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Updated: June 6, 2025
The storm had evidently come down here with terrific force, making a path through the pine-forest, some of whose trees were laid like wheat after a heavy wind; while just in front one huge tree had been blown right over, and in falling had crushed down a dozen or more in the path of its fall, letting in light, and strewing the soft earth with broken limbs, and trunks lying like jack-straws on the ground.
Out on the Square the huge elms and pines had been uprooted and flung in titanic confusion, like a game of giants' jack-straws. And vast conical excavations showed, here and there, where vials of the explosive had struck the earth. Gravel and rocks had even been thrown over the Metropolitan Building itself into the woodland glades of Madison Avenue.
Here are a few specimens of beginnings which seldom fail to arrest the attention of the child: "There was once a giant ogre, and he lived in a cave by himself." From "The Giant and Jack-straws," David Starr Jordan. "There were once twenty-five tin soldiers, who were all brothers, for they had been made out of the same old tin spoon." From "The Tin Soldier," Hans Christian Andersen.
Then, once again, as we crossed the streak of light that streamed like a narrow moon path from the doorway, Evan paused and nodded his head toward the hall. I turned there sat Miss Lavinia and Martin Cortright on the stairs, playing with the boys' jack-straws! "After this, what?" I asked, in my mirth leaning backward on Evan's supporting arm.
The first few tiers toppled smash into the current, raising a waterspout like that made by a dynamite explosion; the mass behind plunged forward blindly, rising and falling as the integral logs were up-ended, turned over, thrust to one side, or forced bodily into the air by the mighty power playing jack-straws with them. The rivermen, though caught unaware, reached either bank.
He played with the incommunicable, the inconceivable, the absolute, the antinomies, as he would have played with a bundle of jack-straws. "Brahma," the poem which so mystified the readers of the "Atlantic Monthly," was one of his spiritual divertisements. To the average Western mind it is the nearest approach to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out of itself.
She seemed now, above deck, like a piece of wild western woodland into which choppers had been. Her masts and yards prostrate, and hanging in jack-straws; several of her sails ballooning out, as they dragged in the sea, like great lopped tops of foliage. The black hull and shattered stumps of masts, galled and riddled, looked as if gigantic woodpeckers had been tapping them.
Henry Bayard's chief pleasures were walking, riding, and playing all manner of games, from jack-straws to chess, with the three younger sisters, and we have often said that the three years he passed in Johnstown were the most delightful of our girlhood.
"Thou wast born beneath the arch of some Duca's gateway," returned Maso, with a sort of reckless sarcasm, that as often cut his friends as his enemies; "thou wilt probably die in the hospital of the poor, and wilt surely be shot from the death-cart into one of the daily holes of thy Campo Santo, among a goodly company of Christians, in which legs and arms will be thrown at random like jack-straws, and in which the wisest among ye all will be puzzled to tell his own limbs from those of his neighbors, at the sound of the last trumpet."
And then, as the slow pressure developed from the three or four miles of logs forced against each other by the pushing of the current, the breast of the jam began to rise. Timbers up-ended, crossed, interlocked, slid one over the other, mounted higher and higher in the formidable game of jack-straws the loss of which spelled death to the players.
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