Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Puddle   Listen
noun
Puddle  n.  
1.
A small quantity of dirty standing water; a muddy plash; a small pool.
2.
Clay, or a mixture of clay and sand, kneaded or worked, when wet, to render it impervious to water.
Puddle poet, a low or worthless poet. (R.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Puddle" Quotes from Famous Books



... bred to a dry climate had to fight in a climate better suited to the Englishman or the German than to the Canadian. There could be no dugouts. Lift a spade of earth below the earth level and it became a puddle. It was a wrestling fight in the mud, this, holding onto shell-craters and the soft remains of trenches. The Germans had heard that the Canadians were highstrung, nervous, quick for the offensive, but badly organized ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... of planting the little trees, the following suggestions may prove of value. As soon as the plants are received, they should be taken from the box and dipped in a thick puddle of water and loam. The roots must be thoroughly covered with the mud. Then the bundles into which the little trees are tied should be loosened and the trees placed in a trench dug on a slant. The dirt should be placed ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison

... They came to a puddle in the road where there was a dance of butterflies. Cicely clapped her hands with glee. A goldfinch dipped across the path like a little yellow streak of laughter in the sun. "Oh, Nick, ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett

... made of stones wrested from the ground; in Mayo, the walls are piled sod—mud cabins. Roofing these western homes is the "skin o' th' soil" or sod with the grass roots in it. Through the homemade roofs or barrel chimneys the wet Atlantic winds often pour streams of water that puddle on the earthen floors. At one end of the cabin is a smoky dent that indicates the fireplace; and at the other there may be a stall or two. The small, deep-set windows are, as a rule, "fixed." Rural slums ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell

... Zeb, and Judson were to dig the holes, putting the surface dirt to the right, and the poor earth to the left; I was to prune the roots and keep tab on the labels; Johnson and Anderson were to set the trees,—Anderson using a shovel and Johnson his hands, feet, and eyes; while Thompson was to puddle and distribute the trees. The puddling was easily done. We sawed an oil barrel in halves, placed these halves on a stone boat, filled them two-thirds full of water, and added a lot of fine clay. Into this thin mud the roots of each tree were ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... Ground and marched to Chocques—the irrepressible Drums giving us one or two tunes on the way. It rained hard at the Station and there was a terrible shortage of accommodation. At length, with much shoving, swearing and puddle-splashing we got on board, and at 4-0 a.m. left the Bethune Area. We had been on the Lens-La Bassee Sector for seventeen months: we never ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills

... he said. "He was planted by mistake and now he has stood and grown big. He shelters the ground from the wind and shades it from the sun, so there is always a big puddle under him, long after the rest of the avenue ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald

... themselves upon the fronts of buildings As the windows light up. But the lemon cubes are edged with angles Upon which they cannot impinge. Up, straight, down, straight—square. Crumpled grey-white papers Blow along the side-walks, Contorted, horrible, Without curves. A horse steps in a puddle, And white, glaring water spurts up In stiff, outflaring lines, Like the rattling stems of reeds. The city is heraldic with angles, A sombre escutcheon of argent and sable And countercoloured bends of ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell

... it is like a torrent; they have been hardly able to cross it in the long boat ... Spring, ah!... Well, I shall certainly have to clean out my double-barrelled gun to-day." With a business-like air he spat into a puddle and vigorously ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak

... I am walking along a country road deeply engaged in meditation, and that I come to a puddle of water in my pathway. I may turn aside and avoid the obstruction without my attention being called to it, and without interruption of my train of thought. The act has been automatic. In this case the nerve current has passed from the ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts

... the top of the hole was just a puddle of mud, he stopped the water and dropped the hose, and the men scattered a little dark-colored dirt that was dry over ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins

... are ensconced in the docks, where their masts make an intricate forest for miles up and down the Liverpool shore. The small black steamers, whizzing industriously along, many of them crowded with passengers, snake up the chief life of the scene. The Mersey has the color of a mud-puddle, and no atmospheric effect, as far as I have seen, ever gives ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... melted and run into any mould, its texture is granular, and it is so brittle as to be quite unreliable for any use requiring much tensile strength. The process of puddling consisted in stirring the molten iron run out in a puddle, and had the effect of so changing its atomic arrangement as to render the process of rolling it more efficacious. The process of boiling is considered an improvement upon this. The boiling-furnace is an oven heated to an intense heat by a fire urged with a blast. The cast-iron ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various

... Snowball cautiously opened an eye and peeped around. Peace! And her deliverer again lapping at the puddle of blue milk that was spreading from the overturned saucer across the broken flagstones. He saw the timid glance and moved a little to one side with a gesture ...
— The Book of the Cat • Mabel Humphrey and Elizabeth Fearne Bonsall

... housewife, before the shower is ended, letting the rain-drops gutter down her visage; while her children (an impish progeny of cavernous recesses below the common sphere of humanity) swarm into the daylight and attain all that they know of personal purification in the nearest mud-puddle. It might almost make a man doubt the existence of his own soul, to observe how Nature has flung these little wretches into the street and left them there, so evidently regarding them as nothing worth, and how all mankind acquiesce in the great mother's estimate of her offspring. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... The road for sixteen miles was lined with stragglers. The new men bore the march badly. Rain fell yesterday afternoon and during the night; I awoke at three o'clock this morning to find myself lying in a puddle of water. A soldier of Captain Rossman's company was wrestling with another, and being thrown, died almost instantly from the ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... around, he ran abroad, Of every puddle drinking. The house with rage he scratch'd and gnaw'd, In vain,—he fast was Sinking; Full many an anguish'd bound he gave, Nothing the hapless brute could save, As if his ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... thirsty. Her lips were parched, her throat dry, nothing having passed them since early tea the previous afternoon, and she was at the lowest ebb of despondency and depression. Her surroundings helped to increase her misery, for the ground was a mixture of puddle and slush, and there seemed no chance of help anywhere. She seemed to have fallen into a deep crater, and but for a projection of roof that still held firm owing to a network of pipal roots, she would have been ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... be a success in Parliament. He'll play a big part; he won't puddle about. I meant there was a risk in letting Carnac run the business ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... to the side of the house, to come upon Gill and his companions, who were engaged in leaping across a puddle near a pit in the hillside. He marched right up to the culprit, the little fellow he had befriended trailing ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster

... with her at one time," said old Timothy Tangs. "But Mr. Melbury won her. She was a child of a woman, and would cry like rain if so be he huffed her. Whenever she and her husband came to a puddle in their walks together he'd take her up like a half-penny doll and put her over without dirting her a speck. And if he keeps the daughter so long at boarding-school, he'll make her as nesh as her mother was. But ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... their light. And if a sudden southern blast The sea in rolling waves doth cast, That angry element doth boil, And from the deep with stormy coil Spews up the sands, which in short space Scatter, and puddle his curl'd face. Then those calm waters, which but now Stood clear as heaven's unclouded brow, And like transparent glass did lie Open to ev'ry searcher's eye, Look foully stirr'd and—though desir'd— Resist the sight, because ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan

... complex problem, involving choice between half-a-mile's walk to a doubtful pool or a canteen full (about a pint and a half) of water obtained from a muddy puddle in the roadway. The latter method requiring a minimum of physical exertion was by far the more popular and each tin of valued water underwent utilisation to its very extreme limits, i.e., until reduced to ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq

... also feel this. With understanding alone you cannot go far, and you must desire, and desire so that a big mountain should seem to you but a hillock, and the sea but a puddle. Eh! When I was of your age I had an easy life, while you are only taking aim. But then, good fruit does ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... were spread for the Countess have been rolled away, and our three humble friends pick their steps as best they may among the dirt-heaps, occasionally slipping into a puddle—I am afraid Avice now and then walks into it deliberately for the fun of the splash!—and following the road taken by the Countess as far as the Bull Gate, they then turn to the left, leaving the frowning Castle on their right, and begin to descend ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt

... did this equipage roll, At a town they call Hod'sdon, the sign of the Bull, Near a nymph with an urn that divides the highway, And into a puddle throws ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins

... certain, when you get back, for puffing them so. They were prosperous cities, too, in their day; but they have gone the way of all flesh. Cities, my friend, die, just like men; stranger still, so do rivers! Inachus is gone from Argos—not a puddle left. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... thought the Hoojers had a very clean, blue, pretty river," said Dotty, thoughtfully; "it looks some like a mud-puddle. Perhaps it carried off too much ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May

... had your ain time o't, Mr Syddall; but ilka bean has its black, and ilka path has its puddle; and it will just set you henceforth to sit at the board end, as weel as it ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop

... conscience, it is a well-harnessed conscience and always wears blinkers. It shies a good deal at gnats, I own; but it can run in double-harness with a camel, if worldly considerations render such a course desirable. It is like a horse we once had, which always shied violently at every puddle, but went past a steamroller without ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... girl, and things went wrong in school, I used to save up my cryin' until I got home. I'm the same now. This Development Company milk is spilled, and, whether any of it can be saved or not, there is no use callin' a crowd to look at the puddle. If your cousin thinks it's necessary to tell other Boston folks, I presume he will, but WE won't ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... had fallen from her shaking hand to the floor. How stupid of her! She was on her knees in an instant, confused, apologetic, mopping up the puddle with a towel. ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... clean them. The next day the same thing occurred, and again and again, till, at last, the gentleman suspected that the bootblack had taught the dog this trick, in order by that means to get customers. He watched, and saw, when he approached the bridge, Master Poodle go and roll himself in a mud puddle, and then come and rub himself against his boots. The gentleman accused the bootblack of the trick. After a while the man ...
— What the Animals Do and Say • Eliza Lee Follen

... last day the sun hath burned; That the green water in the tanks Is to a putrid puddle turned; And the canal that from the stream Of Samarcand is brought this way Wastes and runs thinner every day. "'Now I at nightfall had gone forth Alone; and, in a darksome place Under some mulberry-trees, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... corner before them, waited Clematis, roguishly lying in a mud-puddle in the gutter. He had run through alleys parallel to their course—and in the face of such demoniac cunning the wretched William despaired of evading his society. Indeed, there was nothing to do but to give up, and so the trio proceeded, with ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington

... into the puddle between his feet, and winked at the squire. "It would go dead ag'in' your chances down at Calhoun's, major, if Dave gets that proputty," he said gravely. "Old Tony Calhoun is a full-blood Yankee. He'll never give his daughter to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... entrance, Gervaise had to jump over a wide puddle that had drained from the dye shop. The puddle was blue now, the deep blue of a summer sky. The reflections from the night light of the concierge sparkled in ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... the ware in the Hughes cabin was of light-metal; Murray and his father had mined it in the dead city up the river, from a place where it had floated to the top of a puddle of slag, back when the city had been blasted, at the end of the Old Times. It had been hard work, but the stuff had been easy to carry down to where they had hidden their boat, and, for once, they'd had no trouble with the ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire

... times, but also the greatest heart, was that possessed by this Warwickshire poet. As a man thinketh in his heart so he is. As Shakspere was, so he wrote. This crystalline wholesome water dashing over this rocky cliff did not have its origin in yonder pool. Pure water does not flow from a mud-puddle. Here is a man who in twenty years writes in round numbers forty productions—the task of Hercules. The product of the man attests the nobility of his soul. No man can labor for twenty years without putting his stamp upon his ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... might as well drink of the river Styx as the river Thames, 'Stygio monstrum conforme paludi,' a monstrous drink, thickened by the decomposition of dead Christians and dead brutes, and purified by the odoriferous introduction of gas water and puddle water, joined to a pleasant and healthy amalgamation of all the impurities of the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... gone for ten days, oh, delectable one! Hold up your near forefoot and I'll impress the fact upon it, warty toad of a dried mud-puddle." Deesa took a tent-peg and banged Moti Guj ten times on the nails. Moti Guj grunted and shuffled from ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... river, which, at Harper's Ferry, presents as striking a vista among the hills as a painter could desire to see. But a beautiful landscape is a luxury, and luxuries are thrown away amid discomfort; and when we alighted into the tenacious mud and almost fathomless puddle, on the hither side of the Ferry, (the ultimate point to which the cars proceeded, since the railroad bridge had been destroyed by the Rebels,) I cannot remember that any very rapturous emotions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Ranch. I was a sight, in that weather-stained old suit and ragged toppers, even before I got freckled and splashed with prairie-mud. I was standing up in the stirrups laughing at Francois, who'd had a bad slip and fallen in a puddle just back of our old corral, when her Ladyship came out. She must have taken me for a drunken cowboy who'd rolled into a sheep-dip, for my nose was red and my old Stetson sombrero was crooked on the back of my head and even my hair was caked with mud. She called to me, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... him up out of the puddle of black blood in which he was lying, and his head dropped back over my arm as though it had been fixed to his body with string alone. There was neither heart-beat nor breath in him, and the last flicker of life faded out of that gaunt face even as I watched. ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... could imagine in the sullen little cellar so called. They also showed me the rostrum where the Roman orators addressed the mass-meetings of the republican times, and they showed me the lake, or the puddle left of it, into which Curtius (or one of three heroes of the name) leaped at an earlier day as a specific for the pestilence which the medical science of the period had failed to control. In our stroll about the place ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... injuring the smaller boys and girls in the school that none of them loved him. If he got hurt, none of them pitied him. The whole school seemed glad, one day, when he had shoved a little girl into a mud-puddle, and upset an inkstand on a boy's writing-book, and spoiled it, to see the master give him a severe whipping,—such ...
— Charles Duran - Or, The Career of a Bad Boy • The Author of The Waldos

... declared Jane, as her eye roamed towards the half-dried mortar-bed just beyond the foundation trench. "Wait a second." She skipped across the small chasm which intervened between the foundation-wall and solid ground. She scooped up some water from a hallow puddle with a battered tin can, and began the formation of an oozy little pocket in the middle of the mortar-bed. "Now if I only had a shingle," she said, after she had reduced the mortar ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... back from their blanched faces Into their quivering hearts, with unknown dread, As that accuser pointed to the shape Before his feet. "Dogs, will ye lap his blood Before ye die? Make haste; for it grows cold! Ye will not, will not even dabble your hands In that red puddle of flesh, what? Are ye Spaniards? Come, come, I'll look at you, perchance there's one That's but a demi-devil and holds you back." And with the word Drake stepped among their ranks And read each face among the swarthy crew— ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... whitened walls? So we will walk in the road, and being good-tempered today, will not indulge in violent invectives upon the round-topped little pebbles which form the pavement; but, should we by chance step into a puddle which has no manner of means of running out of our way, we will look with complacency at our dirtied boots, and trip smilingly on. Yes, trip is the word, for I defy the solemnest pedestrian in Christendom to keep a measured pace upon ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie

... road, and whilst you are manoeuvring to escape a cart you see coming towards you, "Gare" is bawled out with stunning roar; you look round and find the pole of a coach within an inch of your shoulder, you scramble out of the way as fast as you can through mud and puddle, and are glad to clap your back against a house to make room for some lumbering vehicle, where the naves of the wheels stick out with menacing effect, happy to congratulate yourself that there is just room enough for it to pass without jamming you quite flat, and that you are ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve

... boy; but rather wet, from a puddle I've fallen into," he answered. "So those confounded rascals have been playing us a trick all the time. However, it's better thus than we expected, and it proves that they are not as ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston

... disturbed now, and the wild beast was back at his claim, knee-deep, and busy among the digging and the wetness, in another pair of overalls just like the ones that were now under some stones at the bottom of a mud-puddle. And then one very bad long scream came up to the ditches, and Drylyn knew the women ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... dark and muddy. The children stumbled a little on the rough road, and once Phyllis absently fell into a puddle, and was picked up damp and unhappy. There were no gas-lamps on the road, and the road was uphill. The cart went at a foot's pace, and they followed the gritty crunch of its wheels. As their eyes got used to the darkness, ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit

... plant your garden with a crop of Giant Regrets. He says these are excellent for sauce. He encourages one of his correspondents with the statement that he "never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and rolled through a mud puddle; he comes out honor bright ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... worn out. She was only rags to begin with, and now she's nothing, since Pete Smith tossed her in the mud-puddle." ...
— Harper's Young People, December 16, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... alive at a neighbouring village. "Your last prince," said he, "is reported to have died of apoplexy, but well you know he died of drink; and of your aldermen one perished miserably last month dead drunk, suffocated in a puddle. Your children's backs go bare that you may fill your bellies with that which makes you the worst of beasts, silly as calves, yet fierce as boars; and drives your families to need, and your souls to hell. I tell ye your town, ay, and your very ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... hind'ring justice or maintaining; To many a whore gave priviledge, 585 And whipp'd for want of quarteridge: Cart-loads of bawds to prison sent For b'ing behind a fortnight's rent And many a trusty pimp and croney To Puddle-dock for want of money; 590 Engag'd the constable to seize All those that would not break the peace, Nor give him back his own foul words, Though sometimes Commoners or Lords, And kept 'em prisoners of course, 595 For being ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... will be granted them, which they hoped for; and that the Bishop of London hath taken good care that places are supplied with very good and able men, which is the only thing that will keep all quiet. I took him in the tavern at Puddle dock, but neither he nor I drank any of the wine we called for, but left it, and so after discourse parted, and Mr. Townsend not being at home I went to my brother's, and there heard how his love matter proceeded, which do not displease me, and so by water to White Hall ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... commune. And the Belgian journal wound up with a few stinging comments on the great City of Paris, thus torn by civil war when the enemy was at its gates. Was it not the presage of approaching decomposition, the puddle of blood and mire that was to engulf ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... time for reason. His brain seemed to have jumped over a hurdle and come down in a puddle beyond, foul with the stuff it had found there. He heard Ellen shriek, and then ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey

... eating jerked meat and salmon berries on the run, and snatching winks of sleep between. Of course, he'd get desperate at times and turn. Then I'd head for soft ground where the creek spread out, and lay anathema upon him and his ancestry, and dare him to come on. But he was too wise to bog in a mud puddle. Once he pinned me in against the walls, and I crawled back into a deep crevice and waited. Whenever he felt for me with his trunk, I'd belt him with the hand-axe till he pulled out, shrieking fit to split my ear drums, he was ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London

... ever see. The moon made it just like daylight, only a heap softer; and once we see a lion standing all alone by himself, just all alone on the earth, it seemed like, and his shadder laid on the sand by him like a puddle of ink. That's the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... followed his instructions, and went into Meridie, and turned to the left when he had come to the great puddle where the adders and toads are reared, and so passed through the mists of Tartarus, with due care of the wild lightning, and took the second turn to his left—"always in seeking Heaven be guided by your heart," had been the advice given him by devils,—and ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... some new law, but turning an abrupt corner, he followed the wandering attention of his audience—'from the point of view of the artist,' he repeated, 'it would be interesting to know what the phenomenon is, that Lady John took for a precipice and that Miss Levering says is a mud-puddle.' ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... table, with bumpers of wine before them, bawling, singing, cursing, and cracking lewd jests at the expense of each prisoner as he entered. The place was in a litter. A lamp had been smashed, and there was a puddle of wine on the floor from a bottle that had been knocked over. On a bench against the wall were ranged a number of prisoners, others lay huddled on the floor, and all ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... Experiences," a famed book in its day too, also on "National Pride," and became "famed throughout the universe"; attended Frederick the Great on his deathbed, and wrote an unwise book about him, "a poor puddle of calumnies and credulities" (1728-1795). For insight into the man and his ways see ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... therefore I will drop lightly into history myself. Standing here on the shore of the Atlantic, and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, I am reminded of a thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when I had just succeeded in stirring up a little Nevadian literary puddle myself, whose spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly California-ward. I started an inspection tramp through the southern mines of California. I was callow and conceited, and I resolved to try the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... the excommunicated one, is living in the Hotel, and with an American woman! the old prejudices against him were aroused, the old enemies were astirring. The priests held up their hands in horror; the women wagged their long tongues in the puddle of scandal; and the most fanatical shrieked out, execrating, vituperating, threatening even the respectable Shakib, who persists in befriending this muleteer's son. Excommunicated, he now comes with this Americaniyah (American woman) to corrupt the community. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... was angry with her and did not want to see her. Perhaps some one had been telling lies to him, and made him mad, and there was a fight, and a knife—she could see him lying on the floor of a tavern, in a little red puddle, with white face and staring eyes, cold and reproachful. Would he ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... in the nearest puddle; The solace this, whereof he's most assured: And when upon his rump the leeches hang and fuddle, He'll be of spirits and of ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... is it?" he asked, with a jerk of his thumb toward a cloud of blue-and-yellow butterflies drifting over a shining puddle—"five miles as the crow flies, and ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... followed the dragoons and brought my regiment within the barricado which they had gained, a musket bullet struck my horse just in the head, and that so effectually that he fell down as dead as a stone all at once. The fall plunged me into a puddle of water and daubed me; and my man having brought me another horse and cleaned me a little, I was just getting up, when another bullet struck me on my left hand, which I had just clapped on the horse's main to lift myself into the saddle. The blow broke one of my fingers, and bruised my hand very ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe

... give over fishing in that puddle, this sminute. I'll give you such a slepping, you see ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... you can no more paint with a square brush than you can with a knife. Some of you could not paint though your palettes were set with Nature's own sunset colors. And others of you, if you had a rabbit's scut at the end of a hop-pole and the gray mud from a rain puddle, would produce work worth considering. You are a community of painters—some clever, some hopeless—but you are not a school, and you ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... the side and carried a portion of the bank with it. Puddles of water and black mud filled the little hollows everywhere. Into one of these I stepped as we were eagerly searching for a trace of the lost boy. My foot stuck to something soft like a garment in the puddle. I kicked it out, and a jet button shone in the ooze. I stooped and lifted the grimy thing. ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter

... you are privileged with, beyond the brute beasts,—to have spirits within you capable of knowing and acknowledging the God of your spirits. Why then do you both rob and spoil God of his glory, and cast away your own excellency? Why do you love to trample on your ornaments and wallow in the puddle; like beasts void of religion, but so much worse than beasts, that you ought to be better, and were created for a more noble design? O base spirited wretches, who hang down your souls to this earth, and ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... living in their palaces, and driving their coaches and sixes, or the good old Virginia gentlemen in the Assembly drinking their twenty and forty bowls of rack punches, and madeira and claret, in lieu of a knot of deputy sheriffs and hack attorneys, each with his cruet of whiskey before him, and puddle of ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... an unfortunate choice of punishment, for his words carried a suggestion to Bob. Mail and express was still being unloaded, and beside the track was a large puddle of oily, dirty water apparently from a leaky pipe, for there were no indications ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson

... ridge is well supplied with clean, soft running water, even in the driest of the season. There are no marshes, swamps, or bogs, no still water—not even a "puddle" for long—for the soil is of such a character, that surface water quickly filters away into the sands and mingles with the streams in the gulfs. Springs of mineral water are abundant everywhere. Probably ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various

... Answer is of a kind to put a gag in the foul mouth of certain extraordinary Pamphleteerings, that were once very copious in the world; and, in particular, to set at rest the Herr Dr. Zimmermann, and his poor puddle of calumnies and credulities, got together in that weak pursuit of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle

... and Gervaise recognized Claude and Etienne. As soon as they saw her they ran toward her, splashing through the puddle's, their untied shoes half off and Claude, the eldest, dragging his ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... the faucet of the water-cooler and let the ice water run all over the floor," explained Janet with a laugh. "Mother's feet were in the puddle of water before we ...
— The Curlytops and Their Playmates - or Jolly Times Through the Holidays • Howard R. Garis

... sleeper's rest and ease disturbed and broken, whereof the first feeling and stinging smart admonisheth that he must patiently endure great pain and trouble, and thereunto provide some remedy; as when we say proverbially, to incense hornets, to move a stinking puddle, and to awake a sleeping lion, instead of these more usual expressions, and of a more familiar and plain meaning, to provoke angry persons, to make a thing the worse by meddling with it, and to irritate a testy choleric man when he is at quiet. On the other part, to ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... desirable to screen from mosquitoes, but to put oil on any body of water where they breed. Even a small puddle can breed millions of mosquitoes. No empty tin cans should be allowed to collect about the kitchen door; they gather rain-water and soon ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... Bradon forest, neer the rode which leadeth to Ashton Caynes, is a boggy place called the Gogges, where is a spring, or springs, rising up out of fuller's earth. This puddle in hot and dry weather is candid like a hoar frost; which to the tast seemes nitrous. I have seen this salt incrustation, even 14th September, four foot round the edges. With half a pound of this ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey

... as did the heart good to listen to. On Sundays, Ivan Ivanovitch, in his lambskin pelisse, and Ivan Nikiforovitch, in his cinnamon-coloured nankeen spencer, used to set out for church almost arm in arm; and if Ivan Ivanovitch, who had remarkably sharp eyes, was the first to catch sight of a puddle or any dirt in the street, which sometimes happened in Mirgorod, he always said to Ivan Nikiforovitch, "Look out! don't put your foot there, it's dirty." Ivan Nikiforovitch, on his side, exhibited the same touching tokens of friendship; and whenever he chanced to be standing, always ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... he evaded them, 'are visible in the sky on their way to us, but once they touch the earth they disappear and go out like a candle. Unless a chance puddle, or a pair of eyes happens to be about to catch them, you can't tell where they've gone to. They go really ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... famly was all ways hanging. There was so many of 'em that it was obliged to be done by relays. There was six rails and a stocking on each, and four small goosbry bushes, always covered with some bit of linning or other. The hall was a regular puddle: wet dabs of dishclouts flapped in your face; soapy smoking bits of flanning went nigh to choke you; and while you were looking up to prevent hanging yourself with the ropes which were strung across and about, slap came the ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... 'em do,' responded Mr. Protheroe, with profoundest gloom, which lightened suddenly into a smile as bright as sunshine. 'But some of 'em don't run at all. And some of 'em are as shallow as any puddle you'll find along the road, only they're so bemuddled you can't see to the bottom of 'em. You can plumb 'em with your little finger, though, if ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray

... disgraceful and barbarous crime against humanity; and the human mind is incapable of understanding how such savagery can be accounted for, except upon the theory that "He that nameth Rebellion nameth not a singular, or one only sin, as is theft, robbery, murder, and such like; but he nameth the whole puddle and sink of all sins against God and man; against his country, his countrymen, his children, his kinsfolk, his friends, and against all men universally; all sins against God and all men heaped together, nameth he that ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan

... enabled him to escape, and to requite them with the point of his less noisy, though more fatal weapon; and that so often, and so effectually, that the huge strength of his antagonist began to give way to fatigue, while the ground on which he stood became a puddle of blood. Yet, still unabated in courage and ire, the wild Boar of Ardennes fought on with as much mental energy as at first, and Quentin's victory seemed dubious and distant, when a female voice behind him called ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... wind chopped about to north-east; and off went rain and cloud, to be succeeded by a cold as cuttingly severe as any I ever encountered in the North. Before dark the mud was converted into solid ridges, and thick ice coated each astonished puddle. ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power

... of inestimable value? Could I, without knowing it, have deprived my king of the great prize for which he had searched so long, with such labor and pains? Of course I was certain of nothing, but I bowed before Alexander, and told him that I had found an insignificant little puddle at the place, that I had tasted it and found it was nothing but common water, and in quantity so small that it scarcely sufficed to quench my thirst. If he would consent to camp in the shade, and wait a few hours, water would trickle again into the little basin, ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton

... had rained the day before and in a hollow beside the path was a puddle several inches deep. Dan, Junior, lost his balance, staggered back, tripped over his own clumsy heels, and splashed ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... I was too old a traveller to quarrel with my guide under present circumstances. I therefore followed close to his crupper, our only light being the glow emitted from the Gipsy's cigar. At last he flung it from his mouth into a puddle, and we were then in darkness. We proceeded in this manner for a long time. The Gipsy was silent. I myself was equally so. The rain descended more and more. I sometimes thought I heard doleful noises, something like the hooting of owls. 'This is a strange night to be wandering ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... shirt; Lilacs drenched, Laburnums pallid; Spirits quenched, Souls squalid; Tennis "off," Icy breeze; Croak, cough, Wheeze, sneeze; Cramped cricket, Arctic squall; Drenched wicket, Soaked ball; Park a puddle. Row a slough; Muck, muddle, Slush, snow; Hay-fever (No hay!) Spoilt beaver, Shoes asplay; Lilies flopping, Washed-out roses; Eaves dropping, Red noses; Pools, splashes, Spouts, spirts; Swollen sashes. Gutters, squirts; Limp curls, Splashed hose; Pretty girls, Damp ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various

... who professed himself keen-set as a hunter, and washed down the viands with a tankard of cider. He described his bathe, and promised Dicky that he should have his first swimming lessons next summer. "I must talk about you to your Uncle Harry. Craze for the sea? At your age if he saw a puddle of water he must stick his toes in it. He's cruising just now, off South Carolina, keeping a look-out for guarda-costas. He'll render an account of them, you may be sure. He writes that he may be coming up Boston way any time now. Oh, I can ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... would insist on stopping in the middle of the roadway to argue the value and the sincerity of the friendship his comrades bore for him. Mortimer strove to pacify him, saying that he would stand in a puddle all night if by doing so he might prove that he loved him, and Dubois entreated him to believe him when he said that to sit with him under a cold September moon talking of the dear dead days would be a bliss that he could not forego. But the ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... truth, in the saying that second thoughts are best. Animals have no second thoughts; man alone is able to see his own thought double, as a drunkard sees a lamp-post; man alone is able to see his own thought upside down as one sees a house in a puddle. This duplication of mentality, as in a mirror, is (we repeat) the inmost thing of human philosophy. There is a mystical, even a monstrous truth, in the statement that two heads are better than one. But they ought both to grow on the ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... then he glanced over it at the purple plain of ocean which lay level and unruffled beyond. A great African moon glowed above it in the night, and the lonely vastness of it all gratified him like the presence of a friend. "You are a decent old puddle," he murmured to himself, "though I say it that's got precious little from you beyond mud and slashing. It's good to be back in reach of the stink ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... sunshine, down upon the loose dirt and gravel, officers and men sprawled to rest themselves. There was a very muddy creek or inset near, and thither went thousands, parched with thirst, to drink, not hesitatingly but gulping down copious draughts of water, tough and thick as from a clay puddle. I wandered with my horse a little way into the town, and ultimately down towards the main stream of the Nile, where the water was cleaner and cooler than by the halting-place. There were plenty of dervishes to be seen about, looking from ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... grumbled Teddy. "How do you suppose I know? This water looks like a big mud puddle. I'm hungry; ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington

... ripe, crush them, and mix them up with a little sandy loam, bury them in a hole 3 ft. deep, and cover with litter. Dig them up and sow them in March. Big bushes are best moved at the end of August, mixing the earth to a puddle before planting. The less pruning they receive the better. They may be ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink

... missus wants some o' they softy stones cut to build up in the yard, round a bit o' drain pipe, to make a puddle to keep fishes in." ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn

... spoil the road to Posilipo. What a heavenly drive! Although I think with more fondness of scaling the heights of Capri in a trembling little Italian cab, not because both views were not divinely beautiful, but because when in Capri my clothes were not damply sticking to me, and I had no puddle of water in each shoe. As I look back I believe I could write specific directions from personal experience on "How to be Happy when Miserable." Jimmie always bewails the fact that the American girl lives on her nerves. "Goes on her uppers" ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell

... mention a few Military Writers, who give great Entertainment to the Age, by reason that the Stupidity of their Heads is quickened by the Alacrity of their Hearts. This Constitution in a dull Fellow, gives Vigour to Nonsense, and makes the Puddle boil, which would otherwise stagnate. The British Prince, that Celebrated Poem, which was written in the Reign of King Charles the Second, and deservedly called by the Wits of that Age Incomparable, [7] was the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... held down the light and followed these same steps along the carpet clear into the room where the baby was; I hadn't gone across the threshold, remember, and yet the steps were all over the room, and a little puddle of water lay close agin the cradle—are ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens

... year. People had only just ceased to use sledges. The snow still lay in the cottage yards, but rivulets were flowing through the village; a big puddle had formed between the cottages, from the dung-heaps, and two little girls, from different cottages, met by this puddle—one younger, the other older. Both little girls had been dressed in new frocks ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... thought of "grinning for joy," in that poem, from my companion's remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon, and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me,—"You grinned like an idiot!" He had ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... standing at Lincoln Branch Barracks. The horse no doubt came in on a sort of byroad that led to Camp Barry, which turned north from the Branch Barracks towards the Bladensburg road. The sweat pouring from the animal had made a regular puddle on the ground. A sentinel at the hospital had stopped the horse. Lieutenant Toffey and Captain Lansing, of the 13th New York Cavalry, took the horse to the headquarters of the picket at the Old Capitol Prison, and from there to General E. O. C. Ord's headquarters. After reaching there, they discovered ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith

... his distance in the gallery, Till banish'd by some coxcomb's raillery; For 'twould his character expose, To bathe among the belles and beaux. So have I seen, within a pen, Young ducklings foster'd by a hen; But, when let out, they run and muddle, As instinct leads them, in a puddle; The sober hen, not born to swim, With mournful note clucks round the brim.[8] The Dean, with all his best endeavour, Gets not an heir, but gets a fever. A victim to the last essays Of vigour in declining days, He dies, and leaves his mourning mate (What could he ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... job for one to bring in!" said the tailor, in an excited tone of voice. "A pretty job, indeed! It looks as if it had been dragged through a duck puddle. ...
— Woman's Trials - or, Tales and Sketches from the Life around Us. • T. S. Arthur

... a lot of water!" sighed the man of the South. But it was much worse when the pebbly path abruptly ceased and he was forced to puddle along in the torrent or jump from rock to rock to save his gaiters. Then a shower joined in, penetrating, steady, and seeming to get colder the higher he went. When he stopped to recover breath he could hear nothing else than a vast ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet

... been in "the puddle of papistry." He loathes what he has left behind him, and it is natural to guess that, in his first years of priesthood, his religious nature slept; that he became a priest and notary merely that he ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang

... such? No; every party's tainted by their touch. Infected persons fly each public place; And none, or enemies alone, embrace: To the foul fiend their every passion's sold: They love, and hate, extempore, for gold: What image of their fury can we form? Dulness and rage, a puddle in a storm. Rest they in peace? If you are pleas'd to buy, To swell your sails, like Lapland winds, they fly: Write they with rage? The tempest quickly flags; A state Ulysses tames 'em with his bags; Let him be what he will, Turk, Pagan, Jew: For Christian ministers of state ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young

... a hundred yards farther on the road. It was something which moved with the wind like a wounded bird, fluttering from the roadside to a puddle and then back to the rushes. She advanced to it, missed it, ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan

... Elizabeth, smiling, 'I do not think that we ever intended to act on that maxim. But really, Anne, I do believe that if you had been a prim pattern of perfection, a real good little girl, a true Miss Jenny Meek, who never put her foot in a puddle, never tore her frock, never spoke above her breath, and never laughed louder than a sucking dove, I should never have cared two straws ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge

... word was sacred to him. He had the courage of a Welf, or Lion-Man; quietly royal in that respect at least. His sense of equity, of what was true and honorable in men and things, remained uneffaced to a respectable degree; and surely it had resisted much. Wilder puddle of muddy infatuations from without and from within, if we consider it well,—of irreconcilable incoherences, bottomless universal hypocrisies, solecisms bred with him and imposed on him,—few sons of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... not through terror of that puddle at the house door, which my handful of dust would dry ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor



Words linked to "Puddle" :   monkey, pack, rile, wade, work, ca-ca, wad, shape, pool, mess around, pee, eliminate, muddle, puddler, stool, compact, roil, monkey around, splosh, covering material, bundle, plash, topographic point, micturate, pee-pee, form, piss, tinker, putter, body of water, crap, take a shit, mold, pass water, shit, muck about, urinate, excrete, relieve oneself, make water, jumble, splatter, piddle, defecate, wee, wet, confuse, spot, potter, spatter, pass, plant, take a crap



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com