United States or Germany ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the obscurity, and keeping in the background as he did, it was not possible for the stranger to scan her features; besides, they were veiled by the long hair of a Polish hunter's cap, with earflaps and a drooping foxtail, worn as the pompon but half-loosened in time.
From the other end of this wand of office depended a long foxtail, or a hare's-foot, which he softly thrust in the faces of the sleeping Priscillas, Charitys, and Hopestills, and which gently brushed and tickled them into reverent but startled wakefulness.
In the opinion of the most competent judges, no improvement in grass culture is more important than this. For mowing-lands the mixture would, of course, be somewhat changed. The meadow foxtail and sweet-scented vernal would be left out entirely, and some six or eight pounds added to the Timothy and red clover.
That summer the rains had been so many and opportune that it was almost more than Shabata and his man could do to keep up with the corn; the orchard was a neglected wilderness. All sorts of weeds and herbs and flowers had grown up there; splotches of wild larkspur, pale green-and-white spikes of hoarhound, plantations of wild cotton, tangles of foxtail and wild wheat.
When the king beheld Maiden Foxtail, and was told that that was his bride, he suspected some cheat, and was very angry, and he ordered that the young man should be thrown into the lions' den. He would not, however, break his kingly word, so he took the ugly maiden for his wife, and she became queen in the place of her step-sister.
So great was the excitement at the little court of Cassel, that many Protestant princes and nobles declared that "they would sooner give their daughters to a boor or a swineherd than to a Papist." The Landgrave was equally vigorous in his protest, drawn up in due form on the 26th April, 1561. He was not used, he said, "to flatter or to tickle with a foxtail."
The silkiness and the silvery grey colour are given to the ear by a soft hair called the "awn" which grows from each spikelet. The leaves are broad and juicy, and there are many of them. Meadow Foxtail, unlike Timothy, is an early grass; you may find it in flower in April. An early grass is always valuable to the farmer, who wants herbage for his sheep and cattle after the long winter.
So it was. From that day the wicked girl was called Maiden Foxtail, and very much talk was there among the folk of her strange looks and her ill-nature. The hag could not bear her step-daughter should be more beautiful than her own daughter, and poor Swanwhite had to put up with all the ill-usage and suffering that a step-child can meet with.
I stretched myself prone on a velvety carpet of moss, and gave myself up to a profound investigation of the one square foot of ground which lay beneath my eyes. The number of blades of grass was prodigious. A few, already awned, stood above their fellows, waving like palms- meadowgrass, fescue, foxtail, brome-grass each slender stalk crowned with a tuft.
Among the grasses found on cultivated lands in this country, the following are considered as among the most valuable for ordinary farm cultivation; some of them being adapted to pastures, and others almost exclusively to mowing and the hay-crop: Timothy, Meadow Foxtail, June or Kentucky Blue Grass, Fowl Meadow, Rough-stalked Meadow, Orchard Grass, Perennial Rye Grass, Italian Rye Grass, Redtop, English Bent, Meadow Fescue, Tall Oat Grass, Sweet-scented Vernal, Hungarian Grass, Red Clover, White or Dutch Clover, and some others.
Word Of The Day