"Wattle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the upland plain. It rose like a huge boulder. Its summit was crowned by the covered grave of some old Kaffir chief—a rude cairn of big stones under a thatched awning. At the foot of this jagged and cleft rock the farmhouse nestled—four square walls of wattle-and-daub, sheltered by its mass from the sweeping winds of the South African plateau. A stream brought water from a spring close by: in front of the house—rare sight in that thirsty land—spread a garden of flowers. It was an oasis in the desert. But ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... Sunday, so we had also to rest, and we celebrated by staying in bed late and going for a walk in the afternoon with an Englishman who was en route for Sofia. We came to a little village where every house was surrounded by high walls made of wattle. The women soon crowded round, imagining Mr. B—— a doctor. Jo pretended to translate, and gave advice for a girl with consumption, and an old woman whose hand was stiff from typhus, and we had to give the money for the latter's unguent. ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... snug as Grimbeard (for such was the chieftain's appropriate name) had boasted, and tolerably wind proof, although in such a storm snow will always force its way through the tiniest crevices. It was built of wattle work, cunningly daubed with clay, even as the early ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... in our company, so I gave him a brace of light-duty men as apprentices and they built a little hut of wattle and daub. It had a nice rural appearance and was warm, but it leaked in wet weather, and the more I thought of Chaucer lying dry under his felt roofs the worse I felt about it. So I had a chat with my sergeant at the wharf, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... against the sky; some native trees, left growing among the cultivated shrubs, stretched silver-white arms up to the moon and gave the little hurrying figure a ghostly kind of feeling. Out of the gate and into the first paddock, where the rose scent did not come at all, and only a pungent smell of wattle was in the thin, hushed air. More gum trees, and more white, ghostly arms; then a sharp movement near the fence, a thick, sepulchral whisper, and ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... to us that we had crossed the boundary from Greece, and were now in Serbia. The lake is five miles wide and landlocked, and the road kept close to the water's edge. It led us through little mud villages with houses of mud and wattle, and some of stone with tiled roofs and rafters, and beams showing through the cement. The second story projected like those of the Spanish blockhouses in Cuba, and the log forts from which, in the days when there were ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... arts is very interesting. It undoubtedly began in an unconscious imitation of local architecture. For instance, in the British Isles, the building in earliest times was with wattles: practically walls of basket work. William of Malmsbury says that Glastonbury was "a mean structure of wattle work," while of the Monastery of Iona, it is related that in 563, Columba "sent forth his monks to gather twigs to build his hospice." British baskets were famous even so far away as Rome. So the first idea of ornament was to copy the interlacing forms. The same idea was worked ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... might shake a crumb from his waistcoat, the eagle adjusted his searchlights and sat motionless. In five minutes a slight jerk of the neck indicated a successful observation, and he soared out, wheeled like a flash, and half turning on his side, hustled down in the foliage of a tall wattle and back again to his perch. Another snake was crumpled up in his talons, and he devoured it in writhing, twirling pieces. The telescope gave unique advantage during this entertainment, one of the tragedies of Nature, or rather the lawful execution of a designing and crafty criminal. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... of mother by this time, lying down like a child on the old native dogskin rug that we tanned ourselves with wattle bark. She had her hand on his hair—thick and curly it was always from a child. She didn't say anything, but I could see the tears drip, drip down from her face; her head was on Jim's shoulder, and by and by he put his arms round ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... war-hosts' flower, he sped 60 To wait upon him on the way with that last help of all, And be between his father's tears: forsooth a solace small Of mighty grief; a debt no less to that sad father due. But others speed a pliant bier weaving a wattle through, Of limber twigs of berry-bush and boughs of oaken-tree, And shadow o'er the piled-up bed with leafy canopy. So there upon the wild-wood couch adown the youth is laid; E'en as a blossom dropped to earth from fingers of a maid— The gilliflower's bloom maybe, or jacinth's hanging ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... Dr. Chapuis, 'Le Pigeon Voyageur Belge,' 1865, p. 87. Boitard et Corbie, 'Les Pigeons de Voliere,' etc., 1824, p. 173. See, also, on similar differences in certain breeds at Modena, 'Le variazioni dei Colombi domestici,' del Paolo Bonizzi, 1873.) The wattle in the English Carrier pigeon, and the crop in the Pouter, are more highly developed in the male than in the female; and although these characters have been gained through long-continued selection by man, the slight differences between the sexes ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... for that cruel and irrefutable place where the throat will wattle, was almost interchangeable with eighteen's. Indeed, Bon Ton grandmothers with backs and French heels that were twenty years younger than their throats and bunions, vied ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... turned him loose for a graze, and, making such a dinner as was possible under the circumstances, I lit a pipe and lay down on the long grass, under the flowering wattle-trees, smoking and watching the manoeuvres of a little tortoise, who was disporting himself in the waterhole before me. Getting tired of that I lay back on the grass, and watched the green leaves waving and shivering against the clear blue sky, given up entirely ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... little bay with its fringe of palms and its cluster of wattle huts opened up to view, Mainwaring discovered a vessel lying at anchor in the little harbor. It was a large and well-rigged schooner of two hundred and fifty or three hundred tons burden. As the Yankee rounded to under the stern of the stranger and dropped ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... seemed nothing of interest about the old cabin. The thatch had half blown off; the adobe-plastered stone fireplace and chimney had tumbled down, and sand had drifted in past the broken wattle door. But when Lennon went in to take advantage of the patch of shade that was offered, he was shocked to find the skeleton of a woman huddled in ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... only a small-sized boy, no other than the heir of the "Cod-fish," a brighter rose flew into Mary's cheeks than the master-cock of all the yard could show upon comb or wattle. Contemptuous of twopence, which Mary felt for, the boy disappeared like a rabbit; and the fowls came and helped themselves to the tail-wheat, while their mistress was thinking of her letter. It was short and sweet—at least in promise—being no more than these few words: "Darling, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... walls, and with that filthy crop Death sprang also from the water-soaked earth. Men died, and women and children, the baron of the castle, the franklin on the farm, the monk in the abbey and the villein in his wattle-and-daub cottage. All breathed the same polluted reek and all died the same death of corruption. Of those who were stricken none recovered, and the illness was ever the same—gross boils, raving, and the black blotches which gave its name ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... peculiar disposition of the walls whisks the rude wattle sails around in the most lively manner. Forty of these mills are in operation at Tabbas; and to see them all in full swing, making a loud "sweeshing" noise as they revolve, is a most extraordinary sight. Aside from Tabbas, these ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... of Italy and France, and portraits of Venezelos were to be seen everywhere, adorned with the pale blue and white national colours of Greece. Probably Mr Lloyd George's fame enjoys even wider bounds. I have seen his likeness enshrined in wattle huts at Omdurman and ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... Hatiheu side begin high up; higher yet, the more melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes. When a native habitation is deserted, the superstructure—pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable tropical timber—speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the wind. Only the stones of the terrace endure; nor can any ruin, cairn, or standing stone, or vitrified fort present a more stern ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... throw out these bridges, and after this fashion; If the two banks of the river are stony, they raise upon them large walls of stone, and then they place four [ropes of] pliable reeds two palms or a little less in thickness, and between them, after the fashion of wattle-work, they weave green osiers two fingers thick and well intertwined, in such a way that some are not left more slack than others, and all are well tied. And upon these they place branches crosswise in such a way that the water is not seen, and in this way they make ...
— An Account of the Conquest of Peru • Pedro Sancho
... as far as the eyes, is smooth, but the rest of the head appears full, the feathers being longer: from the gape of the bill a broad streak of silvery white passes under the eye, and beneath this, on each side of the throat, hangs a pendulous wattle, about half an inch in length, and of an orange colour: the wings, when closed, reach about one third on the tail, which is about half the length of the bird, and cuneiform in shape: both the quills and tail feathers are of a darker brown than the rest of bird, ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... of cryptomeria contrast with the grey monotone of British winters, and, alighting at a farm road too rough for a carriage, we passed through fields and hedgerows to an erection which looks too insignificant for such solemn use. Don't expect any ghastly details. A longish building of "wattle and dab," much like the northern farmhouses, a high roof, and chimneys resembling those of the "oast houses" in Kent, combine with the rural surroundings to suggest "farm buildings" rather than the "funeral pyre," and all that is horrible ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... of the situation was the dilapidated state of the house. It was built of wattle and mud, had a mat roof and a whitewashed interior. She did not, however, mind its condition; she was so absorbed in the work that personal comfort was a matter of indifference to her. Her household consisted of a young woman and several boys and girls, ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... riverine plain, stretches the old-time village with its roofs of palm. In the village dwell several hundred souls, almost entirely the officers and soldiers and their families. There is one long street. The one-story, daub-and-wattle houses have low eaves and steep sloping roofs of palm-leaves or of split palm-trunks. Under one or two old but small trees there are rude benches; and for a part of the length of the street there ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... the preparation of afternoon tea—a building of which the extreme heat made it almost possible to boil the kettle without lighting a fire! Naturally, no one used it for purposes of watching the play, but there was a row of wattle trees along one side of the ground, and seats placed in their shade made an excellent natural grand stand. Here the non-players betook themselves, while the doctor and the two boys went off to the spot where already most of the other players were gathered—a ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... that we came to in the next few days, was inclosed in a zareba, or wall of tangled thorn branches that encircled the village. Within the wall were a number of low houses, six feet high, built of mud and wattle; and within the houses, spilling over plentifully, were large numbers of children and babies and a few women. A gateway of tangled boughs led into the inclosure, while in one part of the village were the curious woven wickerwork granaries in which the community store of kaffir corn ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... I prepared a book of charades and double acrostics, for the printing and binding of which Mrs. Watts paid. It was entitled "Silver Wattle," and the proceeds from the sale of this little book went to help the funds of the home. For a second volume issued for the same purpose Mrs. Strawbridge wrote some poems, Mrs. H. M. Davidson a ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... him, that he but looked confusedly on her, as if he scarce heard her; and they went on together without more words, till he said: Here are we at the cot, and I will show thee thy chamber. So he led her to a little thatched bower, built with walls of wattle-work daubed with clay, which stood without the remnant of the cot: it was clean and dry, for the roof was weather-tight; but there was nought in it at all save a heap of bracken ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... know it so dashed well, what, what?" said Gussie. And, reminded apparently by the word "what" of the word "Wattle," he repeated the latter some sixteen ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... glorious hill-country spring—was down on Kuryong. All the flats along Kiley's River were knee-deep in green grass. The wattle-trees were out in golden bloom, and the snow-water from the mountains set the river running white with foam, fighting its way over bars of granite into big pools where the platypus dived, and the wild ducks—busy with the cares of nesting—just ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... interdigitation; decussation^, transversion^; convolution &c 248; level crossing. reticulation, network; inosculation^, anastomosis, intertexture^, mortise. net, plexus, web, mesh, twill, skein, sleeve, felt, lace; wicker; mat, matting; plait, trellis, wattle, lattice, grating, grille, gridiron, tracery, fretwork, filigree, reticle; tissue, netting, mokes^; rivulation^. cross, chain, wreath, braid, cat's cradle, knot; entangle &c (disorder) 59. [woven fabrics] cloth, linen, muslin, cambric &c V. cross, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... ever surprised me more than the many cases of reversion from crossing. Do you not think it a very curious subject? I have not heard from Mr. Bartlett about the Gallinaceae, and I daresay I never shall. He told me about the Tragopan, and he is positive that the blue wattle becomes gorged with blood, and ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... halls and ways, involved the disappearance of the household; that the typical Victorian "Home," the little brick cell containing kitchen and scullery, living rooms and bedrooms, had, save for the ruins that diversified the countryside, vanished as surely as the wattle hut. But now he saw what had indeed been manifest from the first, that London, regarded as a living place, was no longer an aggregation of houses but a prodigious hotel, an hotel with a thousand classes of accommodation, thousands of dining halls, ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... consisted but of a single room, with a hole in the roof by which the smoke of the fire in the centre made its way out. The doorway was generally closed by a wattle secured by a bar. When this was closed light only found its way into the room through the chinks of the wattle and the hole in the roof. In winter, for extra warmth, a skin was hung before the door. Beyond piles of hides, which served as seats by day and beds ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... brother was not fit to live with a respectable man; and taking his lasts, his awls, and his golden leaf, he left the wattle hut, and went to ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... many times to be spoken to sharply by the captain. Another week was spent in fortifying the position. Young trees were cut down and stuck in the earth two feet apart in the intervals between the trees. A wattle-work of the tough thorny creepers was interwoven across the little promontory, eight feet high. This was painful work, for, however careful they were, they frequently tore ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... absolutely destitute of generic names, its extreme poverty in such is unquestionable. Similarly with the Tasmanians. Dr. Milligan says they "had acquired very limited powers of abstraction or generalization. They possessed no words representing abstract ideas; for each variety of gum-tree and wattle-tree, etc., etc., they had a name, but they had no equivalent for the expression, 'a tree;' neither could they express abstract qualities, such as hard, soft, warm, cold, long, short, round, etc.; for 'hard,' they would say 'like a stone;' for 'tall,' they ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... may be well not to be misled by words. We shall realise them better at the present day by looking to Madagascar or the Marquesas Islands than among the states of Europe. The palace was a shanty of log or wattle, protected, perhaps, by a rampart of earth or uncemented stones, and the king had a stone chair with a few mystic decorations scratched on it, which served for his throne on state occasions. The prospect of acquiring a gold ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... night-bird, or the "plopping" of the fishes that Andrew could never catch as they fell back after rising to snatch some unwary insect. The gentle breezes sighing down the gullies, dim and lone in the eerie moonlight, were laden with the scent of wattle and other native flowers, and otherwise fresh and sweet with the inexpressible purity of summer night on the great unbroken bush-land. In such dryad-like resorts we were tempted to dawdle so long that the big hours ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... castle and gateway, stands on the edge of a still older forest a few miles North of Doullens, and the majority of the inhabitants, under the guidance of a very energetic Mayor, did all they could to make us comfortable. Work was not too hard, and our chief labour was making wattle revetments in the forest—a good task for a hot day—and practising musketry on a home-made rifle range outside the village. The mounted officers were particularly fortunate, for the forest was full of tracks and rides, and each morning soon after ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... was covered with dense wattle thickets, the natives took advantage of the ground, and having completely surrounded the party, commenced first to threaten to throw their spears, then to throw stones, and finally one man caught hold of Mr. Bland by the arm, threatening to strike him with a dowak; another ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... with the nurse and Gertie, had agreed to unite their powers that day in a resolute effort to overtake the household repairs. They were in a cottage now, of the style familiarly known as "wattle and dab," which was rather picturesque than permanent, and suggestive of simplicity. They sat on rude chairs, made by Scholtz, round a rough table by the same artist. Mrs Brook was busy with the rends in a blue pilot-cloth jacket, a dilapidated ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... of other things in the future than of tilling the little rood of earth, and living under the wattle roof, and being called Baas by neighbors a little poorer or a little less poor than himself. The cathedral spire, where it rose beyond the fields in the ruddy evening skies or in the dim, gray, misty mornings, ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... sez she, 'I could be back again Beneath the wattle an' that great blue sky. It's like a breath uv 'ome to meet you men. You've done reel well,' she sez. 'Don't you be shy. When yer in Blighty once again,' sez ...
— Digger Smith • C. J. Dennis
... classes, however, appear such as we should be sorry to call even demi-semi-American. Fancy discovering in California a young lady in book-muslin, the daughter of cultivated parents, who remarks under excitement,—"Well, if this don't bang wattle-gum, I wish I may be buried in the bush in a sheet of bark! Why, I feel all over centipedes and copper-lizards!" Still, there may be some confusion in the dialects used in the book, as there is hardly a person in it, patrician or plebeian, on either side of the equator, who does not address ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... movements, form a circus by placing wattle hurdles on end, leaning outward against the shores or staves; take the stirrups off, tie a string over the flaps and the horse's head loosely to this—a man with a driving whip in the middle. Circus riding, I believe, originated in England, in the time of our ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... typical enough to have been an illustration in a sociography textbook—fields in a belt for a couple of hundred yards around it, dome-thatched mud-and-wattle huts inside a pole stockade with log storehouses built against it, their flat roofs high enough to provide platforms for defending archers, the open oval gathering-place in the middle. There was a big hut ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... time and gains in space, the greater and the more general is the disaster that it may cause; for it is made to catch fire, like torches. It seems better, therefore, to spend on walls of burnt brick, and be at expense, than to save with "wattle and daub," and be in danger. And, in the stucco covering, too, it makes cracks from the inside by the arrangement of its studs and girts. For these swell with moisture as they are daubed, and then contract as they ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... once more, whilst every drop of blood in my veins seemed to run warm and strong, like the red wine they grow on the hillside in my own sunny land; for the story concerned men whom I knew well, men who were bred with the scent of the wattle in the first breath they drew, men who grew from childhood to manhood where the silver sentinel stars form the cross in the rich blue midnight sky. My countrymen—Australians—men with whom I had hunted for silver in the desolate ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... "It's wattle," Prudence answered. "It's in the fields over there. You can smell it for miles sometimes, in the country; it's a nice smell. Let's go and look at Papa's parcels. He went to see Mrs. Macfarline at her toyshop to-day, and when he goes there he always ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... from the acacia of Australia. It is a favorite in England. The varieties are as follows: Gold wattle, silver wattle (blackwood, lightwood), black wattle, green wattle. The gold wattle is a native of Victoria. Its cultivation was tried as an experiment in Algeria and met with some success. The trees are always grown from seeds. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... a man been seen in their tribe. So there was great excitement and a mighty chattering went through the round wattle of mud huts ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... dips into a little hollow. What is that sudden blaze of glowing yellow? It is a little clump of wattle-trees, about as big as apple-trees, covered all over with soft flossy blossom of the brightest yellow. I like to imagine that the wattle is just prisoned sunlight; that one early morning the sun's ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... not bound, or their movements hampered in any way, therefore the moment that the wattle door of their prison was slammed upon them and barred on the outside, the pair joyously shook hands ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... wattle-blooms are drooping in the sombre she-oak glade, And the breathless land is lying in a swoon, He leaves his work a moment, leaning lightly on his spade, And he hears the bell-bird chime the Austral noon. The parrakeets are silent in the gum-tree ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... Auzal by the Somal, is a town about the size of Suez, built for 3000 or 4000 inhabitants, and containing a dozen large whitewashed stone houses, and upwards of 200 Arish or thatched huts, each surrounded by a fence of wattle and matting. The situation is a low and level spit of sand, which high tides make almost an island. There is no Harbour: a vessel of 250 tons cannot approach within a mile of the landing-place; the open roadstead ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... with olden rhymes beside this moaning sea, But many and many a day has gone since I was dear to thee! I know my passion fades away, and therefore oft regret That some who love indeed can part and in the years forget. Ah! through the twilights when we stood the wattle trees between, We did not dream of such a ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... herself in heaps of filthy hovels, wattle and daub and dingy thatch; in "umbrella-trees" (ficus), acacias and calabashes, palms and cotton-trees, all wilted, stunted, and dusty as at Cairo. We are in the latitude of East African Kilwa and of Brazilian Pernambuco; but this is a lee-land, and the suffering is from drought. Yet, ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the southwest coast and made their way to Glastonbury, then Avalon (and so named in allusion to its apple orchards), and by means of preaching and many miraculous deeds persuaded the people to adopt Christianity. Gaining the good will of King Arviragus, they built a church of wattle and twigs on the ground given to them by their royal patron. The Benedictine, with its later developments in Norman times of Augustine and Cluniac orders, was the first religious order introduced into this country. It was instituted in Italy early in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... comparison; and according to this standard, the beak in one {140} Carrier was nearly half an inch longer than in the rock-pigeon. The upper mandible is often slightly arched. The tongue is very long. The development of the carunculated skin or wattle round the eyes, over the nostrils, and on the lower mandible, is prodigious. The eyelids, measured longitudinally, were in some specimens exactly twice as long as in the rock-pigeon. The external orifice or ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... Moses' brother. On another mountain farther off stood a great crusader castle all in ruins; and to left and right were endless remains of civilization that throve when the British were living in mud-and-wattle huts. The dry climate had preserved it all; but there was water enough; it only needed the labor of a thousand men to remake a ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... The machine was horsed in the usual manner—that is, with three mules and two nags—but how different from usual was the way-bill! With the exception of the driver and his aide, a youngster who jumped down from the box every hundred yards, and belaboured the beasts with a wattle, there was not one passenger fit to carry arms. We had a load of women and babies, a decrepit patriarch, and two boys under the fighting age. We halted at Renteria, harnessed a fresh team to our conveniency, and sent on a messenger to ascertain if the Carlists ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... And good and gay is their raiment, and their spears are sharp and sheen, And they crown themselves with the oak-leaves, and sit, both most and least, And there on the forest venison and the ancient wine they feast; Then they wattle the twigs of the thicket to bear their spoil away, And the toughness of the beech-boughs with the woodbine overlay: With the voice of their merry labour the hall of the oakwood rings, For fair they are and joyous as the first ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... eight miles again made the river. Having crossed the river, we travelled over the richest land I had ever seen in my life; marsh mallows with leaves as large as those of the cabbage tribe, and as high as my head. We recrossed at a native ford, and we observed on a wattle tree, which they had been stripping of the bark, scratches or marks of figures, representing blacks in the act of fighting. These figures I copied as near ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... pause to tell how some clan of the wild Irish had descended from an incomparable King of the Blue Belt, or Warrior of the Ozier Wattle, or to tell with many curses how all the strangers and most of the Queen's Irish were the seed of the misshapen and horned People from Under the Sea or of the servile and creeping Ferbolg; but Costello cared only ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... sma', droop-rumpl't, hunter cattle Might aiblins waur't thee for a brattle; But sax Scotch mile, thou try't their mettle, An' gar't them whaizle: Nae whip nor spur, but just a wattle O' ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... bounded on either side by sandstone ranges, from which numerous small creeks flow east and west until they are lost in small flats and clay pans amongst the sand hills. Their course is marked by an acacia, which is somewhat analogous in its general characteristics to the common wattle; a few are favoured with some box trees, but we only found water in one. The whole country has a most deplorably arid appearance; birds are very scarce, native dogs numerous. The paths of the blacks on the ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... red loam, and covered with stupendous Angopheras, to extensive flats of the finest description, studded with magnificent blue and water gums, and occasional stripes of Accacias and papilionaceous shrubs, resembling the green wattle of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... great gate was furnished, proof against assault. A bastion was erected in one corner, mounting the swivel piece so that it might be fired above the top of the wall. A little more work of chinking the walls, of flooring the cabins, of making chimneys of wattle and clay—and presto, before the winter had well settled down, the white explorers were housed and fortified and ready ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... quickness of their eye, and the agility of their limbs. A shooting party approached a native camp near the Clyde, and found they had just abandoned their half-cooked opossums and their spears: excepting a small group of wattle bushes, at the distance of ten yards, the ground was free of all but the lofty trees: the travellers immediately scoured this thicket, but on turning round they, in great astonishment, discovered that opossums and spears ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... to pitch to the separator, grain bags to be filled and hauled to the straw-pile granary, while between times we drove wagon-loads of chaff and straw bouncing behind the bronco teams to complete that altogether western structure. Its erection is simple. You drive stout birch poles into the sod, wattle them with willow branches, and lash on whatever comes handiest for rafters; then pile the straw all over it several fathoms thick, and leave the wind and snow to do the rest. When it has settled into shape and solidity it is both frost and ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss |
