and overgrown with forest; now and then a solitary dwelling was seen in the ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... city I saw the palace of the king from whom we took Burma. It stands inside a large space, with high walls all round it. Outside the wall is a broad ditch full of water. When I saw the ditch it was overgrown with water-plants covered ...
— Highroads of Geography • Anonymous
... laborer wanted was to work as pleasantly as possible, with rests, and above all, carelessly and heedlessly, without thinking. That summer Levin saw this at every step. He sent the men to mow some clover for hay, picking out the worst patches where the clover was overgrown with grass and weeds and of no use for seed; again and again they mowed the best acres of clover, justifying themselves by the pretense that the bailiff had told them to, and trying to pacify him with ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... of that rushing fall was a scene very different indeed. The pirates and their captives stood under a blazing sun, looking across a wide and beautiful landscape. Behind them, in the side of a high hill overgrown with bushes, was the hole by which they had come forth, and across the inside of this hole was the curtain of falling water. Freddie wondered how anyone had ever had the courage to plunge for the first time through that curtain into the unknown dark. ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... building, and we emerged upon the other side. This front we found even more beautiful than the one facing the city. At the centre was a flight of steps of magnificent proportions, now falling asunder and overgrown in many places with ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... of the ridge upon which we stood appeared to lead straight toward the mountain, moreover it was not nearly so densely overgrown as was the lower ground; our progress, therefore, was tolerably rapid, and in the course of an hour we found ourselves clear of the bush and standing upon the lower slopes of the mountain. And then we knew that the towering mass in front of us could be nothing else than ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... is a reflection of the hopes, desires, and purposes of the parents who brought him overseas, no matter how precocious and independent the child may be. Your immigrant inspectors will tell you what poverty the foreigner brings in his baggage, what want in his pockets. Let the overgrown boy of twelve, reverently drawing his letters in the baby class, testify to the noble dreams and high ideals that may be hidden beneath the greasy caftan of the immigrant. Speaking for the Jews, at least, I know I am safe ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... ourselves, for rural pleasures, mere romance and poetic illusion; but if poetic beauty alone were concerned, we must still admire harvest-time in the country. The whole land is then an Arcadia, full of simple, healthful, and rejoicing spirits. Overgrown towns and manufactories may have changed for the worse, the spirit and feelings of our population; in them, "evil communications may have corrupted good manners;" but in the country at large, there never was a more simple-minded, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... and thanksgivings. At Constantinople a Jew met him in the street, and was reproached for neglecting to wear the fringed garment and for shaving. At once fringed garments were reintroduced throughout the Empire, and heads, though always shaven after the manner of Turks and the East, now became overgrown incommodiously with hair—even the Piyos, or earlock, hung again down the side of the face, and its absence served to mark off ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... We think the same about everything—I am afraid I have a tendency to make over my ideas to match his! But he is almost always right; he ought to be, you know, for he has fourteen years' start of me. In other ways, though, he's just an overgrown boy, and he does need looking after—he hasn't any sense about wearing rubbers when it rains. He and I always think the same things are funny, and that is such a lot; it's dreadful when two people's senses of humour are antagonistic. I don't believe ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... from the old road, I wander over soft logs and gray yielding debris, across the little trout brook, until I emerge in the overgrown Barkpeeling,—pausing now and then on the way to admire a small, solitary white flower which rises above the moss, with radical, heart-shaped leaves, and a blossom precisely like the liverwort except in color, but which is not put down in my botany,—or to ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... to which we had clambered was thickly overgrown with brambles, through which we soon discovered that it would have been impossible to force our way but for the scythe; and Jupiter, by direction of his master, proceeded to clear for us a path to the foot of an enormously tall tulip-tree, which stood, with ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... movie-show. Want to bet he won't loosen up and release Procyon and Northern Lights and unblockade the Grank Residency after he sees that shot of Firkked's head leering at him off the point of that overgrown asagai? As I said, that's only the last scene, too. I've been having scenes shot all through this fight; some of them are ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... story about Isaac Frewen," said the Story Girl. "When he was young he went by the name of Oatmeal Frewen and he got it this way. He was noted for doing outlandish things. He lived at Markdale then and he was a great, overgrown, awkward fellow, six feet tall. He drove over to Baywater one Saturday to visit his uncle there and came home the next afternoon, and although it was Sunday he brought a big bag of oatmeal in the wagon with him. When he came to Carlisle ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... question that remains—and it is a question the future alone will solve—is the particular point at which this ancient and overgrown stronghold of war, now being invested so vigorously from so many sides, will finally be overthrown, whether from within or from without, whether by its own inherent weakness, by the persuasive reasonableness ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the characters in the old morris-dance. He wore a red cap faced with yellow, a yellow "slabbering-bib," a blue doublet, red hose, and black shoes. He represents an overgrown baby, but was a tumbler, and mimicked the barking of a dog. The word Bavian is derived from bavon, a "bib for a slabbering child" (see Cotgrave, French Dictionary). In modern French bave means "drivel," ...
— 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.
... first interview had been a good deal of a shock to her—almost as much of a shock as if she had been asked to tutor the offspring of a pair of chimpanzees—nevertheless she had nerved herself to the necessary sacrifice of dignity. After all, Allegheny was only an overgrown child in need of advanced kindergarten training, and in the meantime there was the prospect of a season at Burlington Notch. The latter was, in itself, a prospect alluring to one suffering from the wear and tear of a trying profession. After some hesitation, Mrs. Ring had accepted ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... the sand thrown up by the waves has long since formed a partial barrier between the sweet water and the stagnant, rising up to within a few feet of the surface. This barrier is overgrown with flags and reeds, where it is shallow. Here it is possible to sail along the sweet water within an arrow-shot of the swamp. Nor, indeed, would the stagnant mingle with the sweet, as is evident at other parts of the swamp, where streams ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... Afternoon Dancing Class, but otherwise not often a companion: a home-sheltered lad, tutored privately and preserved against the coarsening influences of rude comradeship and miscellaneous information. Heavily overgrown in all physical dimensions, virtuous, and placid, this cloistered mutton was wholly uninteresting to Penrod Schofield. Nevertheless, Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Junior, was a personage on account of the importance of the Magsworth Bitts family; and it was Penrod's destiny to increase Roderick's celebrity ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... spirit did not prevent an apt employment of examples from the Scriptures on occasion, as his rebuke to an overgrown and too active freshman showed: "Sir, you remind me of Jeshurun; the Bible says 'Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked.'" But in the class room he was traditionally lenient. One student who found himself unable to fit his carefully prepared notes and the examination questions together, finally handed ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... Scott, while carelessly galloping in his youth through Liddesdale, and listening to ballads and old-world stories, was "making himself" into the mighty minstrel of the border—so this big, clumsy, overgrown student, seated in the pit of Drury Lane, or exalted to the one-shilling gallery of Covent Garden, was silently growing into the greatest poet of the ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... they were wonderfully successful. The dress used for this purpose, consisted of a sort of thick cloak, covered with feathers, like those of the South Sea islands, and was so fashioned, by means of a tight thick quilting, as to make the wearer, at a little distance, very much resemble an overgrown bird, except that the legs were somewhat too thick. Their arms were concealed under the wings; and the resemblance was yet further increased, by marks with beaks adapted to the particular plumage: some personating doves, ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... neighboring countries not tied together by the same governments; which their own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which, opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... pressing he does as he is bid and follows us, looking like an overgrown boy only half awake. I make no objection to this singular hospitality; after all, it looks so little like a bed, the matting we are to share, and we sleep in our clothes, as we always do, according to the Nipponese fashion. After all, on a journey in a railway, do not the most ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... find to do there? In a distant and disdainful fashion Sir Bunny knew Abbey Burnfoot. It was not even a mansion—merely a new-fangled sort of cottage at the best—built in Italian fashion, they said, but after all, only two score yards of garden, with a narrow rim of links overgrown with sea pink and ground holly. It was stuck ridiculously in between the white sands and the pour of the Abbey Burn—no drives or pleasances, no cropped hedges and trim parterres—nothing, in short, which Royalty had a right to expect when visiting a real ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... down this they turned. As they went, Anthony kept a good look-out for a place to turn aside; and a hundred yards from the turning saw what he wanted. On the left-hand side a little path led into the wood; it was overgrown with brambles, and looked as if it were now disused. Anthony gave the word and turned his horse down the entrance, and was followed in single file by the others. There were thick trees about them on every side, and, what was far more important, the road they had left at this point ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... no less barbarous; that cattle was their chief wealth; that they counted it no infamy to commit robberies, and that in their view violence and murder were in no way displeasing to God; that the country was overgrown with woods, which abounded in wolves and other voracious animals,' &c. It was, no doubt, very provoking that such stories should be repeated 130 years after the plantation of Ulster, and Harris undertook, with laudable patriotism, to show 'how far this description ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... all his dignity as one of the Princess's pages, and heedless now in his excitement of what any of the well-dressed promenaders might think; while, laughing to himself the while, Frank kept step with him, running easily and looking quite cool when the tall, overgrown lad at his side, who was unused to outdoor exercise, dropped into a ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... Pompey's theatre showed need of repairs, which were not given. The circus maximus, where the last and dearest of Roman pleasures—the chariot races—were no longer celebrated, stretched its long lines beneath the imperial palace covered with dust and overgrown with grass. The colossal amphitheatre of Titus still reared its circle perfect, but stripped of its decorations. The gigantic baths, fed by no aqueduct since the ruin wrought by Vitiges the Goth, rose like fallen cities in a wilderness. Ivy began to creep over them. The costly marble mantle of ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... which has never been ploughed, mown or cropped and also land once cultivated but now overgrown with trees or ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the man said, "nor has there ever been. Such a feat would require enormous engineering works. Such works under the ocean would be matched by comparable works on land, and would therefore show up in our aerial surveys, however ancient and overgrown." ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... The garden, overgrown—yet mild, See, fragrant herbs are flowering there! Strong children of the Alpine wild Whose culture is the brethren's care; Of human tasks their only one, And ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... dames coming out from their doors to watch them, or to chat with each other in the intervals of work; and the sheep on the sunny downs above; and the sparkling stream which came murmuring by, half overgrown with bushes, so that its pleasant sound alone showed its locality; and its deep pool, where the trout loved to lie; and the cattle in the green meadow, seeking for shade under the tall elms, or with lazy strokes of their tails whisking off the flies; and ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... partisans against that enemy, may induce him, in future, to tolerate our commercial intercourse with his people, is still to be seen. For my part, I wish that all nations may recover and retain their independence; that those which are overgrown may not advance beyond safe measures of power, that a salutary balance may be ever maintained among nations, and that our peace, commerce, and friendship may be sought and cultivated by all. It is our business to manufacture for ourselves whatever we can, to keep all ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the attack. Far off through the hills, then covered by the yellowing leaves of the forest of Anderida, glistens, between earth and sky, the grey sea that brought over the Norman fleet eighteen centuries ago. Heaps of stones, overgrown with ivy, mark the place where Harold fell, the last king of English blood who ever sat upon the throne of Great Britain. It is a secluded spot; large cedars, alders, and a tree with white foliage form a curtain, and shut off from the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... often discussed the remarkable feature of Egyptian architecture, which is displayed in the tendency to exaggerate the door-posts and lintels, until in the New Empire the great temples become transformed into little more than monstrously overgrown doorways or pylons. I need not emphasize again the profound influence exerted by this line of development upon the Dravidian temples of India and the symbolic gateways ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... illustrating its various features. The two-story portico with a Doric order below and Ionic above, relieved against the brick front laid in Flemish bond, the simple but well-designed iron fence, flanked on either side by a wall with massive brick posts covered with plaster, and all overgrown with a tangle of foliage, make up a fascinating picture. The view of the side gateway and a group of darky boys is wonderfully picturesque, besides being very suggestive as ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 04, April 1895 - Byzantine-Romanesque Windows in Southern Italy • Various
... thirty miles of ups and downs, ascending to a height of 7,600 feet and descending again some 3,000 feet. In the beginning it was almost impossible to make out the track; where it did not lead over bare rocks, it was nearly obliterated by overgrown grass. The first ascent was over a mile long in a straight line; then, after a little while, came the most arduous climbing I had until then ever attempted. Following the slope of the mountain, the track rose higher and higher in long zigzags, without any chance for the animals ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... a messenger of rest. But all God's messengers are not angels. And there was little indeed of the angel in this man's composition. His figure would have been tall but for a deformity which his enemies called a hump back, and his friends merely an overgrown shoulder; and his face would have been handsome but for its morose, scowling expression, which by no means betokened ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... self-dependent, so that no longer they shall have to import their corn from the Northwest, their lumber-men and hay from Maine, their manufactures from Massachusetts, their minerals from Pennsylvania, and to employ the shipping of the world. Finally, it must make it impossible for one overgrown interest to plunge the whole community unresistingly into frantic rebellion or needless war. They must learn that a well-conditioned state is, so far as may be, perfect in itself,—and, to be perfect in itself, must be intelligent and free. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... but in some species the peduncle, even when long (patula), may become overgrown and concealed by the basal scales of the ripe cone. Articulation usually takes place between the peduncle and the branch, sometimes with the loss of a few basal scales which remain temporarily on the tree (ponderosa, palustris, etc.). With P. Nelsonii, and to a less degree with P. ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... should be as pure as possible. In summer curtains should not be used at all, and in winter we should do well without them. In summer every wise man, who can afford it, will sleep out of town—at any of the villages which are removed sufficiently from the smoke and impurities of this overgrown metropolis. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... everywhere were books and flowers. It was all very sweet and lovely: it matched well with Mrs. Erveng, who looked daintiness itself lying back on her silken cushions, and I ought to have enjoyed it; but in some way or other it made me feel uncomfortably big and clumsy and overgrown, and I couldn't get over the feeling. Nora, however, didn't seem to be troubled in this way; I couldn't but notice how pretty she looked, ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... road wound near the beds of what had been formerly two fish-ponds, which were now nothing more than stagnant swamps, overgrown with rank weeds, and here and there encroached upon by the straggling underwood; the avenue itself was much broken; and in many places the stones were almost concealed by grass and nettles; the loose stone walls which had here and there intersected the broad park, were, in many places, ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... water; roads that the Romans made, form part of our highways. In some old battle-fields, British spear-heads and Roman armour have been found, mingled together in decay, as they fell in the thick pressure of the fight. Traces of Roman camps overgrown with grass, and of mounds that are the burial-places of heaps of Britons, are to be seen in almost all parts of the country. Across the bleak moors of Northumberland, the wall of SEVERUS, overrun with moss and weeds, still stretches, a strong ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... deeply disgusted at this want of appreciation of the romantic spot where she had dreamed away more than one happy summer noontide, while the Wendover children played hide-and-seek in the overgrown ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... lead him to a place full of rivers, surrounded by eight hundred kinds of roses and myrtles. Each one has a canopy according to his merits,[78] and under it flow four rivers, one of milk, the other of balsam, the third of wine, and the fourth of honey. Every canopy is overgrown by a vine of gold, and thirty pearls hang from it, each of them shining like Venus. Under each canopy there is a table of precious stones and pearls, and sixty angels stand at the head of every just man, saying unto him: ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... floated a wordless conviction that, however it might once have been, the state would immediately abandon its industries now that she had come away from it. I beheld its considerable area desolated, the forges cold, the hammers stilled, the fields overgrown, the ships rotting at their docks, the stalwart mechanics drooping idly above their unfinished tasks. It was not possible to suppose that any one could feel, in a state which she had left, that ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... presently walked up River Street in the mellow afternoon sunlight, and through the old wooden gates of the Holly grounds. On every side were great high-flung sprays of overgrown roses, dusty and choked with weeds, ragged pepper tassels dragged in the grass, and where the path lay under the eucalyptus trees it was slippery with the dry, crescent-shaped leaves. Bees hummed over rank poppies and tangled honeysuckle; once or twice a hummingbird came through the garden ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... crossed to the right shore, and the three canoes were run into a quiet little nook close to the swirling mouth of the race. The mill was twenty yards above, and a little to the right of it a cozy frame house, overgrown with trailing vines, peeped ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... the mountain which they were ascending was less precipitous than the side facing the camp, and save for occasional patches of thicket where the path was overgrown, ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... distributed where it was needed; and that, even if it were at all practicable, which no business man could for a moment believe, the people would not be willing to have a fruitful field of industry in shipping occupied by some great overgrown company, with a great coffee monopoly, which would surely follow. Too much has been expected of large ships. The clipper "Great Republic" is not freighted half of her time. The "Leviathan" can not pay in freighting unless she runs to Australia ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... level of dire want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in pristine splendour; and the falling stones of the walls, the overgrown vegetation in the parks, the dry and dusty moat, the ill-paved courtyards, and toppling towers without, as well as the sagging floors, the worm-eaten wainscots, and the faded tapestries within, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... I can arrange it," reflected Eleanor. "It is only that Father misses me so. In some ways he is like an overgrown child. All great musicians are ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... half overgrown with grass and goldenrod bordered the wheat-field, and it wound away down toward the house. Her father appeared mounted on the white horse he always rode. Lenore sat down in the grass to wait for him. Nodding stalks of goldenrod leaned to her ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... had wandered on for a long time it began to grow dark. At last they reached a great plain overgrown with bushes, and when they looked around them, they saw, as much as they could in the darkness, that they were among the same beautiful raspberry bushes from which they had picked their baskets and their aprons full. Then they were so tired that they ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... picturesque, that it needs no additional interest. It is close to the ancient walls of Rome, which stretch on either side as far as the eye can reach in huge and broken masses of brickwork, fragments of battlements and buttresses, overgrown in many parts with shrubs and even trees. Around the base of the Pyramid lies the burying-ground of strangers and heretics. Many of the monuments are elegant, and their frail materials and diminutive forms are in affecting contrast ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... wall, interspersed, overgrown, and veiled with moss and maiden-hair and blossoming brambles. Before them lay the long meadow, sprinkled with sunbeams, green to its last ripe richness, discolored only where the tall grass made itself hoary in the breeze, or where some trail of dun brown ran ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... in attack, not in defence; he cannot fight an up-hill battle. He will not bear the least punishing. If any one turns upon him (which few people like to do) he immediately turns tail. Like an overgrown schoolboy, he is so used to have it all his own way, that he cannot submit to anything like competition or a struggle for the mastery; he must lay on all the blows, and take none. He is bullying and cowardly; a Big Ben in politics, who will fall upon others and crush them by his ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... her where she had wished to lie—near the little mausoleum which still covers Mamma's tomb. The little mound beneath which she sleeps is overgrown with nettles and burdock, and surrounded by a black railing, but I never forget, when leaving the mausoleum, to approach that railing, and to salute the plot of earth within by ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... convent or monastery attached; for arches in ruins, remains of oriel windows, and fragments of blackened walls, were yet standing-, while other portions of the old building, which had crumbled away and fallen down, were mingled with the churchyard earth and overgrown with grass, as if they too claimed a burying-place and sought to mix their ashes with the dust of men. Hard by these gravestones of dead years, and forming a part of the ruin which some pains had been taken to render habitable in modern times, were two small ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... moment. The path upon which the party traveled was now so narrow as not to admit, with any sort of convenience, above two riders abreast, and began to descend into a dingle, traversed by a brook, the banks of which were broken, swampy, and overgrown with dwarf willows. Cedric and Athelstane, who were at the head of their [v]retinue, saw the risk of being attacked in this pass, but neither knew anything else to do than hasten through the defile as fast as possible. ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... came to the termination of the cypress woods, but, to the surprise of Barney and the professor, the swamp, overgrown with tall rushes and reed-grass, continued, with the water course ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... a short distance, paying much less attention than before to the beauties of the scenery. They had just reached the neighbourhood of what appeared to be an old summer-house, now neglected and disused, for it was thickly overgrown with ivy and various creepers. Looking up close to it they observed a board, on which was painted in large letters, "Whoever is found trespassing in these grounds will be punished with the utmost rigour of the law." Scarcely ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... play, of two or three years old, so near us, that through the grates of the window we could almost touch it with our hands; and if, whilst we took delight in the harmless diversion, and imperfect prattle, of the innocent babe, a nasty overgrown sow should come in upon the child, set it a screaming, and frighten it out of its wits; it is natural to think that this would make us uneasy, and that with crying out, and making all the menacing noise we could, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... are going now for the preliminary canter. We shall have just time to back him. There is a Pari Mutuel a little way down the course; or shall we back the horse in the ring? No, it is too late to get across the course. The Pari Mutuel will do. Isn't the racecourse like an English lawn, like an overgrown croquet ground? and the horses go round ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... and aged, kind treatment of animals, the love of Nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force—many such good things have been nourished in the child's heart by this powerful aid. It has greatly helped to keep us ever young, by preserving through our worldly ways one slender track, not overgrown with weeds, where we may walk with children, sharing ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... the purpose of entering the great everglade south of the Lake Okeechobee, in which the Seminoles were supposed to be in much strength. The country in which he was about to act seemed to be the realization of the poetic chaos. It was overgrown with trees of immense size, of kinds almost unknown in other portions of the peninsula, and grass of great highth and strength rose two or three feet above the surface of the water, which not unfrequently had ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... leaving a swamp to this day. He declared that he once stuck a pole in there, which went down easily several feet, but then struck the skull-bone of an Indian, when instantly all the hassocks and flags began to shake; he heard a yell as from fifty overgrown Pequots; that he left the pole and ran for life. Mr. West also said that no Indian had ever been known to go near that swamp since, but that whenever one came that way, he turned out of the road near the house of Mr. West, and went straight ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... bore a great resemblance to that of Thingvalla; but the third one was again fearful. Lava covered it, and was quite overgrown with that whitish moss, which has a beautiful appearance when it only covers a portion of the lava, and when black masses rise above it, but which here ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... his head, a rope girdle like that used by a cordelier, sandal shoon, and a venerable white beard descending to his waist. The features of the hermit, for such he seemed, were majestic and benevolent. Seated on a bank overgrown with wild thyme, beneath the shade of a broad-armed elm, he appeared so intently engaged in the perusal of a large open volume laid on his knee, that he did not notice Richard's approach. Deeply interested, however, by his appearance, the young man determined to ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was a chaos of feelings, all of them unpleasant. He had run up against something which he violently, blindly detested, and the trouble was that he could not tell why. It was all perfectly absurd, for why on earth should an ugly house, some overgrown trees, and a couple of ill-favoured servants so malignly affect him? Yet this was the fact; he had strayed out of Arcady into a sphere that filled him with revolt and a nameless fear. Never in his experience had ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... noble structure exhibited such a melancholy proof. I walked round it several times, meditating on the fleeting and transitory nature of all terrestrial things; on the eastern end were the remains of a lofty tower, near forty feet high, overgrown with ivy, the top apparently flat; I surveyed it on every side very minutely, thinking that if I could gain its summit I should enjoy the most delightful prospect of the circumjacent country. Animated with this hope, I resolved, if ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... interrupted only by the streams, a few natural glades and some tracts under cultivation. The term taiga is used in a general way for all lands under timber, but east of the Altai it is applied more especially to the moist and spongy region overgrown with tangled roots and thickets, where the mari, or peat bogs, and marshes alternate with the padi, or narrow ravines. The miners call by this name the wooded mountains where they go in search of auriferous sands. But everywhere the ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... fragments of arrows and broken bows. The path leading down to a fine spring was not yet overgrown with grass, and they inferred from it that the Indians had not been gone many months. There was also an open space showing signs of cultivation. Evidently maize and ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... thousand, and growing, sir!" loyally declared those disinterested citizens engaged in the sale of remote fields of ragweed as building lots—Westville was still but half-evolved from its earlier state of an overgrown country town. It was as yet semi-pastoral, semi-urban. Automobiles and farm wagons locked hubs in brotherly embrace upon its highways; cowhide boots and patent leather shared its sidewalks. There was a stockbroker's office that was thoroughly ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... a crazy picket fence overgrown with morning glory and wild gourd vines. Often he could see little heads with mops of black hair and flashing dark eyes dodging in and out between the pickets, keeping tabs on ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... of the hill a hidden wild field, two sides of which were backed by the wood, the other sides by high loose hedges of hawthorn and elder bushes. Between these overgrown bushes were gaps that the cattle might have walked through had there been any cattle now. There the turf was smooth as velveteen, padded and holed by the rabbits. The field itself was coarse, and crowded with tall, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... found himself upon an old disused and overgrown road, that for years had been traveled only by rabbits and skunks and woodchucks and deer. And in a clearing at one side he saw an old log cabin which had not been lived in for years and years. There was a bit of brook ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the gently winding way to the village of By. Everybody was asleep at By, or else gone on a journey. Soon we came to the old, massive, moss-covered gateposts that marked the entrance to the mansion. A chain was stretched across the entrance and we crawled under. The driveway was partly overgrown with grass, and the place seemed to be taking care of itself. Half a dozen long-horned Bonnie Brier Bush cows were grazing on the lawn, their calves with them; and evidently these cows and calves were the only ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... flesh"—the Welsh. Following the directions I had received, I arrived at the top of a certain street, when I heard the sound of sacred song; but I could not tell whether it was Welsh or not, nor exactly whence it came. As I stood listening, an overgrown boy came by, of whom I inquired, "Where does that singing come from?"—"I guess it comes from a church down below there." "Is it a Welsh Church?"—"I can't tell, but I guess it is." "Well, then," I rejoined, "I guess I will ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... lofty helmet, triple-tressed with horse-hair, holds high a Chimaera breathing from her throat Aetnean fires, raging the more and exasperate with baleful flames, as the battle and bloodshed grow fiercer. But on his polished shield was emblazoned in gold Io with uplifted horns, already a heifer and overgrown with hair, a lofty design, and Argus the maiden's warder, and lord Inachus pouring his stream from his embossed urn. Behind comes a cloud of infantry, and shielded columns thicken over all the plains; the Argive men and Auruncan forces, the Rutulians and old Sicanians, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... upon the bank of the river. Among the emigrants there was an overgrown boy, some eighteen years old, with a head as round and about as large as a pumpkin, and fever-and-ague fits had dyed his face of a corresponding color. He wore an old white hat, tied under his chin with a handkerchief; his body was short and stout, but his ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... one thing to say it about. It was art from the moment we met until we parted, though we might sit over our coffee for hours. Often it was next morning when J. and I reached the house at the top of the hill, and he dragged the huge key from his pocket, undid the ponderous lock and struck the overgrown match, or undersized candle, by which the Roman lit himself to his rooms, and we panted up our six flights afraid ours would not last, for we had but the ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... of St. Ronan's seem to have been at one time a very powerful family. They were allied to, and friends of the house of Douglas, at the time when the overgrown power of that heroic race made the Stewarts tremble on the Scottish throne. It followed that, when, as our old naif historian expresses it, "no one dared to strive with a Douglas, nor yet with a Douglas's man, for if ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... commonly found. Large ponds with clean edges, inhabited by fish or predatory insects, are safe; smaller ponds, if wind swept, and all ponds in the "ripple area" are safe. All rain pools, stagnant gutters, overgrown edges of large ponds, and all receptacles holding water not constantly renewed, are dangerous. You raise most of your ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... Saskatchewan breaks from its river bed and is lost for a hundred and fifty miles through a country of pure muskeg, quaking silt soft as sponge, overgrown with reed and goose grass. Here are not even low banks; there are no banks at all. Canoes are on a level with the land, and reeds sixteen feet high line the aisled water channels. One can stand on prow or stern and far as eye ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... into what used to be the garden of the mill, but the enclosure was now overgrown with rank and poisonous weeds. There was a path running through it paved with flagstones; the spectre pointed with its finder to one of them. Sam stooped down, and, much to his astonishment, raised it with ease. Beneath there was an iron chest, the lid of which he also opened, and saw that it was ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... far in the jungle that the path was entirely overgrown. No ray of light penetrated through the deep foliage. Angelita became frightened. "I'll not go another step if you do not tell me where you are taking me," she said as she stamped her ...
— Tales of Giants from Brazil • Elsie Spicer Eells
... black, frowning wall. He had to go slower here, because of the darkness. But at last he reached the slow rise of jumbled rock that evidently marked the extent of weathering on that side. Here he turned to the right and rode out into the valley. The floor was level and thickly overgrown with long, dead grass and dead greasewood, as dry as tinder. It was easy to account for the dryness; neither snow nor rain had visited that valley for many months. Slone whipped one of the sticks in the wind and soon had the smouldering end red ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... on with delight. Its noble breadth, with its termination in a full and beautiful run, was rendered yet more picturesque by one of those islets which are often happily situated in the Scottish lakes. The ruins upon that isle, now almost shapeless, being overgrown with wood rose, at the time we speak of, into the towers and pinnacles of a priory, where slumbered the remains of Sibylla, daughter of Henry I of England, and consort of Alexander the First of Scotland. This holy place had been deemed of dignity ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... contact; but we doubt whether he is superior to the intelligent, but forgotten, races which peopled the regions around him centuries before Pizzaro set foot therein, and which built enormous cities whose ruins have long been overgrown by forests. To compare the Spaniard of to-day, in Peru, with its ancient Incas is to do him no honor. To be sure, he is a good Catholic, which the Incas were not, but he is indolent, enervated, and enslaved by his own passions. His religion has not done much for him—at ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... that castle far away, There is a mist where we have been That weeps about it, cold and grey. And if we seek to travel back 'Tis through a thicket dim and sere, With many a grave beside the track, And many a haunting form of fear. Dead leaves are wet among the moss, With weed and thistle overgrown - A ruined barge within the fosse, A castle built of crumbling stone! The drawbridge drops from rusty chains, There comes no challenge from the hold; No squire, nor dame, nor knight remains, Of all who dwelt with us of old. And there ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... keels and bottoms of the ships were strangely overgrown with certain shells, two inches or more in length, as thick as they could stand, and so large that a man might put his thumb into their mouths. It is affirmed that a certain slimy substance grows in these ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... Brighton; and having nothing better to do, I put myself in the "Times," and arrived at the Bedford Hotel. It was not until after some inquiry, that I could find out his address. At last I obtained it, in a respectable but not fashionable part of this overgrown town. Willemott received ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat) |
