"Peat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the hut. It was a wretched little hovel of earth only, I think, and for a window had only a small hole, which was stopped with a piece of turf, that was taken out occasionally to let in light. In the middle of the room or space which we entered, was a fire of peat, the smoke going out at a hole in the roof. She had a pot upon it, with goat's flesh, boiling. There was at one end under the same roof, but divided by a kind of partition made of wattles, a pen or fold in which we saw ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... he mounted guard about French citadels, so may some officer marching his company of the Scots- Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in particular to all men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one of Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Critic, who is abstemious. "I will only say, then, that Nickerson's, once an all-night refuge, closes now at three—desecration has made it the yellow marble office of a teetotaler in the banking line—and the Glengyle, that blessed essence of the barley, heather, peat, and mist of Old Scotland, has been taken over by an exporting company, limited. Sometimes I think I detect a little of it in the poisons that the grocers of Glasgow and Edinburgh send over here, or perhaps I only dream of ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... peat was glowing ruddily. The Indians were already deep within their fur-lined bags, and slumbering with the utter indifference engendered of complete weariness of body. Marcel and Keeko were squatting beside each other over the cheering warmth which kept the night chills ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... defined. Formations of the Recent Period. Modern littoral Deposits containing Works of Art near Naples. Danish Peat and Shell-mounds. Swiss Lake-dwellings. Periods of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. Post-pliocene Formations. Coexistence of Man with extinct Mammalia. Reindeer Period of South of France. Alluvial Deposits of Paleolithic Age. Higher and Lower-level Valley-gravels. Loess or Inundation-mud ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... into the room, and Kalle went groping about to light a candle. Twice he took up the matches and dropped them again to light it at the fire, but the peat was burning badly. "Oh, bother!" he said, resolutely striking a match at last. "We don't have visitors ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... but a very little house in which the children found themselves; and it took some time for them to make it out, for there was no light but that of a feeble rushlight in a horn lantern, and the faint glow of a peat fire. But after a while they perceived that it was built of sods of turf and lined with heather, neatly fixed into the turf by wooden pegs such as gardeners use; while the ceiling was also of heather, laid crosswise against ashen poles. The fire-place seemed to be built ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... is autumn, it is very warm all through Miss De Grammont's mansion, as she insists on fires, huge bonfires, you may call them, of wood and peat in every room and on every hearth. Out of the fires grew ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... your way in by here." But the bannock was frightened when it heard about the ale, and turned and was off as hard as it could, and the smith after it, and cast the hammer. But it missed, and the bannock was out of sight in a crack, and ran till it came to a farmhouse with a good peat-stack at the end of it. Inside it runs to the fireside. The goodman was cloving lint, and the goodwife heckling. "O Janet," quoth he, "there's a wee bannock; I'll have the ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... little hamlet of Pont-y-fro. Jos Hughes's shop was the very last house in the village, the road beyond it merging into the rushy moor, and dwindling into a stony track, down which a streamlet trickled from the peat bog above. The house had stood in the same place for two hundred years, and Jos Hughes looked as if he too had lived there for the same length of time. His quaintly cut blue cloth coat adorned with large brass buttons, his knee breeches of corduroy, and grey blue stockings, looking well in keeping ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... heather-clad hills which form the broad dividing barrier between England and Scotland, the little river Esk brawls and bickers over its stony bed through a wild land of barren braesides and brown peat mosses, forming altogether some of the gloomiest and most forbidding scenery in the whole expanse of northern Britain. Almost the entire bulk of the counties of Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, and Ayr is composed of just such ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... the traveller enjoys a succession of vast prospects of the vineyard region of the Jura—Aiglepierre, Marnoz, Arbois, &c. After the vines, come the pinewoods and the splendid forest of Joux. After the pinewoods generally come the peat-fields, or tourbieres, of Chaux d'Arlier, traversed by two rivers which here meet, the Doubs and the Drugeon. Lastly, Pontarlier is reached, eight hundred and seventy yards above the level of the sea, anciently a confederation of ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Aptien stage of France. Chalk flints are widely distributed in the drift between Fyvie and the east coast of Buchan. At Plaidy a patch of clay with Liassic fossils occurs. At several localities between Logie Coldstone and Dinnet a deposit of diatomite (Kieselguhr) occurs beneath the peat. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... mountains, with huge masses of rock, which fell down God knows where, sprinkling the ground in every direction, and giving it the aspect of the burial-place of a race of giants. Now and then we passed a hut or two, with neither window nor chimney, and the smoke of the peat fire rolling out at the door. But there were not six of these dwellings in a dozen miles; and anything so bleak and wild, and mighty in its loneliness, as the whole country, it is impossible to conceive. Glencoe itself is perfectly terrible. The pass is an awful place. It is shut in on ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... philosophic eloquences, elegancies; takes you to a Castle of Choczim, a Monastery of Czenstochow, a Bay of Tschesme, and lets off extensive fire-works that contain little or no shot; leads you on trackless marches, inroads or outroads, through the Lithuanian Peat-bogs, on daring adventures and hair-breadth escapes of mere Pulawski, Potocki and the like;—had not got to understand the matter himself, you perceive: how hopeless to make you ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... were profuse. There was a kettle of broth on the peat fire, and after placing the girl in a corner of the settle, she filled three wooden bowls, two of which she placed before Hal and the shepherd, making signs to the heavy-browed Piers to wait; and getting no reply from her worn-out guest, she took her in her arms, and fed her from a wooden spoon. ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... supper when the two brothers were seated before the fire, on which the peat crackled cheerfully, the dogs lying at their feet, and the old woman's black cat sitting gravely with half-shut eyes on the hearth between them, Fergus recovered himself and began to tell ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... this moss was delightful to walk on. So on she went, treading lightly and carefully, finding every step a pure pleasure, till she saw sunlight breaking through the green, and knew that she was coming to the edge of the peat bog. Ah, what memories this place brought to Margaret's mind! She could see her cousin Rita, springing out in merry defiance over the treacherous green meadow; could hear her scream, and see her sinking deep, deep, into the dreadful blackness below. Then, like ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... particularly attractive to those animals," replied Manoel, "but why it is rather embarrassing to say. For instance, is the coloration due to the hydrocarbons which the waters hold in solution, or is it because they flow through districts of peat, coal, and anthracite; or should we not rather attribute it to the enormous quantity of minute plants which they bear along? There is nothing certain in the matter. Under any circumstances, they are excellent ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... hard at him. "What?" said he, "insult old Semmes' liquid music with a hot breath of peat smoke! Never, sir. And consequently I'll take another glimpse at ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... took a mouthful, sir. It tasted of peat: oh! something horrid, sir. The people here call peat turf. Potcheen and strong porter is what they like, sir. I'm sure I don't know how they can stand it. Give me ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... life; the flower-market, where the middleclass people found the cheap floral decorations for their often gloomy interiors: the meat-market in the Nes: the Monday's market, on the Singel, of small furniture and kitchen-utensils: the vegetable- and peat-market on the Prinsengracht, etc. That all good housewives, even those of middle and upper classes, made it a rule to frequent these markets is revealed to us not only by contemporary pictures but also by a passage in one of Huygens's letters to the Prince of Orange, in which this refined ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... Palisades on the Hudson; the highlands of the Mull of Cantire were on the opposite side of the Channel, and the wind being ahead, we tacked from shore to shore, running so near the Irish coast, that we could see the little thatched huts, stacks of peat, and even rows of potatoes in the fields. It was a panorama: the view extended for miles inland, and the fields of different colored grain were spread out before us, a brilliant mosaic. Towards evening we passed Ailsa Crag, the sea-bird's home, within sight, though about ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... Parliament for the county of—, and a nephew of the laird's younger brother, worthy Lord Bladderskate, whilk ye are aware sounds as like being akin to a peatship [Formerly, a lawyer, supposed to be under the peculiar patronage of any particular judge, was invidiously termed his PEAT or PET.] and a sheriffdom, as a sieve is sib to a riddle. Now, Peter Drudgeit, my lord's clerk, came to me this morning in the House, like ane bereft of his wits; for it seems that young Dumtoustie is ane of the Poor's lawyers, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... windy days Cry up amang the peat Whaur, on the road that speels the braes, I've heard my ain sheep's feet, An' the bonnie lambs wi' their canny ways An' the silly yowes ...
— Songs of Angus and More Songs of Angus • Violet Jacob
... years, during which he lived at Stirling, and travelled to and from his work. He was succeeded in 1738 by his son, who became Sir William Moncrieff Wellwood. In that year the old kirk was burned in rather curious circumstances. The kirk was being used as the parish school, and was heated by a peat fire. In the master's absence one day the boys amused themselves by throwing about the lighted peats. The kirk caught fire, and was burned to the ground. Sir Henry Moncrieff succeeded his father in 1771, the sixth minister of the family in a lineal descent. He had not finished his University ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... were unkind ones who did not hesitate to hint that he had only been over to Ireland working in a peat-bog, and that his knowledge of Brazil was gotten ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... and here, around him, seemed to be the walls of the old fashioned little room at Borvabost, with its big shells, its peacocks' feathers, its skins and stuffed fish, and masses of crimson bell-heather. Was there not, too, an odor of peat-smoke in the air?—and then his eye caught sight of the plate that still stood on the window-sill, with the ashes of the burned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... it is filled, have formed in the several valleys a great variety of swamps, where the Indian grass and the blue bent, peculiar to such soils, grow with tolerable luxuriancy. Some of the swamps abound with peat, which serves the poor instead of firewood. There are fourteen ponds on this island, all extremely useful, some lying transversely, almost across it, which greatly helps to divide it into partitions for the ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... the lee of a tent, for there they swarm and are as vigorous in their attacks as during a calm. The men wear mosquito-net hoods over their heads and shoulders while in camp or hunting, and women and children live in the smoke of their smouldering peat fires. ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... sacred to Men Scryfa. At the center, above a land almost barren save for stunted heath and wind-beaten fern it rose—a tall stone of rough and irregular shape. The bare black earth, in which shone quartz crystals, stretched at hand in squares. From these raw spaces, peat had been cut, to be subsequently burned for manure; and it stood hard by stacked in a row of beat-burrows or little piles of overlapping pieces, the cut side out. Near the famous old stone itself, surmounting a barrow-like tumulus, grew stunted bracken; and here Joan presently sat down full of happiness ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... not know why these subjects should be forbidden, but she was in a strange land and going to see strange people, whose habits were different from hers. Moreover, when her husband had gone she reflected that these people, having no fishing and no peat-mosses and no wild-duck, could not possibly be interested in such affairs; and thus she fancied she perceived the reason why she should avoid all mention of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... day is coming when coal, instead of being carried by rail to distant works and cities, will be burned at the pit mouth, and its heat transformed by means of engines and dynamos into electricity for distribution to the surrounding country. I have shown elsewhere that peat can be utilised in a similar manner, and how the great Bog of Allen is virtually a neglected gold field in the heart of Ireland. [Footnote: The Nineteenth Century for December 1894.] The sunshine of deserts, and ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... After poring over his big book, he told his distracted client to find a black hen without a single feather of any other colour. This she was to bake (not living, but dead, as appears by the sequel) before a fire of wood (not, as usual, of peat), with feathers and all intact. Every window and opening was to be closed, except one—presumably the chimney; and she was not to watch the crimbil, or changeling, until the hen had been done enough, which she would know by the falling off of all her feathers. The more knowing woman, in an ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... in two, making each occupant as private as if in a separate room, with a dressing-table and ample washing conveniences on each side. A large grate filled with turf, and all ready for lighting, with a peat basket lined with tin, and also filled with the same fuel, reminded us strongly that we were in Ireland. Large wax candles were on the mantelpiece, and every convenience ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... magic moorland with wild winds drifting by, And pools among the peat-hags that mirror back the sky; And there in golden bracken the fronds that toss and turn Are really little ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... the gold-mines of finance and that political slaughter of fat oxen whereby a man himself grows fat, they were apt to run goose-hunting into regions of bilberries and crowberries, and be swallowed up at last in remote peat-bogs. Of that unwise science, which, as ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... to find a neatly, though plainly, furnished room, which was evidently the kitchen of the house—indeed, the sole room, with the exception of an off-shoot closet. The large open fireplace contained a peat fire on the hearth, over which hung a bubbling pot. There were two box-beds opposite the fire, and in the wall which faced the door there was a very small window, containing four panes of glass, each of which had a knot in the ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... possession, and to set before his guests a muttonham and a bottle of that drink which they call Athole brose. The two enemies were still on the very breach of a quarrel; but down they sat, one upon each side of the peat fire, with a mighty show of politeness. Maclaren pressed them to taste his muttonham and "the wife's brose," reminding them the wife was out of Athole and had a name far and wide for her skill in that confection. But Robin put aside these ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... was exercised. All vessels entering port were strictly examined, and there was a guard house on the quay. Lying by one of the wharves was a large boat laden with peat, which was being rapidly unloaded, the peat being sold as soon as landed, as fuel was ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... (whilome study) that is to us highly refreshing, and good against fainting; and we make tours in search of the picturesque, climbing over stone walls, and what not, to gain some hill-top whence we may see the sun set or the moon rise, haply getting soused in a peat-drain for our pains—and we pencil sketches from nature, really very like; and the blue mountains, the solemn sunsets, and purple shadows among the woods, or falling on the tawny sands, girdling the sea, whose blue-gray ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... he had ten going pleas before the Session, eight of them oppressive. And the same doom extended even to his agents; his grieve, that had been his right hand in many a left-hand business, being cast from his horse one night and drowned in a peat-hag on the Kye-skairs; and his very doer (although lawyers have long spoons) surviving him not long, and dying on a sudden ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... display of his acquaintance with Mrs. Needham and herself, this epistle made no impression on Katherine, who was glad to have an unusual amount of work for Mrs. Needham, who had started—or rather promised her assistance in starting—a new scheme for extracting wax candle out of peat. Respecting this she was immensely sanguine, for the first time in her life she was to be properly remunerated for her trouble, and in a year or ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... and children, dogs, ducks, and a donkey, are frequently crowded together in these miserable cabins, the like of which on any English estate would bring down a torrent of indignation on the landlord. They are all of one pattern, wretchedly thatched, but with stout stone walls, and are, when a big peat fire is burning, hot almost to suffocation. When it is possible to distinguish the pattern of the bed-curtains through the dirt, they are seen to be of the familiar blue and white checked pattern made familiar to London ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... principle in grafting trees is to regulate the moisture and the temperature factors. As a means of regulating the moisture I use German peat around the graft. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... in Ireland, at least amongst their own class. But behind them, and I should say in unpleasant proximity (for the peasantry do not carry handkerchiefs scented with White Rose or Jockey Club,—only the odor of the peat and the bogwood), surged a vast crowd of men and women, on whose lips and in whose hearts was a prayer for her who was entering on the momentous change in her sweet and tranquil life. And young Patsies and Willies and Jameses were locked ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... solution? This question I will, in conclusion, try to answer. Bone charcoal, or bone black, has a wonderful attraction for many organic matters such as colours, dyes, and coloured impurities like those in peat water, raw sugar solutions, etc. For example, if we place on a paper filter some bone black, and filter through it some indigo solution, after first warming the latter with some more of the bone black, the liquid comes through clear, all the indigo being absorbed in some peculiar way, ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... of Glaston was really of wattle is more than probable, for the remains of British buildings thus constructed have been found abundantly in the neighbouring peat. The Arimathaean theory of its consecration became so generally accepted that at the Council of Constance (1419) precedence was actually accorded to our Bishops as representing the senior Church of Christendom. But the oldest ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... anti-quagmire operations and strong pile-drivings, he finds half a furlong of his latest heavy piling clean gone. What in the world has become of it? Pooh, the swollen lake has burst it topsy-turvy; and it floats yonder, bottom uppermost, a half-furlong of distracted liquid-peat. Whereat his Majesty gave a loud laugh, says Bielfeld, [Baron de Bielfeld, Lettres Familieres (second edition, a Leide, 1767), i. 31.] and commenced anew. The piles now stand firm enough, like the rest ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... like a large collection of farm out-buildings without a farm-house. Muddy little lanes intersecting each other at every possible angle; rickety little cottages turned about to all the points of the compass; ducks, geese, cocks, hens, pigs, cows, horses, dunghills, puddles, sheds, peat-stacks, timber, nets, seemed to be all indiscriminately huddled together where there was little or no room for them. To find the inn amid this confusion of animate and inanimate objects, was no easy matter; and when we at length discovered it, pushed our way through ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... close valley, which is watered by a beck or burn, known as the Dryhope Burn. It is deeply buried in the hills. Spurs of the Cheviots as these are, they rise to a considerable elevation, but are pasturable nearly to the top. There, however, where the heather begins, peat-hags and morasses make dangerous provision, from which the flocks are carefully guarded. It is the practice of the country for the shepherds to be within touch of them all night, lest some, feeding upward (as sheep always do) should reach the summits and be lost or mired inextricably. ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... precipitous peat track brought us down to our friend's house.—Another fine moonlight night; but a thick fog rising from the neighbouring river, enveloped the rocky and wood-crested knoll on which our fancy cottage had been erected; and, under the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... getting lodgings in one of the cottages. As he put it, there was no joke in sleeping in a room with a numerous family of healthy Irish in one corner and the pigsty in the other, while overhead a ragged colony of roosting fowls distributed their blessings impartially, and the whole place so full of peat smoke that it made a fellow sneeze his head off just to put it inside ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... at least beside the chair drawn up to a fire of peat that perfumed the apartment lay a book upon a table, and it was characteristic of the Count, who loved books as he loved sport, and Villon above all, that he should strain his eyes a little and tilt his head slightly to see what ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... no longer spoke to a lawyer named Peat; to which he replied, "I choose to give up his acquaintance—I have common of turbary, and have a right to cut peat!" An impromptu of his on a learned serjeant who was holding the Court of Common Pleas with his glittering eye, is ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... raised there till you can't rest—and corn, and all that sort of thing. Then you've got a little stretch along through Belshazzar that don't produce anything now—at least nothing but rocks—but irrigation will fetch it. Then from Catfish to Babylon it's a little swampy, but there's dead loads of peat down under there somewhere. Next is the Bloody Run and Hail Columbia country—tobacco enough can be raised there to support two such railroads. Next is the sassparilla region. I reckon there's enough of that truck along in there on the line of the ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... the little party of engineers charged with the task of blowing in the gate started forward on the hazardous errand. Captain Peat of the Bombay Engineers was in command. Durand, a young lieutenant of Bengal Engineers, who was later to attain high distinction, was entrusted with the service of heading the explosion party. The latter, leading the party, had advanced unmolested to within ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... were somewhat shy, Coming when none but Knott was nigh, And people said 'twas all their eye, (Or rather his) a flam, the sly Digestion's machination: Some recommended a wet sheet, Some a nice broth of pounded peat, Some a cold flat-iron to the feet, Some a decoction of lamb's-bleat, Some a southwesterly grain of wheat; 310 Meat was by some pronounced unmeet, Others thought fish most indiscreet, And that 'twas worse ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... done and will do, and still she waited, doing absolutely nothing and with no excuse for loitering in the hotel with its long broad verandah; learning much of the city's history from the charming manager who walks with a stick, and has the blue-green-brown shadow of the peat ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... of Ammoniacal Products; Human Urine as a Source of Ammonia — Extraction of Ammoniacal Products from Sewage — Extraction of Ammonia from Gas Liquor — Manufacture of Ammoniacal Compounds from Bones, Nitrogenous Waste, Beetroot Wash and Peat — Manufacture of Caustic Ammonia, and Ammonium Chloride, Phosphate and Carbonate — Recovery of Ammonia from the Ammonia-Soda ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... mind—never mind—there's a gentleman that will tell you, that just when I had ga'en up to Lourie Lowther's, and had bidden the drinking of twa cheerers, and gotten just in again upon the moss, and was whigging cannily [*Cautiously] awa hame, twa land-loupers jumpit out of a peat-bog on me as I was thinking, and got me down, and knevelled [*Beat] me sair aneuch, or I could gar my whip walk about their lugs—and troth, gudewife, if this honest gentleman hadna come up, I would have gotten mair licks than I like, and lost mair siller than I could weel spare; so ye maun be ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... that woman cooking over there," said Mr. Strong, as they went up to a woman who was cooking over a peat fire, holding over the coals an old battered skillet in which she was frying fish. She nodded and smiled at the boys, and, as Esquimos are always friendly and hospitable souls, told them to go right into her iglu, which ...
— Kalitan, Our Little Alaskan Cousin • Mary F. Nixon-Roulet
... dark the air turned very chill, and snow began to fall thick and fast. Malcolm laid a few sticks on the smouldering peat-fire, but they were damp and did not catch. All at once the laird gave a shriek, and crying out, "Mither! mither!" fell into a fit so violent that the heavy bed shook with his convulsions. Malcolm held his wrists and called aloud. No one came, and, bethinking himself ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... low valley and through a belt of fan-palms and jungle bordering an ever-flowering stream the banks of which are knee-deep in fat, rich loam. Huge tea-trees stand in the water, where the fibrous roots are matted like peat. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... captain up into the hills to hold a meeting out of the reach of persecuting troopers. We know that battle may follow prayer; and as we believe that in the worst issue of battle heaven must be our reward, we are ready and willing to redden the peat-moss with our blood. That music stirs my soul; it wakens all my life; it makes my heart beat—not with its temperate daily pulse, but with a new, thrilling vigour. I almost long for danger—for a faith, a land, or at least a lover ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... for those who have eaten oatmeal porridge in the wayside cottages of bonny Scotland, or who love to linger over "The Cotter's Saturday Night," there is a touch of tender pathos in the picture. The stone floor, the bare, whitewashed walls, the peat smoldering on the hearth, sending out long, fitful streaks that dance among the rafters overhead, and the mother and son sitting there watching the coal—silent. The woman takes a small twig from a bundle of sticks, reaches over, lights it, applies it to her pipe, takes a few whiffs and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... often very beautiful, and of imposing form. One of the finest we have seen belonged to the Rev. H. B. Hutchings, of Appleshaw, Hants,[100-*] and was found in a meadow at Bosington, near Stockbridge, in the same county, by a labourer who saw it among a heap of peat. We give a side and front view of this interesting relic; the whole is of gold, and is of considerable weight and thickness; the gold threads are all beautifully reeded, and the lettering and head executed with great care. The inscription reads—NOMEN EHLLA FID IN XPO, equivalent to its owner ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... with a handy and cheap fuel, I doubt that these little bogs are any detriment to the country. Some of them have been made to take on a soil (by draining, cutting, drying and burning the upper strata of peat, and spreading the ashes over the entire surface), and are now quite productive.—Drainage and ridging are almost universally resorted to, showing the extraordinary humidity of the atmosphere. The Potato is now generally in blossom, and, having a large breadth of the land, and ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... foot, I'm sure and steady ...' She pricked her ears, then set them back; And like a shot was out of sight: And, with a happy heart and light, As quickly I was on my feet; And following the way she went, Keen as a lurcher on the scent, Across the heather and the bent, Across the quaking moss and peat. Of course, I lost her soon enough, For moorland tracks are steep and rough; And hares are made of nimbler stuff Than any lad of seventeen, However lanky-legged and tough, However kestrel-eyed and keen: ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... but to the shepherd of the Redswirehead, and I heard it from him in his dwelling, as I stayed the night, belated on the darkening moors. He told me it after supper in a flood of misty Doric, and his voice grew rough at times, and he poked viciously at the dying peat. ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... far as in me lay, I was not found wanting; having taken care to provide a famous Dunlop cheese, at fivepence-halfpenny the pound—I believe I paled fifteen, in Joseph Gowdy's shop, before I fixed on it;—to say nothing of a bottle, or maybe two, of real peat-reek, Farintosh, small-still Hieland whisky—Glenlivat, I think, is the name o't—half a peck of shortbread, baken by Thomas Burlings, with three pounds of butter, and two ounces of carvie-seeds in it, let alone orange-peel, and a pennyworth of ground cinnamon—half a mutchkin of best cony ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... legal assassination more cruel and terrible than if he had, like so many other Irish gentlemen, been shot down upon the public road. The latter terrible fate befell Mr. E. White, of Abbeleix, for asserting his right to some peat land which he had purchased. This circumstance offended the "Ribband" men, who in open day lodged a bullet in his heart, in a populous neighbourhood. The murderers were well known, but the populace sympathised with them. In the north of Ireland ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... patient, gentle-spoken sort of woman, and would bear a good deal from a fellow; but she used to fire up sometimes, and that was more than she could stand. "You don't deserve to be cared about, for speaking like that!" says she, with her cheeks as red as peat-coals. ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... masses of violet cloud stretched across from north to south, and thickening as they got near the horizon. Down at their feet, near the shore, a dusky line of huts and houses was scarcely visible; and over these lay a pale blue film of peat smoke that did not move ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... running with us gave its name. Not a quiet, sluggish river, keeping flat pastures green, reflecting straight lines of pollard willows, and constantly flowing past gay villas and country cottages, but a pretty, brawling river with a stony bed, now yellow with iron, and now brown with peat, for long distances running its solitary race between the hills, but made useful here and there by ugly mills built upon the banks. Sometimes there was a hamlet as well as a mill. Tracts of the neighbouring moorland were enclosed and cultivated, the fields being ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... wet and haggard, looking into the peat fire as if for visions of the past, and never heeding a word Ellis said. Nor did he move when Nest brought ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... I live in a deserted hut of peat into which I must crawl on my hands and knees. Someone must have built it long ago and used it, for lack of a better,—perhaps a man who was in hiding, a man who concealed himself here for a few autumn ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... know what the Ingvorstrup horses were intended for. They were to blind the judge and to lead him aside from the narrow path of righteousness. The rich Morten Bruns covets poor Ole Anderson's peat moor and pasture land. It would have been a good bargain for Morten even at seventy thalers. But no indeed, my good fellow, ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... year at once; besides many other services to be performed at different though regular and stated times; as tanning leather for brogans, making heather ropes for thatch, digging and drying peats for fuel; one pannier of peat charcoal to be carried to the smith; so many days for gathering and shearing sheep and lambs: for ferrying cattle from island to island, and other distant places, and several days for going on distant errands: so many pounds of wool to be spun ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... fashion of wrapping Christmas gifts in white tissue, and the invention of the low-priced cameras have increased enormously the amount of paper called for. In the attempt to supply the demand all sorts of materials have been used, such as hemp, old rope, peat, the stems of flax, straw, the Spanish and African esparto grass, and especially wood; but much more paper is made of wood than of all the rest together. Poplar, gum, and chestnut trees, and especially ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... we had to pass them, so we crawled carefully forward, and made our way close to where one of these objects was standing, and when we thought we were near enough we raised up and took a look. It was a stack of peat piled to just about the size of a man. We had a good laugh, and I assure you we felt very much relieved. We made our way safely across the swamp and had just reached the other side when we heard the hounds. We listened, and noted that the sound came from across the swamp, just the direction ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... life at the cottage, though rugged, was not cheerless. In the long winter evenings they would gather around a smoking fire of peat, while Tennyson read aloud the Idylls of the King to the rude old cottager. Not to show his rudeness, the old man kept awake by sitting on a tin-tack. This also kept his mind on the right tack. The two found that they had much in common, especially the old ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... my eyrie at last, and having laid my flask, tobacco-pouch, and twelve loose cartridges where I could reach them most handily on projecting shelves of peat inside the butt—I love neatness and method: Kitty says that when (if ever) I get to heaven I will decline to enter until I have wiped my boots,—settled down to enjoy a superb view and take note of the not altogether uninteresting ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... inhabitants, and understand something of their manners of life and customs. Their rude abodes had probably cone-shaped roofs made of rafters lashed together at the centre, protected by an outside coat of peat, sods of turf, or rushes. The spindle-whorl is evidence that they could spin thread; the mealing stones show that they knew how to cultivate corn; and the bones of the animals found in their dwellings testify ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... made a bright peat fire, which all the children gathered round, expecting every minute to hear their parents' voices at the door. But it began to get dark and late, and still they did not come. Agnes had often heard of the dangers of snow among the hills, and she soon got uneasy. Her little brothers were afraid ...
— The Old Castle and Other Stories • Anonymous
... square of the window and a red light in the oblong of the grate. A small boy with a toasting-fork knelt by the hearth. You disentangled a smell of stewed tea and browning toast from thick, deep smells of peat smoke and the sweat drying on Ned's shirt. When Farmer Alderson got up you saw the round table, the coarse blue-grey teacups and the brown glazed teapot ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... to the wail of an old Irish peasant in Kerry, Robert Blatchford asked him what he wanted. "The old man leaned upon his spade and looked out across the black peat fields at the lowering skies. 'What is it that I'm wantun?' he said; then in a deep plaintive tone he continued, more to himself than to me, 'All our brave bhoys and dear gurrls is away an' over the says, an' the agent has taken the pig off me, an' the wet has ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... the next room, the housekeeper's room—very comfortable, yak (oak) all round—there was a fine fire blazin' away, wi' coal, and peat, and wood, all in a low together, and tea on the table, and hot cake, and smokin' meat; and there was Mrs. Wyvern, fat, jolly, and talkin' away, more in an hour than my aunt would in ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... all these monuments, everywhere so much like each other in their massive form and dimensions, everywhere so like in their utter mystery. Round the lakes of Erne there are wide expanses of peat, dug as fuel for centuries, and in many places as much as twelve feet deep, on a bed of clay, the waste of old glaciers. Though formed with incredible slowness, this whole mass of peat has grown since some ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... the sea. At the mouth of the Igarape Grande, both at Soure and at Salvaterra, on the southern side of the Igarape, is a submerged forest. Evidently this forest grew in one of those marshy lands constantly inundated, for between the stumps is accumulated the loose, felt-like peat characteristic of such grounds, and containing about as much mud as vegetable matter. Such a marshy forest, with the stumps of the trees still standing erect in the peat, has been laid bare on both sides of the Igarape Grande by the encroachments ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... muffin is quite hot," said Fanny, stooping down to a tray which stood before the peat fire, holding the muffin dish. "But perhaps you'd like a morsel of buttered toast; say the word, uncle, and I'll make it in a ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... change of feature. The gloaming bad darkened, and the little small-paned window was a fretted sheet of dark and lucent blue. Grateful odours of food and drink and tobacco hung in the air, though tar and homespun and the far-carried fragrance of peat fought stoutly for ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... he, "I'll be earlier at my work to-morrow if I sleep comfortably on the sheltery side of a pile of dry peat on dry grass, and not be coming here and going back. So you may as well give me my supper, and be done with the day's trouble." She gave him that, thinking he'd take it to the bog; but he fell to on the spot, and did not leave ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... and from the remains of art found in them. This is often a perplexing, always an arduous task; much more so is it to decipher the earth's history."[363] "The canoes, for example, and stone hatchets found in our peat bogs afford an insight into the rude arts and manners of the earliest inhabitants of our island; the buried coin fixes the date of some Roman emperor; the ancient encampments indicate the districts once occupied ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... sea. He could not help springing up at the sight—pale, leaden, and misty as it was; and though Markham forthwith rebuked him for not listening, his heart was still beating as at the first sight of a dear old friend, when that peep was far behind. More black heaths, with stacks of peat and withered ferns. Guy was straining his eyes far off in the darkness to look for the smoke of the old keeper's cottage chimney, and could with difficulty refrain from interrupting Markham to ask after ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... efer seen der peat uf dot!" gasped Hans, his eyes bulging. "Uf dot don't peen a recular fight, I ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... the Irish hearth with peat There lives a subtle spell— The faint blue smoke, the gentle ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... white man and an Indian, I start on a climb to the summit of the Paunsa'gunt Plateau, which rises above us on the east. Our way for a mile or more is over a great peat bog, which trembles under our feet, and now and then a mule sinks through the broken turf and we are compelled to pull it out with ropes. Passing the bog, our way is up a gulch at the foot of the Pink Cliffs, ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... grew sae grit, That the ne'er a bit o't he dought to eat— Then was he aware of an auld peat-house, Where a' the night he ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... the noticeable dark blue eyes that twinkled merrily, yet with something gloomy in their darkness, as of hyacinths in a woodland glade, drifting and smoky, like the kind of smoke that comes from weed-burning or a peat-fire lit ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... Mr. Bronte's studio was the kitchen; and there we may easily picture the Bronte children telling stories to Tabby or Martha, or to whatever servant reigned at the time, and learning, as all of them did, to become thoroughly domesticated—Emily most of all. Behind the dining-room was a peat-room, which, when Charlotte was married in 1854, was cleared out and converted into a little study for Mr. Nicholls. The staircase with its solid banister remains as it did half a century ago; and at its foot one ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... depended in chains some eight or ten bodies, from several of which the cere-clothes had dropped away, leaving the skeletons swinging lightly by their chains. A tall ladder reached to the summit of the structure, and on the peat beneath ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... which a very rocky creek going down to Snowdrop's Creek, intercepted our course. Having crossed it with great difficulty, we travelled through a scrubby forest, and came to the heads of the same creek, several of which were formed by swamps. Here the drooping tea-tree, growing in a sandy peat, attained a stately height. The sandy slopes around the swamps were covered with Banksia, the Melaleuca gum, and Pandanus, and a rich profusion of grasses and low sedges surrounded the deep pools of spring water. These spots, ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... was of wood and peat, though coal was also used. For artificial lighting oil-lamps (wicks in oil) and candles were used. A light was obtained from flint and tinder, the latter being ignited by a spark got from striking the flint ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... two foot stoves. They consisted of small, square boxes, with holes bored in the top, and a little fire of peat in an earthen vessel within. Rollo asked Mr. George to give him two sheets of thin note paper, and he established himself at a window that looked out upon a canal. He intended to amuse himself in the intervals of his writing ...
— Rollo in Holland • Jacob Abbott
... 'hellish.' Fas est ab hoste doceri— disrespect is made more pungent by quotation; and there is no doubt but he felt relieved, and went upstairs into his tutor's chamber with a quiet mind. M'Brair sat by the cheek of the peat-fire and shivered, for he had a quartan ague and this was his day. The great night-cap and plaid, the dark unshaven cheeks of the man, and the white, thin hands that held the plaid about his chittering body, made a sorrowful picture. But Francie knew and loved him; came straight ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... appropriate thing when he gave her that name. For she is of her country, and more, of her county. She has the love of it in her bones. I do not think that she could be quite happy in India, or indeed in any place which was not within reach of Donegal, the smell of its peat, its streams, and the brown friendliness of its hills. One has to ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... Cobley broke her sad tale to her son, while he sat and sucked his pipe and listened on a winter evening, with the wind puffing the peat smoke from the fire into ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... the door was the sign "Water en vuur te koop."[1] It was not necessary for the children to go inside. They could see the whole apartment through the wide-open door-way. An old woman stood by a stove, or great oven, with a pair of tongs, taking up pieces of burning peat and dropping them into the buckets of the children, and then filling their tea-kettles with boiling water from great copper tanks on the stove. For this each child paid her a Dutch cent, which is less than half of one ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... repositories of this knowledge leads sometimes into strange contrasts. One friend of mine lay stretched for long hours on top of a roof of sticks and peat-scraws which was propped against the wall of a ruined cabin, while within the evicted tenant, still clinging to his home as life clings to the shattered body, lay bedridden on a lair of rushes, and chanted the deeds of heroes; his voice issuing through the vent ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... the Common, but he felt deeply that it was pure dog-in-the-mangerism of the cottagers, and this he could not stand. Not one beast in two years had fattened on its barrenness. Three old donkeys alone eked out the remnants of their days. A bundle of firewood or old bracken, a few peat sods from one especial corner, were all the selfish peasants gathered. But the cottagers were no great matter—he could soon have settled them; it was that fellow Peacock whom he could not settle, just because he happened to abut on the Common, and his fathers had been nasty before ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... be a good loam with a little peat, and stones varying in size from a mustard seed to an almond. A little manure may be used, but it must ...
— Making A Rock Garden • Henry Sherman Adams
... old-fashioned way and until recently the dyestuffs were obtained from mosses, lichens, heather, broom, and other plants. Now, however, some of the best aniline dyes are being used. A peculiar characteristic of the Harris tweed is the peat smoke smell caused by the fabric being woven in the crofters' cottages, where there is always a strong odor of peat "reek" from the peat which is burned for fuel. The ordinary so-called Harris tweeds sold in ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... innocent of bars and bolts. The ford, known to so few, and the evil name of the Wolf, served instead. The door opened at a push, and Marcos went in. A wood-fire smouldered on an open hearth, while the acrid smoke half-filled the room, blackened by the fumes of peat and charcoal. ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... the villages saying: "Ge's a peat t' burn the witches." They were thought to be out stealing milk and harming cattle. Torches used to counteract them were carried from west to east, against the sun. This ceremony grew into a game, when a fire was built by one party, attacked by another, and defended. ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... certainly had not its old sense of 'assets'), and in May 1813, Scott seems to have thought that if John Ballantyne would curb his taste for long-dated bills, things might go well. Unluckily, John did not choose to do so, and Scott, despite the warning, was equally unable to curb his own for peat-bogs, marl-pits, the Cauldshiels Loch, and splendid lots of ancient armour. By July there was again trouble, and in August things were so bad that they were only cleared by Scott's obtaining from the Duke of Buccleuch a guarantee for L4000. It was in consenting ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... in language, crafty in purpose, really, an overture for the hand of Marget Forbes, and I sat far into the night, while my peat fire died out in Corgarff Castle, wondering how I was to answer it, and, even more, how I myself stood towards the acute personal situation which it created. For I saw that the Black Colonel meant to make love and do business ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... Helier, Jersey, and carried their borings down to bed rock at about thirty feet, which roughly coincides with the present mean sea-level. The modern meadow-soil went down about five feet. Then came a bed of moss-peat, one to three feet thick. There had been a bog here at a time which, to judge by similar finds in other places, was just before the beginning of the bronze-age. Underneath the moss-peat came two or three feet of silt with sea-shells in it. Clearly the island of Jersey underwent ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... naked, appreciative eyes; they had come with microscopes to the study of Burns. Far more interesting material awaited them farther on: The Poet's Welcome, for example! They could amplify that. Here, too, is the first hint of Burns's brilliant powers as a talker; a glimpse on this lonely peat moss of the man who, not many years afterwards, was to dazzle literary Edinburgh with the sparkle and force of ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... Perhaps it was because I was tired: the office faded away, desk, Headquarters across the street, boy, officer, business, and all. In their place were the brown heath I loved, the distant hills, the winding wagon track, the peat stacks, and the solitary sheep browsing on the barrows. Forgotten the thirty years, the seas that rolled between, the teeming city! I was at home again, a child. And there he stood, the boy, with it all in his dull, absent look. I read it now as ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... the soil was found upon the sides of sloping hills, and in the broad valleys between them. Some parts that were low and level had a wet and peat-like surface, bounded by small tracts of flowering shrubs and odoriferous plants, that perfumed the air with the fragrance of their oils.* These retained in general the appearance of those in New South Wales, while they were in reality very different. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... choose my own. I'm American and American born. I'd rather be bossed by a silk tile and kid gloves than by a Tipperary hat and a shillalah, with a damned three-cornered shamrock riding the necks of both. It's a pretty pass we've come to if we've got to go to Irish peat-bogs and Russian snow-banks to find them as will tell us our rights and how to get them, and then import dagoes with rings in their ears and Hungarians with spikes in their shoes to back us up. Let me talk a bit! I get my seventy-five ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... unintermitted hollow blowing of the wind (according to the weather) are equally mournful. The rotten soil is cleft and torn into gulleys and small channels, in which the mahogany-coloured rivulets, springing from the peat morass, straggle silently with a sluggish motion in harmony with the lifeless scene. There, if a weedy-roofed hut do appear, (detected by its thin feeble smoke column) or the shepherd who tenants it should show his solitary figure in the distance, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... tears and take comfort," said the tall lady in the green peaked hat. "Here is money enough to pay your rent and buy another cow." With that, she sat down at the round table near the peat fire. Opening her bag, the shining gold coins slid out and formed a little heap on ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... the fresh heather, as I have done many a night on less occasion," said Roland Graeme, "than in the smoky garret of your father, that smells of peat smoke and ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... want to have anything to do with Herman Kreder and his dirty stingy parents. The old Kreders were to an Irish nature, a stingy, dirty couple. They had not the free-hearted, thoughtless, fighting, mud bespattered, ragged, peat-smoked cabin dirt that irish Mary knew and could forgive and love. Theirs was the german dirt of saving, of being dowdy and loose and foul in your clothes so as to save them and yourself in washing, having your hair greasy to save it in the ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... were absorbed, it might be expected that vegetation would be most luxuriant on soils containing abundance of that substance, especially if it existed in a soluble and readily absorbable form; but so far from this being the case, nothing is more certain than that peat, in which these conditions are fulfilled, is positively injurious to most plants. On the other hand, our daily experience affords innumerable examples of plants growing luxuriantly in soils and places where no humus exists. The sands of the sea-shore, and the most barren rocks, have their vegetation, ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... scent of the pine-trees especially, and of all the earth, the tinkling jangle of the harness as you pass the trees on the roadside, the life of the horses, the glitter and the shadow, the cottages and the roses and the rosy faces, the scent of burning wood or peat from the chimneys, these and a thousand other things combine to make such a journey delightful. But I believe it needs something more than this—something even closer to the human life—to account for the pleasure that motion gives us. I suspect it is its living symbolism; the hidden relations which ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... Hafodgarreg was shepherding his father's flock on the hills, and whilst thus engaged, he, one misty morning, came suddenly upon a lovely girl, seated on the sheltered side of a peat-stack. The maiden appeared to be in great distress, and she was crying bitterly. The young man went up to her, and spoke kindly to her, and his attention and sympathy were not without effect on the ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... F, for cutting the material into suitable lengths in a peat machine having a continuous discharge from the ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... said, extending my slipper toe to the glowing peat, which by extraordinary effort had been brought up from the hotel kitchen, as a bit of local colour, "it is ridiculous that we three women should be in Ireland together; it's the sort of thing that ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... all women and all wise in the art of reading the days to come. It was supposed that she had come from Iceland, but nobody remembered to have brought her, nor knew of her origin. In these days she lived by herself in a hut of the Settlement at the Ness, and crouched over a peat fire all the winter, singing songs to herself which nobody could understand. In the summer she was often seen about among the pastures below the hills, but always by herself. When she was asked she might go out and show ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... Stranger this poorly dressed lass who boils the potatoes over the rude peat fire, and croons her songs of suffering and of the cruel drowning in the seas, so that from hut to hut they carry her songs, and the old wives' tears start afresh to think of their brave sons ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... Thames and Kennet sizes, seem the only attractive baits: and for this reason, that they are the flies of the place. The cinnamon Phryganea comes up abundantly from among the stones; and the large peat moss to the west of the tarn abounds, as usual, in house-flies and bluebottles, and in the caterpillars of the fox and oak-egger moths: another proof that the most attractive flies are imitations of ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... is inconclusive, being a happy recollection that he had omitted any reference to stoofjes, the footstools filled with burning peat which are used to keep the feet warm in church. Such a custom was of course not less reprehensible than the building of dykes to keep out the sea. Hence these eight lines, which, however, would have come better ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... Jersey, Grand Lake, Nova Scotia, and in New Brunswick. Several new stations for the curly grass have recently been discovered in the southwest counties of Nova Scotia by the Gray Herbarium expedition, mostly in bogs and hollows of sandy peat or sphagnum. ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... are more than a relief. Observe my Oncidium. It stands in a pot, but this is only for convenience—a receptacle filled with moss. The long stem feathered with great blossoms springs from a bare slab of wood. No mould nor peat surrounds it; there is absolutely nothing save the roots that twine round their support, and the wire that sustains it in the air. It asks no attention beyond its daily bath. From the day I tied it on that block last year—reft from ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... of cottages capped with thatch strewn with tufts of sengreen and clumps of moss. In the open fields, under the shadow of high ricks, he would lie, listening to the hollow splashing of the mills and inhaling the fresh breeze from Voulzie. Sometimes he went as far as the peat-bogs, to the green and black hamlet of Longueville, or climbed wind-swept hillsides affording magnificent views. There, below to one side, as far as the eye could reach, lay the Seine valley, blending in the distance with the blue sky; high up, near the horizon, on the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... blindfold, and you might cross Sutton Heath a dozen times without meeting anything but a wheelbarrow-full of peat." ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge |
