United States or Iran ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


"No. Well, we have the three weeks yet. Yes, I must send you away, and get at the reports. How you brighten this room, Helen! I think it must be the sunshine that seems caught in your hair. It gleams like bronze oak-leaves in October." "Love has done wonderful things for your eyes, John," she said, smiling, as she left him.

Glancing round quickly the children saw a little man about three feet high, dressed in green, wearing a long peaked cap with a wreath of tiny oak-leaves around it. He looked very strong, although he was small, and he stuck his arms out akimbo in a curious angular way like the branches of an oak-tree. "How did you know that trees were alive?" he asked the children.

It is now the middle of November; and the young grass is springing up after the rain, and even where it does not grow there is no bare earth, but brown oak-leaves and brakes, with soft warm colors, particularly when the sun strikes across them. The skies, too, are like those at home, with the magnificent sunrise and sunset that only clouds can give.

The oaks were not yet yellow, their leaves were half green, half brown; Time had begun to invade them, but had not yet indented his full mark. Of the year there are two most pleasurable seasons: the spring, when the oak-leaves come russet-brown on the great oaks; the autumn, when the oak-leaves begin to turn. At the one, I enjoy the summer that is coming; at the other, the summer that is going.

But presently cypresses and sombre yews rose on either side of the path, and the road to Wych Maries was soft and silent, and the serene sun was lost, and their whispering footsteps forbade them to shout any more. At the bottom of the hill the trees increased in number and variety; the sun shone through pale oak-leaves and the warm green of sycamores.

He who in the fight first scales the enemy's walls receives after the battle a crown of grass, as a token of honour, and at the presentation the women and boys applaud loudly; that one who affords aid to an ally gets a civic crown of oak-leaves; he who kills a tyrant dedicates his arms in the temple and receives from Hoh the cognomen of his deed, and other warriors obtain other kinds of crowns.

Stand under this tree and see how finely its leaves are cut against the sky, as it were, only a few sharp points extending from a midrib. They look like double, treble, or quadruple crosses. They are far more ethereal than the less deeply scolloped Oak-leaves. They have so little leafy terra firma that they appear melting away in the light, and scarcely obstruct our view.

He was a man, I should judge, who would shine rather in war than in peace, for, with his long goat's face and his brandy nose, he looked, in spite of his golden oak-leaves, just such a long-legged, vulgar, swaggering, foul-mouthed old soldier as every barrack-room can show. He was an older man than the others, and his sudden promotion had come too late for him to change.

He heard a faint plash on the surface of the water, and at once his little heart beat fast with mingled hope and fear; but the sound merely indicated that the last of winter's withered oak-leaves, pushed gently aside by a swelling bud, had fallen from the bough. Suddenly, from the ruined garden above him on the brow of the slope, came the dread hunting cry of his old enemy, the tawny owl.

The ground was white with snow, and all the trees were bare except for a few frozen oak-leaves here and there, which shivered in the wind and somehow added to the desolation. Leaden clouds covered the sky, and only in the west was there a gleam of the departing winter day.