The horse chestnut, buckeye and hickory trees have palmate leaves. That is, the broad oval leaflets are all set around the tip of a common leaf stem, spreading in a circle, like the ribs of a palm leaf fan.

It will be sadly missed by enthusiasts who have found Ireland's railways among the most characterful in Europe.

He wondered if any of the boys had a grandmother like his, a woman with knowledge and secrets and a gentle habit of helping you up your game.

When the Duke of Buckingham laid, as his heaviest anathema, upon the cur that snapped at his ducal fingers the wish that the brute “was married and settled in the country,” his grace evidently knew little of quarantine, or I ween the sentence of a banishment to Chowbent, or the depths of the New Forest, for the term of a life, would no doubt have been exchanged for a month’s residence in the lazzaretto of Alexandria, amid the flies and other Egyptian plagues, and perhaps during a Khamseen wind, bearing upon its hot breath clouds of sand, so subtle as to penetrate even the recesses of a watch, to say nothing of the parched and excoriated throat and blood-shot eyes of the traveller but lately landed from Beirout or Jaffa, and stricken, perhaps, with the fatal Syrian fever.[…]Among the many lazzarettos of the Mediterranean, that of Malta is, with regard to comfort, interior economy, and the civility of its officials, immeasurably superior to any other; and as a slight peep into the menâge of such an establishment may be a novelty to those who “live at home at ease,” I shall place my reader’s eye at the little hole in the showman’s box, and let him judge for himself.