"Decayed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a small one; but its appearance in the decayed and deserted city of the Pyramids—which had grown only lengthwise, like a huge reed-leaf, since its breadth was confined between the Nile and the Libyan Hills—attracted the gaze of the passers-by, though in former years a Memphite would scarcely have thought it worth while to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... stranger sitting here Hath not disgraced thee. I have neither missed The rings, nor found it hard to bend the bow; Nor has my manly strength decayed, as these Who seek to bring me to contempt pretend; And now the hour is come when we prepare A supper for the Achaians, while the day Yet lasts, and after supper the delights Of song and harp, which ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... slowly descending from our eyrie, amid the varied shadows of a most lustrous moonlight, our eyes fell upon the distant wood which surrounded Haddon Hall; its massive walls, its mouldering tapestries, its stately terrace, its quaint rooms and closets, its protected though decayed records of the olden time, its minstrel gallery—were again present to our minds; and it was a natural and most pleasing contrast—that of the deserted and half-ruined house, with the mansion happily inhabited, filled with so many art-treasures, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... black miry ravine, some ten or twelve feet in depth. The bogs around waved thick with silvery willows of small size; but sticking out from the black sides of the ravine itself, and in some instances stretched across it from side to side, lay the decayed remains of huge giants of the vegetable world, that had flourished and died long ages ere, in at least our northern part of the island, the course of history had begun. There were oaks of enormous ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... too great to bear. I dashed madly forward, one sound still ringing in my ears, one horrid image before my eyes. I reached the garden wall; I cleared the little rivulet beside the flower-garden; I traversed its beds (neglected and decayed); I gained the avenue, taking no heed of the crowds before me,—some on foot, some on horseback, others mounted upon the low country car, many seated in groups upon the grass, their heads bowed upon their bosoms, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Christminster who knew not the colleges, nor their works, nor their ways. Jude was asked if he could suggest any guest in addition to those named by Arabella and her father, and in a saturnine humour of perfect recklessness mentioned Uncle Joe, and Stagg, and the decayed auctioneer, and others whom he remembered as having been frequenters of the well-known tavern during his bout therein years before. He also suggested Freckles and Bower o' Bliss. Arabella took him at his word so far as the men went, but drew ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... dues, the captain's copies of bills of lading, store lists, and some picture-postcards from the old man's family. A lump of indurated plum-duff, like a geological specimen, was on the table. There was a slant of sunshine through a square port window, and it rested on a decayed suit of oilskins. We sat silent, the shipbreaker having finished estimating to me, with enthusiasm, what she had of copper. He was now waiting for his men to return to work. They were going to take the masts out of her. But I was wondering what I could do to lay ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... stables. The roof of lath and straw was peaked, turned-up, and crooked as a Jew's torn cap. From the gable protruded the edges of a balcony, supported on a row of close-set wooden columns; the columns, which were a great architectural marvel, were solid, though half decayed, and were put up crooked, as in the tower of Pisa; they did not conform to Greek models, for they lacked bases and capitals. On the columns rested semicircular arches, also of wood, in imitation of Gothic art. Above ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... assaulted, and burnt, in the civil wars of Vitellius and Vespasian. [37] The temples of Jupiter and his kindred deities had crumbled into dust; their place was supplied by monasteries and houses; and the solid walls, the long and shelving porticos, were decayed or ruined by the lapse of time. It was the first act of the Romans, an act of freedom, to restore the strength, though not the beauty, of the Capitol; to fortify the seat of their arms and counsels; and as often ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... seemed now to have come to the old man. He was done with the earnest business of life. Moses was gradually taking his place, as father and Friend; and Asenath would be reasonably provided for at his death. As his bodily energies decayed, his imperious temper softened, his mind became more accessible to liberal influences, and he even cultivated a cordial friendship with a neighboring farmer who was one of "the world's people." Thus, at seventy-five he was really younger, because tenderer of heart and more considerate, ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... saying what to seek. In general, all banks are beautiful things, and will reward work better than large landscapes. If you live in a lowland country, you must look for places where the ground is broken to the river's edges, with decayed posts, or roots of trees; or, if by great good luck there should be such things within your reach, for remnants of stone quays or steps, mossy mill-dams, etc. Nearly every other mile of road in chalk country will present beautiful bits of broken bank at its sides; ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... own reproduction in children which makes us quit the world happy and contented; because then we only retire to make room for another race, bringing with them all those faculties which are in us decayed; and capable, which we ourselves have ceased to be, of taking our parts and figuring on the stage of life so long as it may please the Supreme Manager to busy them in earthly scenes! Then talk no more to me of weeds and mourning, but show me christenings and all ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... to these were all ladies visiting the city constrained to resort. Some of these were well kept and comfortable, but afforded none or very few of the advantages of public hotels. They were generally kept by decayed females who were constrained to this vocation by pecuniary misfortunes. The liberal accommodation afforded in hotels, especially built and furnished for the purpose, was not to be found in ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... man, my cousin also had trouble. It was hard to hit the right degree of disagreeableness. Some of them were so very unpleasant. He eventually made choice of a decayed cab-driver with advanced Radical opinions, who insisted on a three ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... safe to calculate the age of the forest at about two hundred years, with here and there a tree a little older. The area enclosed is level. In the field south there are numerous hummocks formed by the decayed stumps of fallen trees. The walls were manifestly thrown up from the outside. There is an exception on the south-east. Here the ground outside was higher, and to get the requisite elevation the earth ...
— The Country of the Neutrals - (As Far As Comprised in the County of Elgin), From Champlain to Talbot • James H. Coyne
... dirty, shabby-looking nests, obviously made of dead materials, old withered and partially-decayed grass, and not with fresh grass; they seem to have measured 3 inches in diameter, and 2.5 in height externally; the cavity was perhaps 1.5 to 1.75 in diameter, and 1 inch more or ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... Arthur," says Mrs. Laura, gravely: but rather declines to argue the point raised by me; namely, that the selection of that especial thirty-seventh psalm was not complimentary to those decayed ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was, in consequence of its decayed condition, demolished about the year 1870. Becoming aware of what was taking place, I gave instructions that a photograph should be taken of the chapel in which the body of Stradivari was interred. This was accomplished whilst the workmen were in the act of levelling the structure, ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... driven more than five versts when I saw the land on the bank of the Irtysh all covered with great lakes, the road disappeared under water, and the bridges on the road really had been swept away or had decayed. I was prevented from turning back partly by obstinacy and partly by the desire to get out of these dreary parts as quickly as possible. We began driving through the lakes.... My God, I have never experienced anything like it in my life! The cutting wind, the cold, the loathsome ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... reason for the conclusion that these are the aboriginal race of the Eastern Archipelago, nearly stationary in their original condition. While successive waves of civilization have swept onward the rest of the inhabitants, while tribes as wild have arisen to power, flourished, and decayed, the Dyak in his native jungles still retains the feelings of earlier times, and shows the features of society as it existed before the influx of foreign races either improved or corrupted ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... of silver, and engraved all over with fruit and flowers, while the stocks of ivory were also carved in every part, and were quite perfect, not even discoloured like the wood work in the pit. They were wrapped in soft leather, and enclosed in a velvet case which was in a somewhat discoloured and decayed state, but still in a sufficiently whole form ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... with carts of all sorts, sizes, and descriptions, from the heavy lumbering waggon, with its four stout horses, to the jingling costermonger's cart, with its consumptive donkey. The pavement is already strewed with decayed cabbage-leaves, broken hay-bands, and all the indescribable litter of a vegetable market; men are shouting, carts backing, horses neighing, boys fighting, basket-women talking, piemen expatiating on the excellence of their pastry, and donkeys braying. ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... back again before long, this time with intent to seize the town. There was little or no defence. Ormond was away; the walls were decayed; ordnance was short—a good deal of it, the Geraldine enemies said, had been already removed to Maynooth. White, the commander, threw himself into the castle; the gates were opened; Lord Thomas cantered in and took possession of the town, the ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... the long window leading from our bedroom to the porch, where a few startled swallows flew out, crying harshly, from among the white columns. Many of the elms had died; the magnolias and laburnums, with the exception of a few stately trees, had decayed on the terrace, and the thick maze of box was now thin and rapidly dwindling away from the gravelled paths. On the ground, under the young green of dandelion and wild violets, the rotting leaves of last year were still lying; and as we descended the ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... Norway rats, and they fill all the brothels of the continent.... But they multiply—the only scriptural precept they obey—and boast their millions. So do the Chinese; so do the Apisdae, and all other pests of the animal kingdom. Pull the bark from a decayed log, and you will see a mass of maggots full of vitality, in constant motion and eternal gyration, one crawling over one, and another creeping under another, all precisely alike, all intently engaged in preying upon one another, and you have an apt illustration of Yankee numbers, Yankee ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... this road (in June, 1883) I found a nest of the yellow-bellied flycatcher (Empidonax flaviventris). It was built at the base of a decayed stump, in a little depression between two roots, and was partially overarched with growing moss. It contained four eggs,—white, spotted with brown. I called upon the bird half a dozen times or more, and found her a model "keeper at home." On one ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... a type, and thus it did not perish; and it was only a type, and so it is decayed. It was a type which contained the truth, and thus it has lasted until it no longer contained ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... a lover;—she had had him since six months before her father died, and the decayed publisher had never guessed of him nor Sally confessed him; for the good, thoughtful daughter knew it would but complicate the old man's perplexities and cares to no purpose. To be sure, his joyful consent was certain; but so long as he lived, "the thing was not to be thought of," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... the street pavement in which the undisturbed refuse accumulated day by day. The system of garbage collecting was inadequate throughout the city but it became the greatest menace in a ward such as ours, where the normal amount of waste was much increased by the decayed fruit and vegetables discarded by the Italian and Greek fruit peddlers, and by the residuum left over from the piles of filthy rags which were fished out of the city dumps and brought to the homes of the rag pickers for further ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... honour of a place in history. As in two previous cases, the Mere Gate was at first but a fisherman's station for the village of St. John's, which gathered about the old church at the south end of the existing town. But as the Northmouth closed up, and Sandwich Haven decayed, the Mere Gate naturally became the little local port for corn grown on the island and wool raised on the newly-reclaimed Minster Level. A wooden pier existed at Margate long before the reign of Henry VIII., when Leland found it "sore decayed," and the village was in repute for fishery ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... 'I will now answer your sarcasm. There is some excuse for ignorant seamen before the mast, who enter on board of privateers: they are indifferent to blood and carnage, and their feelings are blunted—there is some excuse even for decayed gentlemen like me, Mr. Trevannion (for I am a gentleman born), who, to obtain a maintenance without labour, risk their lives and shed their blood; but there is no excuse for those who, having already as much wealth and more than they can require, still furnish the means ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... quest of driftwood. Before I had found the wood I chanced upon another patch of delicious wild strawberries, and took an appetizer of them out of hand. Presently I picked up a yellow birch stick the size of my arm. The wood was decayed, but the bark was perfect. I broke it in two, punched out the rotten wood, and had the bark intact. The fatty or resinous substance in this bark preserves it, and makes it excellent kindling. With some seasoned twigs and a scrap of paper I soon had a fire going that answered ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... since the body had been deposited in the shallow grave, and the crevices among the piles of bluestones had been filled by the wind with the yellow stalks of decayed grass. Nosey walked round his own particular pile, and inspected it closely. He was pleased to find that it showed no signs of having been touched since he raised it. It was just like any of the other heaps of rocks around it. He had, at any rate, ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... which was frequented chiefly by the sailors who chanced to be in the port, and by the squalid population in its immediate neighbourhood. Although small, the Red Lion Inn was superior in many respects to its surroundings. It was larger than the decayed buildings that propped it; cleaner than the locality that owned it; brighter and warmer than the homes of the lean crew on whom it fattened. It was a pretty, light, cheery, snug place of temptation, where men and women, and even children assembled at nights to waste ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... however, there was nothing to examine except timber, and that of little value. "Plenty of firewood," was his only comment as he went on. Beyond the belt of wood, however, he came upon a clear space bordering the creek, and strewed with decayed fish, fragments of old nets, and broken pieces of wood—traces of the use to which the Indians were in the habit of putting it. A small hut stood just in the shelter of the bush, but it was empty, and the whole place ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... be most useful if we could lay aside all these mouldy and decayed expressions, and introduce a word that simply means what is not understood by body, the subject, in opposition to the objective world. It would by no means follow that what is not body must therefore exist independent of the body. It would first of all only ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... on, however, and as their strength decayed, their fury seemed to increase. Henry Wynd, now wounded in many places, was still bent on breaking through, or exterminating, the band of bold hearts who continued to fight around the object of his animosity. But still the ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... few paces from the pathway. There was nothing about it to arrest the attention of a passer-by, except, perhaps, all appearance of extreme but picturesque humility. The walls were riveted together with iron-bands in crossbars and zig-zags; the brickwork was decayed and crumbling away in blotches; the roof was low and thatched. Yet, in spite of these evidences of poverty, the scholar regarded the structure with a reverential aspect, with such an aspect as he might have presented had he contemplated the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... plan was accomplished. He marched his hussars to Stralsund, and for a moment fortune smiled on him. The French commander, General Candras, preferred to meet the enemy in the open field instead of awaiting him behind the half-decayed fortifications. He marched against Schill with the whole garrison and a battery of light artillery; but the Prussian hussars, with a shout attacked the enemy, and dispersed them, took six hundred prisoners, and made their triumphant entry ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... revenge upon them, but afraid of rendering his new government unpopular by requiring great supplies from his subjects, summoned at Westminster a council of the peers, without the commons, and laid before them the state of his affairs.[***] The military part of the feudal constitution was now much decayed: there remained only so much of that fabric as affected the civil rights and properties of men: and the peers here undertook, but voluntarily, to attend the king in an expedition against Scotland, each ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... given Esther half his empire, and [5552]Herod bid Herodias "ask what she would, she should have it." Caligula gave 100,000 sesterces to his courtesan at first word, to buy her pins, and yet when he was solicited by the senate to bestow something to repair the decayed walls of Rome for the commonwealth's good, he would give but 6000 sesterces at most. [5553]Dionysius, that Sicilian tyrant, rejected all his privy councillors, and was so besotted on Mirrha his favourite and mistress, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... very nice," said John Charles briskly, quite as if he were an old salesman. "No mashed or decayed ones among them." ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... the workman of the new Calendar. I chanced to pick up "Albertus Pighius Campensis de aequinoctiorum solsticiorumque inventione... Ejusdem de ratione Paschalis celebrationis, De que Restitutione ecclesiastici Kalendarii," Paris, 1520, folio.[760] On the title-page were decayed words followed by "..hristophor.. C..ii, 1556 (or 8)," the last blank not entirely erased by time, but showing the lower halves of an l and of an a, and {373} rather too much room for a v. It looked very like E Libris ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding generations of mankind. The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... windows; and of these, most of the largest are boarded up, (some, indeed, more substantially closed with brick and mortar) in order to render it as independent as possible of the glazier and the assessor of taxes. There is a little bridge, very much decayed, thrown across the narrow moat to what was, in former days, the main entrance; but now the door was nailed up, the bridge ruinous, and the path leading to it no longer distinguishable in the long rank grass that covered the wet meadows upon which the house looked out. It was a place that filled you ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... lady by herself may give money to a beggar without a trace of a blush, but if others are present, and she doubts whether they approve, or suspects that they think her influenced by display, she will blush. So it will be, if she offers to relieve the distress of a decayed gentlewoman, more particularly of one whom she had previously known under better circumstances, as she cannot then feel sure how her conduct will be viewed. But such cases as these ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... exploration and discovery still remains for us to do. We stand on the further edge of the great floras of by-past creations, and have gathered but a few handfuls of faded leaves, a few broken branches, a few decayed cones. ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... distribute his charity to all the prisons in London, at all the festival times of the year, especially at the Birth and Resurrection of our Saviour. He gave an hundred pounds at one time to an old friend, whom he had known live plentifully, and by a too liberal heart and carelessness became decayed in his estate; and when the receiving of it was denied, by the gentleman's saying, "He wanted not;"—for the reader may note, that as there be some spirits so generous as to labour to conceal and endure a sad poverty, rather than expose themselves to ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... inherited from her father. This is the only way in which to account for her glowing physical health and her manifest mental disorder. She has her father's mind in a body drawn from her mother. One-half of her is pure and sweet and girlish, the other is old, decayed, lying, and irresponsible. Can ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... the wall he came to more shelves, decayed, broken, left by the last tenant as not worth carrying away. And presently his feet came upon something harder, colder than the boards; it was a hearthstone, and it marked the place where, before the room was turned into a shop, there had been a small fireplace. And on the other side ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... could hire out as a male assistant to a female dancer and get fifty a week, perhaps. Nancy couldn't even do that. They are both liabilities. So there you are, with Duchesses on the contraband list, and Nancy not old enough to marry a decayed old Pittsburg millionaire, I will be compelled to keep on working. For my assets aren't what your noble husband would call quick, though they are live. I really don't know what to do. I shall wait till Anne comes home and then, as usual, do ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... cities as existing in his day;[5165] it was not Carteia, for it lay west of Gades, while Carteia lay east. Probably it occupied, as Strabo thought, a small island between two arms of the Guadalquivir, and gradually decayed as Gades rose to importance. It certainly did not exist in Strabo's time, but five or six centuries earlier it was a most flourishing place.[5166] If it is the Tarshish of Scripture, its prosperity and importance must have been even anterior to the time of Solomon, whose ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... winds around, for it is a logging trail, leading up to the best bluffs, which are ruthlessly cut down by the fuel-hunters. Only dead and half decayed trees are spared. But still young boles spring up in astonishing numbers. Aspen and Balm predominate, though there is some ash and oak left here and there, with a conifer as the rarest treat for the lover of trees. It is a pitiful ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... problem to trace the families of emperors and kings, of heroes and conquerors, from the era of their decline and fall to their ultimate extinction. Some 'Old Mortality' might find as congenial employment in this field of sepulchral research as did the original in clearing up the decayed and moss-grown tombs of the Covenanters. The genealogist makes it his business rather to flatter the great by blazoning the antiquity of their pedigrees, than to teach the world a moral lesson on the instability of earthly grandeur, by chronicling their reverses. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... door, with a projecting porch. All the windows, with smallish panes and largish frames, were relieved with stone copings; so that the house had an air of solidity and well-to-do-ness about it,—nothing tricky on the one hand, nothing decayed on the other. The house stood a little back from the garden gates, which were large, and set between two piers surmounted with vases. Many might object that in wet weather you had to walk some way to your carriage; but we obviated that objection ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is growing very old; and though a piercing radiance, as of stars, bursts occasionally from the central part of him, the outworks are getting decayed and dim; obstruction more and more accumulating, and the immeasurable Night drawing nigh. Well does Voltaire himself, at all moments, know this; and his bearing under it, one must say, is rather beautiful. There is a tenderness, a sadness, in these his later Letters ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Sea-bankes and Highewaies, some for Educac[i]on and p[re]fermente of Orphans, some for or towardes Reliefe, Stocke or Maintenaunce for Howses of Correcc[i]on, some for Mariages of poore Maides, some for Supportac[i]on, Ayde and Helpe of younge Tradesmen, Handiecraftesmen and p[er]sons decayed, and others ... for aide or ease of any poore Inhabitants conc[er]ninge paymente of Fifteenes, settinge out of Souldiers and other ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware
... from the top of the cupboard an incredibly dirty carpet bag of huge dimensions and decayed antiquity, and bade me pack therein our belongings. The process was not a lengthy one; we had so few. When we had little more than half filled the bag with articles of attire and the toilette stuffed in pell-mell, we looked ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... It is pleasant here to remark that neither Aurora nor Clotilde made any waste of their sudden acquisitions; they furnished their rooms with much beauty at moderate cost, and their salon with artistic, not extravagant, elegance, and, for the sake of greater propriety, employed a decayed lady as housekeeper; but, being discreet in all other directions, they agreed upon one bold ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... in the bamboo forest, but they were all ancient ones, half-filled with decayed leaves and obviously unused for half a century or more. From some of them fairly large-sized trees had grown. Sometimes in the midst of these great, silent, light-green forests we came upon giant trees, tangled ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... A really greasy, though very rancid, broth resulted. Some of the bones and particularly the hoofs were maggoty, but, as Hubbard said, the maggots seemed to make the broth the richer, and we drank it all. It tasted good. For some time we sat gnawing the gristle and scraps of decayed flesh that clung to the bones, and we were ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... kinds, but which I afterwards found were unpolished gems. Yes, senor; there lay the gold in ingots, each wrapped in matting, and each ingot as much in weight as I could well lift. The matting was decayed in the first three or four tiers, and the metal discoloured almost to blackness; but towards the centre of the cargo (which is, probably, not more than twelve tiers deep altogether), the matting, though so rotten that it crumbled to dust as I touched it, ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... distracted, runs to her sack, pulls out the Bible, and puts it into the hand of the Blazing Tinman, who then thrusts the end of it into my mouth with such fury that it made my lips bleed, and broke short one of my teeth which happened to be decayed. 'Swear,' said he, 'swear, you mumping villain, take your Bible oath that you will quit and give up the beat altogether, or I'll—and then the hard-hearted villain made me swear by the Bible, and my own damnation, half-throttled as I ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Walter, I cannot but admire to see How housekeeping is decayed within this thirty year; But where the fault is, God knows: I know not. My father in his lifetime gave hospitality To all strangers, And distressed travellers; His table was never empty of bread, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... know, and who appeared to know no one, used to visit about noon every day, and calling for a sixpenny glass of brandy and water, sit over it until he had carefully gone through the perusal of the London paper of the previous evening. On Christmas Eve, honest John Weeks, anxious that the decayed gentleman should have one meal at least in the 'Bush,' delicately hinted that on the following day he kept open table. Punctually at one o'clock, being the appointed hour, he appeared at the Bush in his usual seedy attire. John Weeks called his head waiter, a ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs
... described above, either among other plants, or in special boxes of smaller size; but common boxes or barrels will do, if there are no glass boxes, well filled with earth. The seeds should be put in light earth a little damp, or in dust of decayed wood. Five or 6 centimetres of earth are put at the bottom of a box, and the seeds sown in this earth at distances, equal to the size of the seed. Then another layer of earth of three centimetres, then a bed of seeds, and so on up to 3 or 4 decimetres in height. ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... hereinafter described, is not the sole surviving relic of the Good Duke's rule. Turn where you please on this island domain, memories of that charming and incisive personality will meet your eye and ear; memories in stone-schools, convents, decayed castles and bathing chalets; memories in the spoken word—proverbs attributed to him, legends and traditions of his sagacity that still linger among the populace. IN THE DAYS OF THE DUKE: so runs a local saying, much as we speak ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the old capital, has a decayed dignity of its own. The public square, with its stately eighteenth-century buildings, is the only architectural feature I ever saw in the British West Indies. Our national lack of imagination is ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... dealing statistically with large numbers of nuclei of a particular radioactive isotope. In the case of thorium-232, for example, radioactive decay proceeds so slowly that 14 billion years must elapse before one-half of an initial quantity decayed to a more stable configuration. Thus the half-life of this isotope is 14 billion years. After the elapse of second half-life (another 14 billion years), only one-fourth of the original quantity of thorium-232 would ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... widening in our own age. The greatest, most permanent, and most universal force is literature. Raphael and Michael Angelo have not influenced the world so profoundly as Shakespeare and Dante; while so many artistic achievements of antiquity are lost or half decayed, its literary masterpieces still survive with undiminished freshness and charm; and while the most eminent works even of contemporary artists are seen only occasionally by a few, the most eminent writings of the world's master minds may and do ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... dead Glimpse upward from their turfy bed, Startling the traveller, late and lone; As, on some night of starless weather, They silently commune together, Each sitting on his own head-stone The roofless house, decayed, deserted, Its living tenants all departed, No longer rings with midnight revel Of witch, or ghost, or goblin evil; No pale blue flame sends out its flashes Through creviced roof and shattered sashes! The witch-grass ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... taken so completely by surprise that neither said a word. Over and over they went, a shower of dirt, sticks and dead leaves coming after them. Then they brought up on a big pile of decayed leaves and lay there, the breath all ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)
... Bayfield, or Bagvil, in 1810. Their "founder" had settled in Axcester towards the middle of the seventeenth century, and prospered—mainly, it was said, by usury. A little before his death, which befel in 1668, he purchased Bayfield House from a decayed Royalist who had lost his only son in the Civil Wars; and to Bayfield and the ancestral business (exalted now into Banking) his descendants continued faithful. One or both of the two brothers who, with their half-sister, represented the family in 1810, rode in on every week-day to their Bank-office ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... which the trial is to take place has arrived. On the south side of Broad Street there stands a small wooden building, the boarding discoloured and decayed, looking as if it had been accidentally dropped between the walls of two brick buildings standing at its sides. In addition, it has the appearance of one side having been set at a higher elevation than ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... Bosio, Veronica was a Serra, which was at least equivalent to saying that she was not an insignificant person of weak will and feeble intelligence. She was indeed the last of her name, but the race had not decayed. It was by accident and by force of circumstances that it had come to be represented by the solitary young girl who sat reading a novel over her fire on that evening, caring very little for the fact that she was a very great ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... multitude of deep wrinkles in his little fat face, the Adam's apple hung below his sharp chin like a great, fleshy goiter, which gave him a peculiar, repulsive, sensual appearance; add to that a long rapacious mouth with full lips, between which could be seen little stumps of black decayed teeth. He slobbered every time he began to speak. He was fond indeed of making fun of his own face, though, I believe, he was well satisfied with it. He used particularly to point to his nose, which was not very large, but very delicate and conspicuously ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... 802, St. Paulinus assembled a council at Altino, a city near the Adriatic sea, which had been destroyed by Attila, and was at that time only a shadow of what it had been, though famous for a monastery, in which this synod was probably held.[15] It is long since entirely decayed. St. Paulinus closed a holy life by a happy death on the 11th of January, in 804, as Madrisius proves.[16] His festival occurs on this day in the old missal of Aquileia, and in several German Martyrologies: but it is at present kept at Aquileia, Friuli, and in some other places, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... close to the opposite edge. After a moment of rest I crossed the room to investigate. The white was the bleached human bones—the skull, collar bones, arms, and a few of the upper ribs of a man. The brown was the dust of a decayed military cap and blouse. In a chair before the desk were other bones, while more still strewed the floor beneath the desk and about the chair. A man had died sitting there with his face buried in his arms—two ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... reanimated the discouraged army. When our residence was composed of three rooms,—an extremely rare occurrence, then the third room, or closet, was occupied by the Prince de Neuchatel, who always slept as near by as possible. We often found in these wretched dwellings old decayed furniture of singular shapes, and little images in wood or plaster of male or female saints which the proprietors had left. Frequently, however, we found poor people in these dwellings, who, having nothing to save from conquest, had remained. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... requiring to stop every few yards, though their riders, except myself, were afoot. The gloom of the dense, ancient, silent forest is to me awe inspiring. On such an evening it is soundless, except for the branches creaking in the soft wind, the frequent snap of decayed timber, and a murmur in the pine tops as of a not distant waterfall, all tending to produce EERINESS and a sadness "hardly akin to pain." There no lumberer's axe has ever rung. The trees die when they have attained their prime, and stand ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... to the helplessness of her situation. She cast a hurried glance around, but could find no signs of comfort; yet she fixed her last hopes on Marien Rufa, this decayed piece of blanched mortality, like the drowning wretch who snatches at a withered branch, though conscious of the frail ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... cautiously in. It proved a passage, level for some distance, then sloping gently up. He advanced carefully, feeling his way as he went. At length he was stopped by a door—a small door, studded with iron. But the wood was in places so much decayed that some of the bolts had dropped out, and he felt sure of being able to open it. He returned, therefore, to fetch Lina and his mattock. Arrived at the cleft, his strong miner arms bore him swiftly up along the rope and ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... things, Dale," he said deliberately. "One of them is a dark, narrow room—a room piled with indistinct boxes and crates, and with an open door bearing the black number 4167. And in that open doorway, coming forward with slow steps—alive, with arms extended and a frightful face of passion—is a decayed human form. A corpse, Dale. A man who has been dead for many days, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... black dress-coat, and a cheap brown wig, which made no pretense of being his own natural hair. Short black trousers clung like attached old servants round his wizen legs; and rusty black gaiters hid all they could of his knobbed, ungainly feet. Black crape added its mite to the decayed and dingy wretchedness of his old beaver hat; black mohair in the obsolete form of a stock drearily encircled his neck and rose as high as his haggard jaws. The one morsel of color he carried about him was a lawyer's bag of blue serge, ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... mighty glad, I came here when I did." He gave a short mirthless laugh. "I doubt if my satisfaction is inspired by any moral scruple," he added hastily, as the other nodded. "Say, can you understand how I feel when I say I believe all moral scruple has somehow decayed, rotted, died in me? I don't mean that I don't want to be decent. I do; but that's because decency appeals to me from some sort of artistic feelings which have survived the wreck I made of life ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... distance, the lower branches and leaves of the trees of smaller growth were laved by its waters. The picture so beautifully described by our own admirable poet, and which we have placed at the head of this chapter, was here realized; the earth fattened by the decayed vegetation of centuries, and black with loam, the stream that filled the banks nearly to overflowing, and the "fresh and boundless wood," being all as visible to the eye as the pen of Bryant has elsewhere vividly presented them to the ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... I was about to probe a mysterious-looking hole, I beheld with alarm and amazement the ugly head of a large black snake suddenly thrust out at me from a dark mass, which I presently found was the decayed stump of a tree. I fell back as far as possible, and then saw that the reptile had quite uncoiled itself from the stem, and was coming straight at me. I promptly dealt it a violent blow on the body, just below that point where it raised its head from the ground. No sooner had I done this than another ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... Africanus, fortunate men when I saw them with a company of young nobles about them. Nor should we think any teachers of the fine arts otherwise than happy, however much their bodily forces may have decayed and failed. And yet that same failure of the bodily forces is more often brought about by the vices of youth than of old age; for a dissolute and intemperate youth hands down the body to old age in a worn-out ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the strange question, replied, "No, your grace, that is not my department; I am in the laundry, and my business is"—"Oh, never mind," said the duke, with the look of one greatly relieved, "I am perfectly satisfied so you don't bake the bread." A decayed gentleman, who had found harbourage at Fleurs, was staying rather longer than convenient. It was in the depth of winter, and the ground was covered with snow. The duke, who was an early riser in all seasons, had been out for ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... yonder spheres sublime Pealed their first notes to sound the march of time, Thy joyous youth began:—but not to fade.— When all the sister planets have decayed; When wrapt in flames the realms of ether glow, And Heaven's last thunder shakes the world below; Thou, undismay'd, shalt o'er the ruins smile, And light thy ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... persuasion, Ludjuan gave his consent for me to go. On our way we stopped at the tent, and I procured for the last time, a small quantity of the ship's provisions, although the meat was some of it in a very decayed state. ...
— A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 1824 • William Lay
... of decayed mounts, which Whitelocke guessed to have been dedicated to their other gods, from whom they gave the names of the other days of the week: as, to Thor, whom they called Jupiter, and, from whence the day Thoresdag, which we call Thursday, the Germans say Thorsdaeg, and the Latins Dies Jovis; ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... theirs! Four or five square inches of half-decayed flooring-board was their sole home. The keen air blew about them from all quarters: the morning sky hung dull grey above their heads, and surrounding them everywhere was the ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... The victualling system did not permit of her doing so. The austere republican virtue of the Commonwealth authorities enabled them to do what was out of Elizabeth's power. In 1653, 'beer and other provisions "decayed and unfit for use" were licensed for export free of Customs.' Mr. Oppenheim, who reports this fact, makes the remarkable comment that this was done 'perhaps in the hope that such stores would go to Holland,' with whose people we were at war. As the heavy mortality ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... perhaps, one of the most depressing fictions ever encountered by stage-passenger, or pedestrian afield: and depends so exclusively upon the imagination for any earthly distinction from the retired and neglected private hiding-place of some decayed and morbid agricultural family, that only the conventional swing sign-board before the door saves the cognizant mind from a painfully dense confusion. Smelling about equally of eternal wash-day, casual cow-shed, and passing feather-bed, it sustains ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... the yellow Tiber. We give him all the sesterces we have about us, along with a few sustaining aphorisms from our commonplace book upon the folly, if not the wickedness, of suicide, and see him safely home. When we next encounter the decayed virtuoso, he has grown a beard (very badly kept), and set up as a philosopher of the hyper-virtuous Jaques school. Of course he lectures us upon every vice which we have not, and every little frailty which we have, with a pointed asperity that upsets our temper for the day, and causes us ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... observing that "there must be a beginning to every thing"), I became quite expert. I was subsequently initiated into the higher branches of tooth-drawing and bleeding. In the former, at first I gave great dissatisfaction, either from breaking the decayed tooth short off, and leaving the stump in the socket, or from mistaking the one pointed out, and drawing a sound engine of mastication in its stead. In the latter, I made more serious mistakes, having more than once cut so deep as to open the artery, while I missed the vein; in consequence ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of those of our race have in the past weakened and decayed. This will not always be. Increase of spiritual knowledge will show the cause of such decay, and will show, also, how to take advantage of a Law or Force to build us up, renew ever the body and give it greater and greater strength, instead of blindly using that Law or Force, as ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... miles a day she could learn to walk if she should start out into the world on foot to find somebody, as she had heard that Bonaventure had once done to find her mother's lover. There are no Bonaventures now, she thinks, in these decayed times. ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... a forest of birch trees, and suitable wood for canoe frames. They had commenced the voyage with old canoes, which were frail and decayed, and in which they could not safely launch forth upon the turbulent flood of the Mississippi. The whole band consequently encamped for several days upon this eminence, to construct new canoes. The veteran hunters wandered through the forests and over the prairies, to hunt ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... chance for its life in a race with a dog. When the snow was not too soft and deep, it usually made good its escape, for our dogs were only fat, short-legged mongrels. We sometimes discovered hares in standing hollow trees, crouching on decayed punky wood at the bottom, as far back as possible from the opening, but when alarmed they managed to climb to a considerable height if the hollow was not too wide, by ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... howl of the gray wolves, who closed in about us and set up their hunger wails beyond the reach of our bullets; and the heat of the day with its peril of arrow and rifle-ball filled the long hours. Hunger was a terror now. Our meat was gone save a few decayed portions which we could barely swallow after we had sprinkled them over with gunpowder. For the stomach refused them even in starvation. Dreams of banquets tortured our short, troubled sleep, and the waking was a ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... species, appearing from late spring until late autumn. It sometimes appears in greenhouses throughout the year. The plants are 2—3 cm. high, and the caps 6—10 mm. broad. The plants are crowded in large tufts, often growing on decaying wood, but also on the ground, especially about much decayed stumps, but also in lawns and similar places, where buried roots, etc., are decaying. They resemble ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... Haroun-al-Raschid's Bagdad, or Semiramis' Babylon, as well as in those of poor little modern Tangier. And the Verona of the Scaligers may have been just such a Verona as this which delights and depresses us, only with new beautiful things being built quite naturally alongside of decayed and defiled ones; things nowadays all equally levelled in ruin and squalor. The splendour of the Past may be a mere fiction of our own, like the romance of the Past which we say we no longer believe in. But history gives us, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... decayed barrels and boxes, garnished the ground in all directions; and three or four ferocious-looking dogs, roused by the sound of the wagon-wheels, came tearing out, and were with difficulty restrained from laying hold of Tom and his companions, by the effort of the ragged servants who ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... persons in the place; every one had some sufficient calling or an income to render it unnecessary; vagrants and paupers were instantly snapped up and provided for at "the Farm." There was, however, in a gambrel-roofed house here and there, a decayed old gentlewoman, occupying a scrupulously neat room with just a suspicion of maccaboy snuff in the air, who had her meals sent in to her by the neighborhood—as a matter of course, and involving no sense of dependency on her side. It is wonderful what an ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... its law; if the Geotrupes remain faithful to filth, although experience shows that they can accommodate themselves equally well to the putrefaction of decayed leaves; if the predatory species—the Cerceris, the Sphex, the Ammophila—resort only to one species of quarry to nourish their larvae, although these same larvae accept all indifferently, it is on account of those superior economic laws and ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... of an apple-tree but a few yards off, and much nearer the house than they usually build, a pair of high-holes, or golden-shafted woodpeckers, took up their abode. A knothole which led to the decayed interior was enlarged, the live wood being cut away as clean as a squirrel would have done it. The inside preparations I could not witness, but day after day, as I passed near, I heard the bird hammering away, evidently beating down obstructions and shaping and ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... these pine regions of literal importance. There is something besides utility also to be mentioned in this connection. With the exception of swamps, which are few and far between, the timber land has all the beauty of a sylvan grove. The entire absence of underbrush and decayed logs lends ornament and attraction to the woods. They are more like the groves around a mansion in their neat and cheerful appearance; and awaken reflection on the Muses and the dialogues of philosophers rather than apprehension of ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... by column upon column of wishy-washy twaddle in the morning papers, that Henley Regatta has actually taken place. The effete parasites of a decayed aristocracy who direct this gathering endeavour year after year to make the world believe that theirs is the only meeting at which honour has the least chance of bursting into flower. I have my own opinions on this point. Really, these tenth transmitters ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... ensued as to the origin and use of these numerous gateways. Mr. Squier thinks that these openings were occupied by timber work in the nature of block-houses, which have long since decayed. Others, however, think that the wall was originally entire except in a few instances, and that the breaks now apparent were formed by natural causes, such as water gathering in pools, and muskrats burrowing ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... my journey I reached Ganhard, which was formerly one of the most prosperous towns in Central India, but is now much decayed and governed by a wealthy, arbitrary, violent, generous, and cruel prince. His name is Rajah Maddan, a true Oriental potentate, delicate and barbarous, affable and sanguinary, combining feminine grace ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of plucking foreigners: how should a youngster's imagination be nurtured in this atmosphere of savourless modernism? Then I asked myself: who comes to these regions, now that invalids have learnt the drawbacks of their climate? Decayed Muscovites, Englishmen such as you will vainly seek in England, and their painted women-folk with stony, Medusa-like gambling eyes, a Turk or two, Jews and cosmopolitan sharks and sharpers, flamboyant Americans, Brazilian, Peruvian, Chilian, Bolivian rastaqueros with names that ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... the sun is of the nature of chastisement, and appointed of the infinitely good Being for our benefit. When you see a youth, who, but lately, was the picture of bloom and manly beauty, now utterly withered and decayed; his body bent; his teeth dropping out; his nose consumed; with foetid breath, ichorous eyes, and his whole appearance most putrid, ghastly, and loathsome, you are filled with pity and with horror; you can hardly believe there is a God, or hardly refrain from charging ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium: the bitter lapse into everyday life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... revolutions are too slow to be discernible in the short period known to us by history and tradition. Physically and in mental powers men have been pretty much the same in all known ages. The sciences and arts have flourished now and have again decayed, but when they reached the highest perfection among one people, the neighbouring peoples were perhaps wholly unacquainted with them. We are therefore uncertain whether at present man is advancing to his point of perfection or declining from it. [Footnote: Essay ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... fortunately prevented a distant separation. They now led their horses forth, and, mounting without delay, whipped forward for life or death. Could the summit of the mound be attained, they were in safety—for there the soil was not encumbered with decayed vegetation—and they spurred their animals to the top of their speed. It was a noble sight to see the majestic white steed flying toward the mound with the velocity of the wind, while the diminutive pony miraculously followed in the wake like an inseparable shadow. The careering flames were ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... in the business of mining in the mountains of California in early days, and having occasion to work often among timber, in removing stumps, etc., it was while so engaged that I noticed one peculiar fact, which was this—that the stumps of some trees which had been cut but two or three years had decayed, while others of the same size and variety of pine which had been cut the same year were as sound and firm as when first cut. This seemed strange to me, and I found upon inquiry of old lumbermen who had worked among timber all their lives, that it was strange to them also, and they could offer ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... weather-worn; and probably these were but the successors of other stones that had quite crumbled away, or been buried by the accumulation of dead men's dust above them. In the centre of the churchyard stood an old yew-tree, with immense trunk, which was all decayed within, so that it is a wonder how the tree retains any life,—which, nevertheless, it does. It was called "the old Yew of Eastham," six ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... before my journey to Geneva. I had exclaimed in my transport: "Ah, madam, what a delightful habitation! This asylum was purposely prepared for me." Madam D'Epinay did not pay much attention to what I said; but at this second journey I was quite surprised to find, instead of the old decayed building, a little house almost entirely new, well laid out, and very habitable for a little family of three persons. Madam D'Epinay had caused this to be done in silence, and at a very small expense, by detaching a few materials and some of the work men from the castle. She now ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... being some noble and imposing jack-fruits, whose broad, bright green branches were almost level with the crowns of the palm-trees, their roots embedded in a rich, soft, black soil, formed by the fallen leaves of hundreds of years, mixed with decayed coral detritus. ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... these experimental results, it may be inferred from general considerations, that nitric acid must be one of the sources from which plants derive their nitrogen. It has been already stated, that the humus contained in the soil consists of the remains of decayed plants, and there is every reason to suppose that the primeval soil contained no organic matters, and that the first generation of plants must have derived the whole of their nitrogen from, the atmosphere. If, therefore, it be assumed that ammonia is the only source of the nitrogen of ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... more likely to occur in children suffering from adenoids, enlarged tonsils, indigestion, and decayed teeth, and is favored by dry, furnace heat, by exposure to cold, and by screaming ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... It was discovered by Mariette at Saqqara. "The head, torso, arms, and even the staff, were intact; but the pedestal and legs were hopelessly decayed, and the statue was only kept upright by the sand which surrounded it." The staff has since been broken, and is replaced by a more recent one exactly like it. In order to set up the figure, Mariette was obliged to supply new feet, which retain the colour of the fresh wood. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... altered spirit of the times. It was one feature of a general system of manners, fitted by its piety and simplicity for a pious and simple age, and which therefore even the 17th century had already outgrown. It is not to be inferred that filial affection and reverence have decayed amongst us, because they no longer express themselves in the same way. In an age of imperfect culture, all passions and emotions are in a more elementary state—'speak a plainer language'—and express themselves ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... years. Don't preach much now. My lungs done got decayed and I can't hold up. Some people thinks preachin' is an ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... being chiefly built of stone. Some years ago the whole place was covered by the trees, and on the dilapidated stone wall, may still be seen immense trees, whose growth among the stones helped to displace them. The decayed wood beneath some of these trees indicates that successions of forests have flourished since these forts were abandoned by ...
— Mound-Builders • William J. Smyth
... Kingsland is thinking in what cravat he shall adorn himself when he goes to do the same thing in the afternoon. For Mr. Kingsland has arrived at home, where he and his old father keep a bachelor sort of household in a decayed old house at one extremity of Crocus. They have a respectable name, folks say, but not wealth to set it off; and the household is small. The same little boy who rubs down Mr. Kingsland's horse waits upon table, and there is nobody else but a housekeeper. ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... and of the former John Warder, and Graydon, who wrote certain memoirs long after. His mother, a widow, kept boarders in the great Slate-roof House near by; for in those days this was a common resource of decayed gentlewomen, and by no means affected their social position. Here came many officers to stay, and their red coats used to please my eyes as I went by the porch, where at evening I saw them smoking long pipes, ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... whiskers that grew unevenly on his face, and in places where you would have expected the hair to grow thickly there was no hair at all. His skin was pasty and yellow. He held out his hand to Philip, and when he smiled showed badly decayed teeth. He spoke with a patronising and at the same time a timid air, as though he sought to assume an importance which he did not feel. He said he hoped Philip would like the work; there was a good deal of drudgery ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... though surrounded by guards and other appurtenances of Royalty, is only inhabited by decayed servants of the Court, impoverished and broken-down scions of the Aristocracy, &c. to whom the royal generosity proffers a subsistence within its walls. I suppose about two-thirds of it are thus occupied, while the residue is thrown open at certain hours to the public. ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... sides; and of these Mount Abida, three thousand feet in height, whose cup, enveloped in clouds, stretches some two and a half miles in diameter, would seem to be the parent. Beyond, the still loftier crater of Aiulloo, the ancient landmark of the now-decayed empire of Ethiopia, is visible in dim perspective; and, looming hazily in the extreme distance, is the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... ever surprised that light in Dockland will be persuaded that it is not there still, and will remain. But what could strangers see of it? The foreshore to them is the unending monotony of grey streets, sometimes grim, often decayed, and always reticent and sullen, that might never have seen the stars nor heard of good luck; and the light would be, when closely looked at, merely a high gas bracket on a dank wall in solitude, its glass broken, and the flame within it fluttering to extinction like an imprisoned ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... the eight Beatitudes, all ascribed with some ingenuity of application to her majesty. The fourth ventured upon a more trying topic: its opposite sides represented in lively contrast the images of a decayed and of a flourishing commonwealth; and from a cave below issued Time leading forth his daughter Truth, who held in her hand an English bible, which she offered to the queen's acceptance. Elizabeth received the volume, and reverently pressing it with both hands to her heart and to her lips, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... thou mother of ten thousand blessings—thou cook of fat beef and dainty greens!—thou manufacturer of warm Shetland hose, and comfortable surtouts!—thou old housewife, darning thy decayed stockings with thy ancient spectacles on thy aged nose!—lead me, hand me in thy clutching palsied fist, up those heights, and through those thickets, hitherto inaccessible, and impervious to my anxious, weary feet:—not those Parnassian crags, bleak and ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... eyebrows. My eyes are very liquid, but with dark circles, and bistered; and they are subject to slight temporary inflammation. My mouth is fairly large, with thick red lips, the lower pendent; they tell me I have the Austrian mouth. My teeth are dazzling, though three are decayed and stopped; fortunately, they cannot be seen. My ears are small and with very colored lobes. My chin is very fat, and at 18 it was smooth and velvety as a woman's; at present there is a slight beard, always shaved. Two beauty spots, black ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... did despatch a second fleet, instead of sending supplies for the starving people under Phillip's care, sent more prisoners, and very little to eat was sent with them. The authorities seem to have had an idea that a few hundred shovels, some decayed garden seeds, and a thousand or two of Old Bailey men and women criminals, were all the means needed to found a prosperous and self-supporting colony. How Phillip and his successors surmounted these difficulties is another ...
— The Beginning Of The Sea Story Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... And thus the king his child addrest, Whilst anger darkened o'er his brow:— "What hast thou done, ungrateful, now? Why hast thou flung, in evil day, The veil of modesty away? That cheek the bloom of spring displayed, Now all is withered, all decayed; But daughters, as the wise declare, Are ever false, if they ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... where the plants had pushed through the green moss, and their leaves having slightly expanded, they looked like miniature myrtles. Instead of going directly inland, we made our way along the shore among the penguin grass. This grows to the height of ten feet, on the top of clumps of decayed vegetable matter, forming large hillocks, which made the shore look as if it had been covered with a coppice of underwood. We took our way through it, often being hid from each other by the high grass, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... their nests in the hollows of decayed trees, and lay twice in the year—generally two eggs at a time, the male and female alternately watching over them. They are said to increase the size of the hole with their powerful beaks, should it not be sufficiently large for their purpose. ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... experienced, however, frequent visitations of trance or ecstasy, sometimes lasting for a long period; and it may have been in one of these that he was inspired by the idea of asking the Emperor for a decayed city in Campania, there to establish a philosophic commonwealth as nearly upon the model of Plato's Republic as the degeneracy ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... A decayed vintner, sir, That might have thriv'd, but that your worship broke me, With trusting you with muscadine and eggs, And five pound suppers, with your after-drinkings, When you lodged upon ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... to use a harpoon which had been thrust into a piece of decayed liver. She wounded a reindeer with the harpoon and ...
— The Later Cave-Men • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... of us believed them to have been political, and fancied that we had in Bibi a specimen of the decayed Nihilist. In view of the fact that he often proclaimed himself a socialist, this seemed to bear some colour of probability; but against it argued the circumstance that of the members of that little clan of Russian refugees ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... gained considerably in commercial and military status. It is the point of intersection for three lines; the Italian government has made it a great cavalry depot, and there are signs of reviving traffic in its decayed streets. Whether the presence of a large garrison has already modified the population, or whether we may ascribe something to the absence of Roman municipal institutions in the far past, and to the savagery of the mediaeval period, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Horace in the life of after times. It will include an account of the esteem in which he was held while still in the flesh; of the fame he enjoyed and the influence he exercised until Rome as a great empire was no more and the Roman tongue and Roman spirit alike were decayed; of the way in which his works were preserved intact through obscure centuries of ignorance and turmoil; and of their second birth when men began to delight once more in the luxuries of the mind. This will prepare the way for a final chapter, on the peculiar quality ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... heart of London had been cleft open for the mere purpose of showing how rotten and drearily mean it had become. The shore is lined with the shabbiest, blackest, and ugliest buildings that can be imagined, decayed warehouses with blind windows, and wharves that look ruinous; insomuch that, had I known nothing more of the world's metropolis, I might have fancied that it had already experienced the down-fall which I have heard commercial and financial ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... freshness of leaves, flowers, and carolling birds, as if raising them from an annual interment in winter's cold grave, and then thinking of the destiny of his own race, how many generations have ripened and decayed, how many human crops have been harvested from the cradle and planted in the tomb, might naturally especially if he had any thing of the poet's associating and creative mind say to himself, Are we altogether perishable dust, or are we seed sown for higher fields, seed lying dormant now, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... simplicity and abstinence of an Asiatic, subsists upon the charity of a few booksellers, just sufficient to keep him from the parish, I think Guy, who was himself a bookseller, ought to have appropriated one wing or ward of his hospital to the use of decayed authors; though indeed, there is neither hospital, college, nor workhouse, within the bills of mortality, large enough to contain the poor of this society, composed, as it is, from the refuse of every ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... dedication of Comus. The word does not occur in English at all until the end of the sixteenth century, the possessive case of the neuter pronoun it and of the masculine he being his. This gave rise to confusion when the old gender system decayed, and the form its gradually came into use, until, by the end of the seventeenth century, it was in general use. Milton, however, scarcely recognised it, its place in his involved syntax being taken ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... of each great mansion, and what its owners had done in the history of the republic: a recital as intelligent and as accurate as could have been expected in a book. Most of these buildings have a melancholy, decayed look, being generally very old, and few of the owners being able to spend much in or on them. A few that look tolerably fresh, are found to be occupied by the post, the customs, or some other office, the insignia of which ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... generalities or superficial analogies, why, though mankind started presumably with the same capacities and at the same time, there now exist such wide differences in social development. It must account for the arrested civilizations and for the decayed and destroyed civilizations; for the general facts as to the rise of civilization, and for the petrifying or enervating force which the progress of civilization has heretofore always evolved. It must account for retrogression a well as ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... described a party in a country village which is suddenly broken into confusion by the entrance of the sexton of their parish church, fresh from the digging of a grave. The sexton tells the merrymakers how a chance blow of his pickaxe has opened a decayed coffin, in which ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... Infinite treasures consumed, towns burned, flourishing cities sacked and ruinated, quodque animus meminisse horret, goodly countries depopulated and left desolate, old inhabitants expelled, trade and traffic decayed, maids deflowered, Virgines nondum thalamis jugatae, et comis nondum positis ephaebi; chaste matrons cry out with Andromache, [296]Concubitum mox cogar pati ejus, qui interemit Hectorem, they shall be compelled peradventure ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... looked very much like a proscenium; at Bohebia, on the Bidassoa, the small yellow stream which divides France from Spain, and which at this point offers to view the celebrated Isle of Pheasants, a little bushy strip of earth adorned with a decayed commemorative monument, on which, in the seventeenth century, the affairs of Louis XIV. and his brother monarch were discussed in ornamental conference; at Fuentarabia (glorious name), a mouldering relic of Spanish stateliness; at Hondaye, at Irun, at Renteria, and ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... here in Alexandria I found one that might have been lifted out of Royal Street or Lafayette Square. A ramshackle wooden building, bleached and blistered by many a dust-storm and torrid sun, its cracked and distorted window-panes were curtained with decayed illustrated papers in many tongues, discoloured Greek and Italian penny-dreadfuls, and a few shelves of cheap curios. Over the door a long shingle displayed on one side the legend Librairie Universelle, while the other bore the word [Greek: BIBLIOPOLION], ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... hunting-ground of my youth, had changed its character, become contracted and unfamiliar, sooty. The McAlerys and other older families who had not decayed with the neighbourhood were rapidly deserting it, moving out to the new residence district known as "the Heights." I came to the Willett House. That, too, had an air of shabbiness,—of well-tended shabbiness, to be sure; the stone steps ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
