"Tract" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... continent lies before us, stretched out from the remotest shore of Tartary quite to the Atlantic Ocean. A line drawn through this extent, from east to west, would pass over the greatest body of unbroken land that is anywhere known upon the globe. This tract, in a course of some degrees to the northward, is not interrupted by any sea; neither are the mountains so disposed as to form any considerable obstacle to hostile incursions. Originally it was all inhabited ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... by hand; Wilhelmina satirically says), Tourist Zollner can discern with pleasure "a considerable Brook,"—visible, not audible, smooth Stream, or chain of meres and lakelets, flowing languidly northward towards Kopenik. Inaudible big Brook or Stream; which, we perceive, drains a slightly hollowed Tract; too shallow to be called valley,—of several miles in width, of several yards in depth;—Tract with wood here and there on it, and signs of grass and culture, welcome after what you have passed. On the foreground close to you is the Hamlet of Konigs-Wusterhausen, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... being composed of pea-vines, clover, nettles, cane and briery berry bushes. I would not stop to camp until I could reach a tract free from the stuff. As a result it was nearly sunset by the time we halted in a mixed growth of hickory, ironwood and ash on the banks of a tiny creek. Here we could pick a path that left no signs. We rested a bit and then followed the creek toward ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... round the Abbey, I will tell you how it came to be built at all. To get at the very beginning, we shall have to go back to a time long before Edward the Confessor sat watching his workmen—to the days when London was a Roman city, and when the site of modern Westminster was a marshy tract of ground, crossed by various streams and channels. At that time the river Thames and one of these channels enclosed an island about a quarter of a mile long and somewhat less in breadth. It was a marshy wilderness, and had the character of being "a terrible place," and amongst ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the ground, it comes up in the lines in which it was sown, parted from one another and distinctly showing their separation and the furrows. But when the full corn in the ear waves on the autumn plain, all the lines and separations have disappeared, and there is one unbroken tract of sunny fruitfulness. And so when the life in Christ is low and feeble, His servants may be separated and drawn up in rigid lines of denominations, and churches, and sects; but as they grow the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... Worcesters, and the London Scottish, by all the splendid valour of that "thin red line," French and English, cavalry and infantry, which in the first Battle of Ypres withstood an enemy four times as strong, saved France, and thereby England, and thereby Europe. In that tract of ground over which we are looking lie more than 100,000 graves, English and French; and to it the hearts of two great nations will turn for all time. Then if you try to pierce the northern haze, beyond that ruined tower, you may follow ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... millions and a half of residents enclosed by the legal ring-fence of the County are supplemented by two millions more who live in groups of suburbs included within the wide limits of "Greater London"; while even beyond that large tract of southeastern England, with its six millions and a half of inhabitants, are many towns and villages, populous and increasing, which are concerned with the question of Metropolitan locomotion. [Footnote: The Fortnightly Review, ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... it certainly was until General Jackson closed Bayou Manchac—is a narrow, irregular, flat tract of forest, swamp, city, prairie and sea-marsh, lying east and west, with the Mississippi, trending southeastward, for its southern boundary, and for its northern, a parallel and contiguous chain of alternate lakes and bayous, opening into ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... dear sir," Mr. Bjornerud exclaimed, "I don't see how you managed to go beyond your father's preserves. You know he bought of me the whole forest tract, adjoining his own on the south, about three months ago. So you were perfectly within your rights; for your father hasn't killed an elk on his land for ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... curious child, who dwelt upon a tract Of inland ground, applying to his ear The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell: To which, in silence hushed, his very soul Listened intensely, and his countenance soon Brightened with joy; for from within were heard Murmurings whereby the ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... of the Fair Dodhead has many charms for lovers of the Border. The swift and simple stanzas carry us through a great tract of country, which remains not unlike what it was in the days when Scotts, Armstrongs, and Elliots rode the hills in jack and knapscap, with sword and lance. The song leads us first, with a foraging party of English riders, from Bewcastle, ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... the barn was the clearing—a tract of twenty or thirty acres of land, from which Mr. Brent had cut and burned the trees. On this clearing the stumps stood thick as the hair on an angry dog's back; but the hard-working farmer ploughed between ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... reason, a military reason, why [we have managed to hold out so long]. The fact that our commandos have been spread over so large a tract of country has compelled the British, up to the present time, to divide their forces. But things have changed now; we have had to abandon district after district, and must now operate on a far more limited territory. In other words, the British Army can at last concentrate its ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... the road grew desolate. There were a few patches of corn, a few squalid-looking log or frame houses, a tract of horrible dreary blackness; and still more horrible, beyond it was a region of spectres—trees white and stripped bare, lifting their dead arms like things blasted. Averil cried out in indignant ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... remarkable, that at the Tete de Gravelenes, and where the town is naturally the weakest, they have expended the most money; so that the outworks stretch a great way into the campaign, and consequently occupy a large tract of ground—However, after all that is said and done, it must be acknowledged that Calais was never upon any account so considerable from itself, as from its situation, and that easy entrance which it gave our ancestors, upon all occasions, ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... Warrington of a sow's back. Everything about McQuade suggested strength and tensity of purpose. He had begun work on a canal-boat. He had carried shovel and pick. From boss on a railway section job he had become a brakeman. He took a turn at lumbering, bought a tract of chestnuts and made a good penny in railroad ties. He saved every dollar above his expenses. He bought a small interest in a contracting firm, and presently he became its head. There was ebb and tide to his fortunes but he hung on. A lighting contract made him a rich man. Then he drifted into ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... from the nature of its situation — We now crossed the water of Leven, which, though nothing near so considerable as the Clyde, is much more transparent, pastoral, and delightful. This charming stream is the outlet of Lough-Lomond, and through a tract of four miles pursues its winding course, murmuring over a bed of pebbles, till it joins the Frith at Dunbritton. A very little above its source, on the lake, stands the house of Cameron, belonging to Mr Smollett, so embosomed in an oak wood, that we did not see ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... the outer settlement on the west side of Maine. A "squire" from England gave it his name. He bought the tract, named it, inhabited several years, a popular squire-arch, and then returned from the wild to the tame, from pine woods and stumpy fields to the elm-planted hedge-rows and shaven lawns of placid England. The local gossip did not reveal any ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Haupt's Zeitschrift fuer deutsches Alterthum, v. 472. The idea of a northern myth will of course excite the alarm of all sensible, patriotic Englishmen, (e.g. Mr. Hunter, at page 3 of his tract,) and the bare suggestion of Woden will be received, in the same quarters, with an explosion of scorn. And yet we find the famous shot of Elgill, one of the mythical personages of the Scandinavians, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the Minister of Austria-Hungary which was intended to 'pay out' Italy for her talks with Russia, it is not Austria that would have raised the question. Our Government have given Germany, so far as they could give, a vast tract in Africa in which British subjects had traded, but in most of which no German had ever been. They have also given Germany Heligoland, which they might have sold dear, and which, if Mr. Gladstone had given, they would have destroyed him for giving.... ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... the valley of the Haine, a belt of sand gives rise to a tract of rough uncultivated land which is in many places covered with woods. On its southern boundary the ground rises steeply on the east, and more gently on the west, to the Franco-Belgian frontier, over a rocky subsoil in which the affluents of the ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... done by certain words, and any one can do it, that can but utter the Charm words. Then they thrust a stick into it, and set it either at the Door or hole the Thief went out at. Then one holds the stick with the Nut at the end of it, and the Nut pursues and follows in the Tract that the Thief went. All the way it is going they still continue Charming, and flinging the Blossoms of the Betel-nut-Tree upon it. And at last it will lead to the house or place where the Thief is, and run upon his Feet. This Nut ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... privilege to either nation, and chooses its instruments indifferently from all, in the course of a few generations identity of situation often produces harmony of feeling, and the different races come to feel towards each other as fellow-countrymen, particularly if they are dispersed over the same tract of country. But if the era of aspiration to free government arrives before this fusion has been effected, the opportunity has gone by for effecting it. From that time, if the unreconciled nationalities are geographically separate, ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... I should have long since up stakes and rolled before this sweeping tide of new settlers, only I can't bar to leave this tract 'yer; no, stranger, I can't bar to ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... This proved to be a project for an expedition against Mexico, and the establishment there of an Empire which was to include the States west of the Alleghanies; subsidiary to this, and connected with it, was a plan for the colonization of a large tract of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... absence. When those in the Danish camp observed how the Dalesmen shot their arrows across the stream, Bishop Beldenacke is said to have inquired of the Swedish lords present—to use the words of the chronicles—"how great a force the tract above the Long Wood (the forest on the boundary between Westmanland and Dalecarlia) could furnish at the utmost?" Answer was made to him, full twenty thousand men. Yet further he asked where so many mouths might obtain sustenance? To this it was replied that the people were not ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... enemy's capital, the possession of which is of more importance in France than in other countries. On the way thither the hostile forces were to be driven as persistently as possible back from the fertile southern states into the narrower tract on the north. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... which crowns it. The land on which the College is built is a part of the farm which the late Charles Tufts received by way of inheritance; and, when asked by his relatives what he would do with the bleak hill over in Medford, he replied, "I will put a light on it." The tract of land originally given by Mr. Tufts consisted of twenty acres. Subsequently he gave his pledge to add other valuable tracts adjoining. This pledge has been fulfilled, so that the plot of ground, belonging to the College, given by Mr. Tufts, embraces ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... good and great man, I was as familiar as if I myself had invented that ingenious and instructive tale; I could lisp the moral numbers of Watts and the didactic hymns of Wesley, and the annual reports of the American Tract Society had already revealed to me the sphere of usefulness in which my grandmother hoped I would ultimately figure with discretion and zeal. And yet my heart was free; wholly untouched of that gentle yet deathless passion which was to become my delight, my inspiration, ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... views, "meteors arising from the exhalations of the earth, and blending with the higher ether," expresses himself, however, generally with much caution. He says: "Stell¾ cadentes sunt materia viscida inflammata. Earum aliqu¾ inter cadendum absumuntur, aliqu¾ ver in terram cadunt, pondere suo tract¾. Nec est dissimile vero, quasdam conglobatas esse ex materia f¾culent, in ipsam auram ¾theream immixta: exque atheris regione, tractu rectilineo, per arem trajicere, ceu minutos competas, occult causa motus utrorumque." — Kepler, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... consisted of various lots attached to larger estates, and it turned out that in order to acquire my one plot it would have been necessary to buy out a large number of different owners. I put the difficulties of my case before Wesendonck, and gradually created in him a desire to purchase this wide tract of land, and lay out a fine site containing a large villa for his own family. The idea was that I should also have a plot there. However, the demands made upon my friend in regard to the preliminaries and to the building of his house, which was to be on a scale both generous ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... of ladies at home. I see them fuddle themselves on fine wines and talk like cooks, play heavily and lose, and win, and pay, and drink, and maintain a conservative position in politics, denouncing "Uncle Tom's Cabin," as a false and fanatical tract; and declaring that our peculiar institutions are our own affair, and that John Bull had better keep his eyes at home to look into his coal mines. I see this vigorous fermentation subside, and much clear character deposited—and, also, much life ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... part of Germany which they occupied. And here comes a remarkable and unexpected fact. The line of coast between the Rhine and Elbe, the line which in reasoning a priori, we should fix upon as the most likely tract for the bold seamen who wrested so large an island as Great Britain from its original occupants (changing it from Britain to England), to have proceeded from, is not the country of the Anglo-Saxons. On the contrary, it is the country of a similar but different section of ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... King was making his way down there. But his purpose soon became plain even to her; he was keeping high on the ridges, going about the head of the ravine which lower down cut like a knife across the timbered tract, headed for what he took to be Gus Ingle's cave. A mile away she saw it; a great, ragged, black hole in a high mass of rock, close to the crest of the ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... lands, in part by forcing the subdivision of large private holdings before they can get water from Government irrigation works. The law requires that no right to the use of water for land in private ownership shall be sold for a tract exceeding 160 acres to any one land owner. This provision has excited active and powerful hostility, but the success of the law itself depends on the wise and firm enforcement of it. We cannot afford to substitute tenants for freeholders on ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... or had not been created, yet that country would appear to us fully peopled. With respect to original creation or production of new forms, I have said that isolation appears the chief element. Hence, with respect to terrestrial productions, a tract of country, which had oftenest within the late geological periods subsided and been converted into islands, and reunited, I should expect to ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... given to a tract of sand hillocks extending along the sea-shore from Leith to Portobello, and which at this time were covered with whin-bushes ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... around, toward evening they came to a stony and desolate tract east of the great main valley. There the boy saw another outlying stock farm under him. The people and the cattle had arrived. The men were splitting wood, and the dairymaids ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... trod her soil; and of these the earlier are at once the more authentic and the nobler. Not a few have a character of the sublime; many are pathetic; some have a profound meaning under a strange disguise; but their predominant character is their brightness and gladsomeness. A large tract of Irish history is dark: but the time of Saint Patrick, and the three centuries which succeeded it, were her time of joy. That chronicle is a song of gratitude and hope, as befits the story of a nation's conversion to Christianity, and in it ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... drifted northward, and discovered Franz Josef Land, whence Payer endeavored to push forward to the north with sledges, reaching 82 deg. 5' north latitude on an island, which he named Crown-Prince Rudolf's Land. To the north of this he thought he could see an extensive tract of land, lying in about 83 deg. north latitude, which he called Petermann's Land. Franz Josef Land was afterwards twice visited by the English traveller Leigh Smith in 1880 and 1881-82; and it is here that the English Jackson-Harmsworth expedition ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Painters, together with The Seven Lamps of Architecture and the tract on Pre-Raphaelitism, bore the author's name and Rossetti's in Mr. Ruskin's autograph. There was a fine copy in ten volumes of Violet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire de l'Architecture, and also of the Biographie ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... may not be suitable for that purpose, the said tribes hereby agree, that a fort may be built, either on the upper side of the Ouisconsin, or on the right bank of the Mississippi, as the one or the other may be found most convenient; and a tract of land not exceeding two miles square, shall be given for that purpose; and the said tribes do further agree, that they will at all times, allow to traders and other persons travelling through their country, under the authority of the United States, a free and safe passage for themselves ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... is a faculty unknown to us. To give another illustration of the means by which I conceive it possible that the direction of migrations have been determined. Elk and reindeer in N. America annually cross, as if they could marvellously smell or see at the distance of a hundred miles, a wide tract of absolute desert, to arrive at certain islands where there is a scanty supply of food; the changes of temperature, which geology proclaims, render it probable that this desert tract formerly supported some vegetation, and thus these quadrupeds ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... the trial of 1609, a fact which has aroused natural suspicions. This is the true explanation of the discrepancies between the plot letter cited in Sprot's impeachment, and in the Government pamphlet on his case; and the similar, though not identical, letter produced in 1609. The indictment and the tract published by Government contain merely Sprot's recollections of the epistle from Logan to Gowrie. The letter (IV) produced in 1609 is the genuine letter of Logan, or so Sprot seems, falsely, to swear. This document did not come into the hands of Government till after the Indictment, ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... principle, and the secret of which I discovered, during a trance-condition which lasted for several months, to arise from a subtle magnetism, to which, owing to my peculiar organic condition, I was especially sensitive, and which penetrated the mahatma region from a tract of country almost immediately contiguous to it in the Karakorum Mountains, which was as jealously guarded from foreign intrusion as our own, and which was occupied by the "Thibetan Sisters," a body of female occultists of whom the ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... women.—The dress of the Indian females is regulated, of course, by the nature of the climate. The Southern Indians, by which I mean those occupying the tract of country which is now parcelled out into the States of Louisiana, Florida, Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, at the period of its first settlement by the whites, wore cloaks of the bark of the mulberry tree, or of the feathers of swans, turkeys, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... fatality or other, it has generally happened that they have poured forth their loudest and deepest lamentations at the periods of our most abundant prosperity. Very early in my public life I had occasion to make myself a little acquainted with their natural history. My first political tract in the collection which a friend has made of my publications is an answer to a very gloomy picture of the state of the nation, which was thought to have been drawn by a statesman of some eminence in his time. That was no more than the common spleen of disappointed ambition: ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... many a spot in India sacrosanct for all time; and to no tract perhaps have such traditions clung with greater tenacity than to the western littoral which in the dawn of the centuries watched the traders of the ancient world sail down from the horizon to barter in ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... lab'ring into birth. At close of day the sullen sky held forth Unerring signals. With disastrous glare, The moon's full orb rose crimson'd o'er with blood; And lo! athwart the gloom a falling star Trails a long tract of fire!—What daring step Sounds on the flinty rock? Stand there; what, ho! Speak, ere thou dar'st advance. Unfold thy purpose: Who ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy
... evening to exchange congratulations. He, as well as Mildred and Mark, was interested in the lost will; for Mr. Kinloch had mentioned the fact of the unsettled boundary-line, and directed his executors to make a clear title of the disputed tract to the blacksmith. The shop was his; the boys, at all events, would be undisturbed. One provision in the will greatly excited Mark's curiosity. The notes which he owed to the estate were to be cancelled, and there was an unexplained reference to his uncle Hardwick and to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... I can supply I. E. with another example of the application of this name to a place. A few miles east or south-east of Exeter, on the borders of a waste tract of down extending from Woodbury towards the sea, there is a village which is spelt on the ordnance map, and is commonly called, Greendale. In strictness there are, I believe, two Greendales, an upper and a lower Greendale. A small stream, ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... it necessary for them to secure very large plantations, for they could not be content with a tract of territory sufficiently large to keep busy their force of laborers. They must look forward to the time when their fields would become useless, and if they were wise they would secure ten times more than they could put into cultivation at once. If they failed to do this they ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... foliage which fringed the high tract of land, it was possible to march off at a smart pace without need of taking particular heed to our steps, and we travelled rapidly until having arrived at a point midway between our starting-place and the ruins ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... appearance was upon a most memorable occasion, when Moses and Aaron, armed with miraculous powers, came to a subsequent king of Egypt, to demand from him that their countrymen might be permitted to depart to another tract of the world. They produced a miracle as the evidence of their divine mission: and the king, who was also named Pharoah, "called before him the wise men and the sorcerers of Egypt, who with their enchantments did ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... mate echoed it and with the stream at their back they were off and away in full cry. The trail was broad and strong and with rare breaks continued so for an hour. Often the dogs made us trot; in open grounds we galloped. Once, in a thickety wet tract where the still air was suffocating and a sluggish runlet meandered widely, Hardy was forced, after long hinderance, to drop the trail and recover it on ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... set off again through the forest, at a more moderate pace now, for the way ran no longer clear. The word "forest" to a stay-at-home means a tract of soft, springy turf, with tall trees and pleasant glades and clumps of bracken that shelter rabbits and other small creatures of the woodland. But the forest of the West Indies bears to our English forest the relation of a giant to a dwarf. The ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... to see it without difficulty. Elverston was situated some distance from the coast, within the borders of the New Forest. They were laughing and talking merrily together as they made their way along an uncultivated tract, covered with heather and occasional clumps of trees, here and there paths crossing the main road, ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... batteries of artillery. It was in a measure necessary that this organization should be adopted, from the fact that for some months, each brigade commander was entrusted with supervision and defense of a large tract of territory, and it was impossible to dispense with either of the three arms. Divisions were not organized until late in the fall of 1861—the strength of the brigades was then, to some extent, equalized by the reduction of the larger ones; Army Corps were ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... a distance from the shore, yet commanding a fine view of the sea, was a cottage of larger dimensions, and of neater appearance than the generality of the fishermen's dwellings. It was built on an irregular tract of land, that sloped down to the shore, and behind it rose a ragged hill, in summer partially covered with coarse grass, that concealed its jagged rocks, and lent it an air of cheerfulness; but now its rude outline, no longer softened by the verdure and sunshine, ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... gardener mentioning a murder which had been committed on Wimbledon Common, a fine tract of wild jungle and rolling prairie, that lay across the main road. Without waiting to prosecute inquiries which would have told him that, although the confession was only in the morning papers, the murder was ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... I but now unjustly accused. That which I have suffered must not be laid to thee; for thou wast but a tract through which God had marked out my road—a ground where I had reaped the harvest I had sown. I will love thee, thou wayside shelter, for those hours of happiness thou hast seen me enjoy; I will love thee even for the suffering ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... point was Switzerland. Like a bastion frowning over converging valleys, that Alpine tract dominates the basins of the Po, the Inn, the Upper Rhine, and the Upper Rhone. He who holds it, if strong and resolute, can determine the fortunes of North Italy, Eastern France, South Germany, and the West of the Hapsburg domains. Further, by closing ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... earth into fruitfulness and plenty. The extent of the district was estimated at a million and a half of hectares, equivalent to nearly four millions of English acres: yet the population of this vast tract was only five hundred thousand souls. Even to-day it is not more than ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... distance by the riverside, and along the bottom of the gorge; and, difficult by day, was reported to be impracticable for horses by night. The castle he had mentioned lay full two leagues away, and on the farther edge of a tract of rough woodland. Finally, I doubted whether, in the absence of any other reason for delay, I could have marched my men, weary as they were, to the ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... tract of rich bottom land, where the dry and withered grass of the previous summer lay thick, I struck a light, and for an experiment, set the prairie on fire. The flames blazed forth at once like gunpowder. They spread and roared. The wind ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... the best course to pursue after they had completed the investment of Paris. Moltke had not anticipated a long siege of the French capital. He had imagined that the city would speedily surrender, and that the war would then come to an end. Fully acquainted with the tract of country lying between the Rhine and Paris, he had much less knowledge of other parts of France; and, moreover, although he had long known how many men could be placed in the field by the military organisation of the Empire, he undoubtedly underestimated the further resources of ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... before written a tract on this subject, and proposed ingenious methods for applying electricity to agriculture and gardening, has also repeated a numerous set of experiments; and shews both that natural electricity, as well ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... has rambled at its sweet will over the vast tract of rubble that formed its delta in the diluvial age, changing its course capriciously, and always, wherever it went, covering up the pebble bed with a deposit of fertile soil. Other streams helped in the good work—the Herault, rich with red mud, the Ley, that flows ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... is on a much lower plane than in western Europe. Most of the land is owned in large estates. Individual farming is rare, land tillage being usually a community affair. A village community rents or purchases a tract of land, and the latter is allotted to the families composing it, a part of the land being reserved for pasturage. The business is transacted by "elders," or trustees, who exercise a general management and supervision over the "mir," ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... laughed the other. "I went to school as well as to college in St. Johns. You see, father was a merchant there until he bought a great tract of land on the west coast. Then he gave up his business in the city and came over here to establish a lobster factory, which at that time promised to pay better than anything else on the island. He left us all in St. Johns, and it was only after his death ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... the newspaper, that the American Tract Society boasted of their agents' having exchanged, at a Western cabin door, tracts for the Devil on Two Sticks, and then burnt that more entertaining than edifying volume. No wonder, though, they study it there. Could one but have the ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... passe in their trade to S. Nicholas in Rouscia descending towardes the South, the Nauigation is without impediment to the cape of Bona Esperanca, ordenarilie traded and daily practised. And therefore not to be gaynesayd: which two capes are distant more then 2000 leagues by the neerest tract, in all which distaunces America is not founde to bee any thing neere the coastes either of Europe or Afric, for from England the chefest of the partes of Europa to Newfoundland being parte of America it is 600. leagues ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... description it is much inferior in fertility to the cultivated parts of Europe and Asia, and suffering extremely from severe drought; yet he makes mention of a few spots, such as Cinyps, and the high tract Cyrene, which, undergoing the process of irrigation, may stand comparison with the richest portions of the globe. Generally, however, in quitting the northern coast, which he terms significantly the forehead of Africa, the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... youth, than in age; such as is a fluent and luxuriant speech; which becomes youth well, but not age: so Tully saith of Hortensius, Idem manebat, neque idem decebat. The third is of such, as take too high a strain at the first, and are magnanimous, more than tract of years can uphold. As was Scipio Africanus, of whom Livy saith ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... wrote some Reflections on a theological treatise by one Isaiah Stiefel,[6] the title of which puzzled one of his modern French biographers. The word Stiefel in German means a boot, and the Frenchman therefore gave the title of Boehm's tract as "Reflexions sur ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... Kingsnorth found himself the fortunate possessor of this tract of land peopled by so lawless a race, he determined to see for himself what the conditions really were, so for the first time since they owned a portion of it, a Kingsnorth set foot ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... of the coast still invite the settler, and the communication of this knowledge from a pen so unprejudiced as that of the voyager, may yet be a service in directing the course of colonisation. We are told that the tract of coast between Broad Sound and Whitsunday Passage, between the parallels of twenty-two degrees fifteen seconds, and twenty degrees twenty seconds, exhibits peculiar advantages. Superior fertility, better water, and a higher rise of tide, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... at Monterey Captain John August Sutter, a Swiss-American. In August he takes up a tract of land on the south bank of the American River, east from present Sacramento, and there establishes a trading post which he names New Helvetia, but which became better known as Sutter's Fort. The post grows to be a rallying place for American ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... himself of his brother's fate, he lost no time in useless regret, which could not restore him to life; but resolving immediately to revenge his death, departed for China; where, after crossing plains, rivers, mountains, deserts, and a long tract of country without delay, he arrived ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... short break in the middle of this visit. The moon was shining to-night, and Christopher sped onwards over the pallid high-road as readily as he could have done at noonday. In three-quarters of an hour he reached the park gates; and entering now upon a tract which he had never before explored, he went along more cautiously and with some uncertainty as to the precise direction that the road would take. A frosted expanse of even grass, on which the shadow of his head appeared with an opal ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Tremadoc to Criccaeth, you pass by the parochial church of Ynysynhanarn, situated in a boggy valley running from the mountains, which shoulder up to the Rivals, down to Cardigan Bay. This tract of land has every appearance of having been redeemed at no distant period of time from the sea, and has all the desolate rankness often attendant upon such marshes. But the valley beyond, similar in character, had yet more of gloom at the time of which ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the animals living on either side of a river which ran through the middle of a vast tract of land, supplied in profusion with everything necessary to make their lives comfortable and happy, got into a terrible conflict with each other, which was waged with great bitterness for a long time, and caused the loss of a great many lives. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... render vain: Horrid with cliffs, our meagre land allows Thin herbage for the mountain goat to browse, But neither mead nor plain supplies, to feed The sprightly courser, or indulge his speed: To sea-surrounded realms the gods assign Small tract of fertile lawn, the least ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... a fire had broken out on a tract adjoining their own. "City chaps was up there gunning out o' season," Lumley explained, "and wads from their guns ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... It was the biggest battle in which our people were ever engaged, and so far it has led to bigger results than any battle of this war since the Battle of the Marne. It caused a great falling back of the enemy armies. It freed a great tract of France, seventy miles long, by from ten to twenty-five miles broad. It first gave the enemy the ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... direction of the bands indicates that of the currents; in the described case, however, the line was caused by the wind. The only other appearance which I have to notice, is a thin oily coat on the water which displays iridescent colours. I saw a considerable tract of the ocean thus covered on the coast of Brazil; the seamen attributed it to the putrefying carcass of some whale, which probably was floating at no great distance. I do not here mention the minute gelatinous particles, hereafter to be referred ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... tracts of land, they, being better judges of their own interest than the legislature (which can only proceed on general rules), ought not to be restrained from doing so. But in this argument it was forgotten that the fact of a person's taking a large tract of land is evidence only that it is his interest to take as much as other people, but not that it might not be for his interest to content himself with less, if he could be assured that other people would do so too; an assurance which nothing but a government regulation ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... oak beside it, overhanging the little ancient oratory of Santa Maria della Febbre. The air, laden with the odours of wild herbs and recent rain, came fresh from Monte Calvo. It was a quarter past seven. In the shell-shaped tract watered by the Anio the bells were ringing; first the big bell of Sant' Andrea, then the querulous bells of Santa Maria della Valle; high up on the right, from the little white church near the great wood, the bells of the Capuchins, and others ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... to adorn the walks of civilized life. He came to this country not far from 1738, as land agent of his uncle, Sir Peter Warren, an admiral in the English navy, who had acquired a considerable tract of land upon the Mohawk, in ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... here conclude the first stage of the expedition, during the progress of which the head-quarters will be fixed at Singapore. During some of the intervals I hope to see Manilla, and to acquire a cursory knowledge of the unexplored tract at the southern extremity of Celebes, called in Norie's general chart ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... Mountains, and cuts into the range until it reaches a point within five miles of the crest, where it turns to the east and pursues a course not quite parallel to the trend of the range, but crosses the axis slowly in a direction a little south of east. Thus there is a triangular tract between the river and the axis of the mountain, with its acute angle extending eastward. I climb the mountain overlooking this country. To the east the peaks are not very high, and already most of the snow has melted, but little patches lie here and there under the lee of ledges ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... item to the effect that Mrs. S. F. Smith was a classmate of Whittier's. He knew that his wife was a classmate of Mrs. Smith, and "put this and that together." Without saying anything to her about it, he sent a tract of his to Whittier, and with it a note about his work as an evangelist; in a postscript he said, "Did you ever know Evelina Bray?" Whittier wrote a criticism of the tract, which was against Colonel Ingersoll, ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... World, and this a small; One has its proper beauties, and one all. Like Cynthia, one in thirty days appears, Like Saturn one, rolls round in thirty years. There opens a wide Tract, a length of Floods, A height of Mountains, and a waste of Woods: Here but one Spot; nor Leaf, nor Green depart From Rules, e'en Nature seems the Child of Art. As Unities in Epick works appear, So must they shine in full distinction here. Ev'n the warm Iliad ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... before her through an open tract of the forest, full of brush and birches, and where the starlight guided her; and, beyond that again, must thread the columned blackness of a pine grove joining overhead the thatch of its long branches. At that hour the place was breathless; a horror of night like a presence ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... privacy of his share in the suzerain's defence. Plainly Shu[u]zen Dono put more confidence in his own prowess, or insignificance, than in the strength of outer defences against sudden attack of those at feud with him. Part of his tract inclosed a shrine of the Inari goddess. This had still its worshippers. On his inspection Shu[u]zen noted the loneliness of the building, its desolation. Yet it was clean swept and kept, and a money box for ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... Fellows found To raise their spleen against the Regent's spinney? Were charitable boxes handed round, And would not Guinea Pigs subscribe their guinea? Perchance, the Demoiselle refused to molt The feathers in her head—at least till Monday; Or did the Elephant, unseemly, bolt A tract presented to be read on Sunday?— But what ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... understand, have become possessed of the capacity for being raised upon red pillars. But there is one pitch to which, I think, they could never have attained, and that is the importance which they assume when they become the external covering of a large and extensive tract of underground country. Here we are brought face to face with a totally different explanation, to which I shall recur ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... keys of St. Peter, I wish I could see it practised on every estate in the land! It is this:—Near a sulphur lake at some distance from my farm-house is a tract of marshy ground, overspread here and there by the ruins of an ancient slaughter-house. I propose to dig in this place several subterranean caverns, each of which shall be capable of holding twenty ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... enough; and returning you may probably touch somewhere on New Holland, and so make some profitable discovery in these Places without going out of your way. And to speak my Thoughts freely, I believe 'tis owing to the neglect of this easie way that all that vast Tract of Terra Australis which bounds the South Sea is yet undiscovered: those that cross that Sea seeming to design some Business on the Peruvian or Mexican Coast, and so leaving that at a distance. To confirm which, I shall add what Captain Davis [13] told me lately, That after his departure from ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... an earthly paradise! I never had such fishing, never saw such scenery. I want to come here every summer. I'd like to buy a tract here. But that six-mile drive—O dear me! It makes me shiver when I think I've got to bump back over ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... and Woburn, pleased with the appearance of the place and the prospect it afforded for planting and fishing, petitioned the General Court for a grant of the entire tract of land now embraced in the limits of Lowell and Chelmsford. They made no account whatever of the rights of the poor Patuckets; but, considering it "a comfortable place to accommodate God's people upon," were doubtless prepared to deal with the heathen inhabitants as Joshua the son ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... appointive place. The Senators from his home-State felt compelled to moderately bestir themselves, the result of their joint efforts being that Mr. Warmdollar was tendered a position as guard about the congressional cemetery, said last resting-place of greatness-gone-to-sleep being a wild, weird tract in a semi-farmerish region on the fringe of town. Mr. Warmdollar objected to the place, and the gloomy kind of its duties; but since this was before Mrs. Warmdollar had begun to earn a salary as scrubwoman, ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... 1779, a singularly bold partition of this country was effected by Russia, Prussia, and Austria; Russia laid claim to part of Lithuania, Polesia, Podolia, Volhinia, and part of the Ukraine. This immense tract of country, containing 8,000,000 souls, is become part and parcel of the Russian territory. Prussia claimed Great Poland, the other part of Lithuania, and Polish Russia. The only part of Poland retained by Prussia, is the Grand Duchy of Posen, containing 538 geographical ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... his wife to a small Missouri town, where Southern prejudice is still rife and laws are lax, and where feeling is bitter against the uncle of Constance, the absentee landowner, who has sent Trescott to represent him in enforcing evictions from a tract of land to ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... West, and in the wilds of Maine, are acres upon acres, and miles upon miles, of evergreen forests. One wooded tract in Maine is so vast that it takes an army of choppers twenty years to cut it over. By the time it is done a new growth has sprung up, and an intermediate one is large enough to cut; so the chopping goes on year after year. The first or primeval growth is pine. That is most valuable. After the ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... might have slumbered, and another apartment higher up the street promising lively sport for which we were disinclined at that hour, we moved laboriously into the chestnut woods overhead. Fine old timber, part of that mysterious Ciminian forest which still covers a large tract, from within whose ample shade one looks downhill towards the distant Orte across a broiling stretch of country. There were golden orioles here, calling to each other from the tree-tops. My friend, having excavated himself a couch among the troublesome prickly seeds of ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... that as yet they had received no definite information as to the invasion, for the Persians were still within their own boundaries. So, remaining where he was, he busied himself as follows. In the plain where the Persians were to make their irruption into the land of the Ephthalitae he marked off a tract of very great extent and made a deep trench of sufficient width; but in the centre he left a small portion of ground intact, enough to serve as a way for ten horses. Over the trench he placed reeds, and upon the reeds he scattered ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... to nobody in particular, and one day fell into the hands of a Mr. Jones, at a merely nominal price, in connection with a large tract through which it was thought the railroad, then contemplated, would be likely to run. The railroad changed its mind, as all railroads do, and Mr. Jones's speculation was not so profitable as he had anticipated. It happened that among his friends was a wild, freakish fellow, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Trimble would have given worlds to know what the mysterious document was, and what villainy was brewing. Had he known it, he might not have stood out there in the evening air quite as patiently as he did. For the mysterious document happened to be nothing but an old tattered and torn Commonwealth tract which Jeffreys had discovered folded up between the leaves of an ancient volume of poetry, and which he and his friend the bookseller were spending a very agreeable half-hour ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... reason and justice; and sets forth the moderation and equity of the Edict upon the whole. Grotius did not finish this work; but on occasion of the dispute concerning the power of Sovereigns in things sacred; he composed a very considerable treatise. He had already handled this subject in a tract on the Piety of the States of Holland: he examines it more thoroughly in this, proceeding on the same principles. It is certain that this book may be read with some profit[124], that it contains many curious things, but some others also that are very bold, and very false. Such as are acquainted ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... what he held sacred. The threadbare phrases, the inane expressions of sympathy, the cautious words of a reporter won over to conceal the details of a commonplace vulgar death attacked his stomach. Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him. He saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous. His soul's companion! He thought of the hobbling wretches whom he had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by the barman. Just God, what an end! Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... presumably grow up to be a man like a dozen other men; and a memory in my heart which will cease with the day, not far hence, when this heart shall cease to beat. Now if Haber were to die to-day, a flourishing tract of land and a hundred people whose existence he has improved would testify aloud that his term on earth had not ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... before dawn. All along the lines were watchful sentinels; but many thousands, assured by the reports of those on outpost duty that all was well, were asleep. Presently the reveille sounded, and then, what had seemed an uninhabited tract of country, was peopled by a great armed host. Men in khaki were everywhere. On every hand were preparations for breakfast; laughter and shouts were heard on every hand. As the light increased, Bob saw thousands upon thousands of ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... reproduction of the frontispiece of a black-letter tract, composed by Augustinus de Crema, in honour of the "translation" of one of the sainted martyr's arms to Crema, in Lombardy. It was printed at ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... collision with the numerous submerged logs and trunks of trees carried down by the river Koti and floating on the surface of the sea. The current must be tremendously strong in this river, which gives its name to a large tract of country; for not only are trees and logs washed down, but huge clumps of Nipa and Nebong palms, looking like (what they really are) small floating islands, are carried out to sea with their numerous feathered inhabitants. More than once when a sail had been reported ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... not, however, molested, and after two or three days he was joined by a small body of troops from Meerut. During the months that followed he and his escort had several alarms and some smart skirmishes; for Rohilkand, a large tract of country to the east of Bulandshahr, was held by the rebels until the following spring, and Lyall's district was constantly traversed by bodies ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... the horses drew up at Lablache's lonely ranch. His nearest neighbor was not within ten miles of him. With that love of power and self aggrandisement which always characterized him, the money-lender had purchased from the Government a vast tract of country, and retained every acre of it for his own stock. It might have stood him in good stead now had he let portions of his grazing, and so settled up the district. As it was, his ranch was characteristic of himself—isolated; and he knew that ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... the upper and outer angle in front, and also by the circumstance, that although there are flexible anterior avicularia, they do not correspond in number with the cells, but seem to be disposed in a special tract along the middle of the branch or internode. The connection of the branches by transverse tubular fibres is not a character of either generic or specific importance, though it is more striking in the only species hitherto known as ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... with St. Dunstan. The Archpriest of St. Vitus will have it that the square inscribed in a semicircle is half of the semicircle, or the circumference 3-1/5 diameters. He is active and able, with {62} nothing wrong about him except his paradoxes. In the second tract named he has given the testimonials of crowned heads and ministers, etc. as follows. Louis-Napoleon gives thanks. The minister at Turin refers it to the Academy of Sciences, and hopes so much labor will be judged degna di pregio.[131] The Vice-Chancellor ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... left the Royal Oak to the care of its landlady. The local constabulary bestirred themselves as they had never done before. Every place, likely and unlikely, where a man's body might possibly lie concealed; every tract of bush and woodland; every barn and out building; every hollow and ditch; every field and fence corner, was explored with careful minuteness. Even the wells of the district were peered into and examined for traces of the thirteen stone of humanity which had so unaccountably disappeared ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... relay of fresh camels awaited them, and upon these they travelled, keeping a day's march westward of the Nile. Thence they passed through the desert country of the Ababdeh, and came in sight of a broad grey tract stretching across their path. ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... was that of one of the grandest ancient cities of Yucatan. C[h]een is the name applied to a tract of low-lying fertile land, especially suitable to the production of cacao (Berendt); chi is edge or border. It is therefore a name referring to a locality, "on the border of the c[h]een of the Itzas." C[h]een also means well or cistern, and another derivation ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... This was a new tract of life suddenly opened before her. She realised the life of the miners, hundreds of them toiling below earth and coming up at evening. He seemed to her noble. He risked his life daily, and with gaiety. She looked at him, with a touch of appeal in ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... side, we are made to contemplate the omnipotence of God, that we may not call in question his sovereignty and dominion over the moral world. But between these two positions, on which the light of truth has thus been made to fall, there is a tract of dark and unexplored territory, a terra incognita, which remains to be completely surveyed and delineated, before we can see the beauty of the whole scene. In the attempt to map out this region, to define the precise boundary of that imperium in imperio, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... nation with the last drop of blood, but commonsense and international amity prevailed, especially when Costa Ricans were promised a territory twice as big as their native country in the hinterland between Colombia and Venezuela, a valueless tract both nations had been trying in vain to ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the latest edition issued is either the twenty-first or the twenty-third. The preface to Dr. Eadie's "Cruden" was furnished by Dr. King, and is a masterly performance of its kind. It is worth while noticing that no other copy of "Cruden" is used or recognised by the Tract Society, who have at different times issued it on their own account. In 1848 Dr. Eadie published his Biblical Cyclopaedia, of which in 1868 twenty-four thousand copies had been sold, being upwards ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... Course. — N. corridors of time, sweep of time, vesta of time[obs3], course of time, progress of time, process of time, succession of time, lapse of time, flow of time, flux of time, stream of time, tract of time, current of time, tide of time, march of time, step of time, flight of time; duration &c. 106. [Indefinite time] aorist[obs3]. V. elapse, lapse, flow, run, proceed, advance, pass; roll on, wear on, press on; flit, fly, slip, slide, glide; run its course. run out, expire; go by, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... party was in some distress; and, having children with her, I allowed my feelings——[He opens a drawer and produces from it a tract] Just take this! "Purity in the Home." It's a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "June 25th, 1789. "On this day personally appeared before me, Dennis Dooley, Justice of the Peace of the said county of the commonwealth of Virginia, Elizabeth Scurr, and voluntarily relinquished her right of a dower in a certain tract or piece of land in the town of Westmoreland and Province of New Brunswick, viz.: Three eighty-acre lots, Nos. sixteen, eighteen and twenty, with the marsh and wilderness thereto belonging. All in division letter B, and described fully in a deed from Thomas Scurr to William Trueman and on ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... Brooklyn, Conn., occurs this passage: "In the year 1703, Richard Ames purchased 3,000 acres of land lying in the south part of Pomfret, where the village of Brooklyn now stands, which he divided into five lots and deeded to his sons. Directly north of this was situated a tract of land owned by Mr. John Blackwell, comprising 5,750 acres, which was willed to his son John, and afterward sold to Governor Belcher of Massachusetts, who divided it into farms and sold them to different individuals, among whom was General Israel Putnam. This tract went by the name of 'Mortlake.' ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... close of a cold, keen day, about the early part of spring, in the year 1554, there came two men across a bleak and barren tract of land called Dean Moor, near to Bolton-in-the-Moors. When at some distance from the main path, and far from the many by-roads intersecting this dreary common, they—first looking cautiously around, as though fearing intruders—fell on each other's neck and wept. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... while resident at Ellisland—a gloomy-looking man, the people thought him, all the time that he, with his generous, benevolent nature, was in reality groaning over the stern Calvinistic theology of the preacher. It is a tract of country which has but recently been reclaimed from a marshy and moorish state, and which still shews only partial traces of decoration and high culture. In a gloomy recess among the hills, we caught a glimpse of the situation of the old castle of Lagg, a fortalice surrounded by bogs, the ancient ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... on a forest plain, where only charred stumps of trees are to be seen: this long tract is black, burnt, and deserted—not a bird flies over it. Tall, hanging birches now greet us again; a squirrel springs playfully across the road, and up into the tree; we cast our eye searchingly over the wood-grown mountain-side, which slopes ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... building-stone, petroleum, or salt placers must be more valuable for those minerals than for any other purpose. So through the whole scheme of American land laws runs the necessity for determining the use for which each tract is best fitted. ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... expanse, as if about to return to his old lair. Now he was seen plunging into some bosky dell; and, after being lost to view for a moment, bounding up the opposite bank, and stretching across a tract thickly covered with fern. Here he gained upon the hounds, who were lost in the green wilderness, and their cries were hushed for a brief space—but anon they burst forth anew, and the pack were soon again in full cry, and ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... hands of the Bishop of Norwich. Bishop Herbert de Losinga built the church of St. Margaret at the beginning of the twelfth century, and gave it with many privileges to the monks of Norwich, who held a priory at Lynn; and Bishop Turbus did a wonderfully good stroke of business, reclaimed a large tract of land about 1150 A.D., and amassed wealth for his see from his markets, fairs, and mills. Another bishop, Bishop Grey, induced or compelled King John to grant a free charter to the town, but astutely managed to keep all the power in his own hands. Lynn ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... very much larger share of the proceeds of it, so that they can themselves enjoy the comforts and luxuries of life, and can cultivate their minds and educate their children. Thus, in England, you have, on every considerable tract of farming country, villages of laborers, which consist of mere huts, where men live all their lives, without change, almost as beasts of burden; and then, in some beautiful park in the centre, you have a nobleman, who lives in the ...
— Rollo in London • Jacob Abbott
... literature. He was miserably poor. He toiled through the day at the spade or the plough, or guided the shuttle through the loom. At night, by the flare of the turf-fire or the fitful light of a splinter of bogwood, he made his copy of poem or tract or tale, which but for him would have perished. The copies are often ill-spelt and ill-written, but with all their faults they are as noble a monument to national love of learning as any nation ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Gloddaeth Wood is a remnant of the primaeval forest that is mentioned by Sir John Wynn, in his History of the Gwydir Family, as extending over a large tract of the country. This wood, being undisturbed and in its original wild condition, was the home of foxes and other vermin, for whose destruction the surrounding parishes willingly paid half-a-crown per head. This reward was an inducement to men who had leisure, to trap and hunt these obnoxious ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... said, in his abrupt decisive manner, 'I believe I shall not undertake it.' That he, however, had bestowed much thought upon the subject, before he published his Plan, is evident from the enlarged, clear, and accurate views which it exhibits; and we find him mentioning in that tract, that many of the writers whose testimonies were to be produced as authorities, were selected by Pope[530]; which proves that he had been furnished, probably by Mr. Robert Dodsley, with whatever hints that eminent poet had contributed towards a great literary project, that had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... his language never has more than one meaning, which never requires a second thought to find. By the help of his exact method, it takes so firm a hold on the mind, that it will not allow attention to slacken. His little tract on human nature has scarcely an ambiguous or a needless word. He has so great a power of always choosing the most significant term, that he never is reduced to the poor expedient of using many in its stead. ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... country around for a favorable site, and at length decided upon a spot nearly north of Lavinium, and not many miles distant from it. The place which he marked out for the walls of the city was at the foot of a mountain, on a tract of somewhat elevated ground, which formed one of the lower declivities of it. The mountain, rising abruptly on one side, formed a sure defense on that side: on the other side was a small lake, of clear and pellucid water. In front, and somewhat below, there were ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... little park into a by-lane; a vast tract of common land, yellow with furze and undulated with swell and hollow, spreading in front; to their right the dark beechwoods, still beneath the weight of the July noon. Lionel had been talking about the "Faerie Queene," knight-errantry, the sweet impossible dream-life that, safe ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... desert country he gave orders for the purchase of 20,000 horses, and he expected forage for two months to be provided on a tract where the most distant and dangerous excursions were not sufficient for the supply of the passing day. Some of his officers were astonished to hear orders which it was so impossible to execute; but we have already seen that he sometimes issued ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... less rigid and kept open on Sundays, he took refuge among them (1636), and before spring had gained eighteen pounds and converted Canonicus, one of the hardest cases in New England and the first man to sit up till after ten o'clock at night. Canonicus gave Roger the tract of land on which Providence ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... considerable portion of Hampshire to form a hunting ground, the New Forest, near his residence at Winchester. The chroniclers of the next generation describe the formation of the Forest as the devastation of a large tract of country in which churches were destroyed, the inhabitants driven out, and the cultivated land thrown back into wilderness, and they record a contemporary belief that the violent deaths of so many members of William's house within the bounds ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... to be found in the Memory; we often let many things slip away from us, which deserve to be retain'd, and of those which we treasure up, a great part is either frivolous or false; and if good, and substantial, either in tract of time obliterated, or at best so overwhelmed and buried under more frothy notions, that when there is need of them, they ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... open level tract of country a party of Russian infantry, no two of whom were stationed at the same spot, were suddenly surprised by thirty-two Turks, who opened fire on the Russians from all directions. Each of the Turks simultaneously fired a bullet, and ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... attempted analysis of respiration of the chick embryo in ovo is less than successful, his views on fetal respiration were soon accepted by many, and his tract stands as a great ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... guessed that we had reached that border tract which was harried by the Mountain tribes, for here strong towers built of stone were dotted about the heaths, doubtless to serve as watch-houses or places of refuge. Whether they were garrisoned by soldiers I do not know, but I doubt it, for we saw none. It seems probable indeed that ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... O. Stoddard, in his "Men of Business," tells a characteristic story of the late Leland Stanford. When eighteen years of age his father purchased a tract of woodland, but had not the means to clear it as he wished. He told Leland that he could have all he could make from the timber if he would leave the land clear of trees. A new market had just then been created for cord wood, and Leland took some money that ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... Marsh, now openly angry, demanded. "Do you think that song doesn't kindle the hearts of mothers all over the world?... I can imagine Eve crooning it to little Cain and Abel, and I can imagine a woman in the Combe crooning it to her child!..." The Combe was a tract of slum in Dublin. "It's universal and everlasting. You ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... time been their spiritual, and often their temporal advisers, began to turn the steps of the broken and scattered remnants of the tribes who had suffered most in the war, to the feeble settlement of the Pennacooks, near Quebec, and as early as 1685, the Governor of that colony granted a tract of land at a place called Cote de Lauzon, opposite that city, for their use. Up to the commencement of the war, a considerable number of Indians had continued to reside on the Connecticut river, above Northampton; ...
— The Abenaki Indians - Their Treaties of 1713 & 1717, and a Vocabulary • Frederic Kidder
... choice but to follow his example, or to be left alone on the moor. The intelligent little animals, relieved from our stupid supervision, trot off with their noses to the ground, like hounds on the scent. Where the intersecting tract of bog is wide, they skirt round it. Where it is narrow enough to be leaped over, they cross it by a jump. Trot! trot!—away the hardy little creatures go; never stopping, never hesitating. Our "superior intelligence," perfectly useless in the emergency, wonders how it will end. Our ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... 25th Dec. for that purpose. The point is involved in much uncertainty, but your correspondent may find all the information he seeks in Baronii Apparatus ad Annales Ecclesiasticos, fol., Lucae, 1740, pp. 475. et seq.; and in a curious tract, entitled The Feast of Feasts; or, the Celebration of the Sacred Nativity of our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; grounded upon the Scriptures, and confirmed by the Practice of the Christian Church in all Ages. 4to. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... he was in some part of Italy? that the ship had been carried back to the European Continent during the tempest of the night? No; it was impossible that so lovely a tract of land would remain uninhabited, if known to men. The longer he reflected the more he became convinced that he was on some island hitherto unknown to navigators, and on which some other shipwrecked individual had probably been cast. Why the doublet should have been discarded he could well understand, ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... natural ambition to secure an increase of population. In all of Hancock County there were in 1830 only 483 inhabitants as compared with 32,215 in 1900. Along with this public view of the matter was a private one. A Dr. Isaac Galland owned (or claimed title to) a large tract of land on both sides of the border line between Illinois and Iowa, that in Iowa being included in what was known as "the half-breed tract," an area of some 119,000 acres which, by a treaty between the United States government and the Sacs and Foxes, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... sycamore draws you to the left, and a file of elms beckon the sliced way to a marsh, wilderness of grass and an overgrown gully whence no balls return. In front, one hundred and twenty yards away, is a formidable bunker, running up to which is a tract of long grass, which two or three times a year is barbered by a charitable enterprise. The seventh hole itself lies two hundred and sixty yards away in a hollow guarded by a sunken ditch, a sure ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... redwood and pine forests there are some thirty mill plants, and they own about half of the timber district. The methods of lumbering are exceedingly wasteful. Scarcely half of the standing timber of a tract is taken by the loggers and what is left is often burned or totally neglected. Replanting is unthought of and the young trees are treated ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... about a quarter of its length it runs in a northwesterly direction. At Civray it abruptly turns southward and flows in a meandering course as far as Angouleme, receiving on the way the waters of the Tardouere (Tardoire), and with it almost completely inclosing a considerable tract of land. At Angouleme, the old whim regaining supremacy, the Charente again bends suddenly westward, and finally empties into the ocean below Rochefort, through a narrow arm of the sea known as the Pertuis d'Antioche. ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... other end of the morass began a long tract of dreary-looking, heathy waste, without a sign of life. The Baron took leave of the King, only sending three men-at-arms, to show him the way to a monastery, which was to be the next halting-place. He sent three, because it was not safe for one, even fully armed, to ride alone, for fear of ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... April had been the expedition to Norfolk of the Third Regiment, in which it was my privilege to serve as a private. The fort communicates with the main-land by a dike or causeway about half a mile long, and a wooden bridge, perhaps three hundred feet long, and then there spreads out a tract of country, well wooded and dotted over with farms. Passing from this bridge for a distance of two miles northwestward, you reach a creek or arm of the bay spanned by another wooden bridge, and crossing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various |
