"Freshet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... He has been disgusted with me before, but he never had it in for me so serious as he has now. I guess the whole show would breathe easier if I should fall off the train some dark night, when it was stormy, and we were crossing a high bridge over a stream that was out of its banks on account of a freshet. ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... tone and sense of that vivid and animated atmosphere which Hugh always created about him. His arrival upon any scene was never in the smallest degree uproarious, and still less was it in the least mild or serene; yet he came into a settled circle like a freshet of tumbling water into a ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and forest, looked like a temporary encampment; passed under the Pacific Railroad; and then for twelve miles followed the windings of the Truckee River, a clear, rushing, mountain stream, in which immense pine logs had gone aground not to be floated off till the next freshet, a loud-tongued, rollicking stream of ice-cold water, on whose banks no ferns or trailers hang, and which leaves no greenness along its ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... Western spring freshet. The Ohio was on a rampage—a turbulent, coffee-colored stream, it had risen far beyond its usual boundaries, washed out the familiar land-marks, and, still insolent and greedy, was licking the banks, as if preparatory to swallowing up the whole country. Trees torn up ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... the formation may be seen in their deeply-cleft banks, broad, light- coloured bands of pumice, with a few inches of rich, black, vegetable soil above, and several feet of black sea-sand below. During a freshet which occurred the first night I was at Shiraoi, a single stream covered a piece of land with pumice to the depth of nine inches, being the wash from the hills of the interior, in a course ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... ground here is very shaky, and the swamp beneath the shores of the trees is softer than porridge. A long time ago, during a heavy spring freshet, the river became dammed about a quarter of a mile from the lake, and the whole body of water was turned in another direction. But instead of flowing over the land, it sank into the great mass of soft bog below, ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... we sailed for a time after leaving Rotterdam, was a canal dug by the Romans to connect the Rhine and the Waal," added Mr. Fluxion. "A freshet cleaned it out, and tore away its banks so as to make the present broad river of it. In an inundation a few years later, seventy-two villages were swept away, and one hundred thousand people lost their lives. Thirty-five of these villages were never heard from afterwards, and ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... lowest level is between seven and eight fathoms. If we consider the average width of the Amazon two miles, we shall have a surface of at least five thousand square miles raised fifty feet by the inundation. An extraordinary freshet is ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... The freshet had swept away all the boats, but to Aunt Nancy this was a trifling matter. She found a few logs, tied them together with grapevines, and on this raft made the voyage across the river. She gathered the ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... her, her gentle spirit might have gone on another flight, whither he could not follow her. He was full of foreboding. He fell at length into a restless doze. There was a noise in his ears as of a rushing torrent when a stream is swollen by a freshet in the spring. It was like the breaking up of life; he was struggling in the consciousness of coming death: when Ruth stood by his side, clothed in white, with a face like that of an angel, radiant, smiling, pointing to the sky, and saying, "Come." He awoke ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... "That is no trespass," he answered (so the reader will perceive that I had been quite correct in my understanding of the law); and when I went on to explain my object in visiting his cane-swamp (for such it was, he said, but an unexpected freshet had ruined the crop when it was barely out of the ground), he assured me that I was welcome to visit it as often as I wished. He himself was very fond of natural history, and often regretted that he had not given time to it in his youth. As it was, he protected the birds ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... the gun Armorial. What cheerings did you share, Impulsive in the van, When down upon leagued France and Spain We English ran— The freshet at your bowsprit Like the foam upon the can. Bickering, your colors Licked up the Spanish air, You flapped with flames of battle-flags— Your challenge, Temeraire! The rear ones of our fleet They yearned to share your place, Still vying with the ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... strait-jacket of rocky walls, opening out at intervals into pocket-like valleys, such as the broad and fertile flat which lay below Hidden Water. On either side of the stream the banks rise in benches, each a little higher and broader and more heavily covered: the first pure sand, laid on by the last freshet; the next grown over with grass and weeds; the next bushed up with baby willows and arrow weed; and then, the high bench, studded with mesquite and palo verdes; and at the base of the solid rim perhaps a higher level, strewn with the rocks which time and the ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... done with the Service for ever. An accumulating current of events had swept him from his place in the Force, as an unheeding traveler crossing a mountain torrent is swept from his feet by a raging freshet. The sudden blazing of his smoldering love into a consuming flame for the clumsy country girl, for whom two years ago he had cherished a pitying affection, threw up upon the horizon of his life ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... ponies were all drowned. The sea was undivided from the bay. Pungy boats and canoes drifted helplessly along the coast, and the Eli alone was out of danger in the harbor of New York, waiting to receive young Abraham. At last the freshet crept over the house-tops, and nothing remained but the cottage of the Jew, planted on piles, which lifting it higher than the surrounding houses, yet threatened it the more if the water should float it from ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... steer for days and weeks through a landscape almost as unbroken as the ocean. It was a region of light rainfall; the rivers ran in great curves through beds of quicksand, which usually contained only trickling pools of water, but in times of freshet would in a moment fill from bank to bank with boiling muddy torrents. Hither and thither across these plains led the deep buffalo-trails, worn by the hoofs of the herds that had passed and re-passed through countless ages. For hundreds of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... doom. Half a mile below was the fall, and at the side of the fall, went ever and ever around with tremendous violence, the rending fans of the water-mill. Annette knew full well that any drift boat, or log, or raft, carried down the river at freshet-flow, was always swept into the toils of the inexorable wheels. Yet, if she were reckless and without heed a few minutes before, I am told that now she was calm. Violette gave the alarm that Annette was adrift in the river without a paddle, and in a few seconds every ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... home from Congress, some years since, I approached a river in North Carolina which had been swollen by a recent freshet, and observed a country girl fording it in a merry mood, and carrying a piggin of butter on her head. As I arrived at the river's edge the rustic Naiad emerged from the watery element. 'My girl,' said I, 'how deep's the water and what's the price of butter?' 'Up to your waist and nine pence,' ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... arguing in conversation where there is no thought of art or oratory. Where the remarks are of an explanatory nature the words come slowly and carefully. When persuasion becomes the object, deliberation is thrown aside and words begin to flow like a mountain freshet, and if the speaker has natural capacity he concludes his point with a grand rush that carries everything ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... "'Twas freshet time, 'way back, as long as sixty-six or eight, An' I was comin' to the Post that year a kind of late, For beaver had been plentiful, and ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... cricket. "Once he leaped," said old Iagoo, "Once he leaped, and lo! above him 45 Bent the sky, as ice in rivers When the waters rise beneath it; Twice he leaped, and lo! above him Cracked the sky, as ice in rivers When the freshet is at highest! 50 Thrice he leaped, and lo! above him Broke the shattered sky asunder, And he disappeared within it, And Ojeeg, the Fisher Weasel, With a bound went in behind him!" 55 "Hark you!" shouted Pau-Puk-Keewis As he entered at the doorway; "I am tired of all this talking, ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... left standing erect, they are filled to the brim, or to the height of the next layer of deposits, with the materials that have been swept over them. Upon this set of deposits comes a new bed of coal with the remains of a new forest, and. above this again a layer of materials left by a second freshet, and so on through a number of alternate strata. It is evident from these facts that there have been a succession of forests, one above another, but that in the intervals of their growth great floods have poured over the marshes, bringing with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... that runs into their land and is named Oyoge. The Indians here gave us venison to eat. The land is mostly full of fir trees, and the flat land is abundant. The stream runs through their land near their (Maquas) castle, but we could not ascend it on account of the heavy freshet. ...
— Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 • Various
... through the war. Spies do not readily take to paper money. There are no Greenbackers among them. In the letters of General Washington we find a great many requests to Congress for a kind of money that would pass current anywhere, and suffer no deterioration at the bottom of a river in a freshet. He preferred gold as being the "most portable." He wrote in ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton
... that I should fondly part 30 From my dear native land! Ah, foolish maid! Glad was the hour, when, with thee, myriads bade Adieu to Ganges and their pleasant fields! To one so friendless the clear freshet yields A bitter coolness; the ripe grape is sour: Yet I would have, great gods! but one short hour Of native air—let me but ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... him if he asked me. It would be like marrying a tree that the freshet was rolling about. I'm not going to seek ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... the move, and headed for home. It was encouraging to learn that the water seemed to be already lowering, as the worst of the freshet had spent its force, and the promised storm had been shunted off in another direction by a fortunate ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... end to end was one seething storm of heated, typically "Southern" argument and prophecy. Friendships were being made and broken, over questions as to whether the river had risen four inches the past hour, or only one, and as to whether this freshet were more important than ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of the English settlement, it being a very good way by land and not above thirty-six miles."*4* After this, our author gives a long description of his difficulty and danger in crossing the Santee in a small canoe, in time of a freshet. He then goes on as follows:—"We intended for Mons. Galliar's jun. but were lost *************. When we got to the house we found several of the French inhabitants, who treated us very courteously; wondering about our undertaking such a voyage through a country inhabited by none but savages, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... border surrounded with rain— Sharp from the sky the tooth of Hilo's rain. Trenched is the land, scooped out by the downpour— Tossed and like gnawing surf is Hilo's rain— 10 Beach strewn with a tangle of thicket growth; A billowy freshet pours in Wailuku; Swoll'n is Wai-au, flooding the point Moku-pane; And red leaps the water of Anue-nue. A roar to heaven sends up Kolo-pule, [Page 62] 15 Shaking like thunder, mist rising like smoke. The rain-cloud unfolds in the heavens; Dark grows Hilo, black with the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... car was creeping along foot by foot, impeded by a freshet of vehicles that filled the street. In the car was a chauffeur and an old gentleman with snowy side whiskers and a Scotch plaid cap which could not be worn while automobiling except by a personage. Not even a wine agent ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... moored by means of a long rope to a tree a considerable distance from the water, so that in case of one of those sudden rises that sometimes took place, it would not be carried away by the freshet. The boat was quickly launched, and a few strokes of the paddle carried the two to the opposite bank of ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... was tonight a human spill-way, churning in freshet. Between its walls went up the clamor of human throats raised in talk, in shouts, in song, in laughter and in contest with the blaring of toy horns, the racket of rattlers and all those discordances that seek to swell pandemonium to the bursting of ear-drums. Theaters were disgorging ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... Island they saved no livestock at all. They just did manage to save themselves. They had a hard time getting the slaves to the mainland. Mrs. Sallie Henderson, her step-son, Jack and her son, Jim, and daughter, Lyde were in the Henderson house when the freshet came down upon them. They had to go up on the second floor of their house but the water ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... a spot that they thought would be all right for Mary, and not close enough to disturb the Bass and the Kingfisher, rolled two logs, and fished a board that had been carried by a freshet from the water and laid it across them, and decided that would have to serve until they ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... The basin comes to a bottle-neck between two high hills; all you have to do is dam that narrow gorge, and when the Rio San Gregorio is up and brimming in freshet time, you'll have a lake a hundred feet deep, a mile wide, and five miles long before you know it. Did you ever consider the possibility of leading a ditch from the lake thus formed along the shoulder of El Palomar, that forty-five-hundred-foot ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... injustice. Now, I say books like these, read at right times and read in right proportion with other books, can not help but be ennobling and purifying. But, alas! for the loathsome and impure literature that has come upon this country in the shape of novels like a freshet overflowing all the banks of decency and common sense. They are coming from some of the most celebrated publishing houses in the country. They are coming with the recommendation of some of our religious newspapers. They lie on your ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... Nassau Street was like a canyon. The pavements were wet, for folks had just finished washing windows, though it was eight o'clock in the forenoon. Bicycles zipped past and from somewhere north a freshet of people ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... high military authority that but for the providential freshet, Sheridan would have succeeded in crossing the James River, and cutting the Danville Railroad, which would have deprived Lee's army of supplies. The freshet rendered his pontoon bridge too short, etc. ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... our favour and against us. The water-way taken by the canoe was far from being direct. Both the creek and the larger stream curved repeatedly in their courses; and in ordinary times were of sluggish current. The freshet, however, produced by the late rain-storm, had rendered it swifter than common; and we knew that the canoe would be carried down with considerable rapidity—faster than we were travelling on horseback. On such roads, for so great a distance, fast travelling was impossible; ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... swelling of the stream? This it plainly was, but what could have caused it? There had been no rain for several days before, and no great heat to have caused any unusual melting of the snow upon the mountain. What, then, could be the origin of this sudden and singular freshet? What ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... special fitness in the use of firearms. Why, Inks here couldn't have cooked for my outfit that season, let alone rode. There was no particular incident worth mentioning till we struck Red River, where we overtook five or six herds that were laying over on account of a freshet in the river. I wouldn't have a man those days who was not as good in the water as out. When I rode up to the river, one or two of my men were with me. It looked red and muddy and rolled just a trifle, but I ordered one of the boys to hit it on his horse, to see what it was like. ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... chrysoprase steeples of wood sage all set in shining fern. Upon the boulders in midstream subaqueous mosses, now revealed and starved by the drought, died hard, and the seeds of grasses, figworts, and persicarias thrust up flower and foliage, flourishing in unwonted spots from which the next freshet would rudely tear them. Insect life did not abundantly manifest itself, for the day was sunless; but now and again, with crisp rattle of his gauze wings, a dragon-fly flashed along the river. Through these scenes the Teign ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... choice, Hite," laughed Holcomb. "You fellows must have been drowned out last night; the log over the South Branch is gone in the freshet; we had to get round the best way we could. Step up, Freme," he said. "I want you to know Mr. Thayor. This is Freme Skinner, Mr. Thayor, and this is Hite Holt, and there's no better ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... screen. Triumphant shouts of Bande Mataram come nearer: and to them I am thrilling through and through. Suddenly a stream of barefooted youths in turbans, clad in ascetic ochre, rushes into the quadrangle, like a silt-reddened freshet into a dry river-bed at the first burst of the rains. The whole place is filled with an immense crowd, through which Sandip Babu is borne, seated in a big chair hoisted on the shoulders of ten or twelve ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... footsteps in the corridor, a scuffle and a freshet of giggling; the nurses were going downstairs after the early morning cup of tea in the ward kitchen. This laughter that sounded so strange because it was so late reminded Ellen of the first New Year's Eve that she and her mother had spent in Edinburgh. They had had no friends ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... and the Yokul lifts on high his glittering shield, Far and wide in sunny splendor gleams the ice-engirded field, And the swelling freshet murmurs gay spring-ditties as it flows, Till its noisy life it mingles in the ocean's grand repose; And in silence, Dream-fraught silence, O'er ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... incidents just narrated the life of our hero rippled—but of course it must be clearly understood that a Suakim ripple bore some resemblance to a respectable freshet elsewhere! Osman Digna either waited for reinforcements before delivering a grand assault, or found sufficient entertainment to his mind, and satisfaction to his ambition, in acting the part of a mosquito, by almost nightly harassment ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... Democratic party, in national convention assembled at Chicago, had been in the throes of labor. It had been expected—in fact had been as good as promised—that by ten o'clock that evening the deadlock would melt before a sweetly gushing freshet of party harmony and the head of the presidential ticket would be named, wherefore in the Evening Press shop a late shift had stayed on duty to get out an extra. Back in the press-room the press was dressed. A front page form ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... had meant to break the news more dramatically; but it flowed on now as a freshet released, while his eyes sparkled and his head wagged as though his whole soul were bursting with it. Alban thought for a moment that he had met one of those pleasant eccentrics who are not less rare in the East End than the West. "This ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... stand and to think of all that has happened since the man of our thoughts looked forth from these windows, a common little boy. The world is very much alive in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello; the little freshet of life that flows there flows loud and incessant; and yet into what oceans of death and silence has it not poured since it carried forth Christopher on its stream! One thinks of the continent of that New World that he discovered, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... open country between the Wichita and Pease rivers. On reaching the latter, we found an easy stage of water for crossing, though there was every evidence that the river had been on a recent rise, the debris of a late freshet littering the cutbank, while high-water mark could be easily noticed on the trees along the river bottom. Summer had advanced until the June freshets were to be expected, and for the next month we should be fortunate if our advance was not checked ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... green glass tumbler through the pure water it contains. The salt brine or gelatinous sea-water sinks weighted to the bottom, and over it flows the fresh river-water. If the latter is darkened with sediment, it obscures the silent depths with a heavy, gloomy cloud. In seasons of freshet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... quite destroys the fair proportions of the tree, and thus makes us sensible of a regularity and propriety in the usual forms of nature. The flood of the present season— though it never amounts to a freshet on our quiet stream—has encroached farther upon the land than any previous one for at least a score of years. It has overflowed stone fences, and even rendered a portion of the highway navigable ...
— Buds and Bird Voices (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... when the freshet's over, they tell me,' says he. 'And me and the boss have forded four foot of ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... As over leagues of myrtle-blooms and may; Bevies of spring clouds trooping slow, Like matrons heavy-bosomed and aglow With the mild and placid pride of increase! Nay, What makes this insolent and comely stream Of appetence, this freshet of desire (Milk from the wild breasts of the wilful Day!), Down Piccadilly dance and murmur and gleam In genial wave on wave and gyre on gyre? Why does that nymph unparalleled splash and churn The wealth of her enchanted urn Till, over-billowing all between Her cheerful margents ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... Aiai told his wife to leave her fishing, but she talked saucily to him. So Aiai called upon the names of his ancestors. Immediately a dark and lowering cloud drew near and poured out a flood of water upon the stream, and in a short time the dam was broken by the freshet and all the oopu and opae, together with the child, were swept toward the sea. But the woman was not taken by the flood. Aiai then rose up and departed, ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... I saw rafts of hemlock lumber tied to the shore, ready to take advantage of the first freshet. Rafting is an important industry for a hundred miles or more along the Delaware. The lumbermen sometimes take their families or friends, and have a jollification all the way to Trenton or to Philadelphia. In some places the speed is very great, almost equaling that of ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... made still more compact. But large bodies of cavalry, and heavy artillery, cannot venture on the ice unless it be of great thickness and strength. An army can never trust, for any length of time, to either fords or ice; if it did a freshet or a thaw would place it in a most critical state. Military bridges will, therefore, become its only safe reliance for keeping open ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... of Big Sewell separated by a deep gorge. On the 5th of October the condition of the Kanawha valley had become such that Rosecrans felt compelled to withdraw his forces to the vicinity of Gauley Bridge. The freshet had been an extraordinary one. At Charleston the Kanawha River usually flows in a bed forty or fifty feet below the plateau on which the town is built; but the waters now rose above these high banks and flooded the town itself, being four or five feet deep in the first story of ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... lively and eventful afternoon passes away, and about five o'clock we round the base of a conglomerate hill that has been shutting out the prospect ahead, cross a small spring freshet, and emerge upon an extensive gravelly plain stretching away eastward to the horizon. It is the central plain of the Dasht-i-na-oomid, the heart of the desert, of which the wild, heterogeneous territory traversed since morning forms the setting. So far as the utility of the bicycle and the horses ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... Fulton, none of the inhabitants knew anything about the inventor of steam navigation, and doubted that a steamboat existed near them. Hence the snorting, puffing, and clangor of the vessel as she surged against the freshet, alarmed all the population in hearing when she ascended the ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... mused the man. "That was the time of the big freshet. Yes, I do remember it faintly. It's the freshet I remember most though. Enough timber floated by here to build a barn. See that old shed yonder?" and he pointed to a low structure. "Well, I built that out of timber I fished ashore. Lumber yard beyond Wilmer floated ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... the bridges had been swept away by the freshet, and, in trying to cross, he missed the ford. The horse must have been frightened and unmanageable, the buggy was overturned in the creek, and your cousin, stunned by the fall, drowned instantly; life was just extinct when I ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... of water in the cowshed, and down in the swimmin' hole in the back pasture wasn't nothing but a big gully fifty foot and more across, rushing through the pasture, deep as a lake and brown as the old cow. You know freshet-floods? Full up with sticks and stones and old dead trees and somebody's old shed floatin' down the middle. And I swear to goodness, Parson, that stream was running along so fast I saw four-inch ...
— Year of the Big Thaw • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... on now," he says, "it wouldn't better us a bit. All we'd gain by it would be the league or so from this to the river. Once there, and attempting to travel up its bank, we'd find scores of little creeks that run into it, in full freshet, and have to swim our horses across them. That would only lose time, instead of gaining it. Now, by daybreak, they'll all be down again, when we can travel straight on without being delayed by so many stoppages. I tell you, Senor Cypriano, ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... it away. The natives and their dogs do not consider the scent disagreeable and have no occasion to consult the tastes or smell of others. The first time I visited one of their fish-curing places I thought of the western city that had, after a freshet, 'forty-five distinct and different odors beside several wards ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... exterior and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They engaged him; .. but straightway upon the ship's getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... which he was ignorant—was, that the remainder of the flotilla, borne along by the strong and deep current of the Waal, then in a state of freshet, had shot past the landing-place, and had ever since been vainly struggling against wind and tide to force their way back to the necessary point. Meantime Schenk and his followers fought desperately in the market-place, and desperately ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... like a spring freshet," he said into the mouthpiece, "and the boys want to know if I won't let up now that Reinhart is down? Go back and smother them with all they will take down to 60. That's my answer. Tell them if Reinhart had ten more wives and daughters ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... good thing one may have too much, I would go up in the spring, when the rafts are being formed in the small tributary streams, and I would come down upon one of them, shooting the rapids of the rivers as soon as the first freshets had left the way open. A freshet in the rivers is the rush of waters occasioned by melting snow and ice. The first freshets take down the winter waters of the nearer lakes and rivers. Then the streams become for a time navigable, and the rafts go down. After that comes the second freshet, ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... their commander (which is myself) triumphs in the end, for I privately reconstruct and march them all up in detachments of one. I look after the little trees, the unbent twigs; they are more interesting to me than your monsters. This nursery of saplings sprang up in a night after a freshet: here are quivering aspens trembling forever in penance for that one sin. They once were gravely pointed out by the guide of a party of tourists as "shuddering asps." He is doubtless the same who, being asked "what ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... the kitchen waiting for the cookies to bake or the taffy to cool, Nina used to coax Antonia to tell her stories—about the calf that broke its leg, or how Yulka saved her little turkeys from drowning in the freshet, or about old Christmases and weddings in Bohemia. Nina interpreted the stories about the creche fancifully, and in spite of our derision she cherished a belief that Christ was born in Bohemia a short time before the Shimerdas left that country. We ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... eyes were seeking for some secret panel that might open in the walls and give her escape. She must think! There was little enough time at best to bring order out of this panic-ridden confusion of her thoughts. But her mind was like a stream in freshet. It could only race and swirl along one channel, and that ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... man was the friend alike of my father, my elder brothers and ourselves. He was of an age with each and every one of us. As any piece of stone is good enough for the freshet to dance round and gambol with, so the least provocation would suffice to make him beside himself with joy. Once I had composed a hymn, and had not failed to make due allusion to the trials and tribulations of this world. Srikantha Babu was ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... Bonnet was a planter of high reputation and religious character who, from some sudden and overpowering freshet of wildness in his blood, had given up everything in order to start off pirating in the Caribbean Sea. The example was a recent one, and it had caused the utmost consternation in the islands. Governors had before now been accused of being in league with pirates, and of receiving ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... So they told him where they meant to camp that night. He started over mountains and through woods and up rocks, a far, round-about journey. And the man and his wife went down the river in a spring freshet, headlong with the rapids. [Footnote: One should be familiar with the almost impassable forests of Maine and Canada, even as they are at the present day, to properly appreciate the Chenook's journey. As for the speed of ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... charades; and the singing of war, home, and love songs around the late camp fire, timed to the antic banjo or the sentimental guitar. Drolly, yet with tenderness for others, it portrayed mountain storm, valley freshet, and heart-breaking night marches beside tottering guns in the straining, sucking, leaden-heavy, red clay, and then, raptly, the glories of sunrise and sunset over the contours of the Blue Ridge. And ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... dam that restrained the waters was nearly 1,000 feet in length, 110 feet in height, ninety feet thick at the base, and twenty-five feet wide at the top, which was used as a driveway. For ten years or more this dam was believed to be a standing menace to the Conemaugh valley in times of freshet, though fully equal to all ordinary emergencies. With a dam which was admitted to be structurally weak and with insufficient means of discharging a surplus volume, it was feared that it was only a matter of time before such a reservoir, situated ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... left. I sought a crossing. The stream was not deep, but the slippery banks gave me great difficulty in the darkness. The water came to my waist; on the further side were hollows filled with standing water left by the freshet. I had crossed the main branch of ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... walls, grimly bastioned, ran in bold zigzags across the face of the steep in a way to daunt assailants. Down the hillside, past the cathedral and the college, through the heart of the city, clattered a noisy brook, which in time of freshet flooded the neighbouring streets. Part of the city was within walls, part without. Most of the houses were low, one-story buildings, with large expanse of steep roof, and high dormer windows. Along the incline ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... deep channel paved with gold, Saw proud Potosi lift his glittering head, And pour down Plata thro his tinctured bed. Rich with the spoils of many a distant mine, In his broad silver sea their floods combine; Wide over earth his annual freshet strays, And highland drains with lowland drench repays; Her thirsty regions wait his glad return, And drink their future harvest ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... Dargle," or Glenislorane River, upon Lord Powerscourt's domain. This would be thought "a small specimen" of a river with us, as, except when the waters are swollen with a freshet, it is but a narrow and shallow mountain stream. But in Ireland it passes at such times for a mighty torrent, and at all times ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... by water or wind, which turns a cylinder. On this cylinder is written a prayer, and every time the barrel goes round once, it counts, they say, for one prayer. It may be imagined how piety intensifies in a freshet, or in a heavy gale of wind! And there is a ludicrous notion of economy, as well as a pitiable folly in the conception of profiting by such windy supplications, and of saving all one's time and thoughts for business, while the prayers rattle out by the hundred at ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... a big freshet the next autumn, the water covering the meadows on both sides of the river, and creeping into cellars and yards and houses. It came unexpectedly, early one morning, into the enclosure where Dick, with his half-dozen hens, was confined, and all flew for refuge ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... on my meadows each time the creek rises," Bransome observed at length. "The snow melts fast in hay-time, and, more often than I like, a freshet harvests my timothy grass for me. Now cutting down three-hundred-foot redwoods is good as exercise, but it gets monotonous, and a big strip of natural prairie would be considerably more useful than a beaver's swimming bath. You said you could blow a channel ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... get home long before we reach the steamboats," said Emma Bradford, cheerfully. "Haven't you seen the river in a freshet? and don't you know how it carries all sorts of things along? haystacks, and sheds, and even houses with people in them, I've seen, ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... eyes—so vastly superior to any look that ever came into the eyes of Bream Mortimer. She was telling herself that her relations with Sam were an idyll; for, being young and romantic, she enjoyed this freshet of surreptitious meetings which had come to enliven the stream of her life. It was pleasant to go warily into deep lanes where forbidden love lurked. She cast a swift side-glance at her father—the unconscious ogre in her fairy-story. What ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... her throat tremulous, like that of a bird that sings. How significant the laugh was! the music of how pure a freshet of life! ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... was pouring in at Philadelphia like a flood, sometimes whole parishes at once, each bringing its own pastor; and it left large traces of itself in the eastern counties of Pennsylvania, while it rushed to the western frontier and poured itself like a freshet southwesterly through the valleys of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies. But the Presbyterian churches of eastern Pennsylvania, even as reinforced from England and New England, were neither many nor strong; the Baptists were feebler yet, although both these ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... fever had been slowly creeping about in the lower part of our village, in all the streets which had been under water in the spring freshet. ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... rocks. An unusual quantity of snow had lately fallen, which, having been succeeded by heavy rains, had swollen the stream to more than double its ordinary size. It was evident that, what in the language of the country is called a freshet was commencing. Such is the name given to those swellings of the water, the most formidable of which commonly occur in the month of February, or early in the Spring, when the overcharged rivers, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... thinking she was goin' to find a respectable home, and when she come out hyear and found the place was a dance-hall, she cried all the time. She didn't add none to the hilarity of the place. An' one day Jim he strolled in, an' seem' the girl a-cryin' like a freshet and wishin' she was dead, he inquired the cause. She told him how that old harpy wrote her, an', bein' an orphant, she come out thinkin' she was goin' to a respectable place as waitress, an' Jim he 'lowed it was a case for the law. He ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... with their blankets and light camp equipage on their backs. Two months previously they had started from the mouth of the Laramie River in boats loaded with furs destined for the St. Louis market. They had taken advantage of the June freshet, and were rapidly carried down as far as Scott's Bluffs. There the water spread out into the valley, and the stream was so shallow they were compelled to unload the principal part of their cargo. This they secured as well as possible, ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... only part of the fun of it, but it beats the doctors. San Francisco Bay is no mill pond. It is a large and draughty and variegated piece of water. I remember, one winter evening, trying to enter the mouth of the Sacramento. There was a freshet on the river, the flood tide from the bay had been beaten back into a strong ebb, and the lusty west wind died down with the sun. It was just sunset, and with a fair to middling breeze, dead aft, we stood still in the rapid current. We were squarely in the ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... enough, even through the deep snow, packing the compressible stuff in one passage as hard as ice. Nan followed in this narrow track to the very bank of the river where the logs were heaped in long windrows, ready to be launched into the stream when the waters should rise at the time of the spring freshet. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... boats in common; and as the men of the settlement were not particularly busy during the freshet season, we could easily persuade or hire them to load our skiffs on their wagons, and haul us eight or ten miles up the Sioux or Ocheyedan, for half a day's run down home, in which scarcely the stroke of an oar was necessary, after ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... thinks of Gorki in reading Baroja, mainly because of the contrast. Instead of the tumultuous spring freshet of a new race that drones behind every page of the Russian, there is the cold despair of an old race, of a race that lived long under a formula of life to which it has sacrificed much, only to discover in the end that the formula ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... him steadily in the face,—"travelled! I went once up to Tudiz huckleberrying; and once, when there was a freshet, you took a superannuated broom and paddled me around the orchard ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... is too soft, its several parts will be separated and scattered as readily as though it had fallen upon hard ground where it would be torn to pieces by carnivorous animals. The dead body must then be covered up by a blanket of silt or sand like that which would be deposited as the result of a freshet. If a skeleton is too greatly broken up or scattered, it may be difficult or even impossible for its discoverer to piece together the various fragments and assemble them in their original relations. ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Another blow from the ram, and the door fell to finders. They leaped in over the table like a freshet over a dam. I darted to the window. M. Etienne was in the garret, helping hold the ladder for me. I flung myself upon it all too eagerly. Like a ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... trappin' furs, and fishing through the ice for pickerel that he sold in town. Then in the spring the floods came and the whole little family was wiped out; though the cabin, bein' built so strong, held out against the freshet, and it has ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... days at Smaldeel, the Guards set out for Kroonstad on the Valsch or False River, so called because in some parts it so frequently changes its channel that after a heavy freshet one can seldom be quite sure where to find it. This march of sixty-five miles was covered in three days and a half; Smaldeel seeing the last of us on Wednesday and Kroonstad seeing the first of us about noon on Saturday. In the course of this notable march we saw, or rather heard, two artillery ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... its base, and curled forward at its foamy and wind-whipped crest, as if the upper waters were impatient of the slow speed of those below. Beyond the wave, the valley, from bluff to bluff, was a sea, rolling white-capped waves. Logs, planks, and the other flotsam of a freshet moved on in the ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... the yellow light from the car lamps, his wet nose glistened as if varnished. Over his shoulders the shiny ropes of rain whipped and lashed across the space between the cars. The windows streamed as each succeeding gust flung its miniature freshet against them. ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... trying to meet death by that route. Some quicker way must be found. They leave the saloon and plunge again into the mist. The sidewalks are mere flanges at the base of the houses; the street a cold ravine, the fog filling it like a freshet. Not far away is the Mexican quarter. Conducted as if by wires along the heavy air comes a guitar's tinkle, and the demoralizing ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... descending strong and rapid waters for a distance of about fifteen miles, reached the site of a saw mill. A Mr. Wallace, who with ten men was in charge of it, and was engaged in reconstructing a dam that had been carried off by the last spring freshet, represented Messrs. Rolette and Lockwood of Prairie du Chien. Another mill, he said, was constructed on a creek just below, and out ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... in motion in pursuit of Doyle. In crossing the swamp of Lynch's Creek, during the night, several of the soldiers lost their arms, in consequence of the freshet. The swamp was inundated, and it required all their dexterity and promptitude to save themselves. Snatching a hasty breakfast, the pursuit was continued all day, and resumed the next morning until ten o'clock, when they found such signs ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... Thomas or Mrs. Lasette tell you of it? They knew it, but it is one of the saddest passages of my life, to which I scarcely ever refer. She, my wife, drifted from me, and was drowned in a freshet ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... and listened to the swirl of the water, in that year when the river was higher than the oldest inhabitant had ever seen it,—the year when the covered bridge at the Mills had been carried away, and when the one at the Falls was in hourly danger of succumbing to the force of the freshet. ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... started now; he seemed ready enough with information to-day, and Yan knew enough to "run the rapids on the freshet." ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... was conquering the spring freshet of Jordan. As a matter of fact, Jehovah transacted that little affair. See, says Talmage, "one mile ahead go two priests carrying a glittering box four feet long and two feet wide. It is the Ark of the Covenant." He forgets to add that the Jew God was supposed ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... pier, and then the whole bridge jarred and quivered, and the cake of ice, breaking and splintering, would heap itself on a long white spit that pushed up-stream through the rushing current. The river was yellow with mud torn up by a freshet back among the hills, but the last rays of the sun,—a disk of copper sinking into the brown haze behind the hills,—caught on the broken edges of the icy snow, and made a sudden white glitter ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... he was informed. "I been a-lookin' fer it this many a year, an' this here freshet done it. You see the holler there? Well, they's ten foot o' water in it, an' it had ort to be stone dry. The bridge is tore out behind us, an' we're stuck here till that water runs out. We can't git away till ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... open grove intervened between the dormitories and the meadows along the Remona River where bog hay was cut, and which were sometimes flooded in the freshet season. ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... steep-banked and deep. They are therefore among those accidents of the ground which, duly improved, can seriously affect military operations. The destruction of a bridge impedes the transport of troops and supplies; a sudden freshet, occurring in the midst of an extensive movement, may imperil an army by sundering its forces; while of the utility of such natural trenches to the purposes of shelter and of defence, of awaiting attack, or resisting an advance, ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... was constructed and would no doubt have answered the purpose intended had it not been constructed of clayey soil that disintegrated and floated away with the muddy current the first freshet. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... more suspicious of. I once lost ten thousand dollars by nature. Nature embezzled that amount from me; absconded with ten thousand dollars' worth of my property; a plantation on this stream, swept clean away by one of those sudden shiftings of the banks in a freshet; ten thousand dollars' worth of alluvion thrown ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... frontispiece of this work, reproduced from an official drawing of the Wheeler expedition, may be used more than half the year. In springtime the stream is deep when the melted snows of the Rockies are drained by the spring freshet. Usually, the Mormon expeditions southward started well after the summer season, when the crossing could be made without ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... the train. He had ordered more dynamite for the drive and proposed to take especial charge of the consignment. The drive was starting off slowly. There was ice in the gorges; the first logs through would have the freshet head of water. Latisan had heard more threats and he had definitely detected the trigs which the river bosses of the Three C's were laying—and he had ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... these, called the Lynde-Brook Reservoir, is situated in the township of Leicester. It was built in 1864, has a water-shed of 1,870 acres, and a storage capacity of 681,000,000 gallons, and an elevation of 481 feet above the City Hall. The dam of this reservoir gave way in February, 1876, during a freshet, and the immense mass of water was precipitated, with an unearthly roar, into the valley below, destroying everything in its path, and carrying rocks, earth, trees, and debris to a distance of several miles. The other, called the Holden Reservoir, is in the township ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... mud and sand. The river, helped by tributary brooks right and left, has brought down from the inland that enormous mass. You know that. You know that every flood and freshet brings a fresh load, either of fine mud or of fine sand, or possibly some of it peaty matter out of distant hills. Here is one indisputable fact from which to start. ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... on the animal creation, as if to revenge herself on us for our sarcasms, plunged into the river, then very high by the freshet, and was wafted down the current like a bag of oats! I could hardly sit on my horse for laughter. I am apt to laugh at the vexations of my friends. The fellow, who was of my own age, and my room-mate, half checked the current by oaths as big as lobsters, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... crop. In a few sections small farming is conducted by means of irrigation. In Canon de Chelly, which may be termed the garden spot of the reservation, there are diminutive farms and splendid peach orchards irrigated with freshet water. The canon drains an extensive region, and even a light rain causes the stream which flows at the base of its lofty walls to become swollen. This water the natives divert to their miniature cornfields and orchards, one or two freshets assuring ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... early as March 26th, several persons were drowned and many narrowly escaped death when a freshet swept down ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... mighty walls and vaulted cellars. Meanwhile the Emperor was calling in his troops as fast as possible from behind, but at three in the afternoon his main bridge over the chief arm of the Danube gave way before masses of rubbish brought down from the hill-country by a freshet, which was hourly increasing in volume. The Austrians were from first to last superior in numbers on the battle-field; their enfilading batteries were able to sweep the French lines for several hours, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... preface to "Catriona":—"I see like a vision the youth of my father, and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands. And I admire and bow my head before the romance of destiny." Does not this sentence read as if it were written in stress of some effusive febrile emotion, as if he wrote while still pursuing his idea? ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... with steel arches, one of the most important is the St Louis bridge over the Mississippi, completed in 1874 (fig. 29). The river at St Louis is confined to a single channel, 1600 ft. wide, and in a freshet in 1870 the scour reached a depth of 51 ft. Captain J.B. Eads, the engineer, determined to establish the piers and abutments on rock at a depth for the east pier and east abutment of 136 ft. below high water. This ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Falls, within sight of his mother's home, where she could view daily the evidence that none might threaten her and live. And there the ungainly form lies today—a long, black-rock island known as Moo Kuna, between the rapids—where every freshet, every heavy rain, beats upon it as though in everlasting punishment for plotting the death of Hawaii's ...
— Legends of Wailuku • Charlotte Hapai
... lie four feet deep in the forests, and among the mountains and valleys of the interior, are suddenly melted by the south winds and rains, freshets necessarily succeed, which have been known to do great injury. The flats of the Mohawk, they tell me, are annually overflown, and a moderate freshet is deemed a blessing; but, occasionally, a union of the causes I have mentioned, produces a species of deluge that has a very opposite character. Thus it is, that houses are swept away; and bridges from the smaller mountain streams, have been known, to come ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... of joy and admiration men welcome the patriot or hero who in times of danger held the destiny of the people in his hands and never once betrayed it. And let each intellect soar without hindrance, and the heart pour itself out before God in a freshet of divine love. Great is the genius of Plato or Bacon, revealing itself in tides of thought, but greater and richer is the genius of the heart that is conscious of vast, deep fountains of love, that may be poured forth in generous tides before the God whose ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... a tardy thaw set in. The icy covering of the river split into whirling blocks, the snow grew soft and bally, the crust rotted and picked up. Soon the tempering sun drove the drifts from south exposures. When a freshet coursed down the coulee, and the low spots on the prairie filled until they were broad ponds, around which the migrating wild-fowl alighted with joyous cries. Now eaves dripped musically; slushy wagon ruts ran like ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... freshet on the river, in which the Indian maid is caught in her canoe. The disturbed water and the trash being borne down by the current was an effect arranged by Jim Hooley's workmen. The timbermen working for the Benbow ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... as I can recall his words,—a very sweet song, with a simple but spirited chorus; and as the sympathetic electricity of excitement seized the performers we were all in a minute "going down the rapids in a spring freshet." ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... my heart rose like a freshet, And it swept me on before, Giddy as a whirling stick, Till I felt ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with "millions in it." Almost any proposition that seemed to offer these possible millions appealed to him, and in his imagination he saw the golden freshet pouring in. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to start off on the upper trail," he declared. "I went over it but a few days ago, and at Brown's Crossing the road is all torn up by a freshet. Besides that, we ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill
... daylight as was needful in order to finish his house. So he borrowed a noose from the god Itu, and, it being autumn, when the Sun gets sleepy and stupid, he easily caught the luminary. The Sun cried till his tears made a great freshet which nearly drowned the island; but it was of no use; there he ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... lint which rolled about in the corners like feathers. Her corset was thrown down in a corner; shoes and stockings littered the floor; her comb was clogged with red hair like a wire fence with dead grass after a freshet; dingy, grimy underclothing lay about. I peered into a closet, in which there were more garments on the floor than on the nails. The other bedroom was quite as unkempt; looking as if the occupant must always do his chamber work at the last moment before going ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... the opinion that the danger was not so great as might be supposed. There would be no pollution from those bodies taken from the river before decomposition set in, and the force of the freshet would tend to clear the river bed of any impurities in it rather than make new deposits. The argument which had the most weight, however, with the President was the efficiency of the local authorities. Pennsylvania has a State Board ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... bottle of old rye." When we ask how he overcame the natural difficulties of trade—lack of commission houses, varying standards of money, want of systems of credit and low prices due to the glutting of the market when hundreds of flatboats arrived in the South simultaneously on the same freshet—we are informed that "Billy Earthquake is the geniwine, double-acting engine, and can out-run, out-swim, chaw more tobacco and spit less, drink more whiskey and keep soberer than any ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... sure enough I found him, he'd been killed dead, and floated down the crick, and then the stream had washed him up into a heap of broken sticks and briers, and when the waters fell, for there had been a little freshet, they left him there breast uppermost—and I was glad to find him—for I think, Archer, as that shot was the nicest, prettiest, etarnal, darndest, long good shot, I iver did make, anyhow; and it was so dark I couldn't ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... dollars. The first day it was open, eight hundred mules crossed at a dollar a head, to say nothing of the toll for foot and horse. That night the river rose. The bridge was one hundred and forty feet above low water mark. Yet the freshet rose higher than that, and swept the bridge away. He'd have made ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... were cutting down the giant trees, and piling them in readiness for the Spring freshet, or floods of the river, when the snows melted. Then they would slide them down the mountain sides to ...
— Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper and Other Stories • Anonymous
... front page of the paper still in his hand. Something of Jonathan came into his face,—the same firm lines about his mouth that his father had when he crawled under the floor timbers of the mill to save Baker's girl, pinned down and drowning, the night of the freshet. ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the Place de la Bastile to shelter them from the cruel wind. It was in the twilight of a day in March, when the wind howled dismally, that Boniface Willet, in Barnaby Rudge, flattened his fat nose against the window pane and made one of his famous predictions. It must have been a March freshet when the Knight Huldebrand put Bertalda into Kuhleborn's wagon and the gentle Undine saved them both. And we fancy that it was a cold night in March when Peter stood by the fire and ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... shuffle off your own century. For between the broad plain and the range of hills where the Viale dei Colli now winds serpentine on its beautiful way round the glens and ravines, the Arno runs, a broad torrent flood in times of freshet: the Arno, unbridged as yet (in the days I speak of) by the Ponte Vecchio, an impassable frontier between the wide territory of prehistoric Fiesole and the narrow fields of some minor village, long since forgotten, on the opposite bank. The great alluvial plain lies north of the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... the buttercups, Ranunculus multifidus, and very likely others, spread over the mud by producing runners, much after the manner of a strawberry plant. If, as in case of a freshet, the plants should be covered with water, they show their enterprise by taking advantage of the "tide"; some of the runners are quickly severed, and are then at liberty to go ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... they reached the ford. Harshaw trailed the cattle across in a long file. He watched the herd anxiously, for the stream was running strong from the freshet. After a short, hard swim the ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... deluge, inundation, overflow, cataclysm, freshet. Associated Words: antediluvial, antediluvian, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... bank. The priest one day asked for a photograph of the boat. They gave him one, and he asked them to dinner. After dinner he solemnly burnt the photograph to his god. And—"would you believe it?"—next day a freshet came down and set the vessel afloat. Which shows how superstitions are generated and maintained in a world so little subject to law, on the surface of it, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... to see her, for it had been several weeks since Grace had called, and she was eager to tell her of the great tree up in the ravine that had been blasted by the lightning, and about the beautiful little waterfall caused by the Cherry Creek freshet. ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... good," the Lady Jeanne replied brokenly. "And He has placed me and my troubles in godly hands." And then she wept. And it seemed as if like a spring freshet, her thoughts, soul, and ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... Rabbit 'uz settin' on de bank watchin' 'im. He sot dar, he did, en play in de water, en cut switches fer ter w'ip at de snake-doctors,[86] en all dat time Brer Fox, he pull en haul en tote rocks fer ter hol' dat trap endurin' a freshet. ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... near gay parties were drawn at Easter and Christmas to dance under their roof. Now they are run out. This boy and his mother are the last of the line. Archie's father was drowned in the ford when we had the freshet last spring. The Ramapo, that looks so peaceful now, overflowed its banks then, and ran like a mill-race. I don't know how they manage, but Archie is kept at school, and his mother does everything from ironing white frocks for summer boarders to making jellies and preserves for people ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... why should we call false sorrow upon that bright hour? Was not the world before us, the awakening glory of Ken's Island at our feet? Just as in the dark days all Nature had withered and bent before the death-giving vapours, so now did Nature answer the sun's appeal; and every freshet bubbling over, every wood alive with the music of the birds, the meadows green and golden, the hills all capped with their summer glory, she proclaimed the reign of Nature's God. No sight more splendid ever greeted the eyes of shipwrecked men ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... strong strokes. Thus they journeyed on in silence, save for an occasional word of endearment from one to the other, until the dawn had broken, and a few hours later they found themselves at the Malay village at which Kria lived. They had come down on a half freshet, and that, in the far upper country, where the streams tear over their pebbly or rocky beds through the gorges formed by the high banks, means travelling at a rushing headlong pace. When the fugitives finally ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... go, for you are my wife.' What would that be? That would be the difference. Do you understand, or do you not understand? If you do not understand, I can do nothing. But I will not marry you. Have you ever seen a mule go down to the ford in spring, too heavily laden, when there is freshet? He drowns, if he is driven in, because the burden is too heavy. I will not be the burden; but I should be, if I were your wife, because I am not a real signora. Now you ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... sound in the water awoke me—a sudden boisterous disturbance of the river current—probably the onslaught of a freshet: a thing that often happens at this season. One's feet on the planking of the boat become aware of a variety of forces at work beneath it. Slight tremors, little rockings, gentle heaves, and sudden jerks, all keep me in touch with the pulse of ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... Vermont village, lying among peacefully sloping hills, away from boisterous river-courses, there was small chance of those physical convulsions which sometimes disturb the quiet of generations. The roar of a spring freshet never smote the ears of the dwellers therein, and the winters passed with no danger of avalanches. From its sheltered situation destructive storms seldom launched themselves upon it; the oldest inhabitant could remember little injury from lightning ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of light; and the wind—from the quarter directly opposite—though bitter and searching, blew behind our right shoulders and helped us cheerfully along. Our troubles began in a dip of the road on this side of the hamlet of Froyl, where an autumn freshet, flooding the highway, had been caught by the frost and fixed in a rippled floor of ice. We had seen duly to the roughing of our own chargers; and even they were forced at this passage to feel their steps mincingly; but the pack-horses, for whom I had only ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... most, as a mark of engineering skill and sound calculation on the part of the pond-people, was the direction in which the dam was laid. At either end, where the water was shoal, and comparatively dead even in time of freshet, the dam ran straight, taking the shortest way. But where it crossed the main channel of the brook, and required the greatest strength, it had a pronounced upward curve to help it resist the thrust of the current. He contemplated ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... whole army was hurried up to Batten-Kill in order to cover Breyman's and Frazer's retreat,[34] for Frazer had been ordered to recross the Hudson at once. Frazer's position was most critical; his bridge had been broken by a freshet, and for one whole day he was cut off from the ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... Discovering that the force in his front, near "Seven Pines," on the southern bank of the Chickahominy, was only a portion of the Federal army, General Johnston determined to attack it. This resolution was not in consequence of the freshet in the Chickahominy, as has been supposed, prompting Johnston to attack while the Federal army was cut in two, as it were. His resolution, he states, had already been taken, and was, with or without reference to the rains, that of a good soldier. General Johnston struck at General McClellan ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... rose. It reached and passed the highest mark that it had attained for many years. And then came the big freshet. The streams became torrents, hurling great masses of driftwood and even trees before them. Constant vigilance on the part of the beavers was required to keep the dam from washing away. When a drifting log or mass ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... summer months of 1861, Judah demonstrated the existence of a route by the South Yuba River and the Donner Pass greatly superior to all other projected lines, with no insuperable engineering difficulties, and capable of defence against all interruption by freshet or snow. In the mean while the State Legislature had granted a charter to the incorporators in July; and at the first stockholders' meeting Stanford was elected president and Huntington vice-president of the company. It was evident, however, that an undertaking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... so long we can stand a freshet. Let the Hudson and the Thames and the Susquehanna rise and overflow the lowlands, and the earth be full of the knowledge of God as the waters fill the seas. That time is ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... up the horses, thinking of the Salinas and its treacherous waters. In California, when the ground is well sodden, a very small storm will create a very big freshet. At such times most rivers are dangerous to ford on ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell |
