"The pits" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... They had never failed in such an undertaking. Their charge had always pierced the enemy's line. This had been their record during three years of warfare. But men can not accomplish impossibilities. Baffled by the swamp, cut by the merciless fire that blazed out from the pits, they are driven back, rally, re-form and charge the second and third time, and then retire to the position from which they had ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... surface of the ground. If worked much lower, it ceases to be good. It is brought up in square blocks, about nine feet wide, and two feet thick, by means of vertical wheels, placed at the mouths of the pits. When first dug from the quarry, its color is a pure and glossy white, and its texture very soft; but as it hardens it takes a browner hue, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... closer, and Baggs saw that he was old and incredibly worn; his skin clung in dry yellow patches to his skull, the temples were bony caverns, and the pits of his eyes blank shadows. He felt forward with a siccated hand, on which veins were twisted like blue worsted over fleshless tendons, gripped Harry Baggs' shoulder, and lowered ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... that wind, and every man of them was suffocated, so that not one survived to carry the tidings to their Lord. When the people of Hormos heard of this they went forth to bury the bodies lest they should breed a pestilence. But when they laid hold of them by the arms to drag them to the pits, the bodies proved to be so baked, as it were, by that tremendous heat, that the arms parted from the trunks, and in the end the people had to dig graves hard by each where it lay, and ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... power. I do not mean transmission in the ordinary sense by means of shafting, gearing, or belting, but I mean transmission over long distances. In 1831, we had for this purpose flat rods, as they were called, rods transmitting power from pumping engines for a considerable distance to the pits where the pumps were placed, and we had also the pneumatic, the exhaustion system—the invention of John Hague, a Yorkshire-man, my old master, to whom I was apprenticed—which mode of transmission was then used to a very considerable extent. The ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... little courting, and some cheating. Meynell recognized some of his parishioners, spoke to a farmer or two, exchanged greeting with a sub-agent of the miners' union, and gave some advice to a lad of his choir who had turned against the pits and come to "hire" himself ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... than the bed of Green River, and so far as a surveyor's level can be relied on, the same may be said of the Cavern Pit and some others." The rivers of the Cave were unknown at the time of Mr. Lee's visit in 1835, but they are unquestionably lower than the bottom of the pits, and receive the water which flows from them. According to the statement of Lee, the bed of these rivers is lower than the bed of Green River at its junction with the Ohio, taking for granted that the report of the State engineers as to the extent of fall between ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... lines of deep trenches, the bomb-proof shelters, and the wire entanglements with which the war correspondence of the winter has made us at home—on paper—so familiar. "The numerous woods and villages had been turned into veritable fortresses." The deep cellars in the villages, the pits and quarries of a chalk country, provided cover for machine guns and trench mortars. The dug-outs were often two storeys deep, "and connected by passages as much as thirty feet below the surface of the ground." Strong redoubts, mine-fields, concrete gun emplacements—everything ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... placed two batteries on my right and began to mass troops behind them, and General Gilbert, fearing that my intrenched position on the heights might be carried, directed me to withdraw Hescock and his supports and return them to the pits. My recall was opportune, for I had no sooner got back to my original line than the Confederates attacked me furiously, advancing almost to my intrenchments, notwithstanding that a large part of the ground ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... and launched themselves in a solid mass upon the two. Chet saw Anita for one instant as he felt himself lifted in air. About him was a pandemonium of flailing wings; ahead and below was the red of hidden fires. They were being lifted out and over the pits. ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... scattered along the river's bars, waist high in the pits. Here and there a tent showed white, but a blanket under a tree, a pile of pans by a blackened heap of fire marked most of the camps. Some of the gold-hunters had not waited to undo their packs which lay as they had ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... it was a comfort to know that they were considerably lighter than stone and cast iron. He felt a great respect for such persons of rank as professed to be supporters of the drama, trusting that they would keep the ceilings of the theatres from tumbling into the pits. He spent great part of his time in the Thames Tunnel, and if he ever felt a doubt respecting the ultimate success of that undertaking, he did justice to the enterprise and skill of its projector, that illustrious mole, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... side just at the opening of Thunder Bay, and immediately contiguous to the Grand Portage, where the canoe route to Rainy River, so late as our own century, started from Lake Superior. According to the American Geologists the traces for a mile are found of an old copper mine on this Island. One of the pits opened showed that the excavation had been made in the solid rock to the depth of nine feet, the walls being perfectly smooth. A vein of native copper eighteen inches thick was discovered at the bottom. Here is found ...
— The Mound Builders • George Bryce
... turned to her, just as if he had been sitting squarely in front of her. Some laughed at this foolish notion; but others, who knew more of the nebulous sciences, told her it was like's not jes' so. Folks had read letters laid ag'in' the pits o' their stomachs, 'n' why should n't they see out o' ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the opportunity was long in coming, and they grew elderly. At length the younger sister died, and so solved the problem of her future. The elder sister was left for two years more alone with her confectionery. Then she married a stranger who had come to one of the pits as gangsman. It was a sad falling off. But at all events the gangsman was a local preacher, and so the poor soul who took him for husband had effected a compromise with her cherished ideal. It turned put that he was a scoundrel as well, and had a wife ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... spread manure on the land and let it lie, as in such cases, much of the strength of the manure is lost. Young gardeners should be very careful in preparing and collecting manure, and also when they are moving it from the pits to the ground, they should take care ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... the Palatine their way led them past the slave pens at the lower end of Via Sacra, and shortly after they found themselves traveling a roadway on the Campagna. Here they often found it necessary to step aside to make passageway for carts loaded with Pozzolana sand. It was toward the pits from which this sand came the two were making their way and it was not until they had turned into deserted pitroad that they ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... name; and now he seemed to see the burning tents at Ludlow; the fleeing women and children, shot down by barbarous thugs and gunmen, ghouls in human form! He saw the pits of death, where the charred bodies of innocent victims of greed and heartless rapacity lay in mute protest under the far Colorado sky. And more he saw, east and west, north and south, of this man's inhuman work; ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... mentioned, except for the open vessels in the hardwoods, free resin ducts in the softwoods, and possibly the intercellular spaces, the cells of green wood are enclosed by membranes and the water must pass through the walls or the membranes of the pits. Heat appears to increase this transfusion, ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... charge came. Nothing could stop it. Down went man and horse, line upon line of them swept to death by the pitiless English arrows, but still more rushed on. They fell in the pits that had been dug; they died beneath the shafts and the hoofs of those that followed, but still they struggled on, shouting: "Philip and St. Denis!" and waving their golden banner, ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... in the dark for hours, waiting for a shot. Then our men took to the rifle-pits,—pits ten or twelve feet long by four or five feet deep, with the loose earth banked up a few inches high on the exposed sides. All the pits bore names, more or less felicitous, by which they were known to their transient tenants. One was called "The Pepper-Box," another "Uncle Sam's Well," another "The Reb-Trap," and another, I am constrained to say, was named ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... said Dinass, with a laugh; "you don't call this deep? Why, it's nothing to some of the pits out Saint ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... the pits where you are going you will have little use for pistols. When I again take you from those pits you will quickly learn why I brought you with me. Yaharigans, I have called you, and yaharigans you shall be—Earthly ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... nothing, absolutely nothing—just that seemingly endless stretch of sand, circled by the blazing sky, the wind sweeping its surface soundless, and hot, as though from the pits of hell; no stir, no motion, no movement of anything animate or inanimate to break the awful monotony. Death! it was death everywhere! his aching eyes rested on nothing but what was typical of death. ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... outbreaking doom! Up, brothers! away! a storm is nigh! Smite we the wing up a steeper sky! What matters the hail or the clashing winds, The thunder that buffets, the lightning that blinds! We know by the tempest we do not lie Dead in the pits of eternity! ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... attention of the Board to the pits about Brampton. The seams are so thin that several of them have only two feet headway to all the working. They are worked altogether by boys from eight to twelve years of age, on all-fours, with a dog ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... dimensions. If we pass an attentive lens between the two humps at the lower end, we very often see, encrusted in the earthy mass, the remains of the shell of the egg. This is the potter's mark. The arrangement of the spiral ridges, the number and the shape of the pits enable us almost to read the name of ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... course of conversation, therefore, he mentioned the shaft, on which he pretended to have come in his rambles. Remarking on the danger of such places, he learned that this one served for ventilation, and was still accessible below from other workings. Thereafter he begged permission to go down one of the pits, on pretext of examining the coal-strata, and having secured for his guide one of the most intelligent of those whose acquaintance he had made at the inn, persuaded him, partly by expressions of incredulity because of the distance between, to guide him to the ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... between capital and labour. Also he took endless pains to acquaint himself at first hand with the facts. 'In factories,' he said afterwards, 'I examined the mills, the machinery, the homes, and saw the workers and their work in all its details. In collieries I went down into the pits. In London I went into lodging-houses and thieves' haunts, and every filthy place. It gave me a power I could not otherwise have had.' And this was years before 'slumming' became fashionable and figured in the pages of Punch; it was no distraction ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Also, in summer, the pits are slack. Often, on bright sunny mornings, the men are seen trooping home again at ten, eleven, or twelve o'clock. No empty trucks stand at the pit-mouth. The women on the hillside look across as they shake the hearthrug against the fence, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... ashore with the pinnace, and having caused three pits to be dug he at last found fresh water forcing its way through the sand; we used our best endeavours to take in a stock of the same; about 400 paces north of the farthest of the pits that had been dug, they also found a small fresh-water lake, but the water that collected in the pits was found to be a good ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... spurring our horses forward, we in time found ourselves climbing the gentle acclivities which led up to Reno's old rifle-pits, now almost obliterated. The most noticeable feature of the spot is the number of blanched bones of horses which lie scattered about. A short distance from the pits—which are rather rounded, and follow the outline of the hills in shape—and in a slight hollow below them, are more bones of horses. This is where the wounded were taken, and the hospital established, and the horses kept. ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... prepare for a sporting excursion, and order a number of pits to be dug on the road sufficiently large to hold Rustem and his horse, and in each several swords must be placed with their points and edges upwards. The mouths of the pits must then be slightly covered over, but so carefully that there may be no appearance of the earth underneath having been removed. Everything being thus ready, Rustem, on the pretence of going to the sporting ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... themselves on the corpses, mouth to mouth and brow to brow; it was necessary to beat them in order to make them withdraw when the earth was being thrown in. They blackened their cheeks; they cut off their hair; they drew their own blood and poured it into the pits; they gashed themselves in imitation of the wounds that disfigured the dead. Roarings burst forth through the crashings of the cymbals. Some snatched off their amulets and spat upon them. The dying rolled in the bloody mire biting their mutilated fists in their rage; and forty-three Samnites, ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... a covered, open-sided, compost-making factory that sheltered shallow pits, each 30 feet long by 14 feet wide by 2 feet deep with sloping sides. The pits were sufficiently spaced to allow loaded carts to have access to all sides of any of them and a system of pipes brought water near every one. The materials to be composted were all stored adjacent to the factory. ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... ridge, a mile or so west of the town, Longstreet had been posted and he had dug trenches and gunpits. The crest of this ridge, called Marye's Hill, was bare, and here, in addition to the pits and trenches, Longstreet threw up breastworks. Down the slopes were ravines and much timber, making the whole position one of great strength. Harry gazed at it as he carried one of his messages from general to general, and he was enough of a soldier ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of visits from Bechuanas of strange tribes causes the Bakalahari to choose their residences far from water; and they not unfrequently hide their supplies by filling the pits with sand and making a fire over the spot. When they wish to draw water for use, the women come with twenty or thirty of their water-vessels in a bag or net on their backs. These water-vessels consist of ostrich ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... were respected. All the other bodies, together with the entrails or hearts, enclosed in separate urns, were thrown into large pits, lined with a coat of quick lime: they were then covered with the same substance; and the pits were afterwards filled up with earth. Most of them, as may be supposed, were in a state of complete putrescency; of some, the bones only remained, though a few ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... and carried ashore. The dauntless Steller faced the situation with judgment and courage. He acted as doctor, nurse, and hunter, and daily brought in meat for the hungry and furs to cover the dying. Five pits sheltered the castaways. When examined in 1885 the walls of the pits were still intact—three feet of solid peat. Clothing of sea-otter skins of priceless value, which afterwards proved a fortune to those who survived, and food of the flesh of the great sea-cow, saved a remnant of the wretched crew. During most of the month ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... seen sugar for a year. You see, it's like this: we were bottled up in the pits around the Tunnel for seven damn days. It was like nothing you ever saw before. Oops—sorry. Didn't mean to splash you. I was laughing about something that happened there—to a guy. Maybe you guys would ...
— Belly Laugh • Gordon Randall Garrett
... force to charge the archers on their left flank. The unsupported bowmen at once fell back in confusion, leaving the cavalry to do its work. Meanwhile the English men-at-arms were advancing in three "battles," the first of which then came into action. Many of the English fell into the pits prepared for them, and the Scottish shields and pikes broke the attack of those who evaded these obstacles. Gloucester fought with rare gallantry, but was badly seconded by his followers. At last his horse was slain under him, and he was knocked down and killed. The ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... with no more than 700 men, few of whom had seen action, no expectation of reinforcements, and surrounded by a multitude which increased in size by the moment, for the officer in charge of the detachment sent to the church tower told me that the roads leading to the town were full of miners from the pits of Jemmapes, heading for the town of Mons. My little troupe and I were at risk of being wiped out if I had not taken decisive action. My address had produced a marked effect among the rich noblemen, the promoters of this disturbance, and also among the townspeople, ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... ladders of bamboo, and the water in small pails; but in the rainy season the holes cannot possibly be kept free from water, as they are situated on the slope of the mountain, and are filled quicker than they can be emptied. The want of apparatus for discharging water also accounts for the fact that the pits are not ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... revolt. His influence grew, and he became the acknowledged leader of the strike which followed. The result was disastrous. After weeks of misery from cold and hunger the infuriated workmen attempted to destroy one of the pits, and were fired upon by soldiers sent to guard it. Many were killed, and the survivors, with their spirits crushed, returned to work. But worse was yet to come. Souvarine, an Anarchist, disgusted with the ineffectual struggle, ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... day may come for that, if the pits there be used up. Meg, have you ne'er noted that folks oftener come to trouble for want of their chief virtue ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... Urshot Mr. Skinner was hailed by a lime-burner from the pits over by Hankey and asked if he ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... at the collieries have been as troublesome and insubordinate as ever, seeming to think opposition to Lord St. Erme an assertion of their rights as free-born Englishmen; and at last, finding it impossible to do anything with them as long as they did not depend immediately upon himself, he took the pits into his own hands when Mr. Shoreham went away, a fortnight ago. It seems that Mr. Shoreham, knowing that he was going, had let everything fall into a most neglected state, and the overlookers brought reports to Albert that there were hardly any safety-lamps ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... diameter. One and a quarter million cubic feet of gas are manufactured at the works every day. Upwards of 1000 hands are employed. In the shale-pits adjoining, four hundred miners are regularly at work. The pits are conveniently near to the Addiewell Works, none of them being more than two miles off. A network of railway lines communicate with the various shale-pits, and five locomotives are regularly employed in ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... failure. Sort of a gentleman farmer had the notion he knew better than others, and tried it on year after year till he made a laughing-stock of himself. Anyhow, that's the tale. Mr. Bates has shown me the basis of the pits—built over now by the buildings you were looking at. Ah, ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... Now, he was in the pits of despondency, even as one that yieldeth without further struggle to the waves of tempest at midnight, when he was ware of one standing over him,—a woman, old, wrinkled, a very crone, with but room for the drawing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... love lofty marks. Learn, as I have done, to look down with scorn from the summit of indifference upon the feeble darts aimed from the pits beneath you. My child, don't suffer the senseless gossip of the ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... contains about 1500 souls. They are comparatively a fine race of people, and suffer from little but fever and an occasional ophthalmia. Their greatest hardship is the want of the pure element: the Hissi or well, is about four miles distant from the town, and all the pits within the walls supply brackish or bitter water, fit only for external use. This is probably the reason why vegetables are unknown, and why a horse, a mule, or even a dog, is not to ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... go on! Down with the enemy!" was the battle-cry, and no sooner were the pits gained, than the Union soldiers leaped over them and began the steep ascent of the mountain before them, the Confederates from the pits fleeing wildly in all directions, and a great number being ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... rounds governed only by the carrying power of the Mayther. Prester Kleig knew them all: the guns in the wings, the guns which fired through the three propellers, and the guns set two and two in the fuselage, to right and left of the pits, which could be fixed either up or down—all by the mere pressing of buttons. It was marvelous, miraculous, yet even as Kleig told himself that this was so, he felt, deep in the heart of him, that Moyen knew all about ships like these, and regarded ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... New-Year to civilized, people,—mere white folks. Our festival has come and gone, with perfect success, and our good General has been altogether satisfied. Last night the great fires were kept smouldering in the pits, and the beeves were cooked more or less, chiefly more,—during which time they had to be carefully watched, and the great spits turned by main force. Happy were the merry fellows who were permitted to sit up all night, and watch the glimmering flames that threw ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... Had he not chosen well His source of happiness? There are, who mix Pride and ambition with their services Before the altar. Did the tinkling bells Upon the garments of the Jewish priest Draw down his thoughts from God? The mitred brow, Doth it stoop low enough to find the souls That struggle in the pits of sin, and die? Methinks ambitious honors might disturb The man whose banner is the Cross of Christ, And earth's high places ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... than we were; it was said that they had received some cargoes of long Enfields—nine hundred yards' range, according to the marked sights, and no telling how far beyond—by blockade-runners. They could keep us down behind the pits while they would walk about as they chose, unless a shell from one of our batteries was flung at them, in which case they showed that they, too, had been studying the dodging lesson. Willis was greatly disgruntled over the fact that the rebels ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... new Lagrange pit, and though I was much struck by the neatness of his person and apparel, I was more struck by the general absence of anything like the griminess which we commonly associate with mines and mining among his fellows, whom I found still at work around the pits. M. Guary told me that this is a characteristic trait of the Anzin miners. In the buildings attached to each pit there is a large hall, called the miner's hall, where the men meet when they go down to and come up from their underworld. There each ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... or holes have been pecked in the rock as an aid in the more difficult places, and similar aids were often employed to afford access to storage and burial cists. Plate LVI shows a site in the lower part of the canyon where such means have been employed. The pits in the rock are so much worn by atmospheric erosion that the ascent now is very dangerous. The cove or ledge to which they lead is about halfway up the cliff, and on it are a number of cists, one of them still intact, ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... that deep place, and dug many pits in it, and in one of the pits he lay hidden with his sword drawn. There he waited, and presently the earth began to shake with the weight of the Dragon as he crawled to the water. And a cloud of venom flew before him as he snorted and roared, so that it would have been death ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... the direction of our march that they were taking me to Phutra. Once there I did not need much of an imagination to picture what my fate would be. It was the arena and a wild thag or fierce tarag for me—unless the Mahars elected to take me to the pits. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... chemise. Frau Hadebusch, pimp always, had rented the bed from a second-hand dealer; it covered a half of the room. Before Dorothea was a plate of cherries; she had been amusing herself by shooting the pits at her lover. He likewise was lacking nearly all the garments ordinarily worn by men when in the presence of women. He was sitting astride on a chair, smoking ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... arrangement is to dig the pits in a checkerboard plan, leaving alternate squares and placing a stake in each of them to form a wire entanglement, Fig. 16. One man can make 5 ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... ordure, indescribable; and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering foully here and there over all these,—remnants broadcast, of every manner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered bill, festering and flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... bow was drawn till the impetuous squadrons, in full charge toward the flanks of the Scots, fell into the pits; then it was that the Highland archers on the hill launched their arrows; the plunging horses were instantly overwhelmed by others who could not be checked in their career. New showers of darts rained upon them, and, sticking into their flesh, made them rear and roll upon their riders; while others, ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... was fading voyage by voyage. Only rarely was there time to go from the Tyne or the Wear or the Clyde to my home in London. Coal is shipped and ore discharged in the North. But even the North meant little to me beyond the staiths where the coal came down from the pits, and the dirty, rain-swept back streets where the shipping-offices were. Once or twice I tried to get quit of the ship and went inland by rail. I saw cathedrals and castles and temperance hotels. A bleak and unfriendly land! ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... conspicuous success, yet he had preserved a native sincerity and wrought under the guidance of an ideal. Like all men who are worth anything, either in public or private, he possessed a keen sense of humour, and was too awake to the ludicrous aspects of charlatanry to fall into the pits it offered on every band. His misfortune was the difficulty with which he uttered himself; even when he got over his nervousness, words came to him only in a rough-and-tumble fashion; he sputtered and fumed ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... been said, that opening the pock and taking out the matter has not abated the secondary fever; but as I had conceived, that the pits, or marks left after the small-pox, were owing to the acrimony of the matter beneath the hard scabs, which not being able to exhale eroded the skin, and produced ulcers, I directed the faces of two patients in the confluent ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... arts, its luxuries, its individuality, all that was seen then and that shall never again be seen, and then the hand of man rolls boulders, the desert heaps up sand, the waters of the stream deposit mud upon the forgotten entrance to the necropolis. The pits are filled up, the subterranean passages are effaced, the tombs sink and disappear under the dust of empires. A thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand years pass by, and a lucky stroke of the pick reveals a whole ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... yards deep, blown into and under each other till the top of the hill is split apart. No man can now tell which of all these mines were sunk by our men. The quarry runs irregularly in heaps and hollows of chalk and red earth mingled like flesh and blood. On our side of the pits the marks of our occupation are plain. There in several places, as at La Boisselle and on the Beaucourt spur, our men have built up the parapet of our old front line by thousands of sandbags till it ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... is made of two clays — one a reddish-brown mineral dug from pits several feet deep on the hillside, shown in Pl. LXXXII, and the other a bluish mineral gathered from a shallow basin situated on the hillside nearer the river than the pits, and in which a little water stands much of ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... freshly embrowned; Born, no doubt, like insects which breed on The very fruit they are meant to feed on. {360} For the earth—not a use to which they don't turn it, The ore that grows in the mountain's womb, Or the sand in the pits like a honeycomb, They sift and soften it, bake it and burn it— Whether they weld you, for instance, a snaffle With side-bars never a brute can baffle; Or a lock that's a puzzle of wards within wards; Or, if your colt's ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... baby-songs, and the English songs, and the Scotch songs she poured forth without stint, for she sang more for them than for her baby. No wonder they adored her. She was so bright, so gay, she brought light with her when she went into the camp, into the pits—for she went down to see the men work—or into a sick miner's shack; and many a man, lonely and sick for home or wife, or baby or mother, found in that back room cheer and comfort and courage, and to many a poor broken wretch that room ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... soft. The sledges would sink to the depth of the cross-bars. Traveling was slow, and the dogs became demons; at one time, sullen and stubborn; then wildly excited and savage; and in our handling of them I fear we became fiendlike ourselves. Frequently we would have to lift them bodily from the pits of snow, and snow-filled fissures they had fallen into, and I am now sorry to say that we did not do it gently. The dogs, feeling the additional strain, refused to make the slightest effort when spoken ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... what a chance there's in Barbie! It has been a dead town for twenty year, and twenty to the end o't. A verra little would buy the hauf o't. But property 'ull rise in value like a puddock stool at dark, serr, if the pits come round it! It will that. If I was only sure o' your suspeecion, Weelyum, I'd invest every bawbee I have in't. You're going home the ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... pocket. What a selfish beast, to be sure, must this same Peter Westcott, be, for here he was wishing—yes, almost wishing—that Stephen's happiness had not come to him. Always at the back of everything there had been the thought of Stephen Brant. Let all the pits in the world gape and yawn, there was one person in the world to whom Peter was precious. Now—in America—with a wife... some of the sunlight had gone out of the air and Peter's heart was suddenly cold with ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... see that there had once been considerable excavations, but the good layers were now deeply covered by talus, and could only be exposed after much digging. It was about thirty years since the pits had been worked. Dr. Bacmeister found for us a strong country youth, Max Deschle, who dug under our direction all next day in the quarry near the house. The rock is not so easy to work as that at Florissant, and it does not split so well into slabs, but we readily found a number of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... think we had better take our shovels and dig the pits for the water, and then we shall know by to-morrow morning whether the water is good ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... warmth, however, may be proven by the fact that when a warm rain comes some night in February or March, thawing out the crust of the earth, the next morning reveals in our dooryards the mouths of hundreds of the pits or burrows of these primitive tillers of the soil, each surrounded by a little pile of pellets, the castings of the active artisans of the pits during ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... June, 1834. They erected huts on shore for the whalers. The 'Henry' was wrecked; but the whales were plentiful, and yielded more oil than the casks would hold, so the men dug clay pits on shore, and poured the oil into them. The oil from forty-five whales was put into the pits, but the clay absorbed every spoonful of it, and nothing but bones was gained from so much slaughter. Before the 'Elizabeth' left Portland Bay, the Hentys, the first permanent settlers in Victoria, arrived in the schooner ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... destination? However, all remained quiet throughout our progress, and at last we arrived at the entrance to the gun position, which was to be our home for the next fortnight. The guns were speedily unlimbered and man-handled into the pits awaiting their reception, the ammunition was unloaded from the vehicles, and the teams were returned to ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... Roebuck was in financial straits. His pits had been much troubled by water, which no existing machinery could pump out. He had hoped that the new engine would prove successful and sufficiently powerful in time to avert the drowning of the pits, but this hope had failed. His embarrassments were so pressing that he was unable to pay the cost of the engine patent, according to agreement, and Watt had to borrow the money for this from that never-failing ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... so. They were down in the pits mixing the mortar, were the women. They were carrying great pails of it. They were hauling bricks up one ladder and down. They wore short, full skirts with a musical-comedy-chorus effect. Some of them looked seventy and some seventeen. It was fearful work for a woman. A ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... the Neighbourhood of Camps, and have in a particular Manner mentioned the Necessity of burying such putrid Substances. Dr. Pringle has very justly recommended the Digging of Deep Pits for Privies in Camp, and covering the Excrements with Earth daily[142] till the Pits are near full, and then to fill them up with Earth, and dig new ones; and to punish every Person who shall ease himself any where in Camp but in the Privies: And he remarks, that when the Camp begins to ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... spires of the good old market town—and had made for himself an archetypal home-farm, and had built himself a hunting-box, with stables and kennels of the most perfect kind; and this estate, with the Queen Anne house, and the pits, and the mine, was his very own to dispose of as ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... the pits increased in size. At first they were about as large as a threepenny-piece, but ended by measuring ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... in Kiangsu province batteries of the large dye pits were seen sunk in the fields and lined with cement. These were six to eight feet in diameter and four to five feet deep. In one case observed there were nine pits in the set. Some of the pits were neatly sheltered beneath live arbors, as represented in Fig. 66. But much of this spinning, weaving, dyeing and printing of late years is being displaced by the cheaper calicos of foreign make and most of the dye pits we saw were not now used for this purpose, the two in ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... it is becoming the habit to go down the pits in rough home-spun, and reserving the top hat, morning coat and check trousers ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... answered it by setting to work patiently, in order to find out, first, all that could be learnt from native scholars, and afterwards to form his own opinion. His experience as a practical man, his judicial frame of mind, his freedom from literary vanity, kept him, here as elsewhere, from falling into the pits of learned pedantry. It will seem almost incredible to later generations that German and English scholars should have wasted so much of their time in trying to prove, either that we should take no notice whatever of the traditional interpretation of the Veda, or that, in following ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... East were full of gold mines, but the men who went into the pits to get gold did not live long, because of the foul air. The gold sand was given to women to wash the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... 1859. ) On my way through Rouen, I stated my convictions on this subject to M. George Pouchet, who immediately betook himself to St. Acheul, commissioned by the municipality of Rouen, and did not quit the pits till he had seen one of the hatchets extracted from gravel in its natural position.* (* "Actes du Musee d'Histoire Naturelle de Rouen" ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... the stalks and leaves to them, the latter being carefully doubled over and lapped round the heads, instead of hanging them up in sheds or other places, as is the usual practice in preserving them. In performing the work, it is begun at one end of the pits, laying the heads in with the root-stalks uppermost, so as that the former may incline downwards, the roots of the one layer covering the tops or heads of the other, until the whole is completed. The pits are then ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... engaged in a pastime resembling a complicated dance, and so absorbed were they on that occasion that they took no notice of me when I walked up to within nine or ten yards of them, and stood still to watch the performance. They were all swiftly racing about and leaping over the pits, always doubling quickly back when the limit of the mound was reached, and although apparently carried away with excitement, and crossing each other's tracks at all angles, and this so rapidly and with so many changes of direction that I became confused ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... One of the pits at Hurstbourne was evidently a cooking-hole, where the pit dwellers prepared their feasts, and bones of the Celtic ox (bos longifrons), pig, red deer, goat, dog, and hare or rabbit were found near it. One of the bones had evidently been bitten by teeth. ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... construction, many of which were made at the Coalbrookdale Works. The increasing demand for iron gave an impetus to coal-mining, which in its turn stimulated inventors in their improvement of the power of the steam-engine; for the coal could not be worked quickly and advantageously unless the pits could be kept clear of water. Thus one invention stimulates another; and when the steam-engine had been perfected by Watt, and enabled powerful-blowing apparatus to be worked by its agency, we shall find that the production of iron by means of pit-coal being rendered cheap and expeditious, ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... Perlerinos. Indeed, to say the truth, the damsel is like any oriental pearl, and looked at on the right side seems a very flower of the field; but on the left not quite so fair, for on that side she wants an eye, which she lost by the small-pox; and though the pits in her face are many and deep, her admirers say they are not pits but graves wherein the hearts of her lovers are buried. So clean and delicate, too, is she, that to prevent defiling her face, she carries her nose so hooked up that it seems to ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the kings of the five towns had concentrated their troops in the vale of Siddim, and were there resolutely awaiting Kudur-lagamar. They were, however, completely routed, some of the fugitives being swallowed up in the pits of bitumen with which the soil abounded, while others with difficulty reached the mountains. Kudur-lagamar sacked Sodom and Gomorrah, re-established his dominion on all sides, and returned laden with booty, Hebrew tradition adding that he was overtaken ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Tees possess but six square miles out of the 96, as far as we at present know. Turning, however, to that part of the coal-field regarded as precarious, and consisting of first, second, and third-rate household coal, we have for future use 300 square miles. London was formerly supplied from the pits east of Tyne Bridge, where is the famous Wallsend Colliery, which gave the name to the best coal. That mine is now drowned out, and, like the great Roman Wall, at the termination of which it was sunk, and from which it derived its name, is now an antiquity. There is now no Wallsend coal, ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... do little or no harm. There are a great many things man may do that only make nature show her beauty the more. I have been thinking a good deal about it lately: it is the rubbish that makes all the difficulty—the refuse of the mills and the pits and the iron-works and the potteries that does ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... what point, or with what success, was as yet unknown. Reports soon came in. The enemy had first driven in the pickets in front of Fort Sanders, and had then attacked our line which was also obliged to fall back. The Rebels in our front, however, did not advance beyond the pits which our men had just vacated, and a new line was at once established by Captain Buffum, our brigade officer of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... in hot countries; but they sent hundreds of hunters into the woods for many miles around. These bold fellows drove the deer, bears, wolves, and the aurochs within an ever narrowing circle towards the pits. Into these, dug deep in the ground and covered with branches and leaves, the animals fell down and were hauled out with ropes. The deer were kept for their meat, but the bears and wolves were shut up, ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... been much used, was evident from the piles of shells, and the pits in which, as I was informed, sweet potatoes used to be kept as a reserve. As there was no water on these hills, the defenders could never have anticipated a long siege, but only a hurried attack for plunder, against which the successive terraces would have afforded good protection. The general ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... of store to be cleaned, when the weevil begins to damage it. When this is apparent the grain should be laid out in the sun and bowls of water placed nearby and the weevil will swarm on this water and drown themselves. Those who store their grain in the pits which are called silos should not attempt to bring out the grain for some time after the silo has been opened because there is danger of suffocation in entering a recently opened silo. The corn which, during ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... from which it is separated by a strait only a mile broad. Its length is 100 miles, its breadth 60. A remarkable bed of coal runs horizontally, at from 6 to 8 feet only, below the surface through a large portion of the island: a fire was once accidentally kindled in one of the pits, which is now continually burning. Cape Breton has been termed the Key to Canada and is the principal protection, through the fine harbor of Louisburg, of all ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... them on the tundra as food for beasts of prey, with weapons, sledges, and household articles. They have perhaps begun to abandon the old custom of burning the dead, since the hunting has fallen off so that the supply of blubber for burning has diminished. I have before described the pits filled with burned bones which Dr. Stuxberg found on the 9th September, 1878, by the bank of a dried-up rivulet. We took them for graves, but not having seen any more at our winter station, we began to ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... less. A pretentious and horrible engine; drawn by four horses; only two of them being ponies impaired the symmetry and majestic beauty of the pageant. Old Joe drove the wheelers; his boy rode the leaders, and every now and then got off and kicked them in the pits of their stomachs, or pierced them with hedge-stakes, to rouse their mettle. Thus encouraged and stimulated, they effected an average of four miles and a half per hour, notwithstanding the snow, and reached Bolton just in time. At the lodge, Francis got out, and lay in ambush,—but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... of a Vale in the Moon; what call'd by Hevelius and Ricciolus, and how describ'd by them: with what substances the hills of the Moon may be cover'd. A description of the pits of the Moon, and a conjecture at their cause: two Experiments that make it probable, that of the surface of boyl'd Alabaster dust seeming the most likely to be resembled by eruptions of vapours out of the body of the Moon: that Earthquakes seem to be generated much the same way, and their ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... and navy, this inexhaustible source of production and riches, impress me by their appearance of comfort and good-humor. It gladdens one's heart to watch them, as they walk arm in arm of an evening, singing in chorus, or fill the pits of the cheaper theatres, or sit down at fashionable caffes in their jackets, with a self-confidence and freedom of manner pleasant to behold. The play of free institutions is not counteracted here, thank God, by the despotism of conventionalities. No shadow of frigid respectability hangs ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... the valley the filling of the pits for reserve against need was in progress. Up and down the trails the men were hastening, bearing the kookas filled with the ripe fruit, large as Edam cheeses and pitted on the surface like a golf-ball. A breadfruit weighs ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... origin. Besides the annual fines due to the King and the feudal lords, and in addition to the general subsidies, such as the quit-rent and the tithes, these communities had to provide for the repair of the walls or ramparts, for the paving of the streets, the cleaning of the pits, the watch on the city gates, and the various ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... and label. Then take a little of the coarsest powder, wetting it to the consistency of cream, and spread on the glass, work as before (using short straight strokes 1-1/2 or 2 in.) until the holes in the glass left by the grain emery are ground out; next use the finer grades until the pits left by each coarser grade are ground out. When the two last grades are used shorten the strokes to less than 2 in. When done the glass should be semi-transparent, and ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... American eagle that stands with one foot upon the Alleghanies and the other upon the Rockies, whetting his beak upon the ice-capped mountains of Alaska, and covering half the Southern gulf with his tail, will cease to scream and sink into the pits of blackness of darkness amidst the shrieks of lost spirits that will forever echo and reecho through ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... much on account of the Makalaka strangers at the kraal as the Zulus. As a matter of fact, after the alarm was given late in the afternoon, as many of the Makalakas as could be communicated with had assembled here. Scouts had reported in the evening that the strangers were looting the corn from the pits, and only a couple of hours before Kondwana called a halt in the darkness, the fires that the Zulus had lighted were still to be seen burning brightly. Moreover, Kondwana had been very careful in preventing the huts being burnt, lest the Makalakas ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... shall have been properly washed, the contained reefs will present this wall-like appearance. The dimensions are ten feet long by the same height and half that thickness, and the slope shows an angle of 40. We passed onwards to the top of the ridge, winding among the pits and round holes sunk by the native miners in order to work the casing of the reef. One of these, carefully measured, showed 82 feet. About sixty yards to the north-north-east we reached the crest of what Mr. Ross calls 'Ponsonby ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... they were discussing the resolution passed by the Corporation regarding the main street, viz., that the inhabitants were to fill up the pits and ditches in the street, and that neither manure nor the dead bodies of domestic animals should be used for the purpose, but only broken tiles, etc., from ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... him, was lying upon his side with his face turned away from Ginsburg and his shrapnel helmet half on and half off his head. Ginsburg stooped, putting his hands under the pits of the captain's arms, and gave a heave. The burden of the body came against him as so much dead heft; a weight limp and unresponsive, the trunk sagging, ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... very few forms these tubes are joined by their sides to each other. In Fistulina the tubes are free from each other though standing closely side by side. In Merulius distinct tubes are not present, but the surface is more or less irregularly pitted, the pits being separated from each other by folds which anastomose, forming a network. These ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... obtained as forage for the horses largely exceeded expectations, for the peasants regarded the British as deliverers from their oppressors, and upon being assured by the sheik that they paid well for everything that they required, the pits that had escaped the French searchers were thrown open at once. General Hutchinson, on his return to carry out the siege of Alexandria to a conclusion, reported to Admiral Keith his very warm appreciation of the services that Lieutenant Blagrove had rendered him. Long before that time the admiral ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... on the embankment and from its height looked down upon the earth. A hundred yards away where the pits, holes, and mounds melted into the darkness of the night, a dim light was twinkling. Beyond it gleamed another light, beyond that a third, then a hundred paces away two red eyes glowed side by side— probably the windows of some hut—and a long series of such lights, growing continually ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... discouraged, who may upon some accident, be desirous, or forc'd to transplant trees, where the partial, or unequal ground does not afford sufficient room, or soil to make the pits equally capacious, (and so apt to nourish and entertain the roots, as where are no impediments), the worthy Mr. Brotherton (whom we shall have occasion to mention more than once in this treatise) speaking of the increase and improvement ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... metropolis of them, Caer Penselcoit, was reported in Somersetshire. Habitations sunk deep in the rock, with only a roof above ground. But the spade has cracked these archaeological theories like filberts, and has proved that the pits in the wolds were sunk after iron ore, or those in Somerset were burrowings for the extraction of chert. [Footnote: Atkinson, "Forty Years in a Moorland Parish." Lond. 1891, p. 161, et seq. Some pits are, however, not so dubious. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... I do not know. I know a little; a few scraps of fact about these pits round here, though about no others. Were I to go into a pit a hundred miles, even fifty miles off, I could tell you nothing certain about it; perhaps might make a dozen mistakes. But what I know, with tolerable certainty, about the pits round here, I ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... men from ambush and from train, Some troops of horse that lightly armed ride He sent to scour the woods and forests main, His pioneers their busy work applied To even the paths and make the highways plain, They filled the pits, and smoothed the rougher ground, And opened every ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... All your plotting has come to naught. Many times has my rage almost betrayed my secret; which none knew but my dear child Azalia. Her I could not long deceive. Let the guards drag from our sight these wretches whose fat carcasses are to make a banquet for the royal beasts in the pits beneath ...
— Bright-Wits, Prince of Mogadore • Burren Laughlin and L. L. Flood
... form divine,' in order to make fantastic playthings for the amusement of the noble-born. But history does not state that these deformities were inherited; certainly no race of monsters has resulted. The pits from small-pox are not inherited, though many successive generations must have been thus pitted by that disease before the beneficent discovery of the immortal Jenner. Children born with scars ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... scattered out, and while most of them hid behind the rock piles and bushes, a few started the antelope toward the mouth of the chute. As they ran by them, the people showed themselves and yelled, and the antelope ran down the chute and finally reached the pits, and falling into them were taken, when they were killed and divided among the hunters. Afterward, this was the common method of securing antelopes up to ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... there and ask me what about it, and haven't the sense to alter it? Couldn't you set up a proper Government to-morrow, if you liked? Couldn't you contrive that the pits belonged to you, instead of you belonging to the pits, like so many old pit-ponies that stop down till they are blind, and take to eating coal-slack for meadow-grass, not knowing the difference? If only you'd learn to think, I'd respect you. As you are, I can't, ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... of the pits in South Wales a system of fine sprays of water is in use, by which the water is ejected from pin-holes pricked in a series of pipes which are carried through the workings. A fine mist is thus caused where necessary, which ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... the spot in la Chaise where the pits in which countless numbers of Communists were buried are situated, stands a small marble cross, on whose pedestal are inscribed the words:—"To the memory of Arnold Dampierre and his wife, Minette, whose bodies rest near ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... heard that, where they dwelt in the pits; in earth and in stocks they hid them like badgers, in wood and in wilderness, in heath and in fen, so that well nigh no man might find any Briton, except they were in castle, or in burgh inclosed ...
— Brut • Layamon
... her cerements—erased her plague-marks. The dead-cart's dreadful bell no longer sounded in the silence of an afflicted city. Coffins no longer stood at every other door; the pits at Finsbury, in Tothill Fields, at Islington, were all filled up and trampled down; and the grass was beginning to grow over the forgotten dead. The Judges came back to Westminster. London was alive again—alive and healed; basking in ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and, they were eating them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked up stray bits of bread the size of peas, apple cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these things these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them, and swallowed them; ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... overwhelmed with despair. I, therefore, repeat my resolves (about mending my conduct). I pray you to protect me like sages that do not accept gifts protecting the poor. Sinful wights abstaining from sacrifices never attain to heaven.[439] Leaving (this world), they have to pass their time in the pits of hell like Pullindas and Khasas.[440] Ignorant that I am, give me wisdom like a learned preceptor to his pupil or like a sire to his son. Be gratified ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... be eaten one by one, and the pits allowed to fall noiselessly into the half-closed hand and then ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green
... cattle brought hither in the Endeavour. A careful person being found to conduct them, the timber-carriage was now, instead of men, drawn by six or eight stout oxen; and all the timber which was wanted for building, or other purposes, was brought to the pits by them, both here and at Parramatta. This was some saving of men, but eight people were still ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... concealment of an appendage specifically, in Rhynchophora, grooves at the sides of the rostrum to receive the scape of antenna 2: also applied to grooves on the sides of mandibles: in Hymenoptera, the usually circular impressions upon the frons, in which the scapes revolve: in Orthoptera, the pits in which ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... wull pe a pad thing when it's a wee pit pisness sic as this. Yer honour wull joost be takin' the pits o' things in ta bothy, an' her nainsel' wull gang awa' an' no say naething aboot it ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... moisture promotes decomposition. The bottom of the pit is perforated and the water impregnated with the dust from the bones is filtered through charcoal and becomes thoroughly disinfected before it is allowed to pass through a sewer into the bay. The pits are the receptacles of the dust of generations, and I am told that so much of it is drained off by the rainfall, as described, that they have never been filled. The carriers are not allowed to leave the grounds, and when a man engages in that occupation he must retire forever from the world, ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... to the river by the same path on two successive nights, they become so apprehensive of danger from this human art. An old elephant will walk in advance of the herd, and uncover the pits with his trunk, that the others may see the openings and tread on firm ground. Female elephants are generally the victims: more timid by nature than the males, and very motherly in their anxiety for their calves, they carry their trunks up, trying every breeze ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... in the other parts of the castle. Ten of the pits had been cleared of their burden to appease the first cravings of the appetite of the hunters. The fires had been replenished, the gridirons again covered, and such a supply kept up as should not only ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... fired from very close quarters, but even its possession made the guerrillas stronger than the people of the country and undoubtedly had much to do with securing their cooeperation, not only as bolomen but also in the digging of the pits which were placed in the trails and also set about the towns. These were required to be constructed by the local authorities. In the bottom was set a sharp spike of bamboo, sometimes poisoned; and the pit was covered ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... Firing by pickets commenced very early, and quite heavy, at 5.40 A.M. Terrific cannonading to the seaward was heard between 9 and 10 A.M. As there was some talk of the enemy making a sortie, all eyes were open. Dirt began falling in the pits from the jar, bells could be heard tolling in the city, and steam whistles in the harbor. There was much speculation as to what was in progress. I'll say that there were many glad hearts when the news reached us that Sampson's fleet was King of the Seas. At 12 M. ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward |
