"Spate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Trenches and dug-outs were quite uninhabitable and a foot deep in water. Fortunately by this time it was dark, so we climbed out of the trenches and prepared to spend the night on the top, where the water was only lying in places. Then came down the water from the hills. The Azmac Dere came down in spate, washing away the Turkish and the Highland barricades, carrying horses, mules, and men, dead and alive, down with it. Peyton Avenue and South Lane were culs-de-sac and soon filled, and the overflow flooded our trenches. The ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... made and that was intended to rule and to resist her, foaming and frothing over the decks of the thing that carries human lives, we can understand much of the old pagan belief. If one has watched a river in spate, red as with blood, rushing triumphantly over all resistance, smashing down the trees that baulk it, sweeping away each poor, helpless thing, brute or human, that it encounters, dealing out ruin and death, and proceeding superbly on to carry ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... abends so spate. Not much it get, but my man can't earn nothing any more." And the woman, as she looked at him, wiped her eyes with the corner ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... burnie, 'wandering and winding,' and the 'wee birdies' foolishly and inconsequently singing with their feeble song drowned in the rush of the burn (no longer a burnie), 'roaring and reaming,' when the 'spate' is spreading desolation on every side. Don't you see how the picture would be spoilt, and the story of complete contrast left untold? I have taken advisedly an extreme and, therefore an unlikely case of halting imagination. But ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... torrent in spate? He must ford it or swim. Has the rain wrecked the road? He must climb by the cliff. Does the tempest cry 'halt'? What are tempests to him? The service admits not a 'but' or an 'if.' While the breath's in his mouth, he must bear ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... undergoing some change either of effect or of composition, even of subject, for the painter could never be satisfied with them. He felt that he lacked the power of expressing himself, and said to me: "These are not my pictures, I dream them differently;" whilst when he had seen Mr. Peter Graham's "Spate in the Highlands," he exclaimed: "This is one of my dream-pictures; I should like to have painted it." Entirely devoid of the false pride which prevents learning from others, he had written to Mr. Peter Graham about what he considered his failures, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... for she moved her apron corner to her eye. "Aweel, this was the nicht o' the wedding, bairn—no this nicht, like; but I think I just see it present, for I was there mysel, a wee bit whilking lassie. Lawson, guid godly Lawson, had tied the knot, an' we war a' merry like; but it was a fearfu' spate, and the Nith went frae bank to brae. 'They are comin!' was the cry. I kenna wha cried it, but a voice said it, an' twenty voices repeated it. Lag an' his troop's coming; they're gallopin owre the Cunning-holm at this moment. John Porter flew to his bonnet, an', in an instant, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... lapse into manly good-nature, And then—well your course would be run! No,—study up spleen's nomenclature; Learn all the mad logic of hate, And then, though your style be like skilly, Your sense frothy Styx in full spate. And your maxims portentously silly; You will find party scope for your pen, Coin meanness and malice to money; But sour dulness must keep to his den, And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... of fighting-men or the rows of thread on a loom. Here the allusion is to a weaver who levels and corrects his threads with the wooden spate and shuttle governing warp and weft and who makes them stand straight (behave aright). The "stirrup" (rikab) is the loop of cord in ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton |
