"Ditch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well last week. With two stone less and a Calyx-eyed saddle-bar, he would have shown up even better. Whenever the barometer goes up two points Catawampus must be remembered. He was foaled in a ditch on the old North Road, somewhere between London and York, and having remained there or thereabouts for a month, may ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... wedding-day—who makes me an outcast—an object of scorn and disgrace! I would die first! I would face starvation and death in this great city. I know what I am saying. I would sweep a crossing like that beggar in rags yonder; I would lie down and die in a ditch sooner. Let me go, Miss Catheron, I beg of you; you only distress me unnecessarily. If you pleaded forever it could not avail. Give my love to Lady Helena; but I will never go back—I will never accept a farthing from Sir Victor Catheron. Don't come here more—don't let ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... husband Jenny, rosy Jenny full of the ardor of life. For all my wisdom and grace of mind Gave her no delight at all, in very truth, But ever and anon she spoke of the giant strength Of Willard Shafer, and of his wonderful feat Of lifting a traction engine out of the ditch One time at Georgie Kirby's. So Jenny inherited my fortune and married Willard— That mount of brawn! ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... through the field, I perceived something glancing before us: it was water—a wide drain or ditch, a zequia for irrigating the field. Like the magueys, it ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... feet sloped away to a basin out of which bubbled a spring. It furnished the drinking supply of the Midas, and he knew every inch of the crevice it had worn down the mountain, so felt his way cautiously along. At the bottom of the hill where it ran out upon the level it had worn a considerable ditch through the soil, and into this he crawled on hands and knees. His bulging clothes handicapped him so that his gait was slow and awkward, while the rain had swelled the streamlet till it trickled over his calves and up to his wrists, chilling him so that his muscles cramped and his ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... in this hyeh Western country, where a woman is a scanty thing. It ain't what Hank has done that surprises me. And it is not on him that the sorrow will fall. For she is good. She is very good. Do yu' remember little black Hank? From Texas he claims he is. He was working on the main ditch over at Sunk Creek last summer when that Em'ly hen was around. Well, seh, yu' would not have pleasured in his company. And this year Hank is placer-mining on Galena Creek, where we'll likely go for ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... strive a very lifetime for that," quoth Dame Hilda. "I should think no man could rise thereto that dwelt not in anchorite's cell, and scourged him on the bare back every morrow, and ate but of black rye-bread, and drank of ditch-water. Deary me, but I would not like that! I'd put up with a bit ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... many 'sizes ago since a packman murdered a young woman in a lone place, and stole her thimble, and threw her body into a ditch." ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... of all kinds left behind us—trees, shrubs, hedges, all in the fullest leaf, lay for miles and miles on every side; and the scenery had about as much resemblance to our ideal of a Welsh landscape, as ditch water to champagne. Through this wilderness of sweets, stifling and oppressive from its very richness, we drove for a long way, looking in vain for the hilly region where the Three Cocks had taken up their abode. At last we saw, a little way in front of us, at the side of the road—or rather with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... voice and then that of the Comtesse. He had no time to think what they wanted or how they came to be crouching in a damp ditch in the rain while the evening darkened over them. He leaped from the bank, crossed the road, and raced off again towards his ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... who do not know the alphabet of Grace, and the means and methods of Grace,—these are often the pretended instructors at the anxious bench and in the meetings for inquirers. Now, we object strongly to such procedures. "Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall in the ditch?" Better let these novices themselves sit at the feet of Christ. Let Christ's teachers instruct them in God's Way of Salvation, before they undertake to lead other lost and ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... known, from the fact that it is not colored, as the white corpuscle. These corpuscles are little cells of the body, which in shape and behavior are almost exactly like an ameba—a tiny "bug," seen only under the microscope, that lives in ditch-water. Under the microscope the white corpuscles look like little round disks, about one-third larger than the red corpuscles, and with a large kernel, or nucleus, in their centre. They have the same power of changing their shape, of surrounding and swallowing scraps of ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... wonder. Was this slender girl, arrayed in a cloud of semi-transparent white, really herself—the Lottie who only a few days before had raced Robin Wingfield home across the fields, had been the first over the gap and through the ditch into the rectory meadow, and had rushed away with the November rain-drops driving in her face? She gazed on: the transformation had its charms, after all. But the shadow came back: "It's no use. Addie's prettier than I ever shall be: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... the Tower of London, is a collection of old buildings, enclosed within a wall, and surrounded by a ditch. The latter, however, is dry. The most curious of the structures, and the one which gives the place its picturesque appearance, in the distance, is a cluster of exceedingly slender, tall, round towers, in which the prisoners are usually confined, and which is the donjon ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... house, and stood up, like a slender grey ghost, paws high up in the bars, and whimpered softly to her lord. He quieted her, and went to the door in the yard that opened on to the field-path to East Maskells, unbarred it and stepped through. There was a dry ditch on his left, where nettles quivered in the stirring air; and a heavy clump of bushes rose beyond, dark and impenetrable. Mr. Buxton stared straight at these a moment or two, and then out towards East Maskells. There lay his own meadows, and the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... up into a thousand islands by ruts and pools of stagnant water. There is a small cleared space along the river's channel but even this being only partly reclaimed from the surrounding marsh, is often inundated. It is cut up into square patches, round each of which runs a ditch of black mud and refuse, which, lying exposed to the rays of an almost tropical sun, sends forth unwholesome odors, and ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... service. Then he does not live like any other Christian land-man; but keeps garrison in his house, as if he were in the midst of his enemies, and makes his servants turn out in the night, watch and watch as he calls it, all the year round. His habitation is defended by a ditch, over which he has laid a draw-bridge, and planted his court-yard with patereroes continually loaded with shot, under the direction of one Mr. Hatchway, who had one of his legs shot away while he acted ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... have made a figure of yourself! Sit down!" said her aunt, shortly, as she thrust a chair down on the hearth before the fire "I should have thought you'd have had wit enough at your age, to keep out of the ditch." ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... on the outside with a vast ditch, full of water, and lined with bricks on both sides. The earth that was dug out of it made the bricks wherewith the walls were built; and therefore, from the vast height and breadth of the walls may be inferred the greatness ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... Church to Main's is metalled for about four and a half miles; there are fences and fields on both sides, either laid down in English grass or sown with grain; the fences are chiefly low ditch and bank planted with gorse, rarely with quick, the scarcity of which detracts from the resemblance to English scenery which would otherwise prevail. The copy, however, is slatternly compared with the original; ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... Suez Canal, had undertaken to excavate a similar one across the Isthmus of Panama, but the work was managed with such wild extravagance that vast sums were spent and the poor investors widely ruined, while the canal remained a half-dug ditch. At a later date this affair became a great scandal, dishonest bargains in connection with it were abundantly unearthed, bribery was shown to have been common in high places, and France was shaken to its center by the startling exposure. ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... soldier of infantry who belonged to the first division of the seventh Army Corps. After the defeats of Wissenbourg and Froeschwiller, Picot, half dead with fatigue and slightly wounded, was left behind in a ditch with his comrade Coutard of the first corps. They were only able to rejoin the army at Rheims on 22nd August, 1870, arriving with their clothes worn out and covered with mud, and having more the appearance of bandits than of ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... the very beginning of June, at evening, but not yet sunset, that I set out from Toul by the Nancy gate; but instead of going straight on past the parade-ground, I turned to the right immediately along the ditch and rampart, and did not leave the fortifications till I came to the road that goes up alongside the Moselle. For it was by the valley of this river that I was to begin my pilgrimage, since, by a happy accident, the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... War correspondents Mr. PHILIP GIBBS contrives to give in his despatches the liveliest sense of the movement, the pageantry and the abominable horror of war. Pageantry there is, for all the evil boredom and weariness of this pit-and-ditch business, and Mr. GIBBS sees finely and has an honest pen that avoids the easy cliche. You might truthfully describe his book, The Battles of the Somme (HEINEMANN), as an epic of the New Armies. He never seems to lose his wonder at their courage and their spirit, and always with an undercurrent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various
... towards the mining district and valley of Illapel. This valley, like every other in Chile, is level, broad, and very fertile: it is bordered on each side, either by cliffs of stratified shingle, or by bare rocky mountains. Above the straight line of the uppermost irrigating ditch, all is brown as on a high road; while all below is of as bright a green as verdigris, from the beds of alfalfa, a kind of clover. We proceeded to Los Hornos, another mining district, where the principal hill was drilled ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... field The chime of war, Sword striking shield, Rings from afar. The living fly; The dead piled high The moor enrich; Red runs the ditch." ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... remembering the little shaver he'd left twenty years back. So I leaned over and kissed him, and he got his arm around my neck and held me pretty tight a minute, and nobody cared. All those dying, suffering, last-ditch men lying around, and the two worn-out doctors hurrying among 'em—they didn't care. No more did he and I. I'd found my father; I ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... that fiercely pursuing locomotive, nor whether they were armed or not. He only knew that within another minute they would overtake him. He formed a desperate resolve, and a moment later Rod Blake thought he saw a dark form scrambling from a ditch beside the track as they flew past. When they reached the "dying" locomotive of which they were in pursuit and found it abandoned, he knew what had taken place. The train robber had leaped from its cab and was now making his way ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... wheels was heard before the open door, and its lights flashed upon a carriage and pair,—an actual private carriage,—the like of which had not been seen since the governor of the State had come down to open the new ditch! Then there was a pause, the flash of the carriage lamps upon white silk, the light tread of a satin foot on the veranda and in the hall, and the entrance of a vision of loveliness! Middle-aged men and old dwellers of cities remembered their youth; younger men bethought themselves of Cinderella ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... sweet-smelling wild honeysuckle I saw a covey of young quails. These hedgerows of locust and cedar are broken now, but along the old road to the mill and Pohick Church and between fields the scattered trees and now and then a bordering ditch are evidences of the old ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... front, the carriage behind, so that if a ditch presented itself unexpectedly the waggon might tumble into it, and the carriage might take warning and ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... twilight in summer, he made me go before, to pilot him; I am absent at times, especially towards evening; and the consequence of this pilotage was some narrow escapes to the M * * on horseback. Once I led him into a ditch over which I had passed as usual, forgetting to warn my convoy; once I led him nearly into the river, instead of on the moveable bridge which incommodes passengers; and twice did we both run against ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... resting his red head against the dark one below it. "I don't seem to feel particularly tired, now," he observed. "Curious, isn't it? Fatigue, as I've often noticed, is more mental than physical—with most of us. Your ditch-digger is tired in his back and arms, but the ordinary person is merely tired because his mind tells ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... exempt from objection in a man who objected to all the world? or will it be thought a profaneness against such profanity, to remind the reader of the philosopher in Swift, who "while gazing on the stars, was betrayed by his lower parts into a ditch!" ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... some rooks crossing from elm to elm, no life was visible in all the green land. And it was quiet—with a strange, a brooding tranquillity. The fields and hills seemed to mock the scars of road and ditch and furrow scraped on them, to mock at barriers of hedge and wall—between the green land and white sky was a conspiracy to disregard those small activities. So lonely was it, so plunged in a ground-bass of silence; so much too big and permanent ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... reaching the abode of Anu, and then the abode of Ishtar. As they rise to height after height the eagle describes the appearance of the world lying stretched out beneath: at first it rises like a huge mountain out of the sea; then the ocean appears as a girdle encircling the land, and finally but as a ditch a gardener digs to irrigate his land. When they have risen so high that the earth is scarcely visible, Etana cries to the eagle to stop; so he does, but his strength is exhausted, and bird and man fall to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... water from the roof, with pipes of some sort to convey it to the ground, or shall it be left to take care of itself? If there are none, the ground around the house should pitch sharply away from the walls and a slight depression should be formed, into which the water would fall. This shallow ditch should be perhaps two feet wide, as the drops will not always come down in straight lines. It may be paved with small stones or bricks, between which the grass will grow, or it maybe more carefully lined with asphalt paving. If it is desired ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... the garrison, by a well-timed sortie, did great damage to the enemy's works. Before the breach, however, could be repaired, the janissaries, recovering from their panic, again assailed it, and, after a desperate struggle, established themselves in the ditch and front of the bastion, while the defenders endeavoured, by changing the direction of their guns, to enfilade the ground thus won by the enemy, so as to prevent their penetrating into the interior, which now lay open ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... Pasha's rebel army of 25,000 Egyptians and 5,000 Bedouins to oppose Sir Garnet Wolseley's flank march on Cairo from Ismailia. About 1,000 yards to the east of the 28th, was a line of earthworks—ditch, rampart, bastion, and redoubt—which, commencing at the Sweet Water Canal, extended about due north for nearly five miles. Other and smaller works lay to the west of this line. At dawn on the 13th ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... ghost. And when I asked the engineer who gave him orders, he said he'd just like to see any man on this planet try to give him orders, black-and-white or verbal; he said he'd run that train to suit himself or he'd run it into the ditch. Now, you see, I'm not much of a theologian, but I'm a good deal of a railroad man, and I don't want to run on a road that has no schedule, makes no time, has no connections, starts anywhere and runs nowhere, and has neither ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... the latter being held back for a time. Major Gilbraith and Colonel Burke's troops, being unable to cross the creek, passed over the bridge that spans it by the left flank, the former's companies having previously occupied a sheltered place in a ditch parallel to and to the right of the main road. About this time the advance-guard, one of the companies of which (Penrose's) had previously held for a short time a knoll on the left of the road, moved forward and ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... as well to motors. We decided to overhaul ours with a few brief excursions, just long enough to give an opportunity for having it towed home. One late afternoon we were hurrying across the mesa to supper, when our magneto flew off into the ditch, scattering screws in all directions. Fortunately, a kind of Knight Errant to our family appeared just in the nick of time to take us home and send help to the wreck. I once kept a garage in San Diego open half an hour after ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... drove the solid-hoofed steeds across the ditch, exulting, and with him went the other Greeks rejoicing. But when they came to the well-constructed tent of Diomede, they tied the steeds by the skilfully-cut reins to the horses' stall, where stood the swift-footed steeds of Diomede, eating sweet corn. In the stern of his vessel ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... heard that the company assembled in the meadow to tell the pleasantest tales imaginable, and being fonder of pleasure than of their prayers, they had gone and hidden themselves in a ditch, where they lay flat on their bellies behind a very thick hedge; and they had there listened so eagerly to the stories that they had not heard the ringing of the monastery bell, as was soon clearly shown, for they returned in such great ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... well-fortified and well-armed fort. Molino del Rey was occupied by a brigade of the National Guards, under General Leon. These were re-enforced on the morning of the 7th by a brigade under General Rangel. The Casta Mata, a large storehouse surrounded by a wide ditch and inclosed by a bastioned fort, was occupied by the brigade of General Perez, and between these two positions was posted General Ramirez's brigade with six pieces of artillery. In the rear occupying some ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... or Tower of London, called Bringwin, and Tourgwin, in Welsh, from its whiteness, is encompassed by a very deep and broad ditch, as well as a double wall very high. In the middle of the whole is that very ancient and very strong tower, enclosed with four others, which, in the opinion of some, was built by Julius Caesar. Upon entering the tower, we were ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... or at any rate bolted and barred. He must either, therefore, try and overpower the man or else try to gain the flat roof by the stairs—of which he knew the position—and, trusting to find a rope or something of the sort in the upper room of the gate, let himself down into the ditch outside. ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... appeared before me, that promised, one way or another, to interrupt the chase; it was a ditch or gully, that intersected my path at right angles. It was several feet in depth, dry at the bottom, ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... the Federals were batteries Mahone and Gregg, but neither had guns mounted nor men assigned them. Mahone was unfinished, and was simply an embrasured battery of three guns. Gregg was a large fort, with a deep ditch in front, and its sally-ports protected in rear, and was embrasured for six guns. These two forts were all that now prevented the enemy from completely cutting the Confederate lines in two to the Appomattox, and dividing A. P. Hill and ...
— Lee's Last Campaign • John C. Gorman
... the Sunset Highway connects with the Inland Empire Road, a southern route to Spokane via Walla Walla. Following the Wenas Valley to North Yakima, it continues southeast through the Union Gap and along the Sunnyside Canal, the largest irrigation ditch in the state, where a splendid view of the valley, with Mount Hood in the distance appears. From Prosser, county seat of Benton county and entrance to the Horse Heaven country, the road drops toward the Columbia river and soon reaches Kennewick, the home of early strawberries, and Pasco, ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... down which he had been riding. It was a lonely spot, but yet was a thoroughfare from which the roads diverged to one or two large villages, and led in one direction ultimately to the market-town. Close to the ditch opposite the road down which Amos had come was a white finger- post, informing those who were capable of deciphering its bleared inscriptions whither they were going or might go. Amos hesitated; he had never been on this exact ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... an insect as you would a magnetic needle and to subject it to the current from an induction coil in order to disturb its magnetism or diamagnetism appeared to me, I must confess, a curious notion, worthy of an imagination in the last ditch. I have but little confidence in our physics, when they pretend to explain life; nevertheless, my respect for the great man would have made me resort to the induction-coils, if I had possessed the necessary apparatus. But my village boasts no scientific ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... willing to wait on thee, and be thy bow-bearer.—Only, for her mother's sake, let there pass some slight form of marriage between you—Ye need no license or priest in these happy days, but may be buckled like beggars in a ditch, with a hedge for a church-roof, and a tinker for a priest. I crave pardon of you for making such an officious and simple request—perhaps you are a ranter—or one of the family of Love, or hold marriage rites as unnecessary, as Knipperdoling, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... come from her husband; but I did lose my labour, and so walked back again, but with pleasure by the walk, and I had the sport to see two boys swear, and stamp, and fret, for not being able to get their horse over a stile and ditch, one of them swearing and cursing most bitterly; and I would fain, in revenge, have persuaded him to have drove his horse through the ditch, by which I believe he would have stuck there. But the horse would not be drove, and so they were forced ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... good luck and great effort we'd got all the guns away but one, when a shell landed just in front of the leaders and knocked them both out with their driver; at the same time the gun was jerked off the road into a muddy ditch. Almost simultaneously another shell killed one of the wheelers, and there we were with one horse left to get the gun out of the ditch and along a road that was almost as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... other day that Garfield would get as enthusiastic in digging a six-foot ditch with his own hands, as when making a speech in Congress. Such was my observation. Going down the lane, he seemed to forget for the time that there was any Presidential canvass pending. He would refer, first to one thing, then another, with that off-hand ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... wrote so much on the beauties of country scenery at the close of the last century, has nothing better to say for Ferns than that they are noxious weeds, to be classed with "Thorns and Briers, and other ditch trumpery." The fact, no doubt, is that Ferns were considered something "uncanny and eerie;" our ancestors could not understand a plant which seemed to them to have neither flower nor seed, and so they boldly asserted it had neither. "This kinde of Ferne," says ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... oxen, horses, scrapers, hoes, crowbars—and begin repairing the highway. It was not strenuous work, but a kind of holiday that we all enjoyed more or less. The road got fixed after a fashion, here and there—a bridge mended, a ditch cleaned out, the loose stones removed, a hole filled up, or a short section "turnpiked"—but the days were eight- hour days and they did not sit heavy upon us. The state does it much better now with road machinery and a few men. Once or twice a year Father ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change—in a perpetual peaceful revolution—a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions—without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... sympathetic statement Bernard cannot be said to have enjoyed his lunch; he was thinking of something else that lay before him and that was not agreeable. He was like a man who has an acrobatic feat to perform—a wide ditch to leap, a high pole to climb—and who has a presentiment of fractures and bruises. Fortunately he was not obliged to talk much, as Mrs. Gordon displayed even more than her usual vivacity, rendering her companions the graceful service of lifting the burden ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... broozin' roun' W'at will give yer wus den butter in der North Countree. You'll get mixed wid der Tar-Baby ef inter der North yo' pitch, For der North ain't gwinter cave in, radder die in der las' ditch!" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 11, 1892 • Various
... be having over the head of being in a breach of promise, and all the expenses of solicitors and lawyers. Then, after that, trying to get the money out of us, and, mind you, we will fight you to the last ditch. ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... one as you're going to start as soon as it's getting dark. Ground's pretty soft for working, and we've got plenty of timber. I s'pose you'll reg'larly fill up Jenks's gate-way, and leave quite a deep ditch ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... took no note of this, but as he gallopped past the little goose-herd, he reversed the whip he held in his hand, and in rough sport gave her such a push in the chest with the butt-end, that she fell backwards into the ditch. ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... said the boy, "that I couldn't get to sleep for thinking of him. You know he drives a good deal late at night. I told him that every dark night he came from Sudbury I thought of the deep ditch alongside the road, and wished his horses hadn't blinders on. And every night he comes from the Junction, and has to drive along the river bank where the water has washed away the earth till the wheels of the wagon are within a foot or two of the edge, I wished again that ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... anything save as he always said, "Look the facts in the face" and fight. He could be made to fight easily enough if imposed upon, but only in a stubborn, resisting way. His plan was to resist every effort to coerce him to the last ditch. If he had to let go in the end he would when compelled, but his views as to the value of not letting go were quite the same even when he had let ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... much bout dem things peoples call ghost, but I know dat I has seen things. I knows once long time back I was gwine long de road late on a evenin drivin me ox what I had hitch up to de cart en a ghost or somethin or another cause dat cart wheel to go right in de ditch. Well, de ox, he pull en he pull, but wid all me help, he couldn' never pull dat cart out. I ax some of dem people bout dere what dey reckon dat was en dey say all dey know to compare it to was a hant or a ghost. No 'mam, didn' ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... decided that this was too remote, and we moved up nearer our work. Here we stayed for a week, with half of each battalion digging each night. It was a tiresome job, as the sand was so soft that a very wide ditch had to be dug and then faced with sandbags. The men were very quick about getting down, and after the first night they were practically working in safety for the remaining four or five days necessary to complete the sandbag ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... of what was then the agony of death. I grasped the pommel of my saddle, mechanically winding the lines about my wrist, and clung with the tenacity of sin clutching the world. Some soldiers looked wonderingly from the wayside, but did not heed my shriek of "stop him, for God's sake!" A ditch crossed the lane,—deep and wide,—and I felt that my moment had come: with a spring that seemed to break thew and sinew, the blue roan cleared it, pitching upon his knees, but recovered directly and darted onward again. I knew that I should fall headlong now, to be trampled by the fierce ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... was a valuable asset to Mr. Merkel, and he determined to fight for it to the "last ditch," so to speak. This water was only a part of the courses that were valuable to his ranch. As for the boys, they had a water supply of their own in Happy Valley, though they had had to fight to secure that, as related in the book named "The ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
... but, in the beginning of spring, when frozen nature undergoes the process of thawing, then it is that one wishes to be deprived of his nose. At the entrance of each house a stone slab is thrown across to the doorway so as to cover the ditch. Only the foundations of the town houses are made of solid stone, well cemented, but in the case of country dwellings these are extended upwards so as to make up one-half of the whole height, the upper part being of mud, ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... moment there might have been a grand smash there on the road, but Frank had caught the words "Run him down!" and he gave Nemo a light cut with the whip, at the same time pulling him still farther into the ditch. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... in the seat—you'll win your money now. Well, Bob Gayner, afther that you'll never live till you're drowned! Come away to the double ditch; that's where they'll show what they're made of—the mare'll be cooled now, and she'll run as easy as ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... his to say this belongs to me, and who found people simple enough to believe him,[3338] was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, what wars, what murders, what misery and what horrors would have been spared the human race if he who, pulling up the landmark and filling up the ditch, had cried out to his fellows: Be wary of that impostor; you are lost if you forget that no one has a right to the land and that its fruits are the property of all!"—The first ownership was a robbery by which an individual abstracted from the community a portion of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... blooded horses, a magnificent whip, and the accidents which happened to the kaiser, while out driving with him, were merely due to the fact that in each case the horses were too young, and not sufficiently broken in. On one occasion, the drag was upset into a ditch not far from Schlobitten, the kaiser and the count being severely bruised and shaken up; while at another time a splendid team got beyond the control of the count, smashed harnesses and pole, and dashed helter-skelter into the little town ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... the very extremitie and borders of the said prouince northward, and there it is a narrow Isthmus or neck land, [Footnote: The Isthmus of Perekop.] hauing sea on the East and West sides therof, insomuch that there is a ditch made from one sea vnto the other. In the same plaine (before the Tartars sprang vp) were the Comanians wont to inhabite, who compelled the foresayd cities and castles to pay tribute vnto them. But when the Tartars came ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... hobo, with youth and agility, can hold a train down despite all the efforts of the train-crew to "ditch" him—given, of course, night-time as an essential condition. When such a hobo, under such conditions, makes up his mind that he is going to hold her down, either he does hold her down, or chance trips him up. There is no legitimate way, short of murder, whereby ...
— The Road • Jack London
... nightmare tramp. The rain never ceased. By day we lay in icy misery, chilled to the bone in our sopping clothes, in some dank ditch or wet undergrowth, with aching bones and blistered feet, fearing detection, but fearing, even more, the coming of night and the resumption of our march. Yet we stuck to our programme like Spartans, and about eight o'clock on the third evening, hobbling painfully along the road ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... above mentioned, and commanded him to take up a hog for his master, which no Mahometan will touch. He did so, but on going out of the court gate, he was so hooted at by the Mahometans, that he threw down his burden in a ditch, and went home; concealing what had passed from his master. Some four days afterwards, the Armenian being on duty in presence of the king, he asked him if the hog he had sent him was good meat. The Armenian replied, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... far behind, mounting the hills and then striking the turnpike—every rod of which he could have found in the dark—his thoughts, like road-swallows, skimmed each mile he covered. Here was where he had stopped with Kate when her stirrup broke; near the branches of that oak close to the ditch marking the triangle of cross-roads he had saved his own and Spitfire's neck by a clear jump that had been the talk of the neighborhood for days. On the crest of this hill—the one he was then ascending—his father ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to see in the shop-windows. It saves a lot of wear and tear to know what's coming. For a good many years I never did know, from one minute to another, and now I like to think that everything's cut-and-dried, and nothing unexpected can jump out at me like a tramp from a ditch." ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... crumbling into ruins, they are still imposing in appearance, and present a clean front of masonry flanked by eleven bastions, and entered by three gates, those of Baffo, Famagousta, and Kyrenia. The original ditch can be traced in various places, but the counterscarp and glacis have been destroyed; therefore the soil has washed in during the rainy seasons, and to an unpractised eye has obliterated all traces of the former important work. On the other hand, the disappearance of the glacis renders ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... incidents occur, and the party return home, grateful to the post-boys for not being drunk, and thankful to Providence for not being thrown into a wet ditch. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... water flows in oily curves or splashes muddily against the very thresholds of the cottages. It penetrates the brine-soaked soil and wells turn brackish. It wanders far inland through winding straits. The wayfarer, stepping across what seems to be a ditch at the end of a field far from the sea wonders to hear brown wrack crackle ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... S.E. The ditch is completely blocked up with vegetation: thus we made only 250 yards. Before us, as usual, is the hopeless sea of high grass, along which is a dark streak which marks the course of the ditch through which we slowly clear a passage. How many days or months we may require to ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... underpropped. Therfore they which will make a citie oughte to cause to be ordained all the saide things: and moreover aboute the walle, there woulde not bee suffered any grounde to be tilled, within a myle thereof, nor any wall made, but shoulde be all champaine, where should be neither ditch nor banck, neither tree nor house, which might let the fighte, and make defence for the ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... later he saw the car round the bend in the road just beyoud him. It came tearing along, swerved unsteadily from one side of the road to the other, then was brought to a sudden, grinding stop, narrowly missing a plunge into the roadside ditch. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... called Fort Prince George, which was situated on the banks of the river Savanna, and within gun-shot of an Indian town called Keowee. This fort was made in the form of a square, and had an earthen rampart about six feet high, on which stockades were fixed, with a ditch, a natural glacis on two sides, and bastions at the angles, on each of which four small cannon were mounted. It contained barracks for an hundred men, and was designed for a defence to the western frontiers of the province. About an hundred and seventy miles further down ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... give in a plan for fortifying Nice, proposed, that the river Paglion should be turned into a new channel, so as to surround the town to the north, and fall into the harbour; that where the Paglion now runs to the westward of the city walls, there should be a deep ditch to be filled with sea-water; and that a fortress should be built to the westward of this fosse. These particulars might be executed at no very great expence; but, I apprehend, they would be ineffectual, as the town is commanded ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... defended except at Union Mills on the extreme right and the Stone Bridge on the extreme left, where the turnpike from Centreville to Warrenton crossed the Run. Bull Run itself was a considerable obstacle, having fairly high banks and running along the Confederate front like the ditch of a fortress. Three miles in rear stood Manassas Junction on a moderate plateau intersected by several creeks. The most important of these creeks, Young's Branch, joined Bull Run on the extreme left, near the Stone Bridge and Warrenton turnpike, ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... driver, holding the reins, guides team and wagon at will. If he were content merely to hold the reins, regardless of whether or no the team followed the road, the entire equipage—team, wagon, reins and driver—would soon be wrecked; the driver would be lying drowned in a ditch or a pool, or have his neck broken going over stumps and rocks. But if he dexterously regulates the movement of the outfit according to the road, observing where it is safe and where unsafe, he will proceed ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... legends. It was he who edited for Macmillan the Morte d'Arthur in the Globe series. According to my father, and I expect quite rightly, Arthur was the last of the British kings to stand up against the Saxons, and really did inhabit that most magnificent of ditch-defended ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... was wider, the assaulting column being rent with musketry as it dashed over the interval between the trenches and the fort. On dashed the assailants, through the abatis, which had been torn to fragments by the artillery fire, into the ditch, and up the face of the work. The parapet was scaled almost without opposition, the few Russians there taking shelter behind their breastworks in the rear, whence they opened fire ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the battle, ditch'd, and wall'd with turf; Which gave advantage to an ancient soldier,— An honest one, I warrant; who deserv'd So long a breeding as his white beard came to, In doing this for 's country: athwart the lane, He, with two ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... throw their shot, with unobstructed aim, into every part of the city. Roads were constructed across the marsh, and the swarming multitudes, in defiance of all the efforts of the heroic little garrison, filled up the ditch, and were just on the rush to take the place by a general assault, when Zrini abandoned the new city to flames, and threw himself into the citadel. His force was now reduced to about a thousand men. Day after day the storm ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... of the river was hastily repaired; and the six battles of the French formed their encampment against the front of the capital, the basis of the triangle which runs about four miles from the port to the Propontis. [65] On the edge of a broad ditch, at the foot of a lofty rampart, they had leisure to contemplate the difficulties of their enterprise. The gates to the right and left of their narrow camp poured forth frequent sallies of cavalry and light-infantry, which cut off their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... centipede was happy quite Until a frog in fun Said, "Pray, which leg comes after which?" This raised her mind to such a pitch, She lay distracted in the ditch, ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... school-boy. Glad I am they had not quite vanished from Scotland before I was sent thither, but remained to help me get ready for the kingdom of heaven: those dykes must still be dear to my brothers who have gone up before me. Some of the fields had only a small ditch between them and the road, and some of them had no kind of fence at all. It was a dreary road even in summer, though not therefore without its loveable features—amongst which the dykes; and wherever there is anything to love, there ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... Kat slipped out through the stable and ran down to the ditch. They put on their skates and skated from the ditch out to the ...
— The Dutch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... vehicles containing his wife, the necessary theatrical paraphernalia, and the members of the company. Well, soon after passing Chatelaudren, he perceived something white lying by the roadside, near the edge of a ditch. 'I must go and see what that is,' he said to his wife. He stopped the horses, alighted from the vehicle he was in, went to the ditch, picked up the object he had noticed, and uttered a cry of surprise. You will ask me what he had found? Ah! good heavens! A mere trifle. ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... any young lady, her aquarium having failed, shall (as dozens do) cast out the same Anacharis into the nearest ditch, she shall be followed to her grave by the maledictions of all millers and trout-fishers. Seriously, this is a wanton act of injury to the neighbouring streams, which must be carefully guarded against. As well turn loose queen-wasps to build in ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... of Charles I. (which now lies before me), it appears that the limits of the former are much circumscribed. For, to say nothing of the farther side, with which I am not so well acquainted, the bounds on this side, in old times, came into Binswood, and extended to the ditch of Ward le Ham Park, in which stands the curious mount called King John's Hill, and Lodge Hill; and to the verge of Hartley Mauduit, called Mauduit Hatch; comprehending also Short Heath, Oakhanger, and Oakwoods—a large ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... Bourts, the Lea Bailey, Bailey Hill and Lining Wood, Great and Little Berry, Pluds and Smithers Tump, Blackthorn Turf and Serridge, Kensley's Ridge, Daniel Moor and Beechenhurst, 'forming in short twenty plantations,' which might, he thinks, be enclosed by a ditch about 3 feet deep and 3.5 wide, with a quick ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... had changed to a slanting rain. The bund was a ditch of clay-like mud. Each street light was ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... replied Cissy cheerfully. "So'll YOUR popper some day. I'm goin' to get mine to let YOUR popper into something—Ditch stocks and such. Yes! True, O King! Popper'll do anything for me," she ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... he was obliged to substitute his son Sam, a very rising lad, with nerves of iron and the coolest of heads. The race was a memorable one, inasmuch as William Scott, who was on Epirus, the first favourite, fell into the ditch soon after starting, and Prince Warden running over him and striking him with his hind leg, he sustained a severe fracture of the collar-bone. Henriade also came down about a distance from home from a dog crossing the course. John Day, however, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... themselves the fourth morning, when, unable any longer to bear Mrs. Bilton's voice, they ran into the woods instead of coming in to breakfast. He seemed to find them at once, to walk unswervingly to their remote and bramble-filled ditch. ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... and they dismounted and sat under the shade of a little oak tree. Near the crest the road looped on itself, so that, looking back, it sloped below them up to the right and then came towards them. About them grew a rich heather with stunted oaks on the edge of a deep ditch along the roadside, and this road was sandy; below the steepness of the hill, however, it was grey and barred with shadows, for there the trees clustered thick and tall. Mr. Hoopdriver fumbled clumsily with ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... preparing to unfold before us, are many vacant areas upon which the astronomer may pitch his secret pavilion. He may dedicate himself to the service of the Double Suns; he has my license to devote his whole time to the quadruple system of suns in Lyra. Swammerdam spent his life in a ditch watching frogs and tadpoles; why may not an astronomer give nine lives, if he had them, to the watching of that awful appearance in Hercules, which pretends to some rights over our own unoffending system? Why may he not ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... 'Devolution,' of the concession of a kind of self-government for Ireland. He will struggle for a while against the designation Home Rule, because not so long ago he was declaring that he would die in the last ditch for the union of the three kingdoms, but he will soon be reconciled to it. It will not be very long till the former landlords, whose chief interests lie in Ireland, ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... formerly built of Timber, but now they build them of Brick, very strong and handsome, and neatly adorned; and when any Church is gone to Decay, or removed to a more convenient Place, they enclose the old one with a Ditch. ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... the stone, to which it adheres as does a clingstone peach. It tastes like a combination of apple, peach, pear, and apricot with a final merger of turpentine. At first the turpentine flavor so far dominates all others that the consumer is moved to throw his fruit into the nearest ditch; but in time it diminishes, and one comes to agree with the tropical races in the opinion that the mango is the king of ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... they were prepared continually to suffer from fever, was a long and troublesome one, the Indians having a strong constitutional objection to anything in the nature of hard work; but Earle succeeded at length, and actually got them started on the work of cutting the drainage ditch, that scheme having been chosen as the one promising the quickest results and involving the least labour. By the time that this was done the invalids were all recovered from their sickness; and ten days after their ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... work of the problem. They decided to follow the train-hands to the next village, twelve miles off; so they picked up their guns and knapsacks, and sprang over the ditch that lay on the mountain side of the track and wound along the base of the hill to the level beyond where the train had stopped. After they were gone the three remaining men proceeded to discuss ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... dig, but with special meanings. Derived, like fosse, a ditch, and fossil, through French from Lat. fossus, perfect part. of fodere, to dig. Fossicking as pres. part., or as verbal noun, is commoner than the other ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... passenger was certainly getting railroad training so coveted by his magnate father. He saw the fireman shoot through the air in his frightened jump for safety. Lemuel Fogg landed in a muddy ditch at the side of the tracks, up ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... garrison of eight men to guard his fortress, in which twelve cannons accumulated their coats of mouldy green. The governor was a sort of happy farmer, harvesting wines, figs, oil, and oranges, preserving his citrons and cedrats in the sun of his casemates. The fortress, encircled by a deep ditch, its only guardian, arose like three heads upon turrets connected with each other by terraces covered ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... down as specimens from the mountains above, and after a short march of five kos, we reached Dras, a little assemblage of flat-roofed houses, with a mud fort about half a mile from it, in the valley. This was built with four bastions and a ditch scarped with paving-stones, which surrounded it on all sides except one, where it was naturally defended by the torrent. On the road we passed a curious bridge, built entirely of rope manufactured from twigs of trees. The cables thus formed were ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... works, he sent a corporal of sappers, who also found all still within. Sir Colin, on hearing of the matter, called for ten volunteers from each of the Scotch regiments to learn the truth. They, advancing at a run, crossed the ditch, and a man of the 93rd was the first to scale the rampart. The place was deserted. The Russians, on a bridge of boats and rafts, had crossed over to the other side of the harbour during the night, having set the town on fire in all parts. We took possession of a city of blazing houses and ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... ready to fly off, delivered its final ultimatum—a marvelously persistent murderer. This time it, or, rather, she, was received with the point—the poisoned point—and, turning like a spent lightning-flash to avoid it, found the queen hard on her heels, following all down the gay hedge-ditch, humming high, in nearly a shriek of rage. Finally, she turned, to do battle for her life, and the two, grappling, fell as shooting-stars fall, gleaming, athwart the sun, with a brrr-r like a fused wire, and finished the ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... had a sweetheart, and he said he would go and get the ball. So he went to the park gate, but 'twas shut; then he climbed the railing, and when he got to the top of it an old woman rose up out of the ditch before him and said that if he wanted to get the ball he must sleep three nights in the house: so he ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... The land is really rich. The ingredients are already here. Instead of being worthless, as was once supposed, this is a precious soil. The Aladdin's wand that unlocks all its treasures is the irrigating ditch; its "open sesame" is water; and the divinity who, at the call of man, bestows the priceless gift, is the Madre of the Sierras. A Roman conqueror once said that he had but to stamp upon the earth and legions would spring up to do his bidding. ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... avoids the ditch into which the clear-sighted falls. Fools advance themselves to honours, by discourses which signify nothing, while men of sense and eloquence live in poverty and contempt. The Mussulmaun with all ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... sort of a man who is killed in any trivial skirmish: There was a moment at the bridge of Arcole when Napoleon, wounded and flung into a ditch, appeared to be lost. But when Nature, often so stupid, really does take stock and become aware that she has created an eagle she does not permit that eagle to be killed before its wings are fledged. Napoleon was picked out of the ditch. Cleggett ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... Distribute (to share) disdoni. District kvartalo. Distrust malfidi. Distrust malfido. Distrustful malfidema. Disturb interrompi. Disturbance tumulto. Disunite disigi. Disunion disigxo. Ditch defluilo. Ditto sama, idemo. Ditty kanteto. Dive subakvigxi. Diver (bird) kolimbo. Diverge malkonvergi. Divers (various) diversa. Diverse diversa. Diversity diverseco. Divert amuzi. Divest senvestigi. Divide dividi. Dividend (finance) rento. Dividend (arith.) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... "Do you not see your country is lost?" asked the Duke of Buckingham when he was sent to negotiate at the Hague. "There is a sure way never to see it lost," replied William, "and that is to die in the last ditch." With the spring of 1673 the tide began to turn. Holland was saved, and province after province won back from the arms of France by William's dauntless resolve. Like his great ancestor, William the Silent, he was ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... ain't, an' hit sticks like glue! Heah de glory kyar is stallded in dis tar-colored Arkansas glue-mud, I say, an' I can't raise wheels enough out'n dis congergation ter sen' it on! An' dis is de Holy Sabbath day, too, de day de Lord done special set apart fur h'istin' a oxes out'n a ditch, ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... ten miles from Warwick, overtaken by the darkness, he had met a band of robbers, who had taken his horse and all he possessed, leaving him for dead, in a ditch by the wayside. Being but stunned and badly bruised, when he came to himself he thought it best to make his way back to Worcester and ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... advantage to the besiegers so obvious and inevitable, that the Ten were induced to make the experiment. The result, however, was quite contrary to their expectation, and produced the utmost disorder in the Florentine camp; for the Lucchese raised high embankments in the direction of the ditch made by our people to conduct the waters of the Serchio, and one night cut through the embankment of the ditch itself, so that having first prevented the water from taking the course designed by the ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... said to have done, by a rope ladder and all the paraphernalia of a romantic elopement, although, as it happened, she was only escaping from a prison that her son had thought quite secure. The poor Queen had great difficulty in getting through the window, but finally succeeded and reached the ditch of the castle; friends were waiting near by to receive her with a coach which bore her away to freedom at Loches or Amboise, I forget which. This window from which Marie de Medicis is said to have escaped is in one ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... as the Marble, founded as the Rocke, As broad, and generall, as the casing Ayre: But now I am cabin'd, crib'd, confin'd, bound in To sawcy doubts, and feares. But Banquo's safe? Mur. I, my good Lord: safe in a ditch he bides, With twenty trenched gashes on his head; The least a ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... cold rations; we could not even enjoy a comforting smoke, as the lighting of a match would have been certain to draw the fire of our vigilant foe. Mr. Jaffray and I both agreed that a night's lodging in a damp ditch was hardly consonant with our wishes, and therefore we set out for the hamlet of Halte, where the railway crosses the road, in hopes that we might find cover ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... containing from five to ten thousand inhabitants. Those at which the travellers halted were called Afoura, Assula, Assonda, and Chocho. At Afoura, the granite formation began to show itself. Assula is surrounded with a wall and a ditch, and contains about six thousand inhabitants. At these places, the travellers were abundantly supplied with provisions, and regaled with dancing and singing the whole night, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... (the poor fellow was killed the 22nd of July, at Atlanta), and that I had better get further. He passed on and waked others. Just then, General Cleburne and staff rode by me, and I heard one of his staff remark, "General, here is a ditch, or gully, that will make a natural breastwork." All I heard General Cleburne say was, "Er, eh, eh!" I saw General Lucius E. Polk's brigade form on the crest of ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... proceeds to trot down the track in front of us. That singularly misnamed appendage, the cow-catcher, strikes her amidships. She is thrown twenty feet in the air, and all that is left of her rolls into the ditch by the ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... of Persia, stands on a plain near the Elburz Mountains, 70 m. S. of the Caspian Sea; is surrounded by a bastioned rampart and ditch, 10 m. in circumference, and entered by 12 gateways; much of it is of modern construction and handsomely laid out with parks, wide streets, and imposing buildings, notable among which are the shah's palace and the British Legation, besides many of the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... thank God, appears much better.... I have christened the pretty mare I have bought "Donna Sol," in honor of my part in "Hernani." In the evening I read Daru, and wrote a few lines of "The Star of Seville;" but I hate it, and the whole thing is as dead as ditch-water. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... you of the curious way in which the frog changes colour to suit his surroundings; of how he changes his skin; of his wonderful vocal powers, and a hundred other things. But meanwhile, try and discover it for yourselves by keeping a few frogs as pets, starting, as I did, with the spawn taken from a ditch in spring. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... said. "Pretty good piece of irrigation work for those old mummies, isn't it? All we had to do was rebuild the intake dam and clean out the ditch. Here's the tank." ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... the city; and pledged himself that burghers enough would volunteer as miners. In less than an hour, ten or twelve thousand persons, including multitudes of women of all ranks, were at work upon the lines marked out by the engineer. A ditch and breast-work extending from the gate of the Beguins to the street of the Abbey Saint Michael, were soon in rapid progress. Meantime, the newly arrived troops, with military insolence, claimed the privilege of quartering themselves in the best houses which they could find. They already began to, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of these towns (now best seen in Libourne) is very simple, and almost always practically the same — a square in the centre formed by the public buildings, with eight streets radiating from it, each guarded by a gate. An outer ditch or moat protected the wall or palisade, and the towns were thus fortified in a simple but effective manner, and guarded as much by their own privileges as by any outer bulwarks. The inhabitants were bound together by close ties, and each smaller city ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... she made her way into the Park, and the rapid Foker made his dash forward. What to do? Just to get a nod of recognition from Miss Amory and her mother; to cross them a half-dozen times in the drive; to watch and ogle them from the other side of the ditch, where the horsemen assemble when the band plays in Kensington Gardens. What is the use of looking at a woman in a pink bonnet across a ditch? What is the earthly good to be got out of a nod of the head? Strange that men will be contented with such ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... maister, well overtane, I thought we two should never meete againe: You went so fast that I to follow thee Slipt over hedge and ditch and ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... danger to life and limb from fallen trees, treacherous quicksand, swollen creeks, the peril of slipping mountain sides after heavy rains. Of necessity he relied upon himself; he could not wait for a neighbor to help pull the ox out of the ditch. He learned early to make his own crude farm implements at his own anvil. In short, he had to be jack-of-all-trades—blacksmith, tanner, ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... and the Karnal and Hissar districts. It is joined by the Umla torrent in Karnal and lower down the Sarusti unites with it in Patiala just beyond the Karnal border. It is hard to believe that the Sarusti of to-day is the famous Sarasvati of the Vedas, though the little ditch-like channel that bears the name certainly passes beside the sacred sites of Thanesar and Pehowa. A small sandy torrent bearing the same name rises in the low hills in the north-east of the Ambala district, but it is doubtful if its waters, ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... fearlessly into the intimate secrets of matter; your Marconi employs the mysterious properties of the "jellied ether," but let a man seek to experiment with the laws of that singular electricity which connects you and me (though you be a millionaire and I a ditch-digger), and we think him a wild visionary, an academic person. I think sometimes that the science of humanity to-day is in about the state of darkness that the natural sciences were when Linneus and Cuvier and Lamarck began groping for the great laws of natural unity. Most ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... full of troops, from the bridge quite to the end of Ligny. On the left in the distance the Prussians were shooting from the windows again, while we did not reply. The shout rose—"The Guard! the Guard!" I do not know how that mass of men passed the muddy ditch, probably by means of plank thrown across, but in a moment they were on ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... a big task, Mr. Anthony, and the mere digging of the ditch is the smallest part. There is a great deal more to be done. You see, as men attain culture, they require more than mere food and drink and bedding, and in the same way, as nations attain to greatness, they require more than mere territory—they reach out and absorb power and prestige. Our ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... he must go to Lydgate's that evening. The Rubicon, we know, was a very insignificant stream to look at; its significance lay entirely in certain invisible conditions. Will felt as if he were forced to cross his small boundary ditch, and what he saw beyond it was not ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... 24th of June three Dutch captains were relieving guard in the trenches near the great north bastion of the town, when it occurred to them to scale the wall of the fort and see what was going on inside. They threw some planks across the ditch, and taking half a company of soldiers, climbed cautiously up. They obtained a foothold before the alarm was given. There was a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, and sixteen of the party fell, and nine of the garrison. The rest fled into the city. The Governor Gysant, rushing ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... packet brought me my first grief. She came up behind us with her horses at the full trot. Their boat was down the canal a hundred yards or so at the end of the tow-line; and just before the boat itself drew even with ours she was laid over by her steersman to the opposite side of the ditch, her horses were checked so as to let her line so slacken as to drop down under our boat, her horses were whipped up by a sneering boy on a tall bay steed, her team went outside ours on the tow-path, and the passage was ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... the extension, and at times the decline, of the Anglo-Norman rule. When Henry VII. became king of England the Anglo-Norman colony or "Pale" had shrunk to two counties and a half around Dublin, defended by a ditch. Many of the original Norman knights had become "more Irish than the Irish themselves." Such was the great family of the Geraldines or Fitzgerald—the most powerful, with the O'Neills of the North, in Ireland. A united attack at this time would most certainly have driven ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... completely cut off from communication with the outside world as though it were on an island in the South Pacific. The postal, telegraph and telephone services were suspended; the railways were blocked with troop trains moving westward; the roads were filled from ditch to ditch with troops and transport wagons; and so tightly were the lines drawn between that portion of Belgium occupied by the Germans and that still held by the Belgians, that those daring souls who attempted to slip through the cordons of sentries did so at peril ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... without difficulty. By the time I had hauled a sufficient number for the structure, the trench was deep enough, and we all went to work setting up the sticks. We placed them on the inside of the ditch, propping them up with others, until we had a dozen up, when we began to throw in the dirt around them, jamming it down ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... declared that indignant damsel. "Just because Mother's nervous and thinks I'm going to run her into the ditch! Wait till I've had my course of motoring lessons! I'll take the shine out of ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... he'll drive me distracted! I wonder if there is such a thing as a ditch or a horsepond anywhere ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... ruin; the land's full o' twitch; There's no one to clean out a drain or a ditch; The gates are all broken, the fences all down; And the state of our farm is the talk ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... on board a man-of-war, I was presently appointed a sergeant, and put in charge of a party of twelve men, assigned to the defence of the rope-walk which joins the main east road from the fort to the Morattoe ditch. ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... come, and the French cavalry are close upon them. But see the Highlanders in the ditch. Hark! there—they give them a volley. Down tumble the horsemen!—look! they are in a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... Stein. "So he is certainly not with Rikli." And as the little girl's shrieks grew louder she began to think something serious was the matter, and the two ladies started away in the direction of the sound. Poor Rikli was indeed in a wretched plight. She was standing in a ditch, covered quite to her neck in the muddy water, and holding up her arms above her head, in an effort to protect it from the many little green frogs that were sporting about her. Aunty reached her first, ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... foot to two feet in diameter. These are equally strong, with the peculiarity that if you fire cannon at them the bamboos yield, admit the shot, and then close again. If these stockades are not close to the river side, they usually have a deep ditch round them, and are further protected by what was more serious to us than the escalading, which were abbatis of pointed bamboos, stuck in a slanting direction in the ground. The slight wounds made by these bamboos brought ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... find in any of our Chronicles, that Edward the Third ever reconnoitred the Enemy, tho' he often discovered the Posture of the French, and as often vanquished them in Battel. The Black Prince passed many a River without the help of Pontoons, and filled a Ditch with Faggots as successfully as the Generals of our Times do it with Fascines. Our Commanders lose half their Praise, and our People half their Joy, by means of those hard Words and dark Expressions ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Slaves of Lamachus! Water, water in a little pot! Make it warm, get ready cloths, cerate greasy wool and bandages for his ankle. In leaping a ditch, the master has hurt himself against a stake; he has dislocated and twisted his ankle, broken his head by falling on a stone, while his Gorgon shot far away from his buckler. His mighty braggadocio plume rolled on the ground; at ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... with an extra bundle. Tenderly unwrapping the covering she disclosed a half-starved baby. That day she had gone to a distant part of the city to assist in organizing a soup kitchen, and a Bible class. On her way home she heard a feeble cry coming from a ditch. She located a bundle of rags, and found a bit ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay |
