I amused myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a hook at the end, dragged them across.
The materials made use of are driftwood, green willows, birch and poplars; also mud and stones intermixed in such a manner as contributes to the strength of the dam; but there is no particular method observed, except that the work is carried on with a regular sweep, and that all the parts are made of equal strength.
Now he rode beside Ilyin under the birch trees, occasionally plucking leaves from a branch that met his hand, sometimes touching his horse's side with his foot, or, without turning round, handing a pipe he had finished to an hussar riding behind him, with as calm and careless an air as though he were merely out for a ride.
The jars and boxes of birch bark made by Russian peasants are often stamped with very effective patterns.
The coniferous forests of the north contain, besides conifers, the birch (Betula alba, B.
The summits of some of the mountains are too high for trees and above belts of dwarf spruce, balsam and birch they are clothed chiefly with sandworts, diapensia, cassiope, rushes, sedges and lichens.
Making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.
The birch in the loftier alpine tracts and plateaus becomes a shrub (Betula nana, B.
They contain the poplar or aspen (Populus tremuloides), balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera), and paper or canoe birch (Betula papyrifera).
The training of certain bedding plants over the surface of the soil is done by small pegs of birch wood or bracken, by loops of wire or cheap hair-pins, or sometimes by loops of raffia having the ends fixed in the soil by the aid of the dibble.