"Reedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to strip off and swim about the floating garden resting on its bosom, and I was just about to undress when I heard a shot quite near. The moment after, I fired in return, and gave a loud hail; then the high reedy cane grass on the other side parted, and a man and a woman came out, stared at me, and then laughed in welcome. They were one Nalik and his wife, people living in my own village. The man carried a long single-barrelled German shot-gun, the woman a basket of ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... the fair, the reedy Cnidos Hauntest, Amathus and the lawny Golgi, Or Dyrrhachium, ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... of open grassy meadows that are dotted with clumps of rounded trees, as in an English park. Now it narrows to a deep and sinuous bed, through alders so rank and reaching that they meet overhead and form a shade of golden green; and again it widens out into reedy lakes, the summer home of countless Ducks, Geese, Tattlers Terns, Peetweets, Gulls, Rails, Blackbirds, and half a hundred of the lesser tribes. Sometimes the foreground is rounded masses of kinnikinnik in snowy flower, or again a far-strung growth of the needle bloom, ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... cried Nell, rapturously, as one moment we caught the glitter of a distant lake, the next the twinkle of a reedy pool overhung with ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... miles above Tientsin.—September 10th.—Two P.M.—This morning we started at about five, and reached this encampment soon after seven. A very nice ride, cool, and through a succession of crops of millet; a stiff, reedy stem, some twelve or fourteen feet high, with a tuft on the top, is the physiognomy of the millet stalk. It would puzzle the Tartar cavalry to charge us through this crop. As it is, we have seen no enemy; and Mr. Parkes has induced the inhabitants to sell us a good many sheep and oxen. ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... remember their faces and they ours. In a moment they came tottering in; he, bent and withered and bald; she, blooming with wholesome old age. He peered through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice, "Come to my arms! Away with titles—I'll know ye by no names but Twain and Twichell!" Then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear, the which we filled with shoutings to this effect: "God bless you, old Howells, what is left ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the strond of Dardan, where they fought, To Simois' reedy banks, the red blood ran; Whose waves to imitate the battle sought, With swelling ridges; and their ranks began To break upon the galled shore, and then Retire again, till, meeting greater ranks, They join, and shoot their ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... and towers, and for many miles you see the magnificent Tagus, rolling by banks crowned with trees and towers. But to arrive at this enormous building you have to climb a steep suburb of wretched huts, many of them with dismal gardens of dry cracked earth, where a few reedy sprouts of Indian corn seemed to be the chief cultivation, and which were guarded by huge plants of spiky aloes, on which the rags of the proprietors of the huts were sunning themselves. The terrace before the palace was similarly ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... afterwards they should be called—which grew low along the sand like brambles, the boughs curiously twisted, the foliage compact, like thatch. The thicket stretched down from the top of one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage. The marsh was steaming in the strong sun, and the outline of the Spy-glass trembled through ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lunatic? Have you made your will, hey?' 'Oh,' I retorted, 'If you've bought the road, or the earth, I'll get off it, of course. I should have said you were the escaped lunatic going along at that pace.' He laughed, a high, reedy cackle that seemed familiar, rose stiffly out of his place and stepped down as though he had cramp. 'Ouch!' he said, bending and straightening to unlimber himself. 'Where are we, hey? Barnet? Taking an evening stroll after the office?' And ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... coming up again far off, just where one did not expect her. She would have been in the lake of a night too, if she could have had her way; for the balcony of her window overhung a deep pool in it; and through a shallow reedy passage she could have swum out into the wide wet water, and no one would have been any the wiser. Indeed when she happened to wake in the moonlight, she could hardly resist the temptation. But there was the sad difficulty of getting into it. She ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... and no red in the west remained, neither were stars forthcoming, suddenly a wailing voice rose along the valleys, and a sound in the air, as of people running. It mattered not whether you stood on the moor, or crouched behind rocks away from it, or down among reedy places; all as one the sound would come, now from the heart of the earth beneath, now overhead bearing down on you. And then there was rushing of something by, and melancholy laughter, and the hair of a man would stand on end before ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... not know what were the visions of this rude and ardent saint, as he paced the low heights day by day, looking over the monstrous lakes. At night no doubt he heard the cries of the marsh-fowl and saw the elfin lights stir on the reedy flats. Perhaps some touch of fever kindled his visions; but he raised a tiny shrine here, and here he laid his bones; and long after, when the monks grew rich, they raised a great church here to the memory of the ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and vest, by horse and crest, Each warlike Lucumo. There Cilnius of Arretium On his fleet roan was seen; And Astur of the fourfold shield, Girt with the brand none else may wield, Tolumnius with the belt of gold, And dark Verbenna from the hold By reedy Thrasymene. ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... or five feet high,) is still handsomer and of more vivid colors than its congeners, and might well have caught the Indian's eye. It has a long, narrow, one-sided, and slightly nodding panicle of bright purple and yellow flowers, like a banner raised above its reedy leaves. These bright standards are now advanced on the distant hill-sides, not in large armies, but in scattered troops or single file, like the red men. They stand thus fair and bright, representative of the race which they are named after, but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... three-cornered shaft, and so gain experience. This we bottomed at 100 feet, obtaining good specimens of shotty gold. Mr. Robert Christison, owner of Lammermoor Station, and Mr. Richard Anning, from either Cargoon or Reedy Springs Stations (I forget which), arrived with two horses and a dray. They camped close to us, and like ourselves, intended trying ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... ablutions; great grain boats heavily thatched, containing not only families, but their sheep and poultry; and all the other sights of a crowded Srinagar waterway, the houses being characteristically distorted and out of repair. This canal gradually widens into the Anchar Lake, a reedy mere of indefinite boundaries, the breeding-ground of legions of mosquitos; and after the tawny twilight darkened into a stifling night we made fast to a reed bed, not reaching Ganderbal till late the next morning, where my horse and caravan awaited ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... spade and hoe were busy in front flower-beds and rear kitchen-gardens. Lanes were green, skies blue, roads good. In the bas fonds the oaks of many kinds and the tupelo-gums were hiding all their gray in shimmering green; in these coverts and in the reedy marshes, all the feathered flocks not gone away north were broken into nesting pairs; in the fields, crops were springing almost at the sower's heels; on the prairie pastures, once so vast, now being narrowed so rapidly by the people's thrift, ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... in rain or fog or burning sun, by the margins of turgid south-western rivers, where his "leaders" shied at the alligators asleep in the stage-road; through dreary pine woods, where the owls hooted at silence; over red, reedy, slimy causeways; in cane-breaks and bayous; past villages where civilization looked westward with a dirk between its teeth, and cracked its horsewhip; past rich plantations where the negroes sang afield, and the planter in the house-porch took off his hat to bow—here, ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... tobacco, and then, in worn fields where the tobacco had been, knee-deep wheat rippling in the evening breeze. The wheat ran down to a marsh, and to a wide, slow creek that, save in the shadow of its reedy banks, was blue as the sky above. Haward, riding slowly beside his green fields and still waters, noted with quiet, half-regretful pleasure this or that remembered feature of the landscape. There had been ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... wing and dewy breast, Soars upward like a spirit strong, From reedy nest, The gentle lark, To tune ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... plains; reedy marshes along Iranian border in south with large flooded areas; mountains along borders ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... hide in, as you know well, no caves, or hills, or mazy coombes, just a wide, flat, reedy place, broken by open woods. The only refuge for both now was the sea. 'Twas a wild run you two made, side by side, down that shore, keeping close within the gloom of the sand-hills, the coast-guards ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... strand of Dardan, where they fought, To Simois' reedy banks the red blood ran, Whose waves to imitate the battle sought With swelling ridges; and their ranks began To break upon the galled shore, and than Retire again, till, meeting greater ranks, They join and shoot ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... was possible to get through the marsh with any degree of safety, but gave up the idea when some of the old decayed reeds on which I was standing suddenly gave way and let me through into the water up to my waist. No matter how good a swimmer, a reedy swamp is more than one can contend with, therefore I gave up the idea. Crawling out and walking a little way along the bank, something loomed up in front of me out of the darkness, which turned out to be a long iron bridge. Looking cautiously along it, I saw a couple of dim lights ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... sound of Mike breathing by his wife's side in the kitchen added to his nervous terror. Then he dozed a little; and lying on his back he dreamed he was awake, and the men he had seen sitting round the fireside that evening seemed to him like spectres come out of some unknown region of morass and reedy tarn. He stretched out his hands for his clothes, determined to fly from this house, but remembering the lonely road that led to the station he fell back on his pillow. The geese still cackled, ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... covered with those gnarled, grey-barked, dry-rotted 'native apple-trees' (about as much like apple-trees as the native bear is like any other), and a nasty bit of sand-dusty road that I was always glad to get over in wet weather. To the left on our side of the creek were reedy marshes, with frogs croaking, and across the creek the dark box-scrub-covered ridges ended in steep 'sidings' coming down to the creek-bank, and to the main road that skirted them, running on west up over ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... these for ever; By the loud resounding sea, Where the reedy jav'lins quiver, There is now no place for me. Day by day our ranks diminish, We are falling day by day; But our sons the strife will finish, Where man tarries man ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... a corridor, through several doors, and into a large room, which at first glance seemed empty, but in which several of the peculiarly transparent people of the craft were lying about upon cushions. They were undoubtedly human—but what humans! Tall and reedy they were, with enormous barrel chests, topped by heads which, though really large, appeared insignificant because of the prodigious chests and because of the huge, sail-like, flapping ears. Their skins ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... with inglorious repose, even after having accomplished in action more than was ever dreamed of by any other naturalist; and while the "edition for the people" of his Birds of America was in course of publication, he was busy amid the forests and prairies, the reedy swamps of our southern shores, the cliffs that protect our eastern coasts, by the currents of the Mexican gulf and the tide streams of the Bay of Fundy, with his sons, Victor Gifford and John Woodhouse, making the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... he went on, gazing over towards where a flock of wild ducks had suddenly settled upon a reedy swamp, and were noisily revelling in the water, "did your uncle know anything ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... here his destined fate smote Idmon, son of Abas, skilled in soothsaying; but not at all did his soothsaying save him, for necessity drew him on to death. For in the mead of the reedy river there lay, cooling his flanks and huge belly in the mud, a white-tusked boar, a deadly monster, whom even the nymphs of the marsh dreaded, and no man knew it; but all alone he was feeding in the wide fell. But the son of Abas ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... more, but he drank first, suspicious of the living water source. A hollow below the writhing petals was filling with straw-colored water from the fibrous, reedy interior. He raised it to his mouth and drank. The water was hot and tasted swampy. Sudden sharp pains around his mouth made him jerk the thing away. Tiny glistening white barbs projected from the petals pink-tipped now with his blood. Brion swung towards the Disan angrily—and stopped ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... for? What will they do with us?" whispered the willow-trees as they shivered and trembled on the reedy margin of the stream. The kingfisher was preening his small many-hued ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... wild bright creature of trees, Brooks, and the sun among leaves, Clytie, grown to be maid: Ah, she had eyes like the sea's Iris of green and blue! White as sea-foam her brows, And her hair reedy and gold: So she grew and waxt supple and fit to be spouse In a ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... had a bumping journey thither in a motor-car, a little doubtful if the excursion was worth while, and they found a great amazement in the lavish beauty and decorative wealth of that vast church and its associated cloisters, set far away from any population as it seemed in a flat wilderness of reedy ditches and patchy cultivation. The distilleries and outbuildings were deserted—their white walls were covered by one monstrously great and old wisteria in flower—the soaring marvellous church was in possession of a knot of unattractive ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... with that other famous visit which Sir Roger de Coverley paid to Philips's Distrest Mother. Or take again, as utterly unlike either of these, that burlesque Homeric battle in the churchyard, where the "sweetly-winding Stour" stands for "reedy Simois," and the bumpkins round for Greeks and Trojans! Or take yet once more, though it is woful work to offer bricks from this edifice which has already (in a sense) outlived the Escorial, [Footnote: The Escorial, it will be remembered, was partially burned in 1872.] ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... Dagonet, with his reedy staccato voice, that gave polish and relief to every syllable, tried to come to her aid by questioning her affably about her family and the friends she had made in New York. But the caryatid-parent, who exists simply as a ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Grantchester, in Grantchester!— Some, it may be, can get in touch With Nature there, or Earth, or such. And clever modern men have seen A Faun a-peeping through the green, And felt the Classics were not dead, To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head, Or hear the Goat-foot piping low . . . But these are things I do not know. I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... bad, her upper notes Forced, reedy, and most sadly often flat; 'Tis folly to compare her with the great Full-voiced and plenteous Parepa. Now ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... it easier than it had looked. On we went, and though she often stumbled she made nought of it nor stayed until we were come to a green level or plateau, whence the ground before us trended downwards to a wondrous fertile little valley where ran a notable stream 'twixt reedy banks; here also bloomed flowers, a blaze of varied colours; and beyond these again were flowery thickets a very maze of green boskages besplashed with the vivid colour of flower or bird, for here were many such birds that flew hither and thither on gaudy wings, and filling the air with chatterings ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... Sir; why the hole 'id take in a grape-shot,' said an old fellow, just from behind my uncle, in a pensioner's cocked hat, leggings, and long old-world red frock-coat, speaking with a harsh reedy voice, and a grim ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... shepherd, "ain't I all reedy as I am? I don't want your ile-skins to keep off a little wet. I'm used to it. Lead the way, blackies, and I'll keep ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... the river itself? Through what wild forests, filled with curious vegetation, may it not flow, and how strange, perhaps, are the people who, together with wild beasts and unknown birds, inhabit its reedy margins! ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... but, alas! her voice broke down, and serious throat troubles manifested themselves. She had lost all the upper notes of her voice from C in alt. down to D in the stave, and what was left of it was thin, reedy, and tremulous, like that of an old woman instead of a girl of 24. Her master had insisted on clavicular breathing, the result being that when her lung capacity was tested it registered only 80 cubic inches instead of 240. In ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... the cow-pen and the bright, green rows of vegetables that were raised for market to the reedy brook which divided his father's land from that belonging to General Battle. The brook was always cool and shady, and silvery with minnows darting over the shining pebbles beneath the clear water. As Nicholas looked across the ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... And so in season due he heard the breath Of the brief winds that wake ere darkness' death Sigh through the woods and all the valley wide: The rushes by the water answering sighed: Sighed all the river from its reedy throat. And like a winged creature went the boat, Over the errant water wandering free, As some lone seabird ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... Beauvais, are both carried by square piers; but the piers of St. Mark's are set square to the walls of the church, and those of Beauvais obliquely to them: and this difference is even a more essential one than that between the smooth surface of the one and the reedy complication of the other. The two squares here in the margin (Fig. XV.) are exactly of the same size, but their expression is altogether different, and in that difference lies one of the most subtle distinctions between ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... was very deep, and what large pike there were in it. Malcolm sat a little aside as usual, with his face towards the ladies, and the book open in his hand, waiting a sign to begin, but looking at the lake, which here was some fifty yards broad, reedy at the edge, dark and deep in the centre. All at once he sprang to his feet, dropping the book, ran down to the brink of the water, undoing his buckled belt and pulling off his coat as he ran, threw himself over the ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... side of the river on which they were was a shallow, reedy marsh, where the water was from a few inches to a foot in depth. In these shallow waters, at certain seasons of the year, different varieties of fish are to be found. The principal is the Jack fish, or pike, some of which are over three feet long. As they crowd along ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... lines the tideless seas on dull gray shores did break, No song of bird, no gleam of wing, o'er wood or reedy lake— ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... of her. A shadow flitted past me toward the house, and at the gate I intercepted the girl. Better I had let her alone. My heart misgave me at sight of her face; indeed the whole sweep of her lithesome reedy figure was pregnant with Highland ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... Tomlinson; he looks mortal like one of the same kidney; and here comes another chap" (as the stranger, was joined by a short, stout, ruddy man in a carter's frock, riding on a horse less showy than his comrade's, but of the lengthy, reedy, lank, yet muscular race, which a knowing jockey would like to bet on). "Now that's what I calls a comely lad!" continued Nabbem, pointing to the latter horseman; "none of your thin-faced, dark, strapping fellows like that Captain Lovett, as the blowens raves ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of what I was told was another creeping plant [36] and the stem of a plant which I believe to be one of the Dendrobiums [37]; made and worn by men only. The fibres of the former plant are stained black; the reedy stems of the other plant are put in short bamboo stems filled with water, and then boiled. They are then easily split up into flattish straws, and become a colour varying from rather bright yellow to brown. For making the belt these two materials, looking rather like black and bright ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... marshy banks of this river are skirted by low barren rocks behind which there are some groups of stunted trees. As we advanced the country, becoming flatter, gradually opened to our view and we at length arrived at a shallow, reedy lake, the direct course through which leads to the Hill Portage. This route has however of late years been disused and we therefore turned towards the north and, crossing a small arm of the lake, arrived at Hill Gates by sunset; having ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... the notes of the living things that do not sleep by night, but make music by reedy pools, in underwood, among the blades of grass and along the banks of streams, were audible to her again, filling her mind with the mystery of existence. The glassy note of the frogs was like a falling of something small and pointed ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... better not talk it over here. Come to my room after dinner and bring Landor and James with you. I'll have Reedy and Keller there. I'll mention casually that it's a big game of poker, and I'll have cards and drinks sent up. You want to remember we can't be too careful. If it ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... through our marsh, on rush and reed; And while he eats or chews the cud, Will trample on us in the mud. Alas! to think how frogs must suffer By means of this proud lady heifer!" This fear was not without good sense. One bull was beat, and much to their expense; For, quick retreating to their reedy bower, He trod on twenty of ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... bass next door. Mr. Moggridge looked up. How thin and reedy Sophia's voice sounded to-night! He had never thought ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mimicry, too, enabled me to imitate all the famous characters of the period; and in my assumed inviolability, I used to exhibit the uncouth gestures and spluttering utterance of Marat—the wild and terrible ravings of Danton—and even the reedy treble of my own patron, Robespierre, as he screamed denunciations against the enemies of the people. It is true these exhibitions of mine were only given in secret to certain parties, who, by a kind of instinct, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... hummed With lights and people. Gebnitz was to sing, That rare soprano. All the fiddles strummed With tuning up; the wood-winds made a ring Of reedy bubbling noises, and the sting Of sharp, red brass pierced every eardrum; patting From muffled tympani made a ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... hovel of a poor gaucho on the de la Rosa land, but the poor orphan, although the dirtiest, raggedest, most mischievous little beggar in the land, was an attractive child, intelligent, full of fun, and of an adventurous spirit. Half his days were spent miles from home, wading through the vast reedy and rushy marshes in the neighbourhood, hunting for birds' nests. Little Ambrose, with no child companion at home, where his life had been made too soft for him, was exceedingly happy with his wild companion, and they ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... bad" very often. And then the long withheld rains came one night on the wings of a fierce southwester, beating down their frail lodge and scattering it abroad, quenching their camp-fire, and rolling up the bay until it invaded their reedy island and hissed in their ears. It drove the game from Jim's gun; it tore the net and scattered the bait of Li Tee, the fisherman. Cold and half starved in heart and body, but more dogged and silent than ever, they crept out in their canoe into the storm-tossed bay, ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... settled back into his pillow, pulling the blankets tight about his body. He closed his eyes and tried not to listen to the distant screams, pipings and reedy cries filtering down from ...
— Small World • William F. Nolan
... Yolofka about noon. This river empties into the Kamchatka from the north, twelve versts above Kluchei. Its shores are generally low and marshy, and thickly overgrown with rushes and reedy grass, which furnish cover for thousands of ducks, geese, and wild swans. We reached, before night, a native village called Harchina (har'-chin-ah) and sent at once for a celebrated Russian guide by the name of Nicolai Bragan (nick-o-lai' ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Maxime or he would not go back at all, and cheering the other, with death in his own heart, he struggled along, half swimming, half wading, but always moving on, how he hardly knew. Then at last he saw a dark head, and a face, white in the moonlight, floating seemingly on the reedy surface of the lagoon, like a water lotus on ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... will you—can you come upstairs?" she asked. Her voice was strained, almost reedy, and her ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... though to her it too was a tedious hole. Martin could not forget the Broomhill of old days—the glamour of taverns and churches and streets lay over the few desolate houses and ugly little new church which huddled under the battered sea-wall. Great reedy pools still remained from the thirteenth century floods, brackish on the flat seashore, where the staked keddle nets showed that the mackerel were beginning to come ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... kingfisher, the partridge, and the sparrow-may be classed with our European species, while others betray their equatorial origin in the brightness of their colours. White and black ibises, red flamingoes, pelicans, and cormorants enliven the waters of the river, and animate the reedy swamps of the Delta in infinite variety. They are to be seen ranged in long files upon the sand-banks, fishing and basking in the sun; suddenly the flock is seized with panic, rises heavily, and settles away further off. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... those early workers in the East, was to go for an excursion of some weeks' duration on a river. Possibly they had in mind the beneficial results of a boat excursion on the Thames. But slow progress in a native boat, alongside the mud-banks and reedy swamps of many Indian rivers, was about as sure a way of getting, or increasing, malaria as they ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... Duke of Cambridge and his Duchess, wondering if we might remember their faces, and they ours. In a moment, they came tottering in; he, bent and withered and bald; she blooming with wholesome old age. He peered through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice: "Come to my arms! Away with titles—I'll know ye by no names but Twain and Twichell! Then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear, the which we filled with shoutings to this effect: God bless you, old Howells what is left ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... buried for an instant, but struggling up immediately, and shrieking with horror as she missed John and the boy, who had both been swept in by the tree. The next moment she heard a call, and scrambling up the bank, saw John among the reedy pools a little way down, dragging the boy ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is, naething to ye, sirs; but to me, O yes, to me everything. Ah," said he, plaintively, "how mony days hae I sat through storm, and frost, and sleet! how mony nights hae I watched in the still moonlight, amang the reedy creeks! how mony times I hae weized a slug through a bird a'maist amang the clouds! but I hae had a' my labor in vain, ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... bounded on the east and west by vast reedy swamps, is the haunt of numerous flocks of ducks, storks, and vultures, which act as scavengers to the town. In this market, stocked with all the provisions in use in Africa, beef, mutton, goats' and sometimes ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... boys fired, and even their mother discharged her gun. The shots took not the slightest effect beyond startling the monster, whose movements were accelerated. Fritz and I also fired with steadier aim, but with the same want of success, for the monster, passing on with a gliding motion, entered the reedy marsh to the left, and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... mercenary tyrants sleep As undisturb'd as Justice! but no more The wretched Slave, as on his native shore, Rests on his reedy couch: he wakes to weep! Tho' thro' the toil and anguish of the day No tear escap'd him, not one suffering groan Beneath the twisted thong, he weeps alone In bitterness; thinking that far away Tho' the gay negroes ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... the water-courses. Where the ground was elevated, or out of the reach of flood, the box (unnamed) alone occupied it; and, though the branches of these trees might be interwoven together, the one never left its wet and reedy bed, the other never descended from its more elevated position. The same singular distinction marked the acacia pendula, when it ceased to cover the interior plains of light earth, and was succeeded by another shrub of the same species. It continued to the banks of New-Year's ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... their pigsties, which they call posadas, and ask for bread to eat in the name of God, and straw to lie down in, they curse me, and say there is neither bread nor straw in Galicia; and sure enough, since I have been here I have seen neither, only something that they call broa, and a kind of reedy rubbish with which they litter the horses: all my bones are sore ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... heathy wastes, immix'd with reedy fens; Ye mossy streams, with sedge and rushes stor'd; Ye rugged cliffs, o'erhanging dreary glens, To you I fly, ye ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... faded. The nest immediately sank down deep into the water, but it stopped somewhere, and I made a cast. The black water boiled, and the trout went straight down and sulked. I merely held on, till at last it seemed "time for us to go," and by cautious tugging I got him through the reedy jungle, and "gruppit him," as the Shepherd would have said. He was simply but decently wrapped round, from snout to tail, in very fine water-weeds, as in a garment. Moreover, he was as black as your hat, quite unlike the comely yellow trout who live on the gravel in Clearburn. It hardly seemed ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... Fermor—Lizzie, the elder and livelier of the two sisters—to take her first lesson in croquet. The croquet-ground was a raised plateau to the left of the Italian garden, bounded on one side by a grassy slope and the reedy bank of the river, and on the other by a plantation of young firs; a perfect croquet-ground, smooth as an ancient bowling-green, and unbroken by invading shrub or flower-bed. There were some light iron seats on the outskirts ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... we here?" said the knight in a reedy voice like a boy's. His pale eyes contemplated the figures—the wounded man, now faint again with pain and half-fallen on the litter of branches; his deliverer, tall and grim, but with laughing face; ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... rewarded by seeing a sheet of water, "the great Lake Tchad, glowing with the golden rays of the sun in its strength." Was this, after all, the source of the Niger? Its low shores were surrounded with reedy marshes and clumps of white water-lilies, there were flocks of wild ducks and geese, birds with beautiful plumage were feeding on the margin of the lake, pelicans, cranes, immense white spoonbills, yellow-legged plover—all ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... small loft in the west end of the church, in which stood a little organ, whose voice, weakened by years of praising, and possibly of neglect, had yet, among a good many tones that were rough, wooden, and reedy, a few remaining that were as mellow as ever praiseful heart could wish to praise withal. And these came in amongst the rest like trusting thoughts amidst "eating cares;" like the faces of children borne in the arms of a crowd of anxious mothers; ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... last island in the channel of the lower Delaware now raises its flaming beacon, and the belated collier steers safely by Reedy Island light, lived the daughter of an old West India and coasting captain, who would permit his chronometers to be repaired and cleaned by nobody but Minuit. His cottage stood where now there is a broad and sandy street leading to a wooden ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... yards from where he stood grew a large tree, alone upon the edge of the reedy jungle. Tarzan made his way to it, clambered into it, and finding a comfortable crotch among its branches, reposed himself ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Winged their way to far-off islands, To their nests among the rushes. To his sleep went Hiawatha, And Nokomis to her labor, Toiling patient in the moonlight, Till the sun and moon changed places, Till the sky was red with sunrise, And Kayoshk, the hungry sea-gulls, Came back from the reedy islands, Clamorous for their morning banquet. Three whole days and nights alternate Old Nokomis and the sea-gulls Stripped the oily flesh of Nahma, Till the waves washed through the rib-bones, Till the sea-gulls ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... you go to in our country—but just a little place made of mud bricks that had been dried in the sun. There were holes instead of windows, and there was no door in the open doorway; and on the top of the little building was a roof of rough, reedy grass. ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... grinned. Nature had given him liberally of the wherewithal for indulgence in that relaxation, and Durnovo smiled rather constrainedly. Joseph was grabbing at the long reedy grass, bringing the canoe to a standstill, and it was some moments before his extensive ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... Rank scenting clings! See! how the morning dews They sweep, that from their feet besprinkling drop Dispersed, and leave a track oblique behind. Now on firm land they range, then in the flood They plunge tumultuous; or through reedy pools Rustling they work their way; no holt escapes Their curious search. With quick sensation now The fuming vapour stings; flutter their hearts, And joy redoubled bursts from every mouth In louder symphonies. Yon hollow trunk, That with its hoary head incurv'd salutes The passing wave, must be ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... was a very reedy oboe or clarinet, a pipe played with a reed, the pitch determined by holes stopped by the fingers. These instruments were so hard to blow that the players wore bands over their cheeks because there were cases on record where, in the contests, they broke their cheeks by the wind pressure. The ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... the steading A fortnight, say, or more; A blanket for his bedding We spread beside the door; And when the cocks crowed clearly Before the dawn was ripe, He'd call the milkmaids cheerly Upon a reedy pipe! ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... warm noons you can hear through the waiting, echoing air the laughing shouts of playing children and the low-dropping honk of the wild geese that in a scarcely quivering line are sailing northward across the reedy lowlands which the gentle spring rains will turn into ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... some as were a war-horn braying, Some softly purl like streams on reedy strand. Half nature-sprite and half as man you stand, The two not yet one ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... the deep In countless ripples pass, Like talking children in their sleep, Like winds in reedy grass. And through some ruffled feathers, I The glassy rolling mark, With which the waves eternally Roll on from dawn ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... Panuco. Down the stream glided long Indian canoes, hewn from trees and laden with oranges and bananas. In the stern stood a dark native wielding an enormous paddle with ease. Wild-fowl dotted the glassy expanse; white cranes and pink flamingoes graced the reedy bars; red-breasted kingfishers flew over with friendly screech. The salt breeze kissed my cheek; the sun shone with the comfortable warmth Northerners welcome in spring; from over the white sand-dunes far below came the faint ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... gods wait where secret beauty stirs, By green, untempled altars of the Spring, If haply, still, there be some worshippers Whose hearts are moved with long remembering. The cloven feet of Pan are on the hill, His reedy musics sadder than all rains, Since none will seek—pipe ever as he will— Those ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... it has drifted and faded afar on the hill; No wood-nymphs haunt the hollows; the reedy pipes are still; No more the youth Apollo shall walk in his sunshine clear; No more the maid Diana shall follow the fallow-deer (The woodmen grew so wise, the woodmen grew so old, The gods went back to ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... range. Each in his narrow cell, we sleep the sleep of the just and wake to find ourselves tied to the bank. The captain fears a storm is brooding on Great Slave Lake; so, tethered at the marge of the reedy lagoon, we wait all the forenoon. A corner of Great Slave Lake has to be traversed in order to reach ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... trenches themselves you scarcely realise the difference. Your outlook there is bounded in either case by two muddy walls over which you cannot wisely put your head in the daylight. The place may be a glorious green field, with flowers and birds and little reedy pools, if you are two feet over the parapet. But you see nothing from week-end to week-end except two muddy walls and the damp, dark interior of a small dug-out. You see no more of the country than you would in a city street. Trench life is always a ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... a Mr. David Howell of 105 Cheapside, and a thoroughgoing, unprincipled rascal he proved to be. He was a small, spare, undersized man, with little beady eyes, light complexion, red hair, and stubby beard, and when he spoke it was with a thin reedy voice. From first to last he managed our case in exactly the way the prosecution would have desired. He bled us freely, and altogether we paid him nearly $10,000, and our defense by our eight lawyers—four Queen's Counsels and four barristers—was about the lamest ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... and shot themselves off wooden platforms,—splashes, sparks, coruscations, showers of soldiers. At every corner of the town-wall, every guard-house, every gateway, every sentry-box, every drawbridge, every reedy ditch, and rushy dike, soldiers, soldiers, soldiers. And the town being pretty well all wall, guard-house, gateway, sentry-box, drawbridge, reedy ditch, and rushy dike, the town was pretty ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... by his friend, Sturt proceeded to examine the river. He found it still running strong, without any sign of diminution in its flow, but the reedy flats were so dense and thick that no passage for the teams was practicable. At noon the leader halted, and announced his intention of returning to camp. He had come to the determination to construct the whaleboat he had with him in sections, to send the teams back, and, with six men and Mr. M'Leay, ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... or so later, when I had leisure to observe outside matters, I perceived that among the other actors in the drama confusion still reigned. There was much scuttering about and much meaningless shouting. Mr Abney's reedy tenor voice was issuing directions, each of which reached a dizzier height of futility than the last. Glossop was repeating over and over again the words, 'Shall I telephone for the police?' to which ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... other. I knew not his purpose, and made no question of it, following him as he strode the shore with measured paces, the lantern upon his arm. Then presently he stuck his paddle into the bushes, and mine beside it. We were near the head of the island, walking on a reedy strip of soft earth at the river margin. After a few paces we halted to listen, but heard only the voice of the water and the murmur of pines. Then we pushed through a thicket of small fir trees to where we groped along in utter darkness ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... they would make at least a drier bed than this of mine, and at that thought, turning over, I found all my muscles as stiff as iron, the sinews of my neck and forearms a mass of agonies and no more fit to swim me to those reedy swamps, which now, as pain and hunger began to tell, seemed to wear ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... Go on!" said Vauclin to his own chauffeur. Again they were left alone. Talk between them was almost impossible; Fanny was so muffled, Foss so anxiously watched for Alfred. The reedy singing between the boards where the wind attacked her occupied all her attention. The very core of warmth seemed extinguished in her body, never to be lit again. She remembered their last fourier, or special ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... Gods! Fulvia," he replied, "I am but a sorry epicure, and I love the boar better in his reedy fen, or his wild thicket on the Umbrian hills, with his eye glaring red in rage, and his tusks white with foam, than girt with condiments and spices upon a ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... camp-chair. His vigorous strokes sent him rapidly by Strand-on-the-Green, that secluded bit of a village which so few Londoners have taken the trouble to search out. A narrow paved quay, fringed with stately elm trees, separated the old-fashioned, many-colored houses from the reedy shore, where at high tide low great black barges, which apparently go nowhere, ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... attention, listened as to the pronouncement of a foreman juror, and replied, "No, sir," with the relieved air of a man surprised to find himself still living. "I see Flamby Duveen, I did," he continued, in his reedy ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... wilderness, on the sandy shores of the inland seas. You have seen the trails of the Indian and the deer replaced by highways of steel, and upon the spots where the first immigrants corralled their wagons, and the voyagers dragged their canoes upon the reedy shore, you have seen arise great cities, centres of industry, of commerce, of art, attaining in a generation the proportions and the world-wide fame of cities that were already famous before the discovery ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Thebes, which was situated on the edge of the desert at the foot of the western hills. It was an extensive and roomy structure, lightly built and gaily decorated. The ceiling and pavements of its halls were fantastically painted with scenes of animal life: wild cattle ran through reedy swamps beneath one's feet, and many-coloured fish swam in the water; while overhead flights of pigeons, white against a blue sky, passed across the hall, and the wild duck hastened towards the open casements. Through curtained doorways one might obtain glimpses of a garden ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... worst She to the limping Godhead would devote With slowly-burning wood of illest note. This was the vilest which my girl could find With vow facetious to the Gods assigned. 10 Now, O Creation of the azure sea, Holy Idalium, Urian havenry Haunting, Ancona, Cnidos' reedy site, Amathus, Golgos, and the tavern hight Durrachium—thine Adrian abode— 15 The vow accepting, recognize the vowed As not unworthy and unhandsome naught. But do ye meanwhile to the fire be ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... physical exertions of which he was still capable. At last he stood on the margin of the forest and hill-embosomed waters of that lovely little lake. It was solitary and silent, but for the weird sounds of night birds and aquatic animals that frequented its reedy margin, and a soft, silvery mist was just rising from its unruffled surface, that gathered in a translucent veil against the dark forest of the opposite shore. Its simple, serene and quiet beauty, under the stars and rising moon, was not lost upon the poetic nature of Barton, still ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... added the birds that enliven the waters. Wild-ducks in spring-time hatch their young in the islands, and upon reedy shores;—the sand-piper, flitting along the stony margins, by its restless note attracts the eye to motions as restless:—upon some jutting rock, or at the edge of a smooth meadow, the stately heron may be descried with folded wings, that might seem ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... walk down the shore a way?" suggested Bob. "There might be a duck or two in that reedy cove below here." And Jeremy, glad to quit the place, led off briskly westward along ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... placed each familiar belonging where he had known it all his life. And as he finished, his mother's head shone darkly golden by the piano; her fingers swept over the keys; he heard all their voices, the dear never-forgotten voices. Hark! They were singing his hymn—little Alice's reedy note lifted above the others—"God shall charge ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... said the rivet. "Fatter than me, was he, and in a steamer not half our tonnage? Reedy little peg! I blush for the family, sir." He settled himself more firmly than ever in his place, ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... beady; As mist minute, thy notes ring low and reedy: The vaguest vapor Of melody, now near; now, like some taper Of sound, far-fading— Thou will-o'-wisp of music aye evading. Among the bowers, The fog-washed stalks of Autumn's weeds and flowers, By hill and hollow, I hear thy murmur and in vain I ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... the starboard bow, the low, reedy levels of Foam Island came into view, and in a few minutes more the dory lay in the shallows, oars, mast, and rag stowed; and the two young people splashed busily about in their hip boots, carrying guns, ammunition, and food ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... stops Mersenne had attributed to them in harpsichords more than a hundred and fifty years before, by a bassoon pedal, a card which by a rotatory half-cylinder just impinging upon the strings produced a reedy twang; also by pedals for triangle, cymbals, bells, and tambourine, the last ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... the next year was out the poor boy was dead—murdered by some miscreant for the handful of gold in his possession, down in the lonely bush about Reedy Creek. ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... we put again to sea with a favourable wind, and coasting along a series of reedy islands, we arrived on the 26th of that month at the mouth of the Wolga, a large river which flows from Russia into the Caspian. From the mouth of this river it is computed to be seventy-six miles to the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr |
