"Spruce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and a new set of people fill the streets. The goods in the shop-windows are invitingly arranged; the shopmen in their white neckerchiefs and spruce coats, look as it they couldn't clean a window if their lives depended on it; the carts have disappeared from Covent-garden; the waggoners have returned, and the costermongers repaired to their ordinary 'beats' in the suburbs; clerks are at their ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... down the rural road, our house being on the verge where Norton Bury melted into "the country." It turned out to be the cloak of a well-to-do young farmer's wife riding to market in her cart beside her jolly-looking spouse. Very spruce and self-satisfied she appeared, and the market-people turned to stare after her, for her costume was a novelty then. Doubtless, many thought as I did, how much prettier ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Anne, for directly in front of them was a wigwam, so cunningly built in behind a growth of small spruce trees that unless one knew of its whereabouts it might be easily passed by. The Indian girl laughed at Anne's exclamation, and nodded at her in a ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... in a grove of pines, but the trees that crowded one another almost out into the lake among the lily pads were spruce ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... wood-sorrel bell As yet, though the leaves' green floor Awaited their flower, that would tell Of a red-veined moist yestreen, With its droop and the hues it wore, When we two stood overnight One, in the dark van-glow On our hill-top, seeing beneath Our household's twinkle of light Through spruce-boughs, gem ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... downward from the top of the spruce tree to feed upon the brown seeds still clinging to the pigweed and goldenrod stalks sticking out above the snow by the roadside, it dips and floats through the air like its charming little cousin, the goldfinch. They have several characteristics in common besides their ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... level we encountered a steeper ascent than any I had yet climbed. Here the character of the forest began to change. There were other trees than pines, and particularly one kind, cone-shaped, symmetrical, and bright, which Dick called a silver spruce. I was glad it belonged to the conifers, or pine-tree family, because it was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. We climbed ridges and threaded through aspen thickets in hollows till near sunset. Then Stockton ordered ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... the Assistant Commissioner. The door opened and Chief Inspector Kerry entered. His face was as fresh-looking, his attire as spruce and his eyes were as bright, as though he had slept well, enjoyed his bath and partaken of an excellent breakfast. Whereas he had not been to bed during the preceding twenty-four hours, had breakfasted upon biscuits ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... cakes, and read from grown-up books. She is never allowed to go fishing, or wade in the cove on warm days, or go off in the woods as I do. I doubt if Melvina Lyon could tell the difference 'twixt a partridge and heron, or if she could tell a spruce tree from a fir. And as for presents, hers are of no account. They are but dolls, and silver thimbles and silk aprons. Why! did not my father bring me home a fine beaver skin for a hood, and a pair of duck's wings, and a pair of moccasins the very last ...
— A Little Maid of Old Maine • Alice Turner Curtis
... our coming was celebrated by a dinner of wild goose, plum pudding, and coffee. After the voyage from Halifax it seemed good to rest a little with the firm earth under foot, and where the walls of one's habitation were still. Through the open windows came the fragrance of the spruce woods, and from the little piazza in front of the house you could look down and across Lake Melville, and away to the blue mountains beyond, where the snow was ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... foliage. In one of these natural parlours they paused for their mid-day repast—mid-day in the world without, but here, where only vagrant gleams of the spring sun pierced the forest solitudes, gloomy with spruce and pine, there was a sense of morning in the air. This appearance was heightened by the delicate curtains of cobweb, strung with shining pearls, which still might be seen after the fog at early dawn. There was no sound except sometimes that of an invisible bird, singing in the upper air, ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... seem like a sudden transition back into the winter. The Christmas tree with its gay decorations and lighted candles was a beautiful sight, and the green-trimmed room with its spicy odours of spruce and pine ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... however, and up the hill toiled, and to the door of a sort of spruce-looking lanthorn of a house, without tree or shrub near it. But still it might be good to sleep in; and, nothing daunted by the maid's prophecies and ominous voice, we determined to try our fate. Sir Culling got down and rubbed his hands; while, after his man's knocking at the door ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... considerable shrewdness, and it was plain that he would eventually become as good a merchant as his father. He was little older than Lucy, but his fair hair and his clean-shaven face gave him a more youthful look. With his spruce air and well-made clothes, his conversation about hunting and golf, few would have imagined that he arrived regularly at his office at ten in the morning, and was as keen to make a good bargain as any of the men he came in ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... beat hot upon them, and they diffused a faint aromatic fragrance, refreshing as the scent of vinegar, into the long, unfloored room, which certainly needed something of the kind. It reeked with stale tobacco-smoke, the smell of cookery, and the odors of frowsy clothes. A row of bunks, filled with spruce twigs and old brown blankets, ran down one side of it, a very rude table down the other, and a double row of men with bronzed faces, in dusty garments, sat about the latter, eating voraciously. Fifteen minutes was, at the outside, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... farther north than the quail, and is found throughout the United States. With us he affects high and rocky ground, but northward he keeps at a lower level. At the White Mountains, the regions of this species and of the Canada grouse or spruce partridge are as well defined in height as those of the maples and the "black growth." Still farther north I have observed that our partridge frequents the lowest marshy ground, thus equalizing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... had pined for any kind of civilization rather than a continuance of the eternal snows, wondered if this were any better. Jim pitched the tent under some spruce-trees and high up on a ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... chiefly among the coniferous evergreens, embracing the Pine, the Fir, the Spruce, and the Cypress. Though many of the deciduous trees assume more or less of this outline, it is the normal and characteristic form of the Pines and their kindred species. It is a peculiarity of the pyramidal trees, with a few exceptions, to remain always disfigured, after the loss of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... favourable to any of the European kinds of grain; but produces great plenty of maize, which the people bake into bread, and brew into beer, though their favourite drink is made of molasses hopped, and impregnated with the tops of the spruce-fir, which is a native of this country. The ground raises good flax and tolerable hemp. Here are great herds of black cattle, some of them very large in size, a vast number of excellent hogs, a breed of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... side chamber, which produced an almost incredible effect. An ellipsoidal missile of ninety gauge and several diameters long, made of brass, was driven through thirty-six inches of oak and twenty-four inches of green spruce timber, or fifty inches of the most impenetrable of timbers. The same principle of acceleration has, it is said, been most successfully applied in Boston by the use of a hollow tige or tube fixed at the bottom of the bore with the inside of which the cap-fire communicates,—so that, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... grounds are narrow and without timber; the country is high and broken; a large portion of black rock and brown sandy rock appears in the face of the hills, the tops of which are covered with scattered pine, spruce, and dwarf cedar; the soil is generally poor, sandy near the tops of the hills, and nowhere producing much grass, the low grounds being covered with little else than the hyssop, or southernwood, and the pulpy-leaved thorn. Game is more scarce, particularly ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... Orgeat Cherry shrub Currant wine To make cherry brandy Rose brandy Peach cordial Raspberry cordial Raspberry vinegar Mint cordial Hydromel, or mead To make a substitute for arrack Lemon cordial Ginger beer Spruce beer Molasses beer To keep lemon juice Sugar vinegar Honey vinegar Syrup of vinegar Aromatic vinegar Vinegar of the four thieves Lavender water Hungarian water To prepare cosmetic soap for washing the hands Cologne water Soft pomatum To make soap ...
— The Virginia Housewife • Mary Randolph
... you; what, you; fellow, you; and thus much for greeting. Now, my spruce companions, is all ready, and all ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... greeted with special enthusiasm. Speeches were made, toasts were drunk, the supple boards of the table creaked with good things, cook and messman vied with each other in lavish hospitality, the Hut was ornate with flags, every man was spruce in his snowiest cardigan and neck-cloth, the gramophone sang of music-hall days, the wind roared its appreciation through the stove-pipe, and rollicking merriment was supreme. On such occasions the photographer and the biologist ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... wise Queen Dolores, saying: "I have studied mathematics. I will question this young man, in my tent to-night, and in the morning I will report the truth as to his claims. Are you content to endure this interrogatory, my spruce young fellow who wear ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... think of our first Tree, in some way," said Polly softly, with glistening eyes, looking up at the beautiful branching spruce, its countless arms shaking out brilliant pendants, and gay with streamers and candles, wherever a decoration could be placed, the whole tipped with a shining star. "Oh, Bensie, ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world's commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the birthplace ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... of human servants to minister to his comfort. Yet he was modest and unassuming, and appeared really to enjoy his life of hard work; varying his struggles with a kernel of hard corn on the ground, where his color shone out like a flower against the green, with a rest on a spruce-tree, where ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce." ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Albert, a spruce, good-looking youth, had been too grand to make friends with so young a sister; but, now that she was a person of consequence, his tone was different. He talked his best, and she had a perfect feast of Wrangerton ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... approaching the higher hills. Towering, broken crags loomed ahead darkly in the gathering gloom. The vast riven facets cut the sky-line, and black patches of pine forests, and spruce, gave a ghostly, threatening outlook. They must have been riding over two hours when Scipio realized they were passing over a narrow cattle track on the summit of a wooded hill. Then presently their horses began a steep shelving descent which required ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... and decorations gay, The tinsel-trappings of a vain array. The spruce trimm'd jacket, and the waving plume, The powder'd head emitting soft perfume; These may make fops, but never can impart The soldier's hardy frame, or daring heart; May in Hyde-Park present a splendid train, But are not weapons for a dread campaign; May please ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... currant-bush more nearly than any thing else I can think of. Where the branches are widest the plant is three or four feet from side to side. The lowest branches are the longest, and the plant, standing by itself, has a shape similar to that of the Northern spruce. The stalk is sometimes an inch and a half in diameter where it leaves the ground. Before the leaves have fallen, the rows in a cotton-field bear a strong resemblance to ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... he met Cash walking down the slope where the trail seemed tunneled through deep green, so thick stood the young spruce. Cash was swinging his arms in that free stride of the man who has learned how to walk with the least effort. He did not halt when he saw Bud plodding slowly up the trail, but came on steadily, his keen, blue-gray eyes peering sharply from ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... returned from his surgery at the agency for his midday meal, and his abundant toned hail reached his wife in a remote bedroom in the almost luxurious home which he had had set up amidst the spruce ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... far-off days when fashion itself had not become old-fashioned and got improved into Smart Society,—this haunted half-mile or more still retains many fine old residences of brown stone and of red brick, which are spruce and well-kept. One such, on the west side of the street, of red brick, with a high stoop of brown stone, is a boarding-house, and in it is an apartment to which, on a certain clear, cold afternoon in October, the reader's presence in the ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... poles and bark had been built by the men during his absence. In it were all the stores, as well as a quantity of spruce boughs and hemlock tips for bedding. The chill evening air was filled with a delicious fragrance of burning cedar, mingled with the pleasant odor of boiling coffee. Several white-fish nailed to oak planks were browning before a bed of glowing coals, while slices of a lake-trout were sizzling ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... this gallant and spruce company (for every man had donned his best, and dressed himself with the utmost care) came Caron La Boulaye. He walked alone, for although their comrade in death, he was their comrade in nothing else. Their heads might lie together in the sawdust of Sanson's basket, but ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... into the woods. In the winter wild you will hardly get far into them, except at the Christmas season for greenery. Gathering this by deputy is poor business. It is all very well, if you can do no better, to engage Mr. Brown to engage some one else to bring in the needed spruce, fir, and hemlock with which to obscure the fresco deformities of St. Boniface's; but it is far better to hunt for them yourself. There is something intensely delightful in the changes of the search; for it begins dull enough. You start in the drear December weather, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... choose to call them, stretching more than twenty feet from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending as perfectly into them as if your spinal cord ran down the centre strip of your boat, and the nerves of your arms tingled as far as the broad blades of your oars,—oars of spruce, balanced, leathered, and ringed under your own special direction. This, in sober earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever made or perhaps ever will make. As the hawk sails without flapping his pinions, so you drift ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a party of returned Californians. Their line was uneven, their wheeling excessively loose, their evolutions of the simplest and yet awkwardly executed. Evidently they were newly embodied, and from the country; for the Charleston companies are spruce in appearance and well drilled. Half a dozen of them, who had been on sentinel duty during the night, discharged their guns in the air,—a daily process, rendered necessary by the moist atmosphere of the harbor at this season; and then, the exercise being over, there was a general scamper for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... old snow-shoes, stuffed with spruce tips underneath, and covered with dressed deerskin. He had cut off the back ends of them. You shall see them to-morrow. I found them down yonder where he had left them after crossing the warm spring. He had five bits of sharp round ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... lord may be) Thus low I take off mine to thee, The homage of a layman's castor, To the spruce delta of his pastor. Oh mayst thou be, as thou proceedest, Still smarter cockt, still brusht the brighter, Till, bowing all the way, thou leadest Thy sleek ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to cross the country, where the land becomes more solid. The armies must move, instead of through marshes, along innumerable small lakes, most of the lakes being long and narrow and running north and south, with a fairly thick growth of timber among them, mostly pine and spruce and fir. In character this section is rather similar to parts of Minnesota. There are two cities to be conquered in this drier region, Dvinsk, and, further south, Vilna, once the chief city or capital of the Lithuanians. We shall see the Russians thrust back from Koenigsberg, and the heavy fighting ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... I stood in the hall, a tall, clean-shaven, rather spruce young man entered and spoke to the concierge, who at once ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... the drawing-room on their return. Her suspicion reasserted itself, and it was strengthened, against her reason, by the fact that Arthur Twemlow made no comment on John's invisibility. In the dusk of the spruce stable, where an enamelled name-plate over the manger of a loose box announced that 'Prince' was its pampered tenant, she opened the cornbin, and, entering the loose-box, offered the cob a handful of crushed oats. And when ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... Drangollie, and the Draget fine, Mead, Mattebru, and the Metheling. Red wine, the claret and the white, with Tent and Alicant, in whom I delight. Wine of Languedoc and of Orleans thereto: Single beer, and other that is double: Spruce beer, and the beer of ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... although it was no laughing matter, at the plight the liquidator was now in. He was changed in a moment from the spruce and natty personage into a miserable and draggled being. From every part of him the salt water was streaming, and the curl was completely taken out of his whiskers. He could not speak from terror, which the boat-boys soon ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... midnight before he went to bed. He was up with the first cold gray of dawn. All that day he strode steadily eastward on snowshoes, over the company's trail to the bay. Two hours before dusk he put up his light tent, gathered balsam for a bed, and built a fire of dry spruce against the face of a huge rock in front of his shelter. It was still light when he wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down on the balsam, with his feet stretched out to the reflected heat of the big ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... It was notorious in the canyon that the only bear Old Bill ever saw was a fifty-pound cub that stole a string of trout from under Bill's nose, waded the creek and went away while Old Bill was throwing his gun into the brush and hitching frantically along a fallen spruce under the impression that he was climbing a tree. As for himself, he was getting too old and rheumatic to hunt, but he had had a little sport with bears in his time. He recalled with especial glee a little incident of ten or a dozen years ago. He had been over on the Iron Fork hunting ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... appear'd, what a shout rent the air! The spruce widow affords the most excellent cheer; For comfort in quarters there's nothing can beat her, So up rose the lads with a welcome to greet her: The muse with true gallantry led her to place, And Truth said good humour ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... a secret, says a beau, And sneers at some ill-natured wit below; But faith, if we should tell but half we know, There's many a spruce young fellow in this place, Wou'd never presume to show his face; Women are not so weak, what e'er men prate; How many tip-top beaux have had the fate, T'enjoy from mama's secrets their estate! Who, if her early folly had made known, Had rid behind ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... leaving her to question herself whether she existed, for more of life seemed to be with their mystery than with her speculations. The phantom ring of mist enclosing for miles the invariable low-sweeping dark spruce-fir kept her thoughts on them as close as the shroud. She walked fast, but scarcely felt that she was moving. Near midday the haunted circle widened; rocks were loosely folded in it, and heads of trees, whose round ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wonderful garden. She and Old Aaron lived in a little gray cube of a house that had its front face set straight to the edge of Charlotte Street. However, the north side of the cube looked into a great green yard where tall spruce trees, overrun with trumpet vines and woodbine, shaded long beds of flowers that love semi-shady places. The rear of the house overlooked an old-fashioned garden enclosed with a white-washed picket fence. Always were there flowers at Granny's house. In the cold days ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... world!"? At such moments a great force seems to uplift one as on wings; and one flies, and everything else flies, but contrariwise—both the verst stones, and traders riding on the shafts of their waggons, and the forest with dark lines of spruce and fir amid which may be heard the axe of the woodcutter and the croaking of the raven. Yes, out of a dim, remote distance the road comes towards one, and while nothing save the sky and the light clouds through which the moon ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... was signalled. The orchestra struck up a rollicking measure and Tony Luton made his entrance amid a rousing storm of applause. He was dressed as an errand-boy of some West End shop, with a livery and box- tricycle, as spruce and decorative as the most ambitious errand-boy could see himself in his most ambitious dreams. His song was a lively and very audacious chronicle of life behind the scenes of a big retail establishment, and sparkled ...
— When William Came • Saki
... OR DOUBLE SPRUCE.) Leaves about 1/2 in. long, erect, stiff, somewhat 4-sided, very dark green or whitish-gray; branchlets pubescent. Cones persistent, 1 to 1 1/2 in. long, ovate or ovate-oblong, changing from dark purple ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... upon the ground. He generally wore an old linen duster, a black slouch hat, and a pair of light blue pants thrust into the tops of heavy boots which were seldom blacked, but often splashed with Cairo mud. But everybody stepped respectfully aside to let him pass, and the spruce young staff officers never failed to ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... eastward. No Crag (Number 2) known east of Cromer Jetty. 3 prime. Fluvio-marine series. At Cromer and eastward, with abundant lignite beds and mammalian remains, and with cones of the Scotch and spruce firs and wood. At Runton, north-west of Cromer, expanding into a thick freshwater deposit, with overlying marine strata, elsewhere consisting of alternating sands and clays, tranquilly deposited, some with ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... shelf-like projection on the side of steep cliffs, overhanging a mountain stream, they were not frightened. But when they began to grow tired, and the trail led them into a dark forest, where the sun came through the thick boughs and shone only in patches of light upon the slippery spruce needles, they grew ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... were at the topmost source—fons et origo—of our chosen river. This single spring, crystal-clear and ice-cold, gushing out of the hillside in a forest of spruce and yellow birch and sugar maple, gave us the clue that we must follow for a week ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... block; but when the mate came to shake the cat's-paw out of the downhaul, and we began to boom end the sail, it shook the ship to her center. The boom buckled up and bent like a whipstick, and we looked every moment to see something go; but, being of the short, tough upland spruce, it bent like whalebone, and nothing could break it. The carpenter said it was the best ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... top fell off, and revealed the neatest collection of little packages that ever pleased the eye of the admirer of spruce arrangement. Popanilla took up packets upon all possible subjects; smelt them, but they were not savory; he was sorely puzzled. At last, he lighted on a slender volume bound in brown calf, which, with the confined but sensual notions of a savage, ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... spruce trees fell north-eastward, pointing long, cool fingers across belts of undulating prairie, or leaning lazily against the brown foothills. Like an incandescent globe the afternoon sun hung in the bowl of a cloudless heaven, filmy with heat, but the hot rays were met by the high ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... a small space in front of the aperture. To hold the stakes all the more firmly, large stones were piled up against them, and the uprights themselves were closely wattled together by the broad flat branches of the spruce pines that grew near. In this way was constructed a fence that a cat could not have crawled through, much less a bear. One aperture only was left in it, and that was directly in front—a hole at about the height of a man's knee from the ground, and just big enough to admit the head of ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... for they knew that my designs were honourable and virtuous; and I know that they often said as much to Leonisa, in order to dispose her to receive me as her betrothed; but she had set her heart on Cornelio, the son of Ascanio Rotulo, whom you well know—a spruce young gallant, point-de-vice in his attire, with white hands, curly locks, mellifluous voice, amorous discourse—made up, in short, of amber and sugar-paste, garnished with plumes and brocade. She never cared ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... nearly as wide. It was constructed of wood, and covered with the rinds of trees, and skins of deer. It contained large quantities of venison, estimated to have been the choicest parts of at least 100 deer—the flesh was in junks, entirely divested of bone, and stored in boxes made of birch and spruce rinds—each box containing about two cwt. The tongues and hearts were placed in the middle of the packages. In this structure, says the celebrated William Cull, we saw three lids of tin tea kettles, which he believed to be the very same given ...
— Lecture On The Aborigines Of Newfoundland • Joseph Noad
... this northern country is one of exceeding beauty. The dark green forests of spruce, larch and pine, broken now and then by a grove of poplars or silver birches, the secluded valleys and the rounded hills are strangely restful and give one a sense of infinite peace. It is a place to go for tired nerves. Ragged peaks, towering mountains, and yawning chasms, splendid ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... short distance away, and but a few feet from the path, was a low, tent-like spruce. With instant decision he made for it, drawing the camera from his ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... he had reached a second and almost a third hill about three miles distant. In Yalbury Bottom, or Plain, at the foot of the hill, he listened. At first nothing, beyond his own heart-throbs, was to be heard but the slow wind making its moan among the masses of spruce and larch of Yalbury Wood which clothed the heights on either hand; but presently there came the sound of light wheels whetting their felloes against the newly stoned patches of road, accompanied by the distant ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... ashes of fires where the Indians had encamped earlier in the spring; they were absent now, at the silvery falls, higher up the stream, where fish abounded at that season. The soft June breeze, laden with the delicate breath of wild-flowers and the pungent odors of spruce and pine, ruffled the duplicate sky in the water; the new leaves lisped pleasantly in the tree tops, and the birds were singing as if they had gone mad. No ruder sound or movement of life disturbed the primeval solitude. Master Pring would scarcely recognize the spot were ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... been said very prettily of the spruce-tree, that it keeps the secret of its greenness well; so well that we hardly know when it sheds its leaves. There are women who resemble the spruce in their perennial youth, and the vigilance with which they guard the secret of it. The Baroness was one of these. ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... that their future was thus being settled by Mrs. Rachel, were sauntering through the shadows of the Haunted Wood. Beyond, the harvest hills were basking in an amber sunset radiance, under a pale, aerial sky of rose and blue. The distant spruce groves were burnished bronze, and their long shadows barred the upland meadows. But around them a little wind sang among the fir tassels, and in it there was ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... into the woods with its fragrant scents of hemlock, spruce and wintergreen, and out into ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... insisted on his waiting and resting the night there; for he had need of sleep, he was so tired after walking and bathing, dancing and weeping. And they gave him a nice, spruce, dimity-curtained bed to sleep in; and presented him with a beautiful suit of new garments for the morrow; "for," they said, "they had been at his christening, and it was easy to see that the good Dame Ursula, wherever she had been all these years, had brought ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... among others of fashionable cut and finest cloth. Black broad-cloth frocks, and satin or velvet vests, were quite common. Individuals thus attired formed a majority of the guests—for in young settlements the "hotel" or "tavern" is also a boarding-house, where the spruce "storekeepers" and better class of clerks take their meals—usually sleeping in the office ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... rushing in to say all aboard. Then they snaked me on to the caboose platform when the train was under way, pulled me inside and ran me half a mile up the track before they could stop her again. But that half-mile did the business for Mr. Howard. There he was spruce and dandified as you please, dressed fit to kill in a bang-up better suit than I ever hope to own, trying to sit behind a newspaper. They pulled Burtis aboard, too, and in the scuffle he fell all over Howard, knocked his hat off, and I knew the face in a second, and ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... the first day seems to me worth narrating. The brigade bivouacked on a large plantation, where was a colonial house of generous proportions. It fronted on a spacious lawn, which sloped from the house to the highway and was fringed with handsome old spruce and Austrian pines. In front and rear the house had broad porches. A wide hall ran through the center of the house from one porch to the other and on either side of the hall were well furnished rooms of ample size. In rear, in an enclosure as broad as the house, was a well ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... is a spruce brick tenement, red, high, and narrow, boasting, one above another, three sash-windows, the only sash-windows in the village, with a clematis on one side and a rose on the other, tall and narrow like itself. That slender ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... for Max," I declared. So I did, through the spruce woods and over the field as fast as my feet could carry me, thanking my stars that there was a Max to go ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Yosemite Park, richer and wilder become the forests and streams. At an elevation of 6000 feet above the level of the sea the silver firs are 200 feet high, with branches whorled around the colossal shafts in regular order, and every branch beautifully pinnate like a fern frond. The Douglas spruce, the yellow and sugar pines and brown-barked Libocedrus here reach their finest developments of beauty and grandeur. The majestic Sequoia is here, too, the king of conifers, the noblest of all the noble race. These colossal trees are as wonderful in fineness of ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... scarcely even be called torrents, being precipitated as it were in one leap from the Lebanon to the Mediterranean. Olives, vines, and corn cover the maritime plain, while in ancient times the heights were clothed with impenetrable forests of oak, pine, larch, cypress, spruce, and cedar. The mountain range drops in altitude towards the centre of the country and becomes merely a line of low hills, connecting Gebel Ansarieh with the Lebanon proper; beyond the latter it continues without interruption, till at length, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... door as French entered. The Inspector, who was looking very spruce and well-brushed, wished them a general good-morning. His eyes rested last and longest upon Laura, who seemed, however, ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you git religion, Sir, the thing can't never be; Nut but wut I respeck," sez she, "your intellectle part, But you wun't noways du for me athout a change o' heart: Nothun religion works wal North, but it's ez soft ez spruce, Compared to ourn, for keepin' sound," sez she, "upon the goose; A day's experunce'd prove to ye, ez easy 'z pull a trigger, It takes the Southun pint o' view to raise ten bales a nigger; You'll fin' thet human natur, South, ain't wholesome more 'n skin-deep, An' once't a darkie's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... departs amid a shower of blessings, and again urging his horse to speed, reaches his second place of destination. It is a stately mansion. A spruce waiter hastens to answer his ring, but the lady herself meets him as ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... hills were literally carpeted with flowers. I could not learn that any skilled botanist had ever visited Kamchatka and classified its flora. Among the arboreal productions the alder and birch were the most numerous. Pine, larch, and spruce grow on the Kamchatka river, and the timber from them is brought to Avatcha from the mouth ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... people favoured Joyce with glances of admiration, especially a spruce-looking young constable who officially held up the traffic to allow us to cross the road. He paid no attention at all to me, but I consoled myself with the reflection that he was missing an ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... one general store, would as likely be napping on a counter, his head pillowed upon a pile of calico. A little further up the street and near the one tall-spired white church Mrs. Mears, the village gossip, may be sitting on the veranda of a small house almost hid by luxuriantly growing Norway spruce, and idly rocking while she chats with the widow Sloper, who lives there, and whose mission in life is to cut and fit the best "go to meetin'" gowns of female Sandgate. Both dearly love to talk over all that's going on, and whether this or that village swain is paying especial ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... change the whole front, or nobody will knock at the door. The several parts, which must compose this new front, are elegant, easy, natural, superior good-breeding; an engaging address; genteel motions; an insinuating softness in your looks, words, and actions; a spruce, lively air, fashionable dress; and all the glitter that a young ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... stunted spruce trees edged on the lake, and soon its dreary solitudes rang to the strokes of axes. The trees were small and uniform in size. Black stumps protruded, here and there, from the ground, showing work of the steel in time ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... rounded the Cape, that the extreme heat of an Indian climate is so favourable to the growth of hair as to put those wights who are afflicted with dark chevelures, which was my case, to the inconvenient necessity of chin-scraping twice on the game day, when they wish to appear particularly spruce of an evening. Now I intended to have shaved before the play began, but in the hurry of dressing had forgotten all about it; and upon inspecting my visage in a glass, after I had donned Lady Macbeth's night-gear, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... the door, and he stepped forward into the inner room, where, leaning lazily back before a desk, smoking a cigar over his newspaper, arrayed in a loose white jacket, with open throat and slippered feet, reposed a gentleman, much transformed from the spruce butler, but not difficult of recognition. He started to his feet with equal alacrity and consternation, and bowed, not committing himself until he should see whether he were actually known to his lordship. Fitzjocelyn was in too great haste to pause on this matter, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the river were varied and picturesque; sometimes steep cliffs and uncouth heaps of rock, in the most fantastic shapes, rose to a great height; sometimes the shores sloped away into mountains covered with thick forests of pine and spruce. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... ken ye'd be glad o' that if ye was lost in the woods," he said, when he saw the faces of the lads. "What mair can ye want? Dry your clothes, and then there are your beds for ye." He pointed to a heap of spruce fir tops, in a corner of the hut. Though the food was coarse, and their beds rough, the lads slept soundly. They had food of their own, but they wished to husband that for the woods, ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... Tate. "But it appears to be a duplicate of it." He was a mild-looking little man, well along in years, sparse and spruce in his Precol uniform. The small gray eyes in the sun-darkened, leathery face weren't really mild, if you considered them more closely, or ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... drays pass and collide at the corners of the narrow streets. Suddenly the marquis stops; he has found what he wanted. Between a charcoal dealer's dark shop and an undertaker's establishment, where the spruce boards leaning against the wall cause him to shudder, is a porte-cochere surmounted by a sign, the word "BATHS" on a dull lantern. He enters and crosses a damp little garden where a fountain weeps in a basin of artificial rockwork. That is just the dismal ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... furniture,—everything had been set out in the best style,—and she and her girls had been looking forward to the pleasure which they supposed the little surprise of the arrangements would give him. He was received in the spruce fresh room, set himself comfortably down in the chair prepared for him, and remained in the full enjoyment of his own fireside, and a return to his family circle, without the least consciousness that any change had taken place—until, at length, Mrs. Scott's patience ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... was taken, and liked so much that I was offered the basis (at twenty dollars a week) that I desired; I was even assigned to a desk where I should write in the office; and the next morning I came joyfully down to Spruce Street to occupy it. But I was met at the door by one of the editors, who said lightly, as if it were a trifling affair, "Well, we've concluded to waive the idea of an engagement," and once more my bright hopes of a basis dispersed themselves. I said, with what ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Creek tumbled out of the southeast, and roved between noble borders of silver spruce into the shadows of the Blue Mountains of the north, half a dozen miles across and ten long of grazing and farm land, rich, loamy bottom land ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... deliciously penetrating odour of the mimosa and sweetbriar. Down one special alley, where the white philadelphus, or 'mock orange' grew in thick bushes on either side, intermingled with ferns and spruce firs, whose young green tips exhaled a pungent, healthy scent that entered into the blood like wine and invigorated it, Sir Roger de Launay was pacing to and fro with a swinging step which, notwithstanding its ease ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... southward on snow-shoes. Their way was over the ice of Lake Champlain, for more than a century the great thoroughfare of war-parties. They bivouacked in the forest by squads of twelve or more; dug away the snow in a circle, covered the bared earth with a bed of spruce boughs, made a fire in the middle, and smoked their pipes around it. Here crouched the Christian savage, muffled in his blanket, his unwashed face still smirched with soot and vermilion, relics of the war-paint he had worn a week before ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... stirred the generous spruce and darkening pinewoods. The drooping, westering sun, already athwart the barren crown of the hill tops, left a false, velvety suggestion of twilight in the heart of the valley, while a depressing superheat enervated all life, except the profusion of vegetation which beautified the rugged ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... lost a fraction of his belligerence, but none of his arrogance and natty appearance. Homer wondered vaguely how the other managed to remain so spruce in the inadequate ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... visitors, when Malcolm and Moodie returned from the field. There was no affectation about the former. He was manly in his person, and blunt even to rudeness, and I saw by the quizzical look which he cast upon the spruce little Crowe that he was quietly quizzing him from head to heel. A neighbour had sent me a present of maple molasses, and Mr. Crowe was so fearful of spilling some of the rich syrup upon his drab shorts that he spread a large pocket-hankerchief over his knees, and tucked ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... cottages and gardens, is the station with a train usually ready to start from it for Ronda or Seville or Malaga, I do not know which, and with the usual company of freight-cars idling about, empty or laden with sheets of cork, as indifferent to them as if they were so much mere pine or spruce lumber. There is a sufficiently attractive hotel here for transients, and as an allurement to the marine and military leisure of Gibraltar, "The Picnic Restaurant," and "The Cabin Tea Room," where no doubt there is something to be had beside sandwiches and tea. Here also is the pier for the Gibraltar ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... who apparently had been looking around more or less since they came ashore, "there are plenty of spruce and hemlock and fir trees close by. We can make our beds like hunters always used to do, away back in Daniel ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... uncoarsened by the clang of time and uncorroded by the salt of tears. Rich terraces flowed in velvet waves down to the waiting river, murmuring its trysting joy; a full-robed choir of oak and elm and maple kept their eternal places in a grander loft than man could build them, while pine and spruce and cedar, disrobing never, but snatching their bridal garments from the winter ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... with the exception of the last two, seem to explain themselves. During the summer months in the North Woods you will not need a rifle. Partridges, spruce hens, ptarmigan, rabbits, ducks, and geese are usually abundant enough to fill the provision list. For them, of course, a shotgun is the thing; but since such a weapon weighs many pounds, and its ammunition many more, ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... of narrow streets; with carriers' carts, and travel-stained pedestrians, make up the aggregate of the objects on the road. But in another hour the scene will change; the aristocratic 'turn-out,' with its brilliant appointments and spruce footmen—the cab, the brougham, and the open chariot, all filled with gaily-dressed company, will crowd the way; for a Chiswick fete is one of the events of a London season. People go there as they do to the Opera—to see and to be seen. As I journey onward, I catch glimpses of blooming fruit-trees, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... solitude, driving a high-mettled animal upon a sledge so small as to be entirely concealed by his person, so that, to all appearance, he seemed to be gliding away only attached to the horse by the reins in his well-guarded hands. The way led through noble woods of Scotch and Spruce fir, sometimes catching sight of a lofty mansion of stone, or passing a low thatched building of wood with numberless little sash windows, where some of the nobles still reside, and which are the remnants of more simple times. And now "the sun ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... brought back dear memories of glorious April mornings on Long Island, when through the singing of robin and song-sparrow comes the piercing cadence of the meadowlark; and of the far northland woods in June, fragrant with the breath of pine and balsam-fir, where sweetheart sparrows sing from wet spruce thickets and rapid brooks rush under the drenched and ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... really do think there is no luxury equal to that of lying before a good fire on a good spruce bed, after a good supper, and a hard moose chase in a fine clear frosty moonlit starry night. But to enter into the spirit of this, you must understand what a moose chase is: the man himself runs the moose down by pursuing ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... camp cots or bed sacks are usually provided for the men to sleep on. In a shelter tent camp beds should be made of hay, grass, leaves, pine or spruce boughs, or pine needles, on top of which the poncho and blanket are spread, thus softening the ground and keeping the sleeper away from the cold and dampness. Neglect to prepare the bed when sleeping without cot or bed sack means a loss of sleep, and may lead to colds, bowel ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... the saddle on and mounted. "I must be going back, or they will decide I am not coming till to-morrow, and quickly eat my supper." He spoke jauntily from his horse, arm akimbo, natty short jacket put on for to-day's courting, gray steeple-hat silver-embroidered, a spruce, pretty boy, not likely to toil severely at wood contracts so long as he could hold soul and body together and otherwise be merry, and the hand of that careless arm soft on his pistol, lest Don Ruz should abruptly dislike ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... a storm signal, and one they liked little. The temperature was falling. It was quite dark at three o'clock in the afternoon, and they were obliged to travel by snow-light. When camp was finally made, after halting for the night in a thicket of pine and spruce trees, the men were ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... children feeding a pig. The wide flagstoned street smelt sour. At various cavern doors sat groups of the billeted soldiers. Now and then squads marched up and down, monotonously clad in khaki and dun-coloured helmets. Officers, some only recognizable by the Sam Browne belt, others spruce and point-device, passed by. Here and there a shop was open, and the elderly proprietor and his wife stood by the doorway to get the afternoon air. Women and children straggled rarely through the streets. The Boche had left the little town alone for some time; they had other ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... been found in pine trees in Southern Michigan at an elevation of forty feet. In all cases the nests are placed high in hemlocks or pines, which are the bird's favorite resorts. From all accounts the nests of this species are elegantly and compactly made, consisting of a densely woven mass of spruce twigs, soft vegetable down, rootlets, and fine shreds of bark. The lining is often intermixed with horse hairs and feathers. Four eggs of greenish-white or very pale bluish-green, speckled or spotted, have usually been ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... trees, from whose low limbs dangle the tempting wares, and a stump serves as a chopping-block. Under the shrubbery, where the sun cannot penetrate, are stored home-made firkins full of yellow butter, and great cheeses, and heaps of substantial home-baked bread. Kegs of hard cider and spruce beer and perhaps more potent brews are abroach, and behind the haggling and jesting and bustle you may catch the sound of muskets or the whoop of the Indians from afar. Meanwhile, in the settlements, all manner of industries were stimulated, and a great number of women throughout ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... all. A Norway spruce cone. When it is dry its scales are open. I filled them with grass seed and put the cone in a small tumbler so that the lower end might be damp all the time. The dampness makes the scales close and starts the seed to sprouting. This has ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... didn't have no hatchet, but I had a good huntin' knife along with me, and I managed to whittle down a good-sized spruce, which I trimmed so's to make a sort of ladder of it. When that was done I lowered the butt end of it into the hole, and Handsome—that was who it was in the bottom of the hole—he climbed up so's I could get hold of him, and then ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... Dig them in, and their decay will nourish the next crop. If early sowing is practised, and the earliest possible produce of everything is aimed at, there must be always at hand the means of protection, such as litter, spruce branches, mats, or other material, as circumstances require. The vigilant gardener is not surprised by the weather, but is always armed for an emergency. Read the notes for January before proceeding further; and in respect of what remains undone, spare the necessity ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... a spirit of half jest: "I'll have to go out and show you men how to call a Moose." I cut a good piece of birch-bark and fashioned carefully a horn. Disdaining all civilized materials as "bad medicine," I stitched the edge with a spruce root or wattap, and soldered it neatly with pine gum flowed and smoothed with a blazing brand. And then I added the finishing touch, a touch which made the Indian and the halfbreed shake their heads ominously; I drew ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... an Exact and Perfect Relation of the Life and Devilish Practises of Joan Peterson, who dwelt in Spruce Island, near Wapping; Who was condemned for practising Witchcraft, and sentenced to be Hanged at Tyburn, on Munday the 11th of April 1652, ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... is seven miles long by five miles wide, and is covered with a dense forest of pine, oak, maple, basswood, aspen, balsam fir, cedar and spruce, which is nearly in a state of nature. It is much to be hoped that in the near future this park will be enlarged to many times its present ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... was left at liberty to enjoy it, and also to take note of the many gay and fashionable folk who enrich and embellish Ryde in the season; for Mr. Cecil Burleigh was entirely engrossed with another person. The party they had joined consisted of a very thin old gentleman, spruce, well brushed, and well cared for; of a languid, pale lady, some thirty years younger, who was his wife; and of two girls, their daughters. It was one of these daughters who absorbed all Mr. Cecil Burleigh's ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... chairman to bite his lips, to keep in a good round laugh, when those words, fellow-countrymen, came out)—I tell you what it is, the things that are wanted now are boots, and shoes, and stockings, and jackets—and not gingerbread, and sugar plums, and spruce beer, and gimcracks of ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... a useful young fellow enough, and clean and spruce; but lately, he has become shabby and dirty, and ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... from Massachusetts. Maine is noted for being the easternmost State in the Union, and has been utilized by a number of eminent men as a birthplace. White-birch spools for thread, Christmas-trees, and tamarack and spruce-gum are found in great abundance. It is the home of an industrious and peace-loving people. Bar Harbor is a cool place to go to in summer-time and violate the liquor ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... even the most careful observer, would have recognised in the two dusty figures, the once spruce forms of Captain Thomas Tomb and ...
— The Pirate's Pocket Book • Dion Clayton Calthrop
... wind might be rollicking and boisterous. Here it always went gently. Little, winding, fairy paths ran here and there over spruce roots cushioned with moss. Wild cherry trees, that in blossom time would be misty white, were scattered all over the valley, mingling with the dark spruces. A little brook with amber waters ran through it from the Glen village. ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery |
