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Peat   Listen
noun
Peat  n.  A substance of vegetable origin, consisting of roots and fibers, moss, etc., in various stages of decomposition, and found, as a kind of turf or bog, usually in low situations, where it is always more or less saturated with water. It is often dried and used for fuel.
Peat bog, a bog containing peat; also, peat as it occurs in such places; peat moss.
Peat moss.
(a)
The plants which, when decomposed, become peat.
(b)
A fen producing peat.
(c)
(Bot.) Moss of the genus Sphagnum, which often grows abundantly in boggy or peaty places.
Peat reek, the reek or smoke of peat; hence, also, the peculiar flavor given to whisky by being distilled with peat as fuel. (Scot.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Peat" Quotes from Famous Books



... sitting, to the writing-table, which stands in the middle of the room, in front of the window. He sat down at it, and I stood a little behind him, looking on as he took a sheet of notepaper and turned over the pens in the tray in search of a pencil. The room was very hot; the tufts of peat smouldering in the grate, and the two lamps, combined with the fumes of Lord Ashiel's cigar to render the atmosphere oppressive to a person with a violent headache. I glanced longingly towards the window. It was not entirely hidden by the heavy curtains which were ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce

... Limonite is selected as a representative of iron ores in general. It is a native, hydrated oxide of iron. It frequently occurs in or near peat beds and contains more or less organic matter which, if brought into solution, would be acted upon by the potassium bichromate. This organic matter is destroyed by roasting. Since a high temperature tends to ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot

... boundary walls of the line into wide semicircles, and it seemed likely to be touch-and-go with the engine, truck, and your humble commissioner. I took a last look at the landscape, and made a final note, but, while inly wondering whether I should be ultimately consumed in the form of peat or dug up and exhibited to future ages as a bog-preserved brutal Saxon, with a concluding squash we passed the rotten spot, and it was permissible to breathe again. "We prefer it to sink at once," said Mr. Bennett. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... additional incitement to combine for the purpose of a legal assassination more cruel and terrible than if he had, like so many other Irish gentlemen, been shot down upon the public road. The latter terrible fate befell Mr. E. White, of Abbeleix, for asserting his right to some peat land which he had purchased. This circumstance offended the "Ribband" men, who in open day lodged a bullet in his heart, in a populous neighbourhood. The murderers were well known, but the populace sympathised with them. In the north of Ireland several gentlemen and men of humble note fell victims ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... the sledge after him. He roused up a little when the fort was reached, and talked to Peter M'Crawney, the agent, an eager-faced Scot with an insatiable desire for information on all sorts of subjects. Mrs. M'Crawney was an Irishwoman who was always sighing for the mild, moist climate and the peat reek of her childhood's home. But Peter knew when he was well off, and meant to stick to his post until he had saved enough money ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant

... pear trees. And Mrs. Jarvis tells me—"Mrs. Flanders liked Mrs. Jarvis, always said of her that she was too good for such a quiet place, and, though she never listened to her discontent and told her at the end of it (looking up, sucking her thread, or taking off her spectacles) that a little peat wrapped round the iris roots keeps them from the frost, and Parrot's great white sale is Tuesday next, "do remember,"—Mrs. Flanders knew precisely how Mrs. Jarvis felt; and how interesting her letters were, about Mrs. Jarvis, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... Norway the country people repair to the summer pastures among the mountains, and take their cattle there to grass. On the west coast of Jutland, among the sand-hills, are huts built of pieces of wrecks, and covered with peat and layers of heather. The sleeping-places stretch round the principal room; and there sleep and live, during the early spring time, the people employed in the fishing. Every one has his AEsepige, as she is called, whose business it is to put ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen

... help springing up at the sight—pale, leaden, and misty as it was; and though Markham forthwith rebuked him for not listening, his heart was still beating as at the first sight of a dear old friend, when that peep was far behind. More black heaths, with stacks of peat and withered ferns. Guy was straining his eyes far off in the darkness to look for the smoke of the old keeper's cottage chimney, and could with difficulty refrain from interrupting Markham to ask after ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the room in two, making each occupant as private as if in a separate room, with a dressing-table and ample washing conveniences on each side. A large grate filled with turf, and all ready for lighting, with a peat basket lined with tin, and also filled with the same fuel, reminded us strongly that we were in Ireland. Large wax candles were on the mantelpiece, and every ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... to be my birthday. I sat by the peat-fire, waiting for the lamp and the tea-tray, and contemplating my past life from the vantage-ground, so to speak, ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins

... evidences also of the succession of the varieties of trees corresponding to the evidences found in the peat bogs, the oak following the fir, which in turn gave way to the beech. These refuse heaps are usually in ridgelike mounds, sometimes hundreds of yards in length. The weight of the millions of shells and other refuse undoubtedly pressed ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... his feet like the shot o' a gun, hostin' to clear his throat. I dreedit he wud mak' a gutter o't somewey or ither, an' so I keepit my een open. Sandy shut his, an' so did a' the rest. He leaned forrit an' spread oot the muckle clunkers o' hands o' him on the tap o' the peat o' a big roobarb tert. "O Lord," was a' the len'th he'd gotten, when in he gaed, up near to the elbas amon' the het roobarb; an' by a' the skoilin' an' roarin' ever I heard, there never was the like! A gey grace it was, I can tell ye! It'll no' be the morn nor next day 'at I'll ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond

... get the very quality of Connemara peasant life by others, has sure power and a charm all her own. No one who reads "Irish Idylls" (1892) will stop at that collection. Mr. Seumas MacManus is as truly a shanachie as the old story-tellers that yet tell the old tales about peat fires in Donegal. "Through the Turf Smoke" (1899) and "In Chimney Corners" (1899) and "Donegal Fairy Stories" (1900) are alike in having the accent of the spoken story, but when the last word is said you cannot admit their author to be more than a clever entertainer. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... the baked evergreen wreaths festooned round the walls and looking-glass and dressing-table, joined to the heat from the stove, produced a heavy atmosphere that made her gasp. Somebody must already have been in her room, for the stove had been lit again, and she could see the peat blazing inside its open door. But outside, what a divine coldness and purity! She leaned out, drinking it in in long breaths, the warm March sun shining on her head. The garden, a mere uncared-for piece of rough grass with big trees, was radiant with rain-drops; ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... grassy; haunted by sheep and, at night and morning, by the piercing cries of the shepherds; wandered over by a few wild goats; and on its sea-front indented with long, clamorous caves, and faced with cliffs of the colour and ruinous outline of an old peat-stack. In one of these echoing and sunless gullies we saw, clustered like sea-birds on a splashing ledge, shrill as sea-birds in their salutation to the passing boat, a group of fisherwomen, stripped to their gaudy ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... | fathers from | exile Wandered | back to their | native | land to | die in its | bosom. In the | fisherman's | cot the | wheel and the | loom are still | busy; Maidens still | wear their | Norman | caps and their | kirtles of | homespun, And by the | evening | fire re | -peat E | -vangeline's story, While from its | rocky | caverns the | deep-voiced, | neighbouring | ocean Speaks, and in | accents dis | -consolate | answers the | wail of the | forest." HENRY ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... many different species of corals, which form the lagoon-reefs, that we have no more reasons for supposing that their whole surface would grow up as quickly as the coral did in the schooner-channel, than for supposing that the whole surface of a peat-moss would increase as quickly as parts are known to do in holes, where the peat has been cut away. These agencies, nevertheless, tend to fill up the lagoon; but in proportion as it becomes shallower, so must the polypifers be subject to many injurious ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin

... Victorine feels that, too. She loves the smell of the old wood, and of the peat burning there in the fireplace. When she comes down to see me, I must shut fast all the doors and windows; she wants the whole of the smell, pour faire le vrai bouquet, as she says. If she had had children—ah!—I don't say but what I might have consented; but as ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... her wildness, ruggedness, raggedness and simple grandeur, in the glorious land of Scott and Burns, the Queen's journal, though a little clouded at the last, by that "great sorrow," is very pleasant, breezy reading. It gives one a breath of heather, and pine and peat-smoke. ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood

... there had been a subject of dispute between the brother and sister. Martha was bent upon enclosing the green dell, with its clear, cool little pond; and to this end she spent all the time she could spare in raising a rough fence of stones and peat round it. But Stephen would not consent to it; and neither argument, scolding, nor coaxing could turn him. He always answered that he had promised the master that he would not trespass on the manor; and he must stand to his word, whatever they might lose by it; though, indeed, he saw no harm in ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton

... during school-hours. But when the little ones had gone home, and her household duties were all over, when there was no immediate call for exertion, her strength and spirits flagged. Sitting in the dim light of the peat fire, her weary eyes would close, and her work would fall upon her lap. It is true, the lowest tone of her aunt's voice would awaken her again, as indeed it would at any hour of the night; but, waking still weary and unrefreshed, no wonder that the power to step lightly and speak ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson

... probe, and everywhere with the same result. The muck underneath the water ran from three to five feet in depth, and was as black as peat. ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... the noisome smell and thick air. About 1550, Hollingshed foresaw the general use of sea-coal from the neglect of cultivating timber. Coal fires have now been in general use for three centuries. In the country they persevered in using wood and peat. Those who were accustomed to this sweeter smell declared that they always knew a Londoner, by the smell of his clothes, to have come from coal-fires. It must be acknowledged that our custom of ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... the sea, and so discover the cross which had been long since forgotten." It may have been his intention from the first to write a romance based on English soil, but that soil was no longer productive of such intellectual fruit, except in the form in which Dickens dug it up, like peat, out of the lower classes. We find Francis Bennoch writing to Hawthorne after his return to America, [Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, 310.] hoping to encourage him in this direction, but without apparent effect. Instead of a romance, he made a collection of essays from those ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... waited, doing absolutely nothing and with no excuse for loitering in the hotel with its long broad verandah; learning much of the city's history from the charming manager who walks with a stick, and has the blue-green-brown shadow of the peat ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... Afloat" formed a cordon across the mouth of the Thames, and intercepted all traffic. But he did not burn a long peat stack, to use a Scotticism; for the nation was enraged at him, and one by one his ships went back to their allegiance. He was seized, and after a three days' trial was condemned and executed, cool and intrepid to ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables

... these operations go on, lies about twenty English miles southeast of Berlin, as you go towards Schlesien (Silesia);—on the old Silesian road, in a flat moory country made of peat and sand;—and is not distinguished for its beauty at all among royal Hunting-lodges. The Gohrde at Hanover, for example, what a splendor there in comparison! But it serves Friedrich Wilhelm's simple purposes: there is game abundant in the scraggy woodlands, otter-pools, fish-pools, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle

... Snowdrop's Creek, intercepted our course. Having crossed it with great difficulty, we travelled through a scrubby forest, and came to the heads of the same creek, several of which were formed by swamps. Here the drooping tea-tree, growing in a sandy peat, attained a stately height. The sandy slopes around the swamps were covered with Banksia, the Melaleuca gum, and Pandanus, and a rich profusion of grasses and low sedges surrounded the deep pools of spring water. These spots, which bore ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt

... tale. After poring over his big book, he told his distracted client to find a black hen without a single feather of any other colour. This she was to bake (not living, but dead, as appears by the sequel) before a fire of wood (not, as usual, of peat), with feathers and all intact. Every window and opening was to be closed, except one—presumably the chimney; and she was not to watch the crimbil, or changeling, until the hen had been done enough, which ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... upon this turfy substance exposed to the air and moisture. This author has very well described the constant augmentation of this vegetable substance in the morasses of that country, as it also happens in those of our own; but there is a wide difference in those two cases of peat bog and healthy turf; the vegetable substance in the morass is under water, and therefore has its inflammable quality or combustible substance protected from the consuming operation of the vital or atmospheric air; the turfy soil, on the contrary, is exposed ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton

... part of Hancock county) and Clifton (southeastern part of Penobscot county) northward just east of the Penobscot river the predominant tree, generally on dry ridges and eskers, but in Greenbush and Passadumkeag growing abundantly on peat bogs with black spruce; hillsides and lower mountains about Moosehead, scattered; New Hampshire,—ranges with the pitch pine as far north as the White mountains, but is less common, usually in groves of a few to several hundred acres in extent; Vermont,—less common than ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame

... a coot poy today," returned the tremulous voice of a grey headed old man, who was leaning over a small peat fire on the hearth, sifting oatmeal through the fingers of his left hand into a pot, while he stirred the boiling mess with a short ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... heather-clad hills which form the broad dividing barrier between England and Scotland, the little river Esk brawls and bickers over its stony bed through a wild land of barren braesides and brown peat mosses, forming altogether some of the gloomiest and most forbidding scenery in the whole expanse of northern Britain. Almost the entire bulk of the counties of Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, and Ayr is composed of just such solemn desolate ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen

... year before. If it is difficult to obtain well-rotted manure, street sweepings may be used as a substitute, and old chip-dirt from under the wood pile, or the bottom of the woodshed if it has a dirt floor, will do in place of leaf-mould. Peat, or thoroughly dried and sweetened muck are also good substitutes for leaf-mould. Finely screened coal ashes may take ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell

... and behold! as the horses galloped along over the Irish bogs of peat, Saint Bridget saw a great white shape racing towards her. At first she thought it was a dog. But no: no dog was as large as that. She soon saw that it was a wolf, with big eyes and with a red tongue lolling out of his mouth. At last he overtook the frightened horses, ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown

... are traces of Roman occupation hereabouts in mounds and earthworks. Not long ago a man ploughing in the fen struck an old red vase up with the share, and searching the place found a number of the same urns within the space of a few yards, buried in the peat, as fresh as the day they were made. There was nothing else to be found, and the place was under water till fifty years ago; so that it must have been a boatload of pottery being taken in to market that was swamped there, how many centuries ago! ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson

... reached the place. Over the door was the sign "Water en vuur te koop."[1] It was not necessary for the children to go inside. They could see the whole apartment through the wide-open door-way. An old woman stood by a stove, or great oven, with a pair of tongs, taking up pieces of burning peat and dropping them into the buckets of the children, and then filling their tea-kettles with boiling water from great copper tanks on the stove. For this each child paid her a Dutch cent, which is less than ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... wheels of great political machine; If English corn should grow abroad, I ween, And gold be made of gold, or paper sheet; How many pigs be born to each spalpeen; And, ah! how man shall thrive beyond his meat,— With twenty souls alive, to one square sod of peat! ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... which held good for another fifty or sixty years, until it was in its turn effectually disposed of by the report of the Bogs Commission in 1810, when it was proved once for all that it was to the growth of sphagnums and other peat-producing mosses they were in the main due—a view which has never since been called ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... tasted great weather on high, white, green-turreted cliffs by the sea. I have tramped the tough heather, the purple, the brown, By pools of peat water; from the night to the day, Till the moon has dropped down: the ghost of a minim, low down, In a high-piping ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various

... down, struck the stone with her foot, and slipped, but Festing had time to clutch her first. He could not hold her back, but he could steady her, and for a moment felt his muscles crack and the peat tear out from the hole in the bank. Then his hands slipped and he fell, gasping and red in face, upon the shelf ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss

... might all voluntarily sign it, else he would oblige them by law, but most of the principal wadsetters [mortgage-holders] refused, on which he ordered them out of his presence. . . . He has declared that no peat out of his estate should come to this fort. . . . His whole behaviour has greatly alienated the affections of his once dearly beloved followers. I shall take all opportunities of improving this happy spirit of rebellion against so great a chieftain, which ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang

... legal pardon (and there is no other, for divine Principle never pardons our sins or mistakes till they are corrected) leaves the offender free to re- 11:15 peat the offence, if indeed, he has not already suffered sufficiently from vice to make him turn from it with loathing. Truth bestows no pardon upon error, but 11:18 wipes it out in the most effectual manner. Jesus suffered for our sins, not to annul the divine sentence for an in- dividual's sin, but ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... said. "We belonged to Kilbally. The Enniskilleners came that way, and burned it to the ground. They murdered my wife and many another one. I was away cutting peat with my wife's brother here. When we came back, everything was gone. A few had escaped to the bogs, where they could not be followed; the rest was, every mother's son of them, killed by those murdering villains. Your honour may guess what we felt, when we ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty

... be interpreted as due to this process of selection alone, since no transformation of any importance can be evolved by itself; it is always accompanied by a host of secondary changes. He gives the familiar example of the Giant Stag of the Irish peat, the enormous antlers of which required not only a much stronger skull cap, but also greater strength of the sinews, muscles, nerves and bones of the whole anterior half of the animal, if their mass was not to weigh down ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel

... yet is very uneven, and the many rising grounds and eminences with which it is filled, have formed in the several valleys a great variety of swamps, where the Indian grass and the blue bent, peculiar to such soils, grow with tolerable luxuriancy. Some of the swamps abound with peat, which serves the poor instead of firewood. There are fourteen ponds on this island, all extremely useful, some lying transversely, almost across it, which greatly helps to divide it into partitions for the use of their cattle; others abound with peculiar ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... talk, without editorial comment, delights and amuses from its strangeness, and also from the conviction that it is as real as the landscape. They tell wonderful tales of moor and fen as they tramp the woods or sail on moonlit waters, and sitting by a peat fire of a stormy night, discuss, between deep pulls of Scotch whisky, the Erastianism that vitiates modern theology. We must look in the pages of Scott for a more charming picture of the relation of clansman ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... thus dissolved is laid down as limonite when oxidized, as about a chalybeate spring; but out of contact with the air and in the presence of carbon dioxide supplied by decaying vegetation, as in a peat bog, it may be deposited ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... preserves, solely because they have had abundance, and variety of food. In all moor becks, plenty of small Trout are found; such waters are excellent for breeding, but as very little nutriment comes from peat or waste lands, they are generally dwarfish in size, and moderate in flavour. On the contrary, in small streams running through a fertile soil, fish are frequently killed of a most satisfactory size and weight. In rapid ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland

... stone-flagged room, darkly wainscoted, which apparently once had been the hall, and was now kitchen. There were a spotless cloth and neat cutlery on the table by the window; trout and bacon, hacked from the sides hanging beneath the smoke-blackened beams, frizzled upon a peat fire; and, though she found neither wine nor potatoes, Mrs. Savine said that she had not enjoyed such a ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss

... the Scotch mountains, flavoured with the peat of the valleys is highly prized by the natives, not only of Scotland but of all the English speaking countries of this ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford

... the matter in hand, let there be as many of them as possible. If a saddle is a proper place for jewels, then let the seat be paved with diamonds and emeralds, and Runjeet Singh's harness maker be considered as a lofty artist, for whose barbaric splendour Mr. Peat and his Melton customers are to forswear pigskin and severe simplicity—not to say utility, and comfort. If poetic diction be different in species from plain English, then let us have it as poetical as possible, as unlike English: as ungrammatical, abrupt, insolved, transposed, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... was a man who had the patience to wait for his vengeance. The longer it was delayed, the heavier would it be. A characteristic of his cold, callous temperament was that he took fire slowly, but, once lit, his hate endured like peat coals in a grate. A vain man, his dignity was precious to him. He writhed at the defeat Morse had put upon him, at his failure with Jessie, at the scornful public rebuke of her father. Upon all three of these ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine

... breaking up under them like ice in a thaw; with a thousand facts and notions, which they know not how to classify, pouring in on them like a flood?—a very Yeasty state of mind altogether, like a mountain burn in a spring rain, carrying down with it stones, sticks, peat-water, addle grouse-eggs and drowned kingfishers, fertilising salts and vegetable poisons— not, alas! without a large crust, here and there, of sheer froth. Yet no heterogeneous confused flood-deposit, no fertile ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... manatee or sea-cow in herds on the kelp-beds, blue foxes in thousands, the seal rookeries that were to make the islands famous; but there was no timber to build houses for wintering in. It was a barren island. They could make floors of sand, walls of peat, roofs of sea-moss; but what shelter was ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut

... On some peat soils the strawberry thrives abundantly; on others it burns and dwindles. Under such conditions I should experiment with bone-dust, ashes, etc., until I found just ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... minerals—peat, lignite, coal, graphite, asphalt, petroleum, etc.—are, properly speaking, not minerals at all, as they are organic substances, and have no definite chemical composition or crystalline forms. They are, in fact, chiefly the products or phases of a progressive and inevitable ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various

... of turf—a stiffened bull's-hide served for a door. The food consisted of coarse vegetable products, such as peas, and even the bark of trees. In some places they were unacquainted with bread. Cabins of reeds plastered with mud, houses of wattled stakes, chimneyless peat fires, from which there was scarcely an escape for the smoke, dens of physical and moral pollution swarming with vermin, wisps of straw twisted round the limbs to keep off the cold, the ague-stricken peasant with no help except shrine-cure," i.e., cure by the touching bone of saint, or image of ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... catchings, imprisonments, torturings, banishments, headings, hangings, dismemberings, and quarterings quick, forby the hundreds forced from their ain habitations to the deserts, mountains, muirs, mosses, moss-flows, and peat-hags, there to hear the word like bread ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... he lifted the light high, while he took in the scene. His eyes were dark and dancing, like the ripples on a peat stream. "So-ho!" he said softly. "Murder! And by our ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... deserted hut, low, dark, and destitute of window or chimney; the floor was clay, and when they had lit a fire, the peat smoke was blinding and stifling. Still, they could dry their clothes and sleep, even though it were on a bed no better than a sail spread on the hard ground. Here they rested two days, and then found a more comfortable refuge in the Island of Scalpa, where the tacksman—although a Campbell—was ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang

... in the lee of a tent, for there they swarm and are as vigorous in their attacks as during a calm. The men wear mosquito-net hoods over their heads and shoulders while in camp or hunting, and women and children live in the smoke of their smouldering peat fires. ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder

... comfort," said the tall lady in the green peaked hat. "Here is money enough to pay your rent and buy another cow." With that, she sat down at the round table near the peat fire. Opening her bag, the shining gold coins slid out and formed a little ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis

... by Gilfillan, that a minister from this vicinity, having once lost his way in travelling through a distant part of Scotland, vainly solicited the services of a guide for some time, all being engaged in peat-cutting; at last one of the farmers, some of whose ancestors had been included among the sufferers, discovering that he came from this vicinity, had seen the gravestones, and could repeat the inscriptions, was willing to give up half a day's ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... all good farmers.'[640] The farm-buildings of Belgium, Holland, France, and the Rhenish Provinces were much superior. In parts of England indeed no progress seems to have been made for generations at this date. Thousands of acres of peat moss in Lancashire were unreclaimed, and many parts of the Fylde district were difficult even to traverse. Even in Warwickshire, in the heart of England, between Knowle and Tamworth, instead of signs of industry and improvement were narrow winding lanes leading ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler

... one large hut built on a swamp and were continually wet. There were only two small stoves for the seven hundred men and we had only a few two pound syrup tins in which to cook. A poor quality of peat was our only fuel. As only five men could crowd round a stove at a time, one's chances were rather slim in the dense mob, every man-jack of whom was waiting to slip into the first vacant place ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson

... around the fires of peat Live on the ancient days; There still do living lips repeat The old ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston

... see from the turn of the hill-side the Blair of Drummond waving with corn and shadowed with rich woods, where eighty years ago there was a black peat-moss; and far off, on the horizon, Damyat and the Touch Fells; and at his side the little loch of Ruskie, in which he may see five Highland cattle, three tawny brown and two brindled, standing in the still water—themselves as still, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... gentle-spoken sort of woman, and would bear a good deal from a fellow; but she used to fire up sometimes, and that was more than she could stand. "You don't deserve to be cared about, for speaking like that!" says she, with her cheeks as red as peat-coals. ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... when favourably observed, exhibits at a certain stage of its condensation the colours of the sky. It is blue by reflected light, and orange or red by transmitted light. The same effect, as pointed out by Goethe, is to some extent exhibited by peat-smoke. More than ten years ago, I amused myself by observing, on a calm day at Killarney, the straight smoke-columns rising from the cabin-chimneys. It was easy to project the lower portion of a column against a dark pine, and its upper portion against a bright cloud. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... out the pair of pipes that was his principal possession, and to set before his guests a muttonham and a bottle of that drink which they call Athole brose. The two enemies were still on the very breach of a quarrel; but down they sat, one upon each side of the peat fire, with a mighty show of politeness. Maclaren pressed them to taste his muttonham and "the wife's brose," reminding them the wife was out of Athole and had a name far and wide for her skill in that confection. But Robin put aside these hospitalities ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various

... plain, it was a glad sight to see the green spread of the branches and the pleasant gardens which girt the hamlet round. All morning we had seen no sight of a human being, save the old hag upon the moor and a few peat-cutters in the distance. Our belts, too, were beginning to be loose upon us, and the remembrance of our ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... brilliantly, by two hanging brass chandeliers of the famous Flemish workmanship, in each of which were fixed eighteen of the best candles, while on the sideboards were branch candlesticks, also of worked brass. The light thus provided was supplemented by that from the great fire of peat and old ships' timber which burned in a wide blue-tiled fire-place, half way down the chamber, throwing its reflections upon many a flagon and bowl of cunningly hammered silver that adorned the table and ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard

... went up to the Raymond Tavern. Quite a crowd of men were in the bar-room. They were seated in front of a great fire of logs and peat. Captain Rogers was ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan

... patches of woodland, where the tree-trunks opposed a snow-incrusted side towards the northeast; and within ken of deserted villas, with no footprints in their avenues; and passed scattered dwellings, whence puffed the smoke of country fires, strongly impregnated with the pungent aroma of burning peat. Sometimes, encountering a traveller, we shouted a friendly greeting; and he, unmuffling his ears to the bluster and the snow-spray, and listening eagerly, appeared to think our courtesy worth less than the trouble which it cost him. The churl! He understood the shrill whistle of the ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... burning in the caravan, probably from the economy of want. The hut was lighted only by a red tinge, arising from the opening at the top of the stove, in which sparkled a peat fire. On the stove were smoking a porringer and a saucepan, containing to all appearance something to eat. The savoury odour was perceptible. The hut was furnished with a chest, a stool, and an unlighted lantern which hung from the ceiling. Besides, to the partition were attached ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... a low valley and through a belt of fan-palms and jungle bordering an ever-flowering stream the banks of which are knee-deep in fat, rich loam. Huge tea-trees stand in the water, where the fibrous roots are matted like peat. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... clay, and ceilings of moorland turf: a few books on a shelf, thumbed by many a thumb; a few hams drying above head in the smoke, which was in no haste to get out at the roof—a wooden settle, some oak chairs, chaff beds well covered with blankets, with a fire of peat and wood burning at a distance from the gable wall, on the middle of the floor. His food was as homely as his habitation, and consisted chiefly of oatmeal-porridge, barley-broth, and potatoes, and ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... good-tempered because it is a fine day, will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in the one case, the fine weather has got into them, in the other the rainy. Rosamond, as she sat warming herself by the glow of the peat-fire, turning over in her mind all that had passed, and feeling how pleasant the change in her feelings was, began by degrees to think how very good she had grown, and how very good she was to have grown ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald

... quite hot," said Fanny, stooping down to a tray which stood before the peat fire, holding the muffin dish. "But perhaps you'd like a morsel of buttered toast; say the word, uncle, and I'll make it in a brace ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... got a little stretch along through Belshazzar that don't produce anything now—at least nothing but rocks—but irrigation will fetch it. Then from Catfish to Babylon it's a little swampy, but there's dead loads of peat down under there somewhere. Next is the Bloody Run and Hail Columbia country—tobacco enough can be raised there to support two such railroads. Next is the sassparilla region. I reckon there's enough of that truck along in there on the line ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... farther inland. Taking so little room and supplying the poor with a handy and cheap fuel, I doubt that these little bogs are any detriment to the country. Some of them have been made to take on a soil (by draining, cutting, drying and burning the upper strata of peat, and spreading the ashes over the entire surface), and are now quite productive.—Drainage and ridging are almost universally resorted to, showing the extraordinary humidity of the atmosphere. The Potato is now generally in blossom, and, having a large breadth of the ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... so; and thou badst build a mighty pyre Of seasoned wood and well dried peat. But God Almighty blew the fire out. They fled, The twain together, to the ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... which is an excellent non-conductor of heat, and were each covered with an inverted pan of earthenware, the edge of which overhung the hive like a cornice. Each hive was fastened together with pegs of hard wood, so that it could be easily taken to pieces, and the joints were stopped with peat. ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... other, more smooth and undulating, towards a fair scene of inland beauty, straggled the little hamlet of Pont-y-fro. Jos Hughes's shop was the very last house in the village, the road beyond it merging into the rushy moor, and dwindling into a stony track, down which a streamlet trickled from the peat bog above. The house had stood in the same place for two hundred years, and Jos Hughes looked as if he too had lived there for the same length of time. His quaintly cut blue cloth coat adorned with large brass buttons, his knee ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine

... ourselves meekly in that station whereunto it hath pleased Heaven to call us; the herd instinct survives four-footedness. For, we note the strange but not the familiar; our thinking is to right reason what peat is to coal; the outcry of the living and the dead perverts judgment, closes the ear to proof; and our wisest fear the scorn of fools. So we walk cramped and strangely under the tragic tyranny of reiteration: whatever is right; whatever is repeated ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... very spot where she left him, and not finding him, she came to the conclusion that some wild beast had come upon the helpless thing and carried him off. Then a gleam of water coming to her eye, she rushed to the peat-hag whence it was reflected, and would there have drowned herself. But she was intercepted and turned aside by a man who threw down his flauchter-spade, and ran between her and the frightful hole. He thought she was out of her mind, and tried to console her with the assurance that no child left ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald

... heather, peat, nor birks, Nae trout in a' yer burnies lurks, There are nae bonny U.P. kirks, An awfu' place! Nane kens the Covenant o' Works ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang

... "Yes" nor "No." Moved by the soft and insinuating talkativeness of Herzog, she felt herself treading on dangerous ground. It seemed to her that her foot was sinking, as in those dangerous peat-mosses of which the surface is covered with green grass, tempting one to run on it. Cayrol was under the charm. He drank in the German's words. This clever man, who had never till then been duped, had found his master ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... that—love flowers nevertheless. For such these plants are more than a relief. Observe my Oncidium. It stands in a pot, but this is only for convenience—a receptacle filled with moss. The long stem feathered with great blossoms springs from a bare slab of wood. No mould nor peat surrounds it; there is absolutely nothing save the roots that twine round their support, and the wire that sustains it in the air. It asks no attention beyond its daily bath. From the day I tied it on that block last year—reft from home and all its pleasures, bought with ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle

... huge circle is, we gain our best clue to the age of all these monuments, everywhere so much like each other in their massive form and dimensions, everywhere so like in their utter mystery. Round the lakes of Erne there are wide expanses of peat, dug as fuel for centuries, and in many places as much as twelve feet deep, on a bed of clay, the waste of old glaciers. Though formed with incredible slowness, this whole mass of peat has grown since some of the great stone monuments were built; if we can tell ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston

... made he'd lost at gambling. Also, he was in debt three hundred dollars to the Six Companies—you know, they're Chinese affairs. And, remember, this was only seven years ago—health breaking down, three hundred in debt, and no trade. Chow Lam blew into Stockton and got a job on the peat lands at day's wages. It was a Chinese company, down on Middle River, that farmed celery and asparagus. This was when he got onto himself and took stock of himself. A quarter of a century in the United States, back not so strong as it used ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... of it, Strowan," said my Lord Ogilvie. "There's too few of us for this work, but a little peat will boil a little pot. Let us gang back and raddle the Glasgow bodies. ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough

... of this kind collects at the back of fire-places in cottages where peat is the constant fuel burnt; which, purified by solution and evaporation, yields a fine bistre, similar to the Scotch. All kinds of bistre ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... All vessels entering port were strictly examined, and there was a guard house on the quay. Lying by one of the wharves was a large boat laden with peat, which was being rapidly unloaded, the peat being sold as soon as landed, as fuel was ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty

... for the more convenient burning of coal. Hence the remnant of the raised hearth looked like wide hobs to the grate. The recess as a chimney-corner was thereby spoiled, for coal makes a very different kind of smoke from the aromatic product of wood or peat. ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald

... monoxide or hydrocarbon gas on being heated. A great variety of materials is used, a few of them being charcoal (both wood and bone), charred leather, crushed bone, horn, mixtures of charcoal and barium carbonate, coke and heavy oils, coke treated with alkaline carbonates, peat, charcoal mixed with common salt, saltpeter, resin, flour, potassium bichromate, vegetable fibre, limestone, various seed husks, etc. In general, it is well to avoid ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin

... efer schmelt, Py gutter, sink, or well, At efery gorner of Cologne Dere's von can peat dat schmell. Vhen dere you go you'll find it so, Don't dake de ding on troost; De meanest skunk in Yankee land Vould die ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland

... a very little house in which the children found themselves; and it took some time for them to make it out, for there was no light but that of a feeble rushlight in a horn lantern, and the faint glow of a peat fire. But after a while they perceived that it was built of sods of turf and lined with heather, neatly fixed into the turf by wooden pegs such as gardeners use; while the ceiling was also of heather, laid crosswise against ashen poles. The fire-place seemed to be built of round ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue

... annual allowance for his clothing, three yards of woollen cloth, white or russet, six yards of linen, and six of canvas. Four fires were allowed for the whole community. From Michaelmas to All Saints, they had two baskets of peat, on double mess days; and four baskets daily, from All Saints to Easter. On Christmas Day, they had four Yule logs each a cartload, with four trusses of straw; four trusses of straw on All Saints' Eve, and Easter Eve; ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope

... soon find yourself involved in chemical and meteorological questions: as, for instance, when you ask—How is it that I find one flora on the sea-shore, another on the sandstone, another on the chalk, and another on the peat-making gravelly strata? The usual answer would be, I presume—if we could work it out by twenty years' experiment, such as Mr. Lawes, of Rothampsted, has been making on the growth of grasses and leguminous plants in different soils and under different manures—the usual answer, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... them and raised stones above them to mark the place. But at night he had Sigurd Erikson's body carried down to the beach with all the other men who had been of King Valdemar's host. One of the smaller ships was then brought in to the beach, and a pyre of tarred wood and dry peat was built upon its upper deck. Olaf placed the dead body of his uncle upon the pyre, with all the armour that Sigurd had worn. The ship was further loaded with the dead men and with weapons. Then, when the tide had ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton

... of Glaston was really of wattle is more than probable, for the remains of British buildings thus constructed have been found abundantly in the neighbouring peat. The Arimathaean theory of its consecration became so generally accepted that at the Council of Constance (1419) precedence was actually accorded to our Bishops as representing the senior Church of Christendom. But the oldest variant of the ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... there we may easily picture the Bronte children telling stories to Tabby or Martha, or to whatever servant reigned at the time, and learning, as all of them did, to become thoroughly domesticated—Emily most of all. Behind the dining-room was a peat-room, which, when Charlotte was married in 1854, was cleared out and converted into a little study for Mr. Nicholls. The staircase with its solid banister remains as it did half a century ago; and at its foot one is still shown the corner which tradition assigns as the ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... composed of layers of clay, sometimes traversed by layers of peat, overlying profound strata of watery sand. This clay is, in places, of a remarkably firm consistency; for example, in the quarter of the town known as Dorsoduro or "hard-back," and at the spot where ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various

... propagation experiments, preliminary observations were made by placing softwood cuttings in a bottom-heated cold frame at intervals during the growing season. The soil medium was two thirds washed sand and one third peat moss. Daily watering was by a hand hose. The root-inducing substance was indole-butyric acid crystals in a talc based mixture, one to one hundred. The results were ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... was because I was tired: the office faded away, desk, Headquarters across the street, boy, officer, business, and all. In their place were the brown heath I loved, the distant hills, the winding wagon track, the peat stacks, and the solitary sheep browsing on the barrows. Forgotten the thirty years, the seas that rolled between, the teeming city! I was at home again, a child. And there he stood, the boy, with it all in his dull, absent look. I read it now as plain ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... help and advice. Jess was slightly out of her element in a southern setting. Her appropriate background was moorland and heather and gray loch, and driving clouds and a breeze with fine mist in it, that would make you want to wrap a plaid round your shoulders and turn to the luxury of a peat fire. Quite unconsciously she suggested all these things. Peachy once described her as a living incarnation of one of Scott's novels, for she was steeped in old traditions and legends and superstitions, and could tell tales in ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil

... folk I see are so few ... Aye! There was a power of trouble. There were two men killed themselves and families broken up all by reason of me. I meant no harm, wee Shane, but it happened, and it does be troubling me in my old days. And I sit there afeared by the peat fire, and when I've thought too much on it, I get up and go to the half-door. And I look out on the Moyle, wee Shane, and I think: that's been roaring since the first tick of time, and I see the stars so many of them, and the moon that never changed its shape or size, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... asparagus is from one to four tons of marketable shoots per acre, according to age and thrift of plants, etc., the largest yields being on the peat lands of the river islands. On suitable lands one ought to get at least two tons per acre. Roots may yield a few days' cuttings during their second year in permanent place; the third year they will stand much more cutting, and for several years after that will be in full yielding. Asparagus enjoys ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson

... as themselves, or of stones overgrown with moss, would stretch away on both sides, sprinkled with busily-feeding cattle. Now they would pass through a farm-steading, perfumed with the breath of cows, and the odour of burning peat—so fragrant! though not yet so grateful to the inner sense as it would be when encountered in after years and in foreign lands. For the smell of burning and the smell of earth are the deepest underlying sensuous bonds of the earth's unity, and the common brotherhood of them that dwell thereon. ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... on Wednesday decided to accept the free use of Professor W. B. Bottomley's patients for the conversion of raw peat by means of bacteria." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various

... she should re-peat, All sit still; but if she say "Twi-light," each must change his seat, Or a for-feit ...
— The Infant's Delight: Poetry • Anonymous

... uncle's house of Waverley-Honour, the houses of villagers, all white and neat, stood about a village green, or lurked ancient and ivy-grown under the shade of great old park trees. But the turf-roofed hovels of Tully-Veolan, with their low doors supported on either side by all too intimate piles of peat and rubbish, appeared to the young Englishman hardly fit for human beings to live in. Indeed, from the hordes of wretched curs which barked after the heels of his horse, Edward might have supposed them meant to serve as kennels—save, that is, for ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... me, I haf peen practice on der quiet dis long time, so as to surbrize you all," came the proud reply. "Feel dot muscle, Seth, undt tell me if you think idt could pe peat. Gymnastics I haf take, py shiminy, till all der while I dream of chinning mineself, hanging py one toe, undt all der rest. Meppy you vill surbrised pe yet. Holdt on, ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher

... the sea, stunts the trees and limits the garden produce; the house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands, with the scanty fields attached, as an island in a sea of morass. The landscape is unredeemed by grace or grandeur—mere undulating hills of grass and heather, with peat bogs ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... pipes in the old way, by picking up a live coal, or, in Ireland, a fragment of glowing peat, from the kitchen fire, with the ordinary tongs, and applying it to the pipe-bowl; but the old ember-tongs are seldom seen. They may still be found in some farmhouses and country cottages, which have not been raided by the agents of dealers ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson

... and a hungry heart. There too is Couthon, little dreaming what he is;—whom a sad chance has paralysed in the lower extremities. For, it seems, he sat once a whole night, not warm in his true love's bower (who indeed was by law another's), but sunken to the middle in a cold peat-bog, being hunted out; quaking for his life, in the cold quaking morass; (Dumouriez, ii. 370.) and goes now on crutches to the end. Cambon likewise, in whom slumbers undeveloped such a finance-talent ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... Natural resources: forests, peat deposits, small quantities of oil and natural gas, granite, dolomitic limestone, marl, chalk, sand, ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... From the pool into which the last cascade tumbled—a stone dislodged by her foot dropped to it almost plumb—the stream hurtled down the glen, following the curve of its sides until they overlapped; naked cliffs above, touched with sunlight, their feet set in peat, up which the forest trees clambered as if in a race for the top—pines leading, with heather and scrubby junipers, oaks and hemlocks some way behind; alders, mostly by the waterside, with maples in swampy patches, and here and there a birch waving ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... know what the Ingvorstrup horses were intended for. They were to blind the judge and to lead him aside from the narrow path of righteousness. The rich Morten Bruns covets poor Ole Anderson's peat moor and pasture land. It would have been a good bargain for Morten even at seventy thalers. But no indeed, my good fellow, ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... of the parliamentary soldiers as well as of the citizens of London. The city might now look for a plentiful supply of coal, a commodity which had become so scarce that in July the civic authorities had received permission from parliament to dig for turf and peat, by way of a substitute for coal, wherever they thought fit.(664) Seeing that it was by the aid of the city that a fleet had been maintained off the north coast, that Berwick had been secured for ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe

... tufts of sengreen and clumps of moss. In the open fields, under the shadow of high ricks, he would lie, listening to the hollow splashing of the mills and inhaling the fresh breeze from Voulzie. Sometimes he went as far as the peat-bogs, to the green and black hamlet of Longueville, or climbed wind-swept hillsides affording magnificent views. There, below to one side, as far as the eye could reach, lay the Seine valley, blending in the distance with the blue sky; high up, near the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... rowan-tree twigs on every stone, so that once the beast was in the avenue of stones he could only get out at the end. And this was Nelly's part of the job. Next they gathered a quantity of furze and brushwood and peat, and piled it in the end of the avenue next the cottage. Then Angus went and killed a little pig, and dressed ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald

... of the early English were row-boats of very simple construction. We actually possess one undoubted specimen at the present day, whose very date is fixed for us by the circumstances of its discovery. It was dug up, some years since, from a peat-bog in Sleswick, the old England of our forefathers, along with iron arms and implements, and in association with Roman coins ranging in date from A.D. 67 to A.D. 217. It may therefore be pretty confidently assigned to the first half of the third century. In this interesting relic, ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen

... in Dublin, first at the Shamrock Hotel, and then in rather squalid lodgings (for cash was not plentiful), Lola was taken back to her husband's relatives. They lived in a dull Irish village on the edge of a peat bog, where the young bride found existence very boring. Then, too, when the glamour of the elopement had dimmed, it was obvious that her action in running away from Bath had been precipitate. Thomas, for all his luxuriant ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... soil was found upon the sides of sloping hills, and in the broad valleys between them. Some parts that were low and level had a wet and peat-like surface, bounded by small tracts of flowering shrubs and odoriferous plants, that perfumed the air with the fragrance of their oils.* These retained in general the appearance of those in New South Wales, while they were in reality very different. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins

... lying between Bettisfield and Fenns Bank. This, it was supposed, might even be drained by making the railway across its quivering surface, but hopes of this sort were not to be realised, for it remains to-day a wild, but picturesque stretch of heather and silver birches, where the peat-digger plies his trade with, perhaps, as much profit as the farmer would in tilling it. But as to its power to bear the weight of passing trains the engineers had little doubt. The canal already crossed it, and though in making soundings the ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine

... swallowed as much peat smoke as any man of my years. Come out of that now, and let me have ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane

... of forest fires. Some burn unseen two to four feet beneath the surface of the ground. Where the soil contains much peat, these fires may persist for weeks or even months. Sometimes, they do not give off any noticeable smoke. Their fuel is the decaying wood, tree roots and similar material in the soil. These underground fires can be stopped only by flooding ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack

... I doknowye. You're Mulcahy men, ev' moth's sonofye; and you've come to this 'ere meet'n' to put down free-ee-dom of speech. But yer carndoit. 'Peat it, yer ca-arn-doit. I d'fy ye. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... o' cauldrife professors and ministers, that sate bien and warm when the persecuted remnant were warstling wi' hunger, and cauld, and fear of death, and danger of fire and sword upon wet brae-sides, peat-haggs, and flow-mosses, and that now creep out of their holes, like bluebottle flees in a blink of sunshine, to take the pu'pits and places of better folk—of them that witnessed, and testified, and fought, and endured pit, prison-house, and transportation beyond seas?—A bonny bike there's o' them!—And ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... magenta evening primrose in form, the meadow-beauty is likewise a rather niggardly bloomer, only a few flowers in each cluster opening at once; but where masses adorn our marshes, we cannot wonder so effective a plant is exported to European peat gardens. Its lovely sister, the MARYLAND MEADOW-BEAUTY (R. Mariana), a smaller, less brilliant flower, found no farther north than the swamps and pine barrens of New Jersey, also goes abroad to be admired; ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... still a third source of coal. Vegetable bodies macerated in water, and consolidated by compression, form a body almost indistinguishable from some species of coal, as is seen in peat compressed under a great load of earth; and there can be no doubt that coal sometimes originates in this way, for much fossil coal shows abundance of vegetable ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... wind, the scent of the pine-trees especially, and of all the earth, the tinkling jangle of the harness as you pass the trees on the roadside, the life of the horses, the glitter and the shadow, the cottages and the roses and the rosy faces, the scent of burning wood or peat from the chimneys, these and a thousand other things combine to make such a journey delightful. But I believe it needs something more than this—something even closer to the human life—to account for the pleasure that motion gives us. ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald

... corner; a donkey tied to the foot of the bed was patiently looking down into the face of the baby. Father was in England harvesting. A couple of pigs lay under the bed, and the floor space was still further encroached upon by a goodly number of chickens, which were encouraged by the warmth of the peat fire. They not only thought it their duty to emphasize our welcome, but—misled by the firelight—were saluting the still far-off dawn. The resultant emotions which we experienced during the night led us to suggest that we might assist toward the erection of a cattle pen. Before ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... William Garstin in 1899. In 1900 the greater part of the sudd had been removed by the strenuous labours of Major Peake, and the Nile again became navigable from Khartum to Rejaf. The sudd was found to be piled up and of almost as close a structure as peat. It was sawn out in blocks ten feet square and carried away by gunboats. In the years 1901—02 further progress was made, and twenty thousand dollars appropriated for the work; and by means of constant patrolling the sudd is now ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... the flure, Janet, Put on anither peat. It's a lown and starry nicht, Janet, And neither cold ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various

... of Newlands, almost under the bridge that crosses the fall. It was a sweet place in a great solitude, where the silence was broken only by the tumbling waters, the cooing of pigeons on the roof, and the twittering of ringouzels by the side of the torrent. The air was fresh with the smell of new peat. There was a wedge-shaped garden in front, and it was encompassed by chestnut-trees. As Hugh Ritson drew near he noticed that a squirrel crept from the fork of one of these trees. The little creature ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... southern end of Chiloe make a good division for you? I presume, from the collection of Brydges and Anderson, Chiloe is pretty well-known, and southward begins a terra incognita. I collected a few plants amongst the Chonos Islands. The beech being found here and peat being found here, and general appearance of landscape, connects the Chonos Islands and T. del Fuego. I saw the Alerce (313/1. "Alerse" is the local name of a South American timber, described in Capt. King's "Voyages of the 'Adventure' ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... limestone tarn of Malham. There palmers, caperers, and rough black flies, of the largest Thames and Kennet sizes, seem the only attractive baits: and for this reason, that they are the flies of the place. The cinnamon Phryganea comes up abundantly from among the stones; and the large peat moss to the west of the tarn abounds, as usual, in house-flies and bluebottles, and in the caterpillars of the fox and oak-egger moths: another proof that the most attractive flies are imitations of the real ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... seemed to be a mediaeval courtyard flanked by trees, we pulled up in the bright warm light of an open doorway, shook ourselves like Newfoundland dogs, and were welcomed by a frank, good-looking Scottish host to a glowing peat fire in this really comfortable little hotel, the central pivot of a ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert

... method of producing coal-gas. Besides making experiments on production and utilization of coal-gas for lighting, he devoted his knowledge of chemistry to the analysis of the gas. He also made analytical studies of the relative value of wood, peat, oil, wax, and different kinds of coal for the distillation of gas. His chemical analyses showed to a considerable extent the properties of carbureted hydrogen upon which illuminating value depended. The results of his work were published in various English journals between 1805 and 1825 and they ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... desperate speed of passion through the village street, up the winding hill, across the common, along the avenue; and reached in less time than seemed possible the open grove of oaks, in one corner of which this obnoxious beer-house, the torment and puzzle of the magistrates, and the peat of the parish, was situated. There was no sign of death or sickness about the place. The lights from the tap-room and the garden, along one side of which the alley for four-corners was erected, gleamed in the darkness of a moonless summer night between the trees; ...
— The Beauty Of The Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... skipper; and instantly we turned towards it. The little wherry which had fallen behind us, had hard work. The master begged that, if we made for Col, we should put out a light to him. Accordingly one of the sailors waved a glowing peat for some time. The various difficulties that were started, gave me a good deal of apprehension, from which I was relieved, when I found we were to run for a harbour before the wind. But my relief was but of short duration; for I soon heard that our sails were ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... contain 8-10 p.ct. of these constituents in their anhydride form ('pentosanes'). They yield readily to acid hydrolysis, and certainly constitute a considerable percentage of the dissolved products. A similar complex was obtained by the author in his investigation of peat (Berl. Ber. 30, 2571), and was found to be similarly incompletely attacked by yeast. The yields of alcohol corresponded with the proportion of the total carbohydrates disappearing. These were the hexose constituents of the hydrolysed ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross

... a happy recollection that he had omitted any reference to stoofjes, the footstools filled with burning peat which are used to keep the feet warm in church. Such a custom was of course not less reprehensible than the building of dykes to keep out the sea. Hence these eight lines, which, however, would have come better earlier ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... it?" returned Mr. Slocum. "But it's a fact that it's a great cure for rheumatiz. A grea-at cure! Why, there's Barzillay Smith, over to Peat's Corner, has kerried a potato in his pocket for five years,—not the same potato, y' know; changes 'em when they begin to sprout,—and he hesn't hed a touch o' rheumatism all that time. Not a touch! tol' ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards

... Highlands, through the long valley of Glenavon, and thence to the sea-port town of Greenock from which the packet ships went weekly out into the mists, heading for the land of promise somewhere beyond the sky-line. He slept with his companions on heather beds in front of peat fires in the homes of the Highlanders through whose villages they passed, and the Gaelic tongue of one of their number was always a charm sufficient to secure them food. He reached Greenock on the 20th of March, but because of unforeseen delay it was ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan

... advanced, from the time of chipped to that of polished implements. Man has been, from the beginning, under the never resting, never hastening, forces of evolution. The earth from which he sprang holds the record of his transformations in her peat-beds, her buried caverns and her rocky fastnesses. The eternal laws change man, but they ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... matter, the cultivation of them strikes one as highly praiseworthy. Inside the houses we found nicely polished floors, and simply furnished rooms, of a truly German style, stove included. The poorer abodes were mere hovels made of peat, admitting neither light nor air, and having the roofs covered with grass. One would have thought them almost uninhabitable, and yet I had seen dwellings nearly as ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... therefore, to discover and invent materials for supplying us with the means of domestic heat and comfort, has exercised the ingenuity of man. Those now known have been divided into five classes; the first comprehending the fluid inflammable bodies; the second, peat or turf; the third, charcoal of wood; the fourth, pit-coal charred; and the fifth, wood or pit-coal in a crude state, with the capacity of yielding a copious and bright flame. The first may be said seldom ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... shallow valleys, or become the summits of slopes extending with gentle declivity towards the shore. The ground almost everywhere, even on the hills, is boggy, with numerous swamps, rivulets and pools. The peat in some places is as much as six feet in thickness; it forms the only fuel on the island, for not a single tree occurs to diversify the landscape, and few of the bushes exceed a foot in height. The general tint of ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray

... it grew sae grit, That the ne'er a bit o't he dought to eat— Then was he aware of an auld peat-house, Where a' the night he thought for ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott

... know how to manage sharks. He went out and examined the stakes, and found that block 26 did not contain the oak, but was much farther down in the slough, and that the corner lots that were to have been Katy's wedding portion stretched quite into the peat bog, and further that if the Baptist University should stand on block 27, it would have a baptistery all ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston

... Monsieur Jules this particular portress, holding her knitting in one hand, took a knife and stirred the half-extinguished peat in ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac

... shot o' a gun, hostin' to clear his throat. I dreedit he wud mak' a gutter o't somewey or ither, an' so I keepit my een open. Sandy shut his, an' so did a' the rest. He leaned forrit an' spread oot the muckle clunkers o' hands o' him on the tap o' the peat o' a big roobarb tert. "O Lord," was a' the len'th he'd gotten, when in he gaed, up near to the elbas amon' the het roobarb; an' by a' the skoilin' an' roarin' ever I heard, there never was the like! A gey grace ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond

... turnip at once is to eat the turnip. I think any poetic mind that has loved solidity, the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, the firmness of clay, must have sometimes wished that they were things to eat. If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks; if only white firwood were digestible! We talk rightly of giving stones for bread: but there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles, certain split stones of blue and green, that make me ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... which he had worked the cure was China—Sarsaparilla, as we call it now—brought home from the then newly-discovered banks of the Paraguay and Uruguay, where its beds of tangled vine, they say, tinge the clear waters a dark-brown like that of peat, and convert whole streams into a healthful and pleasant tonic. On the virtues of this China (then supposed to be a root) Vesalius wrote a famous little book, into which he contrived to interweave his opinions on things in general, as good Bishop Berkeley ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... boundary of the city at the end of the 17th century. The streets in the oldest part of Amsterdam are often narrow and irregular, and the sky-line is picturesquely broken by fantastic gables, roofs and towers. The site of the city being originally a peat bog, the foundations of the houses have to be secured by driving long piles (4-20 yds.) into the firm clay below, the palace on the Dam being supported on nearly 14,000 piles. As late as 1822, however, an overladen corn magazine sank into the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia



Words linked to "Peat" :   humate, peat bog, peat moss, vegetable matter, peaty



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