"Thatching" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bunk was all completed before dinner time, except thatching it with balsam boughs, and all hands would help at that after the noon meal. Mr. Allen prepared the meal, and it was a real camp dinner. Could fellows ever have ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... live by the land forget the passage of the years. A year is but a harvest. After the ploughing and sowing and cleaning, the reaping and thatching and threshing, what is there left of the twelvemonth? It has gone like a day. Thus it is that a farmer talks of twenty years since as if it was only last week, and seems unable to grasp the flight of time till it is marked and emphasised by some exceptional occurrence. ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... mow and make hay, while Edward and Jacob went out for venison. After all the hay was made and stacked, Humphrey found out a method of thatching with fern, which Jacob had never thought of; and when that was done, they commenced cutting down fern for fodder. Here again Humphrey would have twice as much as Jacob had ever cut before, because he ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... the Weather set in rainy or cold towards the End of the Campaigns, and the Army was in a fixed Position, his Serene Highness Prince Ferdinand constantly ordered the Army to Hutt; which was done either by thatching their Tents, or building Hurdles, or digging Pitts, and covering and thatching them over. The Officers either built Hutts with Fire Places, or had Chimnies built ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... old rafters with them or sold these. Their walls seem to have been of mud and wattle, or of some unsaleable stuff, and these, no doubt, served for a time for the lay brethren, after a little trimming and thatching. But their church had to be looked to before it could serve for the worship of the conversi. The old inhabitants (near two hundred, Mr. Buckle thinks, rather generously), were still there up to Hugh's time, and if their church was like their houses the ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... which would be a pass if the Downs were high enough. One is not far distant; he is digging flints over the ridge, and, perhaps, at this moment rubbing the earth from a corroded Roman coin which he has found in the pit. Another is thatching, for there are three detached wheat-ricks round a spur of the Down a mile away, where the plain is arable, and there, too, a plough is at work. A shepherd is asleep on his back behind the furze a mile in the other ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... plaited to the bottom, leaving an opening." The answer is in both cases a house, for in the first riddle "the timbers stand, the batons lie down, the grass is folded under the cords"; in the second, the process of thatching is described in general terms. In the story of Pikoiakaala, on the other hand; the hero puzzles his contestants by riddling with the word "rat." This word riddling is further illustrated in the story of the debater, Kaipalaoa, already quoted. ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... winter I worked by the cottage; on the dry days thatching and building, keeping a little horse to take me over the peat road ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... of the roots, and the remainder of the afternoon they devoted to strengthening their house. They did this with huge slabs of bark lying everywhere on the ground, fallen in former seasons. Some they put on the roof, thatching in between with dry grass and leaves, and others they fastened ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Was that cry true? What work now performed by humble men was less monotonous than work on the land? What work was even a tenth part so varied? Never quite the same from day to day: Now weeding, now hay, now roots, now hedging; now corn, with sowing, reaping, threshing, stacking, thatching; the care of beasts, and their companionship; sheep-dipping, shearing, wood-gathering, apple-picking, cider-making; fashioning and tarring gates; whitewashing walls; carting; trenching—never, never two days quite the same! Monotony! The poor devils in factories, in shops, in mines; poor devils driving ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... girl, "I'll spill the milk," so she dropt the pitcher and spilt the milk. Now there was an old man just by on the top of a ladder thatching a rick, and when he saw the little girl spill the milk, he said: "Little girl, what do you mean by spilling the milk, your little brothers and sisters must go without their supper." Then said the little girl: "Titty's dead, and Tatty ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... spade to look after you, glad of any excuse to be idle. The houses, however, are not all such as I have described—far from it. You see here and there, between the more humble cabins, a stout, comfortable-looking farm-house, with ornamental thatching and well-glazed windows; adjoining to which is a hay-yard, with five or six large stacks of corn, well-trimmed and roped, and a fine, yellow, weather-beaten old hay-rick, half cut—not taking into account twelve or thirteen circular strata of stones, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... lands.—These lands are set apart to provide a supply of firewood, thatching grass, &c., and are the property of the village. The inhabitants of other villages are not allowed to enjoy the produce of such lands. Such lands can be cultivated by ryots of the village, but the latter possess only occupancy rights, and ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... do still. They came across the roasted body of a dog in the forest and ate it without knowing what animal it was. In the stomach, however, some cooked rice was found, and hence it was known as a dog and they were branded as dog-eaters. As a penalty the Raja imposed on them the duty of thatching a hut for him at the Dasahra festival, which their descendants still perform. The other Dhakars refuse to marry or eat with them, and it is clear from the custom of thatching the Raja's hut that they are a primitive and jungly branch ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... unheeded with Ship in the sweet grass, and clamoured from time to time for milk from a glass bottle; Will stood up aloft and received the hay from Chown's fork, while Mrs. Blanchard, busy with the "skeiner" stuck into the side of the rick, wound stout ropes of rushes for the thatching. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... farm is the kind of vegetation for which the land is best adapted to insure, in a run of seasons, fairly profitable results. If the soil is unfit for cereals, then it is sheer folly to sow any more corn than may be needful for convenience, as, for example, to supply straw for thatching and litter, and oats for horses, to save cost of carriage, &c. On large farms that are far removed from markets it is often necessary to risk a few crops that the land is ill fitted for, in order to satisfy the requirements of the homestead, and to save the outlay of money and the ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune, and talked of "the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown." Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country. Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate others. They see through Claud-Lorraines. And how dare any one, if he could, pluck away the coulisses, stage effects, and ceremonies, by which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... imagine a large umbrella with the handle broken off even with the ribs when closed up, and without any cloth,—nothing but the ribs left. Now open it, and place it on the ground before you, and you have a fair idea of the hut up to the present time. A reed thatching is laid over the frame, and secured firmly by parallel lashings about fifteen inches apart. The door is made last by cutting a hole in the side of the hut facing toward the centre of the contemplated circle of huts.[71] The door ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... posts hissed in the fine rain, and around it crouched several urchins busy making oatmeal cakes in the embers. On one side a respectable lean-to had been constructed by nailing a plank to two fir-trees, running sloping poles thence to the ground, and thatching the whole with spruce branches and heather. On the other side two small dilapidated home-made tents were pitched. Dougal motioned his companion into the lean-to, where they had some privacy from the rest ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... abruptly and snatched off his cap, revealing a crop of crinkly dark-brown hair thatching a lean sunburnt face, out of which gleamed a pair of eyes as vividly blue ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... uses to which the Reed was applied, the thatching of houses (No. 3), and the making of Pan or Shepherd's pipes (No. 6). Nor has he anything to say of its beauty, yet the Reeds of our river sides (Arundo phragmites) are most graceful plants, especially when they have their ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... Rectory grounds the thatched roofs of the village bobbed into view, some gleaming golden in all the pride of recent thatching, others with their crown of straw mellowed by sun and rain to a deeper colour and patched with clumps of moss, vividly green ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... the cable-house, native labourers, in picturesque Oriental costume, were busy thatching its roof or painting it blue, while some were screwing its parts together; for the house, with a view to future telegraphic requirements, was built so as to come to pieces for shipment to still more distant quarters of ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... whispered she to Laura, looking up at him, where he was mounted on the roof, thatching it with reed, the sunshine full on his glowing ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is not uncommon in the Stura valley. In the Val Mastallone, and more especially between Civiasco (above Varallo) and Orta, thatch is more common still, and the thatching is often very beautifully done. Thatch in a stone country is an indication of German, or at any rate Cisalpine descent, and is among the many proofs of the extent to which German races crossed the Alps and spread far down over Piedmont and Lombardy. ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... one forgets to carry his hatchet with him, any more than a Spanish don his toledo, some cut down wood for firing for the night; others branches of trees, which are stuck in the ground with the crotch uppermost, over which a thatching is laid of fir-boughs, with a fence of the same on the weather-side only. The rest is all open, and serves for door and window. A great fire is then lighted, and then every body's lodged. They sup on the ground, or upon some ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... see-saw, Jack thatching the ridge, Which is the way to Banbury-bridge? One foot up and t'other foot down, And that's the way ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson
... When you see me contriving in my little gardens, Christy Mahon, you'll swear the Lord God formed me to be living lone, and that there isn't my match in Mayo for thatching, or ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... country barns. The inside was both strong and regularly made of supporters at the sides, alternately large and small, well fastened by means of withes, and painted red and black. The ridge pole was strong; and the large bull-rushes, which composed the inner part of the thatching, were laid with great exactness parallel to each other. At one end was a small square hole, which served as a door to creep in at; and near, another much smaller, seemingly for letting out the smoke, as no other vent for it could be seen. This, however, ought to be considered ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr |
