pollard

First: In the year the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket, was cruising in the Pacific Ocean.

Just before the window was a row of pollard trees, looking black on one side and with a silvery light on the other.

Next day he moved into a pollard willow near the lake, frightening the wild ducks and the water rats.

Nothing was to be seen save flat meadows, cows feeding unconcernedly for the most part, and silvery pollard willows motionless in the warm sunlight.

Pollard (in Chaucer's English, suitable only for grown-up readers).

Pollard," said he, "my book, The Biography of a Dead Cow , is published anonymously, but you can hardly be ignorant of its authorship.

When I came to the stile, I stopped a minute, looked round and listened, with an idea that a horse's hoofs might ring on the causeway again, and that a rider in a cloak, and a Gytrash-like Newfoundland dog, might be again apparent: I saw only the hedge and a pollard willow before me, rising up still and straight to meet the moonbeams; I heard only the faintest waft of wind roaming fitful among the trees round Thornfield, a mile distant; and when I glanced down in the direction of the murmur, my eye, traversing the hall-front, caught a light kindling in a window: it reminded me that I was late, and I hurried on.

Green, reedy swamps; fields fertile but flat, cultivated in patches that made them look like magnified kitchen-gardens; belts of cut trees, formal as pollard willows, skirting the horizon; narrow canals, gliding slow by the road-side; painted Flemish farmhouses; some very dirty hovels; a gray, dead sky; wet road, wet fields, wet house-tops: not a beautiful, scarcely a picturesque object met my eye along the whole route; yet to me, all was beautiful, all was more than picturesque.

On his 'days out,' those flecks of light in his flat vista of pollard old men,' it was at once Mrs Plornish's delight and sorrow, when he was strong with meat, and had taken his full halfpenny-worth of porter, to say, 'Sing us a song, Father.' Then he would give them Chloe, and if he were in pretty good spirits, Phyllis also--Strephon he had hardly been up to since he went into retirement--and then would Mrs Plornish declare she did believe there never was such a singer as Father, and wipe her eyes.

"Then why oughtn't the elms in the churchyard to be pollarded?"

I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore among the alder-trees and pollards, a mile or more from the church.

"I do not often walk this way now," said Emma, as they proceeded, "but then there will be an inducement, and I shall gradually get intimately acquainted with all the hedges, gates, pools and pollards of this part of Highbury."