A person in extreme poverty is often described as being "as bare as the birch at Yule Even," and an ill-natured or evil-disposed person who tries to do harm, but cannot, is commonly said to: "Jump at it like a cock at a gooseberry.

The sun shone on its lichened front, where a creeper was going red; in the background birches with silver stems and leaves like showers of gold gleamed against somber firs.

She was vividly effective against the background of deep green spruces and white birch in her bright pink dress and large drooping black hat.

Among green New England hills stood an ancient house, many-gabled, mossy-roofed, and quaintly built, but picturesque and pleasant to the eye; for a brook ran babbling through the orchard that encompassed it about, a garden-plot stretched upward to the whispering birches on the slope, and patriarchal elms stood sentinel upon the lawn, as they had stood almost a century ago, when the Revolution rolled that way and found them young.

* The brooklet branching from the silver Trent, The whispering birch by every zephyr bent, The woody island and the naked mead, The lowly hut half hid in groves of reed, The rural wicket and the rural stile, And frequent interspersed the woodman's pile.

CHAPTER V. "The fragrant birch above him hung Her tassels in the sky, And many a vernal blossom sprung, And nodded careless by.

"The baccy, sir; Harvey Birch, he got home, and he bring you a little good baccy." To Sarah Wharton this intelligence gave unexpected pleasure, and, rising from her seat, she bade the black show Birch into the apartment, adding suddenly, with an apologising look, "If Mr. Harper will excuse the presence of a pedlar.

No, he had never seen this glen nor the mountains round about; and never had he noticed such puny and shrunken birches as those under which he now lay.

I got up into the crotch of a great birch near one of 'em, and sat there with my rifle, waitin' for something to turn up.

"Birch of the British Museum is quite right in declaring that the seal, portable and abounding in detail, not difficult of acquisition nor hard to read if we set about deciphering the story it has to tell, takes us back as we look upon it to the very time of its making, and sets us, as it were, face to face with the actual owners of the relic.

"Then I'll be there, Master Julius, to the third seat from the front; but it ain't becoming for a woman of my age, seventy-nine come Christmas, to sit under a slip of a lad as hasn't got the taste of the birch off his back."

Even in the villages, where the solemn and immemorial repose of giant chestnuts aped security, the tossing of a silver birch against their mass, impatient in the littlest wind, brought warning.

Only a faint smoke from the smouldering logs curled up among the branches of the yellow birch over camp.

Cancut navigated Birch through some white water below the dam, and Birch went curveting proudly and gracefully along, evidently feeling his oats.

Concerning that picture and my courtship, the most serious epoch of my life, there is a leetle bit of a story which I would like to be a beacon to others; and if your honour is still a bachelor, and not yet stranded on the shoals of matrimony, it may be Werbum Sapienti, as O'Toole, the Irish schoolmaster, used to observe, when in the act of applying the birch to the booby's back.

He thrust the birch under the old Indian's eyes.

After this bill has been read a third time, whosoever is made, said, or portrayed to be god, I vote he be delivered over to the bogies, and at the next public show be flogged with a birch amongst the new gladiators."

There was nice work with interarching birches among the other trees and in the meeting of the woods and the field, but the light on the leaves was the main act.

Then six sachems rose, casting off their black-and-white blankets, and each in turn planted branches of yellow willow, green willow, red osier, samphire, witch-hazel, spice-bush, and silver birch along the edge of the silent throng of savages.

Only when her pupils quitted the establishment, or when they were about to be married, and once, when poor Miss Birch died of the scarlet fever, was Miss Pinkerton known to write personally to the parents of her pupils; and it was Jemima's opinion that if anything could have consoled Mrs. Birch for her daughter's loss, it would have been that pious and eloquent composition in which Miss Pinkerton announced the event.

We dismounted our birch from the truck, and laid its lightness upon the stream.