"Sapling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two-roomed house was sunk into the backing to the sloping hill. Its front and sides were of green logs and a mud plaster. Its roof was of a primitive thatch, held secure from winter storms by sapling logs lashed fast across it. The central doorway was filled by a rough-boarded door, and the apertures left for added light were covered with thin cotton material. They were left wide open in summer, ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... saddle and hurried back to the spot whence the tree had been rived. It was dusk by the time he reached the spot, but he could detect gold in the friable rock which lined the cavity left by the uprooted sapling. With a mind too excited to sleep he determined to stay with his find till morning. To leave it involved no real risk of losing it, and yet he could not bring himself to even build a camp-fire, for fear some one might be drawn from the ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... know that Death Sits lightly on him as a dreamless sleep; So dear a bud can never lose its sweets; Oh! foolish heart! I thought to see him grow In strength and beauty, like a sapling oak, Spreading his stalwart shoots about the sky, Till, when old age set burdens on my back, In every bough my trembling hands should find A staff to prop me onward to the grave; And now—my heart ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... sapling dat grow in de shade may die while it'm young; de great tree dat grow in de sun must lib till ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... of the trains. These troopers were rather particular about straggling negroes, and Josiah sharply questioned told the simple truth as he moved toward the bridge, answering the questions of a young officer. A horse tied to a sapling at the roadside for reasons unknown kicked the passing cavalry man's horse. The officer moved on swearing a very original mixture of the over-ripe English of armies. Swearing was a highly cultivated accomplishment in the cavalry; no infantry profanity approached ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... the deepening dawn, giving an occasional "gee up, Rhody!" to the mare, and following the track of the harrow with much the same concentration of purpose as that displayed by his four-footed friend. He was strong for his years, lithe as a sapling, and as fearless of elemental changes, and as he walked meditatively across the bare field he might have suggested to an onlooker the possible production of a vast fund ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... sank low on the heaving back with his face buried in the flying mane. The rough bough rasped him rudely, but never shook his spirit nor his grip. Rearing, plunging and struggling, Pommers broke through the sapling grove and was out on the broad stretch of ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... columns starting from the ground—spreading at the base like the gnarled root, and growing till they culminate in crowns of foliage, forming symmetrical capitals, like the first clusters of leaves on a strong young sapling—then the branches spreading and interlacing, only checked at equal intervals by a lovely leaf or burgeon, till they meet in blossoms on the highest point of the arch,—I cannot but adhere to the old idea that rows of ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... tree and sapling, for over a hundred years," replied the big Blue-gum very severely, "and never before have I been treated with such disrespect. When trees become houses they ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... clouded old woman over whose life I had come to watch, I learned that in the backyard, near the old rose garden, there was a locust-tree which my uncle had planted. After his death, while it was still a slender sapling, his mother had a seat built round it, and she used to sit there on summer evenings. His grave was under the ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... discipline should be man-timber. Tough timber must come from well grown, sturdy trees. Such wood can be turned into a mast, can be fashioned into a piano or an exquisite carving. But it must become timber first. Time and patience develop the sapling into the tree. So through discipline, education, experience, the sapling child is developed into ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... from Pedro forestalled any answer. The trio struggled along to the spot where the guides waited at the butt of a slanting tree trunk spanning the gulf. As they reached it Pedro walked carefully up the trunk, carrying a long slender sapling, which he lowered and fixed in the bottom of the stream. Then, steadying himself with the upper end of this pole, he continued his journey to the other side, where he flipped the sapling back to Lourenco. One by one the others crossed, slipping, almost losing balance, ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... elegant; even a wriggling beetle is eaten as daintily as caviare at the king's table. It is only when its confidence in you is abused, and you pass too near the nest, that might easily be mistaken for a robin's, just above your head in a sapling, that the wood thrush so far forgets itself as to become excited. Pit, pit, pit, sharply reiterated, is called out at you with a strident quality in the tone that is painful evidence of the fearful anxiety your presence gives ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... ungraciously as I often treat you, to-night I clearly perceived that we belong together, like a pair of eyes, and that without you I am only half myself—or, at any rate—not complete. And—as we are speaking in images—I felt like a sapling whose prop has been removed; even your Wolff can never have longed for you more ardently. My father found little time to give me. As soon as he saw me take my place in the Polish dance he went with Uncle Pfinzing to the drinking room, and I did not see him again till he ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... uncommon lustre. Her long and tangled black hair fell in elf-locks from the folds of this singular head-gear. Her attitude was that of a sibyl in frenzy, and she stretched out in her right hand a sapling bough which ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... here and there the crimson midsummer men, but the copsewood consisted of the redundant shoots of the old, gnarled, knotted stumps, covered with handsome foliage of the pale sea-green of later summer, and the leaves far exceeding in size those either of the sapling or the full-sized tree—vigorous playfulness of ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the name of Cain, I seem to hear you ask, are men to dance, When all men are musicians. Tell me that, I hear you saying, and I'll tell you the name Of Samson's mother. But why shroud yourself Before the coffin comes? For all you know, The tree that is to fall for your last house Is now a sapling. You may have to wait So long as to be sorry; though I doubt it, For you are not at home in your new Eden Where chilly whispers of a likely frost Accumulate already in the air. I think a touch of ermine, Hamilton, Would be for you ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... in the bothy mid the hills without the knowledge or the suspicion of any living person about them and without anything occurring, until Deirdre was sixteen years of age. Deirdre grew like the white sapling, straight and trim as the rash on the moss. She was the creature of fairest form, of loveliest aspect, and of gentlest nature that existed between earth and heaven in all Ireland—whatever colour of hue she had before, there was nobody that looked into her face but she would blush ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... sloping, being bent into still greater inclination, the angle at which the two parts meet remains the same; or if the strain be put in the opposite direction, the bough will break long before it loses its angle. You will find it difficult to bend the angles out of the youngest sapling, if they be marked; and absolutely impossible, with a strong bough. You may break it, but you will not destroy its angles. And if you watch a tree in the wildest storm, you will find that though all its boughs are bending, none lose ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... an arrant rogue! He is nor boy nor man, sapling nor tree. And long hath he outgrown his mother's rod, Nor ever hath he felt his father's whip. Ungoverned is he as a yearling colt, That's never known the bridle or the whip. We ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... the Beast the sapling rings; His lank sides heaved, [45] his limbs they stirred; He gave a groan, and then another, Of that which went before the brother, And then he gave a ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... what ails the censurer, that he at thee should flite? How shall I be consoled for thee, and thou a sapling slight? O thou, the splendour of whose sight has ta'en my heart by storm, Whose supple bending grace compels to passion's utmost height,[FN125] Whose eyes, with Turkish languor caught, work havoc in the breast And leave such wounds as ne'er were made by falchion ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... it to his garter, whence it dangled like the skin of a mouse at the knee of a tall man. But as he went on through the woods the skin grew larger and larger and larger, till it broke away by its own weight. Then the giant twisted a mighty sapling into a withe, and fastened it around his waist. But it still grew apace as he went on, till, trailing after, it tore down all the forest, pulling away the trees, so that Kitpooseagunow left a clean, fair road behind him. [Footnote: Many of these stories have received ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... pitched in a small open space surrounded by bushes. Through the thicket, on the south side, he picked a way, pushing away each sapling and weed noiselessly to make room for the passage of his huge body. For such a bulk of a figure he moved lightly. Twice he stopped by reason of the crackle of a snapping twig, but no sign of alarm came from ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... strain'd, Struck thro' the bulky bandit's corselet home, And then brake short, and down his enemy roll'd, And there lay still; as he that tells the tale Saw once a great piece of a promontory, That had a sapling growing on it, slide From the long shore-cliff's windy walls to the beach, And there lie still, and yet the sapling grew: So lay the man transfixt. His craven pair Of comrades making slowlier at the Prince, When now they saw ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... unhappy Skull-Splitter with two uplifted paws. In another moment she would give him one of her vigorous "left-handers," which would probably pacify him forever. Ironbeard gave a scream of terror and Thore the Hound broke down an alder-sapling in his excitement. But Wolf-in-the-Temple, remembering that he had sworn foster-brotherhood with this brave and foolish little lad, thought that now was the time to show his heroism. Here it was no longer play, but dead earnest. Down he leaped from his rock, and just as the ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... They only see their own little piece of things, and they don't even know it's little,—like the man who didn't know anything about the forest he was walking through, because he got so interested in the trees. My tree is just a scraggly, crooked little sapling that won't ever amount to much, but I can see the whole big forest, and hear it talk, and that makes up. I'm glad I'm one of the kind that college teaches ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... Still—the very first. He ought to remember that! And as he concentrated his thoughts the veil of the years was rent, and he saw, he saw quite clearly the white moonlit beach, the felucca with its mast bent like a sapling in a high wind, and the great yard of the sail athwart the beam of the boat, the black shadow of it upon the sand, and the carts—yes, ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... clubfooted bear—and something extraordinary must have happened to save him. An indefinite prolongation of the situation is unthinkable. Wherefore things happened in this wise: Foster's hat fell off, and while the bear was investigating it the man gained a few yards and time enough to climb a stout sapling, growing upon the brink of a cleft in the country rock about a dozen feet wide and twice as deep. The tree was as thick as a man's leg at the base and very tall. Foster climbed well out of reach of the bear, and, perched in a crotch twenty feet above the ground, he felt ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... of his brother's courage, gave him a ring and a sword as he wished him success and safety. Then he placed a young sapling by his window [145] ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole
... of the rock, that of the flock that skim along the water, Like whistle shriek the blows they strike, as the torrent of the fell, So fierce they gush—the moor flames' rush their ardour symbols well. Clandonuil's[124] root when crown each shoot of sapling, branch, and stem, What forest fair shall e'er compare in stately pride with them? Their gathering might, what legion wight, in rivalry has dared; Or to ravish from their Lion's face a bristle of his beard? What limbs were wrench'd, what ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Winter's freezing cold, From sapling youth To virile growth. And Age's rigid mould, His energetic axe hath rung Within that ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... round Achilles' corse To right, to left, lay in the dust the slain Countless, as boars around a lion at bay; And evermore the strife waxed deadlier. Then too Hippolochus' war-wise son was slain By Aias of the heart of fire. He fell Backward upon Achilles, even as falls A sapling on a sturdy mountain-oak; So quelled by the spear on Peleus' son he fell. But for his rescue Anchises' stalwart son Strove hard, with all his comrades battle-fain, And haled the corse forth, and to sorrowing friends Gave it, to bear to Ilium's ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... cried, "sisters, daughters of Nereus, that you may hear the burden of my sorrows. Alas, woe is me, woe in that I have borne the most glorious of offspring. I bore him fair and strong, hero among heroes, and he shot up as a sapling; I tended him as a plant in a goodly garden, and sent him with his ships to Ilius to fight the Trojans, but never shall I welcome him back to the house of Peleus. So long as he lives to look upon the light of the sun he is in heaviness, and though I go to him I cannot help him. Nevertheless I will ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... though between them, at certain intervals, are placed others of a light red tinge, so that the tower is beautifully variegated. With respect to size, standing beside the giant witch of Seville, the Tangerine Djmah would show like a ten-year sapling in the vicinity of the cedar of Lebanon, whose trunk the tempests of five hundred years have worn. And yet I will assert that the towers in other respects are one and the same, and that the same mind and the same design are manifested in both; ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... the spot, her heart beating wildly; she drew near, started back and caught at a young sapling for support; yes, there lay a motionless form among the fallen branches, that of a man, a gentleman, as she discerned by what she could see of his clothing; her heart told ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... to the mouth of the Adelaide River along the beach, but found it too boggy for the horses. Wishing to husband the forces at his command, Stuart wisely resolved to push no further; he had a space cleared where they were, and a tall sapling stripped of its boughs to serve as a flagstaff. On this he hoisted the Union Jack which he had carried with him. A record of their arrival, contained in an air-tight case, was then buried at the foot of the impromptu staff, and Stuart cut his initials on the largest ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... silence, shivering with a sudden sense of desolation. He took his bearings, propped a fallen fir sapling aslant by the sled, and, forgetting he was ready to drop, he ran swiftly hack along the way he came. They had travelled all that afternoon and evening on the river ice, hard as iron, retaining no trace of footprint or of runner possible to verify even in ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... your tomahawk, Trackless," I cried, as soon as horror would permit me to speak, "that I may cut down this sapling, and ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... like snakes from under kicking horses, and fainting, got a carbine to the shoulder at aim, and someway, pulled the trigger. Then they were taken in the rear. One-half of the Contra forces, mounted, had waited under the sapling growth of the nearest foothill. Now they sprang from cover, bloodthirsty whelps trailing the Tiger. The guerrillas could not turn back. To retreat they must cleave the way in front, and they did, by sheer desperation. Falling in the ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... any kind of animals that the jungle might produce, and, being on foot, we constructed the usual little hiding-place by cutting half through a sapling about 3 feet from the root, and bearing down upon the young tree so as to form a horizontal rail in front of our seat; a similar cut at the back of another sapling about 3 inches thick, facing the stem already laid, and that was also pressed down to interlace with the branches of ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... scientific history of Scotland during that period. The naturalist, by observing the rings of annual growth in a tree newly cut down, can not only tell what its exact bulk had been at certain determinate dates in the past—from its first existence as a tiny sapling of a single twelvemonth, till the axe had fallen on the huge circumference of perchance its hundredth ring—but he can also form from them a shrewd guess of the various characters of the seasons that have passed over ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... a cumbersome flat-boat of the type used by clam-fishers. In fact the smell that simply swirled up from its oozy bottom left no doubt that the boat had been used for that purpose. A pair of unbelievably heavy oars, cut from a sapling with a hand-axe, trailed in the water from "loose oarlocks." Dave gave a gasp of dismay as he "hefted" the ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... he resembled in visage and character, he was summoned by every drop of blood in his veins to do life-long battle with the spirit of Spanish absolutism, and he was already girding himself for his life's work. He assumed at once for his device a fallen oak, with a young sapling springing from its root. His motto, "Tandem fit surculus arbor," "the twig shall yet become a tree"—was to be ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... facing the stream, and the waggon drawn up some twenty feet in the rear. In the triangle between the waggon and the tents was kindled a large fire, upon each side of which two stakes, forked at the top, were driven into the ground. A long sapling resting in the forks traversed the blaze from side to side. This was Lanty's "crane,"—the ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... estimate the loss the world sustains in its ignorance of the trees of the Talmud? What a sapling in comparison with this giant cedar of Lebanon must the far-famed Mammoth tree have been which was lately cut down in California, and was the largest known ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... delay'd not, and sprang from his car on the sea-beach; And, while Idaeus remain'd to have care of the mules and the horses, On did the old man pass, and he enter'd, and found the Peleides Seated apart from his train: two only of Myrmidons trustful, Hero Automedon only, and Alkimus, sapling of Ares, Near to him minist'ring stood; he repos'd him but now from the meal-time, Sated with food and with wine, nor remov'd from him yet was the table. All unobserv'd of them enter'd the old man stately, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... easily forget the picture he made. His handsome face was flushed with excitement, his beautiful eyes were ablaze with light; he sat his horse erect as a young sapling. A handsomer or finer ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... returned MacGregor, in a low tone that growled like distant thunder—"like a boy, who thinks the auld gnarled oak can be twisted as easily as the young sapling. Can I forget that I have been branded as an outlaw—stigmatised as a traitor—a price set on my head as if I had been a wolf—my family treated as the dam and cubs of the hill-fox, whom all may torment, vilify, degrade, and insult—the ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... mind but that he wanted it. That had been the strongest thing in his look. She felt herself picking her way along a very narrow path, one step over either edge of which would plunge her chasms deep. Now she snatched at a frail sapling to save herself. The fact that Kerr knew her stone didn't prove it belonged to the Crew Idol. And if it didn't—if it wasn't the crown of the heathen god, then her whole dreadful supposition fell to pieces. ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... him. George groaned to himself, "This will be worse than the kissing scrape," and was about to lay a restraining grasp upon his friend. But he slipped away, and lightly went up hand-over-hand a tall, slender sapling on the edge of the bank, the whole party gathering round in breathless expectation. Having reached its slender, swaying top, he threw himself out on the land side. The tree bent at once to the ground with his weight, ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... old Jemmy Coates, a severe man. Because I could not learn his way of hilling corn, he flogged me naked with a severe whip, made of a very tough sapling; this lapped round me at each stroke; the point of it at last entered my belly and broke off, leaving an inch and a half outside. I was not aware of it until, on going to work again, it hurt my inside very much, when, on looking down, I saw it sticking out of my body. I pulled ...
— Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America • Moses Grandy
... what appeared a suitable spot, Ralph tethered Grey Bob to a sapling and took up his position behind a massive oak. He was extracting the field-glasses from the case at his side when his pulses contracted as he felt a cold rim of metal pressed suddenly against the back of his ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... about for something with which to strike. Nothing lay within reach of her bleeding fingers, however, but a little piece of dried sapling. She tried to struggle loose, but the lunatic held her mercilessly. He continued the mechanical loading of ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... tree was reduced that way, but didn't I explain it? Answer me, didn't I? Didn't I say I wished you could have seen it when I first saw it? When you got up on your ear and called me names, and said I had brought you eleven miles to look at a sapling, didn't I explain to you that all the whale-ships in the North Seas had been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years? And did you s'pose the tree could last for-ever, con-found it? I don't see why you want to keep back things that way, and try to injure a person that's never ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and toiled clearing those four acres, where the haystacks are now standing, till every tree and sapling that had grown there was down. We thought then the worst was over; but how little we knew of clearing land! Dad was never tired of calculating and telling us how much the crop would fetch if the ground could only be got ready in time to put ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... the boy gather wood. Well, thank God! he was as unlike that white-faced moody lad who had stumbled into his Tavern of Stars as a boy could be. He whistled a good deal. He was as slim as a sapling, the slimness of muscle and health. His eyes were clear and boyish. And there was color in his face. Best of all, to Brian's mind, after the first sullen period of readjustment he had worked his own salvation and reverted by wholesome instinct to boyhood with its inexhaustible animal vigor, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Saba's shore to Lavaca's tide. She was as bold as the billows that beat, She was as wild as the breezes that blow: From her little head to her little feet, She was swayed in her suppleness to and fro By each gust of passion; a sapling pine That grows on the edge of a Kansas bluff And wars with the wind when the weather is rough, Is like this Lasca, this love of mine. She would hunger that I might eat, Would take the bitter and leave me the sweet; But once, when I made her jealous ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... cuffing her polished red cheeks soundly on the way. Then I stripped off her gay raiment and knotted the ribbon sash about her smooth neck. I had never tied a knot before, but this held, as did the loop I cast over a projecting branch of the sickly peach-sapling. Naked and forlorn, Rozillah dangled a foot and more from the ground. I fetched my father's riding-whip from the hall table, and the last feeble check upon my fury ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... black cauldron of sheep's milk for the making of the rank 'pecorino' cheese. One square room, lighted from the door only. The floor, the beaten earth. The beds, rough-hewn boards, lying one above the other, like bunks, on short strong lengths of sapling stuck into the wall. For mattresses, armfuls of mountain hay. The people, a man, his wife and two or three children, dressed winter and summer in heavy brown homespun woollen and sheepskins. For all furniture, a home-made bench, black with age and smoke. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Browning whom we all know, as well as the youthful dreamer, is here revealed; here too, as well as the disciple of Shelley, we have the author of "The Ring and the Book." In it the long series culminating in "Asolando" is foreshadowed, as the oak is observable in the sapling. The poem is prefaced by a Latin motto from the Occult Philosophy of Cornelius Agrippa, and has also a note in French, set forth as being by Pauline, and appended to her lover's manuscript after his death. Probably Browning placed it in the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... judge of the Indian character, they are not, at all, an agricultural people—nor for a few generations are they likely to become such. Their habits are formed, their lives are directed in a certain line—like a sapling you can bend at will and when grown into a tree you can no longer change its shape-so with them. From time immemorial they have ranged the woods and it is not in the present nor even the next generation ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... one of the houses a girl stood—a tall, lean-flanked, but deep-bosomed creature, as graceful as a well-grown sapling. Her calico frock clung to the lines of her matured figure as though she had just stepped up out of the sea itself. Around her head she had banded a crimson bandanna, but it allowed the escape of glossy black hair that ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... houses and tooke out some things, and durst not stay but came again and told vs; so some seaven or eight of vs went with them, and found how we had gone within a slight shot of them before. The houses were made with long yong Sapling trees bended and both ends stucke into the ground; they were made round like unto an Arbour and covered down to the ground with thicke and well wrought matts, and the doors were not over a yard high made of a matt to open; the chimney was a wide open hole in the top, for which ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... no answer, but clung to the sapling, feeling as though she were going to die herself, and faintly hoping that she might do so. Her eyes wandered vaguely from the face of the messenger of evil, first up to the sky, then down to the cropped and trodden veldt. Past the ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... garments by her long and trailing hair, And like sapling tempest-shaken, wept and ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... visible, paddling busily on the foundations of the dam, while the overflowing water streamed about them, covering their feet. At this stage, most of the water flowed through the still uncompacted structure, leaving work on the top unimpeded. The two beavers were dragging into place a long birch sapling, perhaps eleven feet in length, with a thick, bushy top. When laid to the satisfaction of the architects,—the butt, of course, pointing straight up-stream,—the trunk was jammed firmly down between those already placed. Then the more erect and unmanageable of the branches were gnawed ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... a gratified look, led away the colt, and fastening it to a sapling, took a skin from which he cut a long stout halter so that it could have the range of a few rods, and fastening it left it to feed on the wild ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... Sound are of a very lively, progressive, and aspiring kind, fortunately with abundance of substance about them to warrant their ambition and make them grow. Like young sapling sequoias, they are sending out their roots far and near for nourishment, counting confidently on longevity and grandeur of stature. Seattle and Tacoma are at present far in the lead of all others in the race for supremacy, and these two are keen, active rivals, to all ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... of most anxious and restless vanity being mentioned, 'Sir, (said he,) there is not a young sapling upon Parnassus more severely blown about by every wind of ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... from camp, a sapling was stuck into the ground, and upon the top of this was adjusted a piece of bear's-skin, which, with the long hair upon it, could be distinguished at the distance of a mile or more. The direction having ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... was just turning away, when a sudden gleam of light showed what seemed to be a tiny sail far out in the bay, but it disappeared and, at the same moment, a sudden, violent wind swept in from the sea, and almost threw her down. She caught hold of a sapling-stem to steady herself, and held tightly till the gust passed. Next instant came a great roar of blinding rain, and she was forced to run as fast as she could to the house. It took but two minutes to reach it; but ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... the lineal heir of her monarchy, a pledge of the future restoration of her civil and ecclesiastical constitution, and a guarantee to individuals against sequestrators and informers. The same judicious measures which had preserved the Royal sapling when the parent-tree was felled, should be resorted to for the safety of an illustrious private family; and Dr. Lloyd agreed to hurry back to North Wales, and remove his precious charge to some more auspicious clime, before they heard of the imprisonment of Dr. Beaumont. Virginia ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... The sons are older than the sires; Ere yet the tree to earth is cast, The sapling falls before the blast; Life's ashes keep their ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... may all well know what griefs are in my mind. Woe is me wretched! woe is me who have in an evil hour brought forth the bravest [of men], I who, after having borne a son, blameless and valiant, the chief of heroes, and he grew up[572] like a young tree: having reared him like a sapling in a fruitful spot of a field, I afterwards sent him forth in the curved ships to Ilium, to fight against the Trojans; but I shall not receive him again, having returned home to the palace of Peleus. But whilst he lives and beholds the light of the sun, he grieves,[573] nor can I, going ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... the youths, the preceding night, had cut a tall sapling and set it in the middle of the green, in front of the tavern. On the top of this had been fixed the cocked hat of Justice Goodrich, brought as a trophy from Great Barrington. This was the center of interest, the focus of the crowd, ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... catching a sapling here, a limb there, pulling herself over hard bits of going. Once she turned and fired a chance shot in the direction of the howling. Far away came the roar of one of the mountain lions; and the pack of red wolves became suddenly and magically silent. ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... if to precede him, but throwing his bridle over a sapling, he walked rapidly forward, and overtook her just before she entered the house. The door was partly open. Agnes turned upon ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... interesting studies of the power of movement in various plants, devoted special attention to the clematis clan, of which about one hundred species exist; but, alas! none to our traveller's joy, that flings out the right hand of good fellowship to every twig within reach, winds about the sapling in brotherly embrace, drapes a festoon of flowers from shrub to shrub, hooks even its sensitive leafstalks over any available support as it clambers and riots on its lovely way. By rubbing the footstalk of a young leaf with a twig a few times on any side, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... ashore, and fastened the painter to a sapling on the bank, because it was not long enough to go round a pile. Then they produced their knives, and, proceeding to the place where the young birches grew, cut down two famous rods, to which they attached lines with white and green floats and small hooks with gut attachments. ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... stakes, and against rain and snow helped to hold it in place. The soil, as the path showed, was of a pink stone. It cuts easily, and is the stone from which cathedrals have been built. That suggests that to an ambitious young sapling it offers little nutriment, but the pines, at least, seem to thrive on it. For centuries they have thrived on it. They towered over us to the height of eight stories. The ground beneath was hidden ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... overhead, and the vast dim aisles opened far down in the tender gloom of the wood and faded slowly away in the distance. And every little spray of leaves that tossed airily in the pleasant breeze, every slender branch swaying gently in the wind, every young sapling pushing its childish head panting for light through the mass of greenery and quivering with golden sunbeams, every trunk of aged tree gray with moss and lichens, every tuft of flowers, seemed thrilled and vivified by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... boulder kept to the ground at first, then, gathering momentum, it went bounding into the air. About half-way down the hill it struck a sapling and cut it clean off. This turned its course a little, and the negro in the cart, hearing the noise and seeing the great mass come crashing in his direction, made a wild effort to whip ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... mockery mere: she called herself unworthy To be great Balder's bride and Odin's daughter, And held my love-sick sighs for jest and flatt'ry. Yet never have I heard the word which killeth, Without the aid of Surtur's deadly sapling— The No, the frightful No, by Nanna utter'd. Ha! I will hear it! Yes, by Haelheim's darkness! My tears shall now extract ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... praise— An ashen sapling bending in Thy wind, Uplifting in Thy light new-budded leaves; Nor for myself nor any other raise My boughs in music, though the woodland heaves— O with what ease of pain at length resigned, What hope to the old inheritance restored! Thy praise it is ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... and his seconds soon followed us down the path, and each party saluted. Then Captain Brooke and Dick Ringgold measured off the paces, and threw for the choice of positions. Dick won, and I found myself standing near a small sapling, with my back to the rising sun, which as yet had not climbed over the tree tops, and so did not interfere with Rodolph's position. Facing me, twelve paces away, stood Rodolph, his dark, swarthy face darker, more Indian-like, and forbidding than ever; behind ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... and guide had dismounted from their ponies and were seated on a rock busily engaged in conversation. Chunky, after glancing at them narrowly, shouldered his rifle and strolled off, leaving his pony tethered to a sapling. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... and ran to help the Cuban. The distance was too great for a hand-clasp. The ragged trousers which Stuart was wearing in his disguise as a Haitian lad were only held up by a piece of string; he had no belt which he could throw. There was no sapling growing near enough to ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... escape, but was caught, and handcuffed to another. Being removed from one place to another, the two prisoners managed to knock their guards on the head, and ran for life through the woods, chained together. One would sometimes run on one side of a sapling, and the other on the opposite side. At night they managed to rub their handcuffs off, and finally escaped to Canada. Of the other brothers, two were carried off by the rebels and were never more heard of; John was taken to the rebel army when old enough to do service, but he also escaped to ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... drove up, he observed that both the shafts of his gig were broken, and that they were held together by withes, formed from the bark of a hickory sapling. Our traveler observed further that he was plainly clad, that his knee buckles were loosened, and that something like negligence pervaded his dress. Conceiving him to be one of the honest yeomanry of our land, the courtesies of strangers passed between them, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... "Grab this sapling!" Peter Mink cried, drawing Jimmy close to a small tree. "And I'll pull the sled from under you." But all his pulling did no more than to make Jimmy's arms ache. For Jimmy was nailed so fast to the sled that he stuck to it—or it stuck to him—as ...
— The Tale of Peter Mink - Sleepy-Time Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... no nest-builder that suffers more from crows and squirrels and other enemies than the wood thrush. It builds as openly and unsuspiciously as if it thought all the world as honest as itself. Its favorite place is the fork of a sapling, eight or ten feet from the ground, where it falls an easy prey to every nest-robber that comes prowling through the woods and groves. It is not a bird that skulks and hides, like the catbird, the brown thrasher, the chat, or the chewink, and its nest ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... slowly along it and entering the forest at the base of the mountain was shrunk to a toy. For a moment Clayton stood with his face to the west, drinking in the air; then tightening his belt, he caught the pliant body of a sapling and swung loose from the rock. As the tree flew back, his dog sprang after him. The descent was sharp. At times he was forced to cling to the birch-tops till they lay flat on ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... walked far, when a sharp, wild cry, as of some small animal in pain, struck his ear. Pushing away the brush at the left, he saw the cause—a little dark furry creature hanging to a sapling, as it seemed; and at his appearance the struggles to escape were redoubled, and the weakly cries of fear became more piteous. Arthur perceived that to the top of the sapling was fastened a steel snaptrap, clasping a forepaw in its cruel teeth, ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... women generally scorned them for such uses, thinking them in the way. Henry also helped his father make stools and chairs, the former a very simple task, consisting of a flat piece of wood, chopped or sawed out, in which three holes were bored to receive the legs, the latter made of a section of sapling, an inch or so in diameter. But the baskets required longer and more tedious work. They cut green withes, split them into strips and then plaiting them together formed the basket. In this Mrs. Ware and even the little girl helped. They also made tables and a small ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... down a bent, withered piece of sapling that hung over the dresser. "If this isn't the stick ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... enthusiasm, volunteered to climb the tree and fasten the flag to its topmost stem, and Weber, after some claims on his own behalf, agreed. John was a good climber, alert, agile and full of strength, and he went up the trunk like an expert. It was an uncommonly tall tree for France, much more than a sapling, and when he reached the last bough that would support him he found that he could see over all the other trees and some of the low hills. At a little distance ran the Marne, a silver sheet, and he thought he could discern faint puffs of smoke on the hills beyond. ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... threw Down the Saddel Bags and broke three of our powder goards and Abram's beast Burst open a walet of corn and lost a good Deal and made a turrabel flustration amongst the Reast of the Horses Drake's mair run against a sapling and noct it down we cacht them all again and went on and ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the chief immediately tore off a branch of the feather palm growing beside her, and, certainly within a minute, made a basket, into which she placed a small gourd. Going to the other side of the clearing, she commenced, with the agility of a monkey, to ascend a long sapling which had been laid in a slanting position against a tall palm tree. The long, graceful leaves of this cabbage palm had been torn open, and the heart thus left to ferment. From the hollow cabbage the ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... the axe, ran down the bank and with a few strokes cut a moosewood sapling, which we thrust out to Tom. He caught hold of it, and then, by pulling hard, we hauled him to the bank and ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... the trees upon the snow are blue and soft, sharply defined, and so contrasted with the gleaming white as to appear narrower than the boughs which cast them. There is something subtle and fantastic about these shadows. Here is a leafless larch-sapling, eight feet high. The image of the lower boughs is traced upon the snow, distinct and firm as cordage, while the higher ones grow dimmer by fine gradations, until the slender topmost twig is blurred and almost effaced. But the denser ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... placed under the side of a house, or a large stump; this pole was supported by two forks, placed about one-third of its length from the butt end, so as to elevate the small end about fifteen feet from the ground; to this was attached, by a large mortise a piece of sapling about five or six inches in diameter, and eight or ten feet long. The lower end of this was shaped so as to answer for a pestle. A pin of wood was put through it, at a proper height, so that two persons could work at the sweep at once. This simple machine very ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... half score of soldiers are grouped around a bivouac fire, some broiling bits of meat on sapling spits, others smoking corn-husk cigarettes, all gaily chatting. One is some fifty paces apart, under a spreading tree, keeping guard over two prisoners, who, with legs lashed and hands pinioned, lie prostrate ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... oldest of the sequoias is at least 7000 years old. The least age assigned to it is 5000 years. It was a giant when the Hebrew Patriarchs were keeping sheep. It was a sapling when the first seeds of human civilization were germinating on the banks of the Euphrates and the Nile. It had attained its full growth before the Apostles went forth to spread the Christian religion. It began to die before William ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... water Joe could see the cunning trap which had caused the death of Bill, and insured the captivity of himself and his brother. The crafty savages had trimmed a six-inch sapling and anchored it under the water. They weighted the heavy end, leaving the other pointing upstream. To this last had been tied the grapevine. When the drifting raft reached the sapling, the Indians concealed in the willows pulled hard on the improvised rope; the ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... personality also, I determined to make another experiment in portraiture,—this time in the direction of sculpture. I think it was having come across a very damp country, abounding in plastic clay, that put this idea into my head. First of all, then, I cut down a stout young sapling, which, propped up in the ground, served as the mainstay of my statue; and from it I fastened projecting branches for the arms ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... castle, they languished in the Buckinghamshire Eden—a freestone palace set among the woods that overhang the valley of the Thames. No breezes that blow could waft strength or vitality to those feeble lungs. At thirty the Duchess of Dovedale had lost all her babies, save one frail sapling, a girl of two years old, who promised to have a somewhat better constitution than her perished brothers and sisters. On this small paragon the Duchess concentrated her cares and hopes. She gave up hunting—much ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... and hastened to the woods as I had been bidden. I looked in every direction for a tall, slender tree that would answer the purpose; and every time I stopped to examine a young tree, a taller and straighter sapling ...
— Tiger and Tom and Other Stories for Boys • Various
... unerring and killed the female. She fluttered into a large sapling that sprouted from a large crevice in the rocks, about eight feet above the boy's head, and lay motionless. Although nearly blinded by blood, young Hemingway now attempted a feat which he was convinced offered the only ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... through the motions of hitching old Hip and Jim to a sapling near the top of the "Mountain." They ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... wrench in Europe. Some brutal mishap while he was serving in the army had made him revolt and later desert. Now, after seven years in America, he was compelled to admit that the wrench had been indispensable for transplanting the sapling to the soil best suited to its growth. In the new surroundings, Ritter's nature developed simply, harmoniously and symmetrically, like a tree with plenty of space and sunlight. Fate atoned for the lack of military subordination ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... became angry; visions of the past primaeval forests appeared before me, all of which had been destroyed: and as formerly we hung a man in England for cutting an oak sapling, I thought that the same cure for timber-destroying propensities might save the few remaining forests in this island. While indulging in this strain of unphilanthropic thought we overtook another throng ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... Stepping aside to examine one of these, William Bradford suddenly found his leg inclosed in a noose, while the tree, released and springing upward, would have carried him ignominiously with it had not he seized the trunk of another sapling, and lustily shouted for help. His comrades came running back, and not without laughter and some grim pleasantries released him. Stephen Hopkins alone understood the trap, and cutting from it a piece of smooth fine cord twisted of wood fibres handed ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... off in one piece without a slit; then long strips of meat were cut off and hung over the branches of a tree. When the rest of the meat had been stripped off, they packed it all away in the hide, slung the bundle to a sapling, and, with each end of the pole on a shoulder, they slowly carried the whole to the camp. Venning hoped that his labours were over; but they had only completed one task. They had now to build a scaffolding ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... care was to tether the pony to a sapling, after which he searched about until he found a mountain stream, in which he washed, feeling greatly refreshed afterward. He then treated the pony as he had himself, washing the animal down, and allowing it to quench ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... was well understood, and there were not wanting those to take Darby's side. He had grown to be the likeliest young man in the district, tall, and straight as a sapling, and though Vashti flaunted her hate of him and turned up her little nose more than it was already turned up at his name, there were many other girls in the pines who looked at him languishingly from under their long sun-bonnets, and thought he was ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... recent life been so happy as she was now, possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing, physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... intellectual history of China.[6] The thoughts of men were turned toward deep and acute inquiry into the nature and use of things in general. This thinking resulted in a literature which to-day is the basis of the opinions of the educated men in all Chinese Asia. Instead of a sapling we now have a mighty tree. The chief of the Chinese writers, the Calvin of Asiatic orthodoxy, who may be said to have wrought Confucianism into a developed philosophy, and who may be called the greatest teacher of the mind, of modern China, Korea and Japan, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... strong red flame to be that of the shell-bark hickory—the best firewood—though dry sticks of some lighter wood had been used to kindle it. On each side of the fire a forked stick was stuck into the ground, with the forks at the top; and on these rested a fresh cut sapling, placed horizontally to serve as a crane. A two-gallon camp-kettle of sheet-iron was suspended upon it and over the fire, and the water in the kettle was just beginning to boil. Other utensils were strewed around. There was a frying-pan, some tin cups, several small packages ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... arouse the lightest sleeper, he knelt by Chitta's side, and with great dexterity managed to pass the noose over both his moccasined feet without disturbing his slumber. Drawing it as tightly as he dared, the tall Indian made the other end fast to a sapling, and sat down beside the sleeper to patiently await ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... most fair, the cheery wind Halloos behind the hill, Where bends the wood as seemeth good, And the sapling to his will! Riot O wind; there is that in my blood That ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... foothold she could discover was ten feet above the basin, in sheer ascent. The ledge was dank and slippery with the dashing spray. Gain the top of it, however, she must. She ran up the embankment under the cliff. Here a sapling gave her support; she clung to a crevice or projection there; a drooping bough saved her from falling when the soft earth slid from beneath her feet farther on. So she climbed along the side of the ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... a moment," continued the unthoughtful Lizzy; "here's a beautiful sassafras sapling, and I can't pull it up by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... and a square of garden is fenced in, with dahlias and hollyhocks and marigolds, and perhaps a struggling rosebush, and usually a small patch of tobacco growing in one corner. Once in a long while you may see a balm-of-Gilead tree, or a clump of sapling ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... portal. Within, they saw some fifty of those large oblong dwellings so familiar in after years to the eyes of the Jesuit apostles in Iroquois and Huron forests. They were about fifty yards in length, and twelve or fifteen wide, framed of sapling poles closely covered with sheets of bark, and each containing several fires and several families. In the midst of the town was an open area, or public square, a stone's throw in width. Here Cartier and his ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... file, down the passage, and found Moynglass in a smaller cave at the end of it, staring intently at something which was at first difficult to see in the gloom. Then, by the light of our lamps, we made out a sapling sticking up between two rocks, with a withered human hand impaled on it ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... down, cut off the flag with my pen-knife, and made a paddle of the flag staff, which was a small sapling which they had cut out of the brush, and was forked at the upper end. Between these forks they had carefully sewed this flag with twine, and this part of the canvas I left and made it serve as the blade of my paddle; and so in due time ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... about that now; I will tell you when we have more time," replied Deck, as he rode his horse to a tree, followed by both of his companions, and secured him to the sapling, as did the others. ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic
... behind. But the breath of the woods was now a matter of small moment, for Silk and Satin and Nigger loafing at the sunny end of the stable pricked up their ears at her approach, and she knew that Roaring Bill was home again. She tied her horse to a sapling and drew nearer. The ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... causeway was straight as an arrow, as these old Roman roads will be, but the track men used on its crest was not so. Here and there a great tree had grown from acorn or beech nut, and had set wayfarers aside since it was a sapling, to root up which was no man's business. So we could not see who came, there being a tree and bushes at a swerve of the way. The horses heard, and pricked up their ears, and told us in their way that more steeds ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... wings, darting suddenly down, then up again, and repeating these movements for some time. It mates about the end of February. The nest, composed of dry rootlets laid very closely in rings, is usually found in an oak sapling about ten feet from the ground. The inside diameter is five inches, and depth one and three-fourths inches. It is like a ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... no sapling any more. And, consideration aside, you know it's government's policy for us to establish good relations with any intelligent life-form we have to share a planet with. You ...
— The Venus Trap • Evelyn E. Smith
... for taking so long to find the switch; and so was I, for I wanted to have the thing over and done with. At last, in came David, a picture of open-hearted innocence, solemnly dragging a young bur-oak sapling, and handed the end of it to father, saying it was the best switch he could find. It was an awfully heavy one, about two and a half inches thick at the butt and ten feet long, almost big enough for a fence-pole. There wasn't room enough in the cabin to swing it, and the moment I saw ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir |
