". . . And when the twigsome trees by the wayside (which, I suppose, never will grow leafy, for they never did) guarded here and there a dusty soldier . . ."
I'm reading The Uncommercial Traveller in the new Oxford University Press edition, and was delighted to come upon this passage on page 62. I get sick of bare branches in the winter, but now I won't mind them so much, because I have a wonderful new word to describe them. I don't know for sure that Dickens coined "twigsome," but I don't remember ever seeing it anywhere else (and my spelling & grammar function doesn't recognize it, not that that means much), so I'm going to guess that he did.
(I also got a good laugh out of this on the same page: "The revolving French light on Cape Grinez was seen regularly bursting out and becoming obscured, as if the head of a gigantic light-keeper in an anxious state of mind were interposed every half-minute, to look how it was burning.")
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