United States or Estonia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Laura knew that the scent would not lie very strong after the pelting rain; but they could follow the trail by sight for a long distance. It led straight toward the far end of Acorn Island the end which they and the boys had so carelessly searched the day after the larder had been robbed. Here and there they came upon the print of the unknown man's boots in the softened soil.
The extravagance is sublime. The two little cherry trees are as wasteful; they throw away handfuls of flower; but in the meadows the careless, spendthrift ways of grass and flower and all things are not to be expressed. Seeds by the hundred million float with absolute indifference on the air. The oak has a hundred thousand more leaves than necessary, and never hides a single acorn.
The giant laid himself down to sleep under an oak, and Thor struck him with his mighty hammer. "Hath a leaf fallen upon me from the tree?" said the giant. Thor struck him again on the forehead. "What is the matter," said Skrimner, "hath an acorn fallen upon my head?" A third time Thor struck his tremendous blow. Skrimner rubbed his cheek and said, "Methinks some moss has fallen upon my face."
"It is a pretty idea," said Lady Esmondet, "the having one's orchard so laid out as to be an ornament to one's grounds, instead of as we do, merely as a place to grow fruit." "Yes, I think so," said Lionel, "and at my place the lawn is strewn by acorn, apple and the pear." "The apple blossom is beautiful," said Vaura; "but whom have we here," catching sight of a statue through the trees.
In the south, whole villages have been found living on nothing but ground acorn meal, from which miserable diet many children die and older people cannot long sustain life.
To adopt the language of the naturalist, those three little colonies were the puny germs which bore within themselves a vital force vastly more potent and wonderful than that which dwells in the heart of the gourd seed, and the acorn whose nascent swelling energies will lift huge boulders and split the living rock asunder: vastly more potent because it was not the blind motions of nature merely, but a force at once physical, moral, and intellectual.
We found the stomach full of acorn mush, just as clean and sweet as a mess of cornmeal. Murphy left us to pack the bear up on the pine flat above, while he went around three or four miles to get the horses. After a strenuous half hour, we got our bear up the steep bank and rested on the flat. Here we ate our pocket lunch.
The only sounds that reached his ears were the tappings of the nut-hutches as they sought their food in the rough crannies of the bark, and the occasional falling of a rich ripe acorn from its lofty place on to the frosted grass beneath. The sunshine shone bright, but with a chastened heat, the squirrels scrambled up the oaks, and high in the blue air the rooks pursued their path.
It often happens to us in this world, that when we come with our heart in our hands to some person or other, when we pour out some generous burst of feeling so enthusiastic and self-sacrificing, that a bystander would call us fool and Quixote; it often, I say, happens to us, to find our warm self suddenly thrown back upon our cold self; to discover that we are utterly uncomprehended, and that the swine who would have munched up the acorn does not know what to make of the pearl.
Compare, for example, the innumerable small round seedlets of the poppyhead with the solitary large and richly stored seed of the walnut, or the tiny black specks of mustard and cress with the single compact and well-filled seed of the filbert and the acorn.
Word Of The Day