"Thorn" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... possum hunts an' the rabbits we caught in gums. I remember killin' birds at night with thorn brush. When bird blindin' we hunt 'em at night with lights from big splinters. We went to grass patches, briars, and vines along the creeks an' low groun's where they roosted, an' blinded 'em an' killed 'em when they come out. We cooked 'em on coals, and I remember making a stew and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... colony it became evident that, in the side of President Ham, Billy was a thorn, sharp, irritating, virulent, and that at any moment Ham might pluck that thorn and Billy would leave Hayti in haste, and probably in handcuffs. This was evident to Billy, also, and the prospect was most disquieting. Not because he loved Hayti, but because since he went to lodge at the cafe of ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... Uterysdale, and long continued to use his power to protect the bold outlaws, and Robin Hood dwelt securely in the greenwood, doing good to the poor and worthy, but acting as a thorn in the sides of ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... my back; put thy hand into the ear of the grey filly, and whatever thou findest, throw it behind thee." "There is a twig of sloe-tree," he said. "Throw it behind thee," said she; and he did so, and twenty miles of black-thorn wood grew out of it, so thick that a weasel could not get through. But the Giant cut through it with his big axe and his wood-knife, and went after them again. At the heat of day the Giant's daughter said again, ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... to pluck a thorn out of his very heart, for the condition of things in the War Department, and consequently in his Cabinet, did pain him as a thorn in his heart. You fastened it there, and you are now asked to punish him ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... the large black snails, which are to be found during summer in every hedgerow, rub it over the wart, and then hang it on a thorn. This must be done nine nights successively, at the end of which times the wart will completely disappear. For as the snail, exposed to such cruel treatment, will gradually wither away, so it is believed ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850 • Various
... for we were now descending to the lower elevations. The marching through long grass and over volcanic stones was not easy. Shortly we came out on stumbly hills, mostly rock, very dry, grown with cactus and discouraged desiccated thorn scrub. Here the sun reflected powerfully and the bearers began ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... remarked in him, and of which he found it extremely difficult to divest himself. But it was the triumph of grace, that whilst these faults of character and disposition remained for the most part only as a hidden thorn, the messenger of Satan to buffet him, the virtues to which they were allied, and all the faculties of his mind, were consecrated to the service of God and of his fellow-man, and his whole nature was enlarged, refined ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... diminished force destroyed. So ended the war of the usurpers; and the last and most doubtful of all the usurpers, a wanderer from the Welsh marches, a knight from nowhere, found the crown of England under a bush of thorn. ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... the Sacramento is about a mile and a half above Sisson's, issuing from the base of a drift-covered hill. It is lined with emerald algae and mosses, and shaded with alder, willow, and thorn bushes, which give it a fine setting. Its waters, apparently unaffected by flood or drouth, heat or cold, fall at once into white rapids with a rush and dash, as if glad to escape from the darkness to begin their wild course down ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... found that the Indian had been drinking a powerful narcotic, prepared from the thorn-apple, and which is called huacacachu, or grave-plant, from the power it is supposed to possess of enabling those who drink it to see the inhabitants of the graves. After the Indian had been some time convulsed he fell into a profound slumber, when his friends covered ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... from his companions, for all were as hotly engaged as himself; indeed, Sorrel more so, for he was fighting three men, while Jeming and Dan Casey, side by side, and with their backs against a heavy thorn-bush, were fighting the ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... would have been more dangerous to me than to the tiger if I had. We left our shoes at the outskirts of the jungle and crept in with bare feet. At last we scrambled up into a bamboo thicket, partly stripped of its thorn-like twigs, where I somehow managed to crouch behind my brother till the deed was done; with no means of even administering a shoe-beating to the unmannerly brute had he dared lay his ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... ever celebrated it in verse or oils? The world all young and full of unmitigated sweetness; the Garden of Eden bespangled with the early dew; Adam scrabbling up a fistful of worm's and hooking them on a bent thorn and a line of twisted pampas grass; hurrying down to the branch or the creek or the bayou or whatever it may have been; sitting down on a brand-new stump that the devil had put there to tempt him; throwing out his line; sitting there in the ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... bag lies close to the sting, The rose is fenced by the thorn, Shall we leave to others their gathering, And turn from clustering fruits that cling To the garden wall in scorn? Albeit those purple grapes hang high, Like the fox in the ancient tale, Let us pause and try, ere we pass them by, Though we, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... apparently watching the poultry that scratched and pecked at the new-springing grass with the utmost relish. A little farther off were the ewes with their new-dropped lambs, beyond that the great old thorn-tree with its round fresh clusters of buds, again beyond that there was a glimpse of the vast sunny rippling sea; but Sylvia knew well that Kester was looking at none of these things. She went up to him and touched his arm. He started from his reverie, and turned round upon her with his dim ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... passionately loves a tree, Growth and power shall understand; Everywhere he shall find a friend. Listen! They greet him from every land, English Oak and the Ash and Thorn, Silvery Olive, and Cypress tall, Spreading Willow, and gnarled old Pine, Flowering branches by orchard wall— Sunshine, shadow, and sweetness of glade— All in a Paradise he has made. O, ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... has to contend against fewer than most birds. The shrike is his worst enemy, the swift swoop of his cruel beak being always fatal in a flock of chickadees. Fortunately the shrike is rare with us; one seldom finds his nest, with poor Chickadee impaled on a sharp thorn near by, surrounded by a varied lot of ugly beetles. I suspect the owls sometimes hunt him at night; but he sleeps in the thick pine shrubs, close up against a branch, with the pine needles all about him, making it very dark; ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... and Scandinavia as "Christ's thorn," and is emblematic everywhere of cheerfulness, forgiveness, "peace on earth and good will ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... before the great mud wall was built about the House of Stone in Omdurman. Only a thorn zareeba as yet enclosed that noisome prison and the space about it. It stood upon the eastern border of the town, surely the most squalid capital of any empire since the world began. Not a flower bloomed in a single corner. ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... de los Organos, or Organ Mountains, from which he swept down at frequent intervals, first upon one town in the neighbourhood and then upon another, harassing and cutting up the Spanish garrisons in them, and generally making of himself a thorn in the flesh of Weyler. The spot in which he had established himself was distant only some ten miles, as the crow flies, from the hacienda Montijo; and he had no sooner made himself comfortable in his ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... their branches, and here and there the cedar of Lebanon, patriarch of all trees that bear cones, reared his royal crown above the rest; in and out, too, amongst the great boulders that strewed the park, the sharp-leaved holly stood out boldly, and the exquisite white thorn, all in flower, shot up to three and four times a man's height; below, the heather grew close and green to blossom in the summer-time; and in the deeper, lonelier places the blackthorn and hoe ran wild, and the dog-rose in wild confusion; the alder and the gorse too, the ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... mischief done by his predecessor was so far repaired as to allow him to act with energy as the prophet of the new doctrine. One of the ill effects of Hamsad Beg's iniquities had been the defection to the Russians of n notable partisan—Hadjii Murad—for many years a fatal thorn in the side of the independent party.[6] This and other difficulties, among which was the unpopularity of the Murids under Hamsad Beg, were removed by new alliances and precautions, while all that eloquence and skill could perform was applied to restore the credit of the religious system, before ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... see the full moon yonder, and not the man in it? why, methinks 'tis too-too evident: I see his dog very plain, and look you, just under his tail is a thorn-bush ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... a wrong, for the wrong's sake; but thereby to purchase himself profit, or pleasure, or honor, or the like. Therefore why should I be angry with a man, for loving himself better than me? And if any man should do wrong, merely out of ill-nature, why, yet it is but like the thorn or briar, which prick and scratch, because they can do no other. The most tolerable sort of revenge, is for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy; but then let a man take heed, the revenge be such as there is no law to punish; else ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... followed his example, not excepting Harold and Disco, the latter of whom was caught by the leg, the moment he left the track, by a wait-a-bit thorn—most appropriately so-called, because its powerful spikes are always ready to seize and detain the unwary passer-by. In the present instance it checked the seaman's career for a few seconds, and rent his nether garments ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... Ghibeline races, whereby when the inundation of foreigners ceased, Italy was torn with intestine wars." Yet we may shrewdly suspect that it was not so much any special devotion to the Church, as the thwarted ambition of a powerful house, which made the Welfs to be a thorn in the side first of the Franconian, then of the Suabian Emperors.[10] At any rate, when a representative of the family, in the person of Otto IV., at last reached "the dread summit of Caesarean power," the very Pope, whose support had placed him ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... spreading. the leafets are jointed and oppositely pinnate, 3 pare & terminating in one, sessile, widest at the base and tapering to an accuminated point, an inch and a quarter the greatest width, and 3 inches & a 1/4 in length. each point of their crenate margins armed with a subulate thorn or spine and are from 13 to 17 in number. they are also veined, glossy, carinated and wrinkled; their points obliquely pointing towards the extremity of the common footstalk.- The stem of the 2nd is procumbent abot the size of the former, jointed and unbranched. it's leaves are ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... the first time that she looked at him be became as red as a carrot; for nothing in the world would he have looked a second time—he wriggled on his chair for an hour afterward as if he had been seated on a thorn; he told me afterward that the look had recalled to his mind all the histories of that impudent Bradamanti about the savagesses, which made him blush so much, my old prude of ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... the intrigues of the pro-German king and queen, was a thorn in the flesh to the Allies for the first years of the war. The deposition of King Constantine, and the resumption of power of Premier Venizelos, brought Greece back to the place where ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... marries a grazier, and wants to set up for gentility; she comes and squeezes presents out of her mother, and the whole family are distrusting each other, and squabbling over the spoil before the poor old creature is dead! It makes one sick! I gave that Mrs. Thorn a bit of my mind at last; I could not stand the sight any longer. Madam, said I, you'll have to answer for your mother's death, as sure as my name's Dick May—a harpy dressed up ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... back, Julia," said Mary; "I will myself run home and fetch it. And accordingly her sister went back at a quick step towards her father's house. The spot where Julia stood to await the return, of her sister was within a few yards of a large white-thorn double ditch, on each side of which grew a close hedge of thorns, that could easily afford room for two or three men to walk abreast between them. Here she had not remained more than a minute or two, when, issuing from the cover of the thorns, ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... favor of God ye may cut him off ere he win to the Tongue of Jagai. 5 But if he be passed the Tongue of Jagai, right swiftly turn ye then, For the length and the breadth of that grisly plain is sown with Kamal's men. There is rock to the left, and rock to the right, and low 10 lean thorn between, And ye may hear a breech bolt snick where never a ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... threw himself flat on the ground under the slight shadow of a dried thorn bush, and waited, at intervals sweeping the bare outlines of the kopje with his ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... like the rose,— Her thorn a sad affront is; And doesn't like mankind, Because its ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... amid tilth and pasture, untouched as yet by the fury of modern life, their ancient sanctuaries guarded, as it were, by noble trees and hedges overrun with flowers. In all England there is no sweeter and more varied prospect than that from the hill of the Holy Thorn at Glastonbury; in all England there is no lovelier musing place than the leafy walk beside the Palace Moat at Wells. As I think of the golden hours I spent there, a passion to which I can give no name takes hold upon me; my heart trembles with an ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... her pretty dress was held lightly aside, to avoid trickling drops. She gazed over the wall, along some lonely fields; beyond three dusk trees, rising side by side against the sky; beyond a solitary thorn at the head of a solitary lane far off. She surveyed the dusk moors, where bonfires were kindling. The summer evening was warm; the bell-music was joyous; the blue smoke of the fires looked soft, their red flame bright. Above them, in the sky whence ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... of reversion or selection, perfect thorns. That Natural Selection would tend to produce the most formidable thorns will be admitted by every one who has observed the distribution in South America and Africa (vide Livingstone) of thorn-bearing plants, for they always appear where the bushes grow isolated and are exposed to the attacks of mammals. Even in England it has been noticed that all spine-bearing and sting-bearing plants are ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... out of the poor-house! How kind they've all been to me! Frederic and Elinor and mammy, and, for the most part, Aunt Bethiah, though she is very precise. If I could only forget where I came from. Captain Welles says it is false pride; but that doesn't hinder its plaguing me. When a thorn pricks, it pricks, whether of a rose-bush ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... another, "have we been so long deaf to the saying, that the temporal dominion of the Church was like a thorn in the wound of Italy, which shall never be healed till ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... born for thee; Thou keeper art of this my rural seat,[4] Kept at my charge to keep my garden neat; To train the woodbine and to crop the yew— In th' art of gard'ning equall'd p'rhaps by few. O! could I cultivate my barren soul, As thou this garden canst so well control; Pluck up each brier and thorn, by frequent toil, And clear the mind as thou canst ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... felt his heart oppressed with a new and more bitter emotion. The company thought him happy in exclusive possession of the lovely girl's society—his side was pierced with a cruel, rankling thorn. ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... the glade of earth The autumn-blast is borne, Grieve not, but musing ask thyself: "Where has the rose no thorn?" ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... had left behind him in the ugly church; and unconscious that his impromptu chapel at Wharfside, with its little carved reading-desk, and the table behind, contrived so as to look suspiciously like an altar, was a thorn in anybody's side. Had his mind been in a fit condition at that moment to cogitate trouble, his thoughts would have travelled in a totally different direction, but in the mean time Mr Wentworth was very well able to put aside his perplexities. The green door opened just as he reached ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... to the image for the black letter poems as the yogh/ezh & thorn/h characters are difficult to distinguish. Other internet sources show vastly different interpretations for the text of 'A Plaie ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... rose, bereft and shorn Of all thy primal glory, All leafless now, thy piercing thorn Reveals a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... evening?" I was then near the wood which surrounded the dingle, but at that side which was farthest from the encampment, which stood near the entrance. Suddenly, on turning round the southern corner of the copse, which surrounded the dingle, I perceived Ursula seated under a thorn-bush. I thought I never saw her look prettier than then, dressed as she was, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... cold, and with weariness spent, You droop in your saddle, or crouch in your tent; Can you feel that the love so entire, so true, The love that we dreamed of,—is all things to you? That come what there may,—desolation or loss, The prick of the thorn, or the weight of the cross— You can bear it,—nor feel you are wholly bereft, While the bosom that beats for you only, is left? While the birdlings are spared that have made it so blest, Can you look, undismayed, on the wreck ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston
... cormorants at the island in great abundance, and another like a moor-hen. Fishes likewise of various kinds, as great numbers of small whales, great abundance of seals at the island, and with the sein we took many fishes like mullets as large as trouts, smelts, thorn-backs, and dogs; and plenty of limpets and muscles on the rocks. This place has a most wholesome air, and has plenty of water both to serve navigators, and for travellers in the country, as numerous small streams descend every where ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... powers of endurance; no spoilt dinners, scorched linen, dirtied carpets, torn sofa-covers, squealing brats, cross husbands, would ever discompose either of you. You ought never to marry a good-tempered man, it would be mingling honey with sugar, like sticking white roses upon a black-thorn cudgel. With this very picturesque metaphor I close my letter. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... shale wall and took to the fields. A little footpath lay among the trees at the meadow end and Anthony Barraclough made for it with all possible dispatch jumping a brook and forcing his way through a fringe of thorn and bramble. There had been no rain for some weeks and the going was dry, a circumstance he noted with satisfaction, for your average Cornish footpath is as much a waterway as a thoroughfare for pedestrians. ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... Jack, vehemently. "What, that ugly, disagreeable woman, Ida's mother! I won't believe it. I should just as soon expect to see strawberries growing on a thorn-bush. There isn't ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger
... comprehend. Such were the views of those secret associations of illuminati, which were the terror of superstition and tyranny, and which, carefully selecting wisdom and genius from the great wilderness of society, as the bee selects honey from the flowers of the thorn and the nettle, bound all human excellence in a chain, which, if it had not been prematurely broken, would have commanded ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... from those who had been interred in the hope of resurrection to life. Only one adult lies with the little babes—an old Christian woman—whose last dying request it was that she should be buried with the unbaptized children." The Rev. Mr. Thorn has given the facts poetic form and made immortal that mother-heart whose love made holy—if hallowed it needed to be—the lonely burial-ground ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in his heaven— All's right with ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... withinne; And doth so for he wolde winne Of his desir the vein astat. And whanne he comth anon therat, 600 He scheweth thanne what he was, The corn is torned into gras, That was a Rose is thanne a thorn, And he that was a Lomb beforn Is thanne a Wolf, and thus malice Under the colour of justice Is hid; and as the poeple telleth, These ordres witen where he duelleth, As he that of here conseil is, And thilke world which thei er this 610 Forsoken, he drawth in ayein: He clotheth richesse, ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... long they have been at work, kneading, drying, and stacking the fuel-cakes so necessary in that woodless country. The boys, half hidden in clouds of dust, drive the herds of gaunt cattle and ponderous buffaloes to the thorn-hedged yards. The day is over, the day which has been so hard and toilful even for the children,—and with the night comes rest and play. The village, so deserted before, is alive with voices; the elders cluster round the courtyard doors, the little ones whoop through ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... undoubtedly times when she felt, with an instinct that was not to be combated by reason, that Leslie harbored a queer, indefinable resentment towards her. At times, this secret consciousness marred the delight of their comradeship; at others it was almost forgotten; but Anne always felt the hidden thorn was there, and might prick her at any moment. She felt a cruel sting from it on the day when she told Leslie of what she hoped the spring would bring to the little house of dreams. Leslie looked at her with hard, ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the motley wanderers seek, Pilgrims of life upon the field of scorn, Mocking and mock'd; with plague and hunger weak, And haggard faces bleach'd as those who mourn, And footsteps redden'd with the trodden thorn; Blind stretching hands that grope for truth in vain, Across ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... L. (SCARLET-FRUITED THORN.) Leaves bright green, smooth, thin, roundish-ovate, sharply cut-toothed or lobed, on slender petioles. Branches reddish, villous-pubescent; spines stout, chestnut-brown. Flowers large, 1/2 to 2/3 in., many ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... him and tried to draw the boy towards him in order to embrace him. But Zeno, instead of answering the loving words addressed to him, struggled and cried out sharply, for the strong pressure of his father's hand had driven a big thorn into his finger, and the blood from the wound was running down onto his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... cases in this sub-order, the calyx becomes detached from the carpels, so that the latter organs become more or less "superior," and distinct one from the other. This happens constantly in the double-flowered thorn, Crataegus Oxyacantha, in some blossoms of which the hollowed end of the peduncle still invests the base of the carpels, leaving the upper portions detached. In apples flowers are occasionally met with of greater size than ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... or with the laws of the universe. They cannot consciously do wrong, nor understand that any one else can do so; untoward accidents may happen, but inanimate nature is just as liable to be objectionable in this respect as human beings: the stone that trips them up, the thorn that scratches them, the snow that makes their flesh tingle, is an object of their resentment in just the same kind and degree as are the men and women who thwart or injure them. But of duty—that dreary device to secure future ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... with him?" asked Stafford, his eyes turned towards Brinkwort's Farm miles away. He could see the trees, the kameel-thorn, the blue-gums, the orange and peach trees surrounding it, a clump or cloud of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... this time, with Maryland a thorn in her side, was wrestling with an autocratic governor, John Harvey. This avaricious tyrant sowed the wind until in 1635 he was like to reap the whirlwind. Though he was the King's Governor and in good odor in England, where rested the overpower to which ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... father, thinking that she might be perhaps a little wayward; while he grew daily more enamoured of his plan, redoubled his tenderness, seeking to study her whims in every other respect. It is cruel to loose every bond but that which galls most sorely, to pluck away every thorn but that which pricks most sharply: all the perceptions gather to that point, and the suffering is in consequence tenfold more acute. Such were Lucy's sensations, though she was perhaps scarcely conscious of them herself; while ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... by step, over the ground that is already familiar. Felix Page had ever been the thorn in ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... gazing out over the moorland. It was the first summer day, fresh and timid yet, as though the world and the sun were still ill-acquainted. Down below, over the sparkling brook, an old thorn was quivering in the warm breeze, its bright thin green shining against the brown heather. The larches alone had as yet any richness of leaf, but the sycamore-buds glittered in the sun, and the hedges in the lower valley made wavy green lines delightful to the eye. A warm soft ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... flow down, Down to her lips,—her lips that kiss the print Of nails; and love is like to break her heart! Love and repentance—for it still doth work Sore in her soul to think, to think that she, Even she, did pierce the sacred, sacred feet. And bruise the thorn-crowned head. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... he raised a prophetic finger, "wait until Clip sails under her own colors. Then take note of her friends. This is the thorn in her side, as it were. She speaks ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... woman her mom were! She didn't stay 'round here much, but whenever she run out o' cash an' didn't hev a square meal comin' to her, she camped on Ol' Swallertail an' made him board her. Las' time she come she left her young-un— that's Ingua, ye know—an' the kid's been here ever since; sort of a thorn in the side of ol' Hezekiah, we folks think, though he don't never complain. She ain't more'n twelve or thirteen year old, thet Ingua, but she keeps house fer her gran'dad—what they is to keep, which ain't ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... poplar, sharp as a thorn; I should never have missed you had you never been born. Roses are sweet and lilies are fair, But they lose their beauty ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... there had been something fictitious. The sorrow, the resentment on her father's account, she had, indeed, long felt; too long to feel keenly. Her disapproval of the second marriage was already tinctured by a certain satisfaction; it would free her of a thorn in the flesh, for such her mother's presence in her life had become, and it would justify forever her sense of superiority. It was all the clearest cause for indignation that her mother had given her, and, seeing it as such, she ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the downs. Every now and then he lay down, panting distressfully, with his tongue hanging out, and his young masters always waited for him, often themselves not sorry to rest in the fragment of shade from a solitary thorn or juniper. ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the veil and rested upon the Father's face. Not all the sermons of Bossuet, or Chalmers, or Jeremy Taylor, or Melville, had power to stir the great deeps of her soul like one glance at that pale, thorn-crowned Christ, who looked in voiceless woe and sublime resignation over the world ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... the front the western chain of these hills, and to the left the high crab-claw shaped ridge, which, extending from the western chain, circles round conspicuously above the swelling knolls which lie between the two main rocky ridges. Contorted green thorn-trees, "elephant-foot" stumps, and aloes, seem to thrive best here, by their very nature indicating what the country is, a poor stony land. Our camp was pitched by the river Rumuma, where, sheltered from the winds, and enriched by alluvial soil, there ought to have been no scarcity; ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... in these days a thorn in our hero's side; but Mr. Hart was a scourge of scorpions. Mr. Hart never ceased to talk of Mr. Walker, and of the determination of Walker and Bullbean to go before a magistrate if restitution were not made. Cousin George of course ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... who were afflicted with diseases, and drank the water and were cured. One woman was now at Glastonbury to try it, and already almost well! What strange inventions and superstitions even the ruins of what had belonged to St. Dunstan can yet engender! The Glastonbury thorn we forgot to ask ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... of the thorn tribe, for hedge, in this country. It never suffers from those enemies that destroy so much of the hawthorn. This is also used for ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... did not Clarice attend to her duties better? It was her duty to keep that child from bothering me. What are women good for but to keep their children out of mischief, and to see that their husbands' paths through life are free from every thorn and pebble?" ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... I get one. I would bring Doctor Thorn, but he has too much to do with—too much to do just now." He comes near saying "with our own men," but checks himself in time. He cannot "kick the man that is down" with such a speech as that, and it is not long before he reappears, and brings with him a surgeon from one of the arriving ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... is thorn of lance;[FN385] * Who dareth pluck it, rashest chevisance? Stretch not thy hand towards it, for night long * Those lances marred because we snatched a glance! Say her, who tyrant is and tempter too * (Though justice might her tempting power ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... or the lion with the fox, is not to be looked for. New disputes broke out, new battles were fought,—not now in alliance,—and the happiest day in the life of Louis XI. was that in which he heard that Charles of Burgundy, the constant thorn in his chaplet, had fallen on the fatal field of Nancy, and that France was freed from the threatening presence of the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... Behold! at hand a thicket she surveys Gay with the flowering thorn and vermeil rose: The tuft reflected in the stream which strays Beside it, overshadowing oaks enclose. Hollow within, and safe from vulgar gaze, It seemed a place constructed for repose; With bows so ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... of love than she had ever before made, and they sojourned together a long while. At length it fell out that, as they were going one day hand in hand through the forest of Breceliande, they found a bush of white-thorn, which was laden with flowers; and they seated themselves under the shade of this white-thorn, upon the green grass, and Merlin laid his head upon the damsel's lap, and fell asleep. Then the damsel rose, and made a ring with her wimple round the bush, and round Merlin, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... little Bo-peep, "The wool you may sweep From the hedges and many a thorn, sir; But don't make your attacks upon my sheep's backs, For I will not have their wool ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... tribulation, adversity, reverses, affliction, calamity, misfortune; vexation, annoyance, inconvenience, worry, disturbance; torment, plague, thorn, bane. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Joseph Jefferson The Mocking-Bird The Empty Quatrain Pan Learns Music The Shepherd of Nymphs Echoes from the Greek Anthology One World Joy and Duty The Prison and the Angel The Way Love and Light Facta non Verba Four Things The Great River Inscription for a Tomb in England The Talisman Thorn ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... associates was a grievous thorn which came to the pioneer during the progress of the war. The first marked disagreement between him and them occurred at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society not a month after his wife's ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... any caterpillars or find any freshly spun cocoons. She searched the bushes and low trees behind the garden and all around the edge of the woods on their land, and having little success, at last came to the road. Almost the first thorn bush she examined yielded a Polyphemus cocoon. Elnora lifted her head with the instinct of a hunter on the chase, and began work. She reached the swamp before she knew it, carrying five fine cocoons ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... Desdemona, than from any desire for food. And so it fell out that, having slain the bunny, the hunter and his mate proceeded to amuse themselves in the vicinity, leaving the rabbit lying where it had received its coup de grace, at the foot of a stunted, wind-twisted thorn-bush. ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... Lama said: 'Your credentials, sahib, are correct,—and it is well; as your misfortunes have been great, great will be the blessings that will fall upon thy family and thy name. Thy piety hath been known to all my brethren, likewise thy toleration,—although the INFIDEL hath been a thorn pressed evilly against thy side ... beware of that same infidel today! He is plotting evil HERE against thy very life,—he envieth the lives of thine!... A religious war now breweth in this land!... ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... on the sand. The wind scatters the seeds of different trees, and none asks from where the most beautiful tree has its origin. Why, then, should there not rise among us a Cedar of Lebanon, instead of thorn-bushes?" ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... Hanger and hollied bank, The winter world awoke To hear the feeble bleat Of lambs on downland farms: A blackbird whistled sweet; Old beeches moved their arms Into a mellow haze Aerial, newly-born: And I, alone, agaze, Stood waiting for the thorn To break in blossom white, Or burst in a green flame.... So, in a single night, Fair February came, Bidding my lips to sing Or whisper their surprise, With all the joy of spring ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... each note, so beautifully clear, So soft, so sweetly mellow, rings around. Then faintly dies away upon the ear, That fondly vibrates to the fading sound. Poor bird, thou sing'st, the thorn within thy heart, And I from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... about new Chairman?" he was saying. "Well, of course, that is a delicate question to put to me; was Chairman myself for many sessions; know every thorn in the cushion of the seat. It is, I should say, the most difficult post in House; far more so than SPEAKER'S. SPEAKER is robed about with authority that does not pertain to Chairman. Observations which, addressed to SPEAKER, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 20, 1893 • Various
... quiet and ask me gently to do so.' She had obeyed this injunction when she was a child and caught in the hedge, and she followed the same rule when grown up and suffering from the most terrible trials. She often spoke and joked about the thorn hedge, and the patience and prayer which had then been recommended to her, which admonition she, in after-life, had frequently neglected, but which had never failed her when she had recourse to it. This symbolical coincidence of the events of her ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... the hermit nation, and coax or compel the Japanese to be more sociable and more human. All were in vain until the peaceful armada, under the flag of thirty-one stars, led by Matthew Calbraith Perry,[10] broke the long seclusion of this Thorn-rose of the Pacific, and the unarmed diplomacy of Townsend Harris,[11] brought Japan into the brotherhood of commercial ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... her ends. It was so at the time of the Turkish war of 1877 and of the Berlin Congress, and it remained so until with the advent of the present dynasty Servia offered a sure prospect of becoming and remaining a permanent tool in Russia's hands and a thorn ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... hundred yards of the path when Holman pounced upon a strip of white bark that waved to us from the thorn of a lawyer-vine crossing the track. A few pencilled words covered the smooth side of the strip, and we absorbed them in a ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... received much valuable information. The colored population are opposed to the apprenticeship, and all the influence which they have, both in the colony and with the home government, (which is not small,) is exerted against it. They are a festering thorn in the sides of the planters, among whom they maintain a fearless espionage, exposing by pen and tongue their iniquitous proceedings. It is to be regretted that their influence in this respect is so sadly weakened by their ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the Old Orchard grew a thorn-tree which Peter Rabbit often passed. He never had paid particular attention to it. One morning he stopped to rest under it. Happening to look up, he saw a most astonishing thing. Fastened on the sharp thorns of one of the branches were three big grasshoppers, a big moth, two big caterpillars, ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... elm, ash and crabtree for cart and for plow; Save step for a stile of the crotch of the bough; Save hazel for forks, save sallow for rake; Save hulver and thorn, whereof flail ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... think that he lived in another century, or I might find myself regretting the eclipse of the Olympic Games. As an upholder of law and order I ought to be (I am not) ashamed to admire a man who, to say the least of it, was a very prickly thorn in the side of the police. My excuse is that Jack Sincler and his brother Lishe were kindly men withal. The game-laws were their trouble, but as far as I could make out they did not poach for ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... an old Barcelona tar, in ragged red breeches and dirty night-cap, cheeks trenched and bronzed, whiskers dense as thorn hedges. Seated between two sleepy-looking Africans, this mariner, like his younger shipmate, was employed upon some rigging—splicing a cable—the sleepy-looking blacks performing the inferior function of holding the outer parts of the ropes ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... have decided that alcohol is a powerful poison. And how do they prove this? Simply by comparing its effects with those of other poisons—particularly the poisons derived, as alcohol is, from vegetables—such as henbane, poison hemlock, prussic acid, thorn-apples, deadly nightshade, foxglove, poison sumach, oil of tobacco, and the essence of opium. These poisons, taken in different quantities, according to their strength, produce nausea, dizziness, exhilaration of spirits with subsequent ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... he was illuminating was the prophetic Psalm which describes the ignominy and sufferings of the Redeemer. It was surrounded by a wreathed border of thorn-branches interwoven with the blossoms and tendrils of the passion-flower, and the initial letters of the first two words were formed by a curious combination of the hammer, the nails, the spear, the crown of thorns, the cross, and other instruments of the Passion; and clear, in red letter, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... he was not without his peacock on the wall, his skeleton in the closet, his thorn in his side; though the peacock did not scream loud, the skeleton was not very terrible in his anatomical arrangement, nor was the thorn likely to fester to a gangrene. The Duke was always in awe about ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... a thorn taken out of my mind," said he—"two thorns which have sunk deep, kept me awake half the night. Perhaps, I ought to he ashamed to own I have felt pain from such little things. But so it is; though, after all, I am afraid they will be invisible ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... a man—fret, wear, worry him; to be irritable, is the conditional tax laid of old upon an author's intellect; the crowd of internal imagery makes him hasty, quick, nervous as a haunted hunted man: minds of coarser web heed not how small a thorn rends one of so delicate a texture; they cannot estimate the wish that a duller sword were in a tougher scabbard; the river, not content with channel and restraining banks, overflows perpetually; the extortionate ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... sure that Wainwright had never told her, unless perhaps he had told some tale against him, and made him the butt of a great joke. Well, if he had she had cared enough to defend him and help him out without ever giving away the fact that she knew. But here, too, lay a thorn to disturb him. Why had Ruth Macdonald not told him the plain truth if she knew? Was she trying to shield Harry Wainwright? Could she really care for ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... It is in spots impracticable, in a forest of brambles, on a wild moor where thorn and thistle intertwining forbid approach. The night she passes under an old cromlech. If anyone finds her there, she is isolated by the common dread; she is surrounded, as it were, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... anecdote with respect to the fieldfare (turdus pilaris) which I think is particular enough; this bird, though it sits on trees in the daytime, and procures the greatest part of its food from white-thorn hedges, yea, moreover, builds on very high trees, as may be seen by the fauna suecica; yet always appears with us to roost on the ground. They are seen to come in flocks just before it is dark, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... is the main grief you spoke of as annoying you—the toothache in the Lord Mayor's jaw, the thorn in the cushion of the editorial chair? It is there. Ah! it stings me now as I write. It comes with almost every morning's post. At night I come home and take my letters up to bed (not daring to open them), and in the morning I find one, two, three thorns on my pillow. Three I extracted ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... proved even more extensive than I had anticipated. We pressed on, dodging low-sweeping branches and keeping our arms up to guard our faces from outshoots of thorn bushes. Our progress necessarily was slow, but even so quite a long time seemed to have elapsed ere we came in ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... She, and her son too, must have been a thorn in the flesh of the Masseys. They were all rigid Puritans ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... to the West Indies, which his friends put him upon for his health's sake, the little schooner in which he was embarked was suddenly attacked by some monstrous fish, probably a thorn-back whale, who gave it such a terrible stroke with his tail as started a plank. The frightened crew flew to their pumps, but in vain; for the briny flood rushed with such fury into their vessel, that they were glad to quit her, and tumble as fast as they could into their little jolly ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... "There is a crab thorn an inch long in my foot; it's gone through shoe and all. That wretched Sardanapalus never clears the limbs away when he cuts the hedge. I'll have him horsewhipped. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... be the moments and hours which are devoted to the celebration of eminent BOOK-COLLECTORS! Let the sand roll down the glass as it will; let "the chirping on each thorn" remind us of Aurora's saucy face peering above the horizon! in such society, and with such a subject of ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... sorrow, nor tears, nor sighing, nor death; for the former things are passed away." Love will then be perfect; there will be no heart-burnings and disappointments there. There you shall enjoy the honey without the sting, and the rose without the thorn. "Earth hath no sorrows that heaven cannot heal." All care and toil, and tears, and orphanage, and widowhood, shall drop and disappear at the threshold of heaven. If our tent-home stirs up within us imperishable joys, by the power of anticipation ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... discovered a similar truth several decades ago and laid it up for future use. Even in my limited experience you ain't the first thorn-apple that I've seen pears grafted on to. In recognition of your friendly warning, allow me to say that I'm only ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... under Bowers's hat as his eyes searched the surrounding country. Not a sign of either herder! A cactus thorn that had penetrated his shoe leather did not improve Bowers's temper. As he sat down to extract it, he considered whether it would be advisable to pound Dibert to a jelly when he found him or wait until they got ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... was one of great splendour; for "the commencement of the reign of Henry VIII., who was then styled by his loving subjects 'the rose without a thorn,' witnessed a remarkable revival of magnificence in personal decoration. So brilliant were the dresses of both sexes at the grand entertainment over which the King and Queen presided at Richmond, that it is difficult to convey an adequate idea of their splendour. ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... a meadow saw a Wolf approaching to seize him, and immediately pretended to be lame. The Wolf, coming up, inquired the cause of his lameness. The Ass replied that passing through a hedge he had trod with his foot upon a sharp thorn. He requested that the Wolf pull it out, lest when he ate him it should injure his throat. The Wolf consented and lifted up the foot, and was giving his whole mind to the discovery of the thorn, when the Ass, ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... maimed a man; His horse, the Turk, had been killed and buried There in the ditch by horse-hoofs herried; And over the poor Turk's bones at pace Now, every year, there goes the race, And many a man makes doctor's work At the thorn-bound ditch that hides the Turk, And every man as he rides that course Thinks, there, of the Turk, that good ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... at seven; The hillside's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing: The snail's on the thorn; God's in his Heaven— All's right ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Pommers to a thorn-bush and then turned his attention to the injured man. The white horse had regained his feet and stood whinnying gently as he looked down on his prostrate master. A heavy blow, half broken by his sword, had beaten him down and left ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to his knee: "O Fool! Sir Fool! Most noble Fool!" said he. "Either no fool, or fool forsooth thou art, That dareth thus to take an outlaw's part. Yet, since this day my rogue's life ye did spare, So now by oak, by ash, by thorn I swear— ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... frail vesture of decay, The soul unclad forgets it once hath worn, Stained with the travel of the weary day, And shamed with rents from every wayside thorn. ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... merely that of elongation of the epithelial processes into the connective tissue, until the rete Malpighii gives one the impression that it has hanging to its underneath surface and into the corium a number of thorn-like processes. These extend all round the front of the foot, and even in great part behind. Accompanying this elongation of the processes is a condensation of the epithelial cells immediately ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... They sang so much they scarcely seemed to have time to feed. While approaching one that was singing by gently walking on the sward by the roadside, or where thick dust deadened the footsteps, suddenly another would commence in the low thorn hedge on a branch, so near that it could be touched with a walking-stick. Yet though so near the bird was not wholly visible—he was partly concealed behind a fork of the bough. This is a habit of the sedge-birds. ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... meet them—his mothers and sisters!" Bessie dramatized an excess of anguish. "Oh, Mary, that is the very thorn I have been trying not to press my heart against; and does your hand commend it to my embrace? His folks! Yes, they would be folks; and what folks! I think I am getting a realizing sense. Wait! Don't speak don't move, Molly!" ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... geographical formation secured to Greece as a whole, was at its utmost in these minute reflexions of the national character, with all the relish of local difference—new art, new poetry, fresh ventures in political combination, in the conception of life, springing as if straight from the soil, like the thorn-blossom of early spring in magic lines over all that rocky land. On the other hand, it was just here that ancient habits clung most tenaciously—that old-fashioned, homely, delightful existence, to which the refugee, pent up in Athens in the years of the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... another party had gone overland from Mackinaw and St Louis. On the Tonquin were twenty sailors, four partners, twelve clerks, and thirteen voyageurs. She sailed from New York in September 1810. Jonathan Thorn, the captain, was a retired naval officer, who resented the easy familiarity of the fur traders with their servants, and ridiculed the seasickness of the fresh-water voyageurs. The Tonquin had barely rounded the Horn before the partners and the commander ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut |
