"Ditch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... event of the day and the wind-up was a hurdle and ditch race, open to officers only. Hurdles and ditches alternated the course at a distance of two hundred yards, except at the finish, where a hurdle and ditch were together, the ditch behind the hurdle. Such a race was a hare-brained performance in the highest degree; but ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... their enemies, who were behind breastworks. The troops of Tholouse fired wildly, precipitately, quite over the heads of the assailants. Many of the defenders were slain as fast as they showed themselves above their bulwarks. The ditch was crossed, the breastwork carried at, a single determined charge. The rebels made little resistance, but fled as soon as the enemy entered their fort. It was a hunt, not a battle. Hundreds were stretched dead in the camp; hundreds were driven ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of it or no. Thus an angry man may wish to see him who has offended brought to public confession and shame: but a hater is well content to see his enemy spending his fortune foolishly, or dead drunk in a ditch on a lonely wayside. The man in anger feels grief and annoyance, not so the hater. At a certain point of suffering anger stops, and is appeased when full satisfaction seems to have been made: but an enemy is implacable ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... steeple-chase. Hurray! we have leapt in a clear jump over the canal bridges—now for the four-lane corner. With a shriek and a trail of sparks we are clear again. To be sure, a tram often leaps the rails—but what matter! It sits in a ditch till other trams come to haul it out. It is quite common for a car, packed with one solid mass of living people, to come to a dead halt in the midst of unbroken blackness, the heart of nowhere on a dark night, and for the driver and the girl conductor to call, 'All get ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... carriage drove past, my Friar Lawrence was lying in a ditch, while I was behind an oak. We were near enough to discern the niece, and consequently we feared to be recognised. The situation was neither dignified nor romantic. My friend was sanguine, though big ardour was slightly damped ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... blue-eyed rosy-cheeked little girl;—the ground ashes had been cut down; and her laughing face was pillowed on the violets and oxlips, that burst from between the roots. She was preparing to take another roll into the clayey ditch below. Another little girl was gazing at the child from within the orchard; half doubtful whether she should encourage or check her. One pale-blue slipper and her little sock were half sunk in the clay, while the veiny ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... right; for we heard them pass along that road, and the voice of Mrs. Harris herself, who ran with the rest, notwithstanding the darkness and the rain. By these means we luckily made our escape, and clambring over hedge and ditch, my Amelia performing the part of a heroine all the way, we at length arrived at a little green lane, where stood a vast spreading oak, under which we sheltered ourselves ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... yet up when they reached a wider road running crossways to the one out of the village and here many troops were waiting as far up and down the road as Tom could see. A narrow ditch led away from the opposite side of the road through the fields beyond, and looking up and down the road he could see that there ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... moored about the harbour, and we were all frozen in, as a matter of course. Around each craft, however, a space was kept cut, to form a sort of ditch, in order to prevent being boarded. Parties were regularly stationed to defend the Madison, and, in the days, we worked at her rigging, and at that of the Pike, in gangs. Our larboard guns were landed, and placed in a block-house, while the starboard ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... think one might get tired of it in time. As for lawn parties, I tried one in Fulham the other day, and I don't want to go to any more in England, thank you. They never introduced a soul to us, the band played out of tune, it was as dull as ditch-water,—just dreary, ill-dressed people wandering in and out, and trying to look as if five sour strawberries on a plate, and a thimbleful of ice cream were bliss and high life and all the rest of it. The only thing really nice ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... the ancient Babylon and that the vast walls of Herodotus enclosed it all.[12] This view, however, cannot be accepted. Quite apart from the considerations urged above, the region in question is not square but rather triangular, and traces of wall and ditch surrounding it are altogether wanting, though city-walls have survived elsewhere in this neighbourhood and though nothing can wholly delete an ancient ditch. We have, in short, no good reason to believe that Babylon, in any form or sense whatever, covered ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... the case of a structure consisting of a vestibule, r, and two rooms, s, lighted by two electric lamps, R. In the portion of the figure situated to the left it is easy to see the process employed for insulating the line. A commencement is made by digging a ditch in the street and paving the bottom of it with bricks. Upon these latter there is laid a mixture of sand and asphalt, and then the wires and bobbins are put in, and the whole is finally covered with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... Shore Farmer on agricultural topics; he took part in opposing, through the Moffitt papers, the legislative waste of the people's money; on the question of selling a local canal to the railroad company, which killed that fine old State work, and let the dry ditch grow up to grass, he might have gone to the Legislature, but he contented himself with defeating the Moffitt member who had voted for the job. If he opposed some measures for the general good, like high schools and school libraries, it was because he lacked perspective, in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... He was taught the long, easy lope. He learned how to gather himself for a sail through the air over a hurdle or a water-jump. Then when he could take five bars clean, when he could clear an eight-foot ditch, when his wind was so sound that he could lead the chase from dawn until high noon, he was sent to the stables of a Virginia tobacco-planter who had need of a new hunter and who could ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... we can commit to memory. One of your seers tells us that: 'Renaissance art will make our lives like what seems one of the loveliest things in nature, the iridescent film on the face of stagnant water!' Now it will require at least a decade, to train us to appreciate the subtile symphonies of ditch slime. An English friend compassionating my American stupidity, essayed to initiate me in the cult of 'culture', and gave me a leaf to study, from the latter-day gospel. I learned it after a time, as I did the multiplication table. 'Culture steps in, and points ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... with snow, And cleansed my hands with lye, Thou wouldst plunge me in the ditch, So that mine own garments would ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... a thicket beside the War-god's gate; and there she bade Jason dig a ditch, and kill the lamb, and leave it there, and strew on it magic herbs and ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... my task was not so simple as had appeared. As the ground rose the vineyards ceased, and I came upon a stretch of open country studded with low hills. Crouching in a ditch I examined them with a glass, and I very soon perceived that there was a watcher upon every one of them, and that these people had a line of pickets and outposts thrown forward exactly like our own. I had heard of the discipline which was practised by this scoundrel whom they ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... themselves and so are incomprehensible touching every particular. These, though they have not the least degree of knowledge, profess yet that they have mastered all; nay, though they neither know themselves, nor perceive a ditch or block that lies in their way, for that perhaps most of them are half blind, or their wits a wool-gathering, yet give out that they have discovered ideas, universalities, separated forms, first matters, quiddities, haecceities, formalities, and ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... night, in my car. But about four miles from Millsborough, we had an accident. You've seen my face, Mrs. Brundage, but you haven't seen my car. And we knew that the Marquis was not far behind us. So we dragged ourselves along the ditch into which we had fallen, and hid. At dawn we saw him go tearing by in his sumptuous ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... amount of fat remains but nutritional reserves (vitamins and minerals) are exhausted and there is insufficient nourishment forthcoming, the body begins to consume nutrient-rich muscle and organ tissue in a last-ditch effort to stay alive. Under these dire circumstances, the least essential muscles and organs from the standpoint of survival are metabolized first. For example, muscles in the arms and legs would be consumed early in the process, the heart muscle ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... Ideas, pp. 31-63.]—The derivation of the word "township" shows us to whom we are indebted for the institution itself. The word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon tun-scipe. Tun meant hedge, ditch or defense; and scipe, which we have also in landscape, meant what may be seen. Around the village before mentioned was the tun, and beyond were the fields and meadows and woodlands, the whole forming the tun scipe ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... neighbourhood of Warwick. Down and down we trotted—hills and heights 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... who still think, however, in terms of the days of sailing-ships. They advise us to pull our warships and our planes and our merchant ships into our own home waters and concentrate solely on last ditch defense. But let me illustrate what would happen if we followed such ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... would sometimes think—"I wonder what it feels like to be on the back of a horse, galloping away, or holding the reins in a carriage, and tearing across the country, or jumping a ditch, or running a race, such as I read of or see in pictures. What a lot of things there are that I should like to do! But first I should like to go and ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... horses hitched to light open buggies whirled along, loaded down with men. Horsemen galloped down the slopes in squadrons—and such horsemen!—cowboys from "Lost Park" and "the Animas." Prospectors like Casey and Kelly who were quite as much at home on a horse as with a pick in a ditch, and men like Marshal Haney and Grassi, who were all-round plainsmen, and by that same token born horsemen. Haney and Kelly rode with Reynolds and Mose, while Cora and Mrs. Reynolds followed in a rusty buggy drawn by a fleabitten gray cow pony, ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... I, 7:3] Pompey himself filled up the ditch which was on the north side of the temple and the entire valley also, the army being obliged to carry the material for this purpose. Indeed, it was difficult to fill up that valley because of its great depth and especially as the Jews from their superior position ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... wooden one never kicks, while, to speak the truth, whenever I've got on a regular-built animal, he to a certainty has shied up his stern and sent me over his bows, sometimes right into a hedge, or a ditch, or a pond, or through a window, into a shop, or parlour, I happened to catch sight of a man standing at the end of an outlandish sort of a cart or a van, painted all over with red and yellow, and blue and gold, with a sort of a Chinaman's temple at ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... his white hand in the scorching sunrays and commented jovially: "Talk about Eastern heat—this is a hundred and five Fahrenheit at the very least! A-a-ah!" He drew in a deep breath of the dry pure air. "This is something like! When you get your land under ditch, you'll ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... Young Islay, picking up his rod. "You can do nothing with your hands; I—I can do anything." And he drew up with a bantam's vanity. He moved off. The torn book was in his path. He kicked it before him like a football until he reached the ditch beside the hunting road, and there he left it. A little later Gilian saw him in a distant vista of the trees as an old hunter of the wood, with a gun in his hand and his spoil upon his back, breasting the brae with long strides, a ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... smoking, like the beasts that perish' (speaking, we may presume, in a remotely analogical sense); and in some of the alehouse corners the drink was flavoured by a dingy kind of infidelity, something like rinsings of Tom Paine in ditch-water. A certain amount of religious excitement created by the popular preaching of Mr. Parry, Amos's predecessor, had nearly died out, and the religious life of Shepperton was falling back towards low-water mark. Here, you perceive, was a terrible stronghold of Satan; and you may well ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Rimmer, and the men set to work spending two whole days digging what resembled a pretty good ditch in the sand, and leading from the embedded keel right out nearly to the ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... trouble and expense by stopping leakages; heretofore every holey vessel had to be sent out of town. Both boys have gardens and sell vegetables to their father at extraordinary prices, and they are now filling up a deep ditch 500 feet long at a "York shilling" an hour—men get a "long shilling" and do the work no better. With the money thus made they buy tools of all sorts, seeds and fruit trees, but no nonsense. Three happier children than these three can ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... careful to prepare a list of plausible reasons for leaving then. They had first invented a gold rumor that they hoped would sound convincing, but Andy had insisted upon telling him straightforwardly that they did not favor fence-building and ditch-digging and such back-breaking toil; that they were range men and they demanded range work or none; that if they must dig ditches and build fences and perform like menial tasks, they preferred doing it for themselves. "That," said Andy, "makes us out such dirty, low-down sons-of-guns we'd have to ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... the front row and not to stick our head over the top in the day time and you would think we was the home guards or something and at that I guess the home guards is seeing as much of the war as we are in this old ditch but they say it will be different when we get up in front and believe me I hope so and they can't send us there to soon ...
— The Real Dope • Ring Lardner
... going to push it down into the straw when the bailiff —who as a matter of fact was not a Jute, but a Zeelander—happened to turn round and caught sight of it. He told the boy to throw it into the ditch. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... accept ready-made standards?" Edgar said. "None of the great governing forces of life can fit into a ditch of conventions." ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... viewed a mound, Memorial of some saint renowned, And then the mouldered ditch and ramp Which marked an ancient Roman camp. Then past Lubnaig on we went, Gazed on Ben Ledi's steep ascent, And passed by lovely stream and valley Through Dochart Glen to reach Dalmally, Where on a rough and winding track We wished ourselves ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seventh resolves, this last-ditch effort made no difference. The public printer, conservative Joseph Royle of the Virginia Gazette, refused to publish the resolves at all. What went into print outside the colonies were the four true resolves, plus ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... more does one revel in his account of what led up to the moment when Johnson 'to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple Bar to Fleet Ditch.' ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... miracle of the falling snow,—the air a dizzy maze of whirling, eddying flakes, noiselessly transforming the world, the exquisite crystals dropping in ditch and gutter, and disguising in the same suit of spotless livery all objects upon which they fall. How novel and fine the first drifts! The old, dilapidated fence is suddenly set off with the most fantastic ruffles, scalloped and fluted after an unheard-of fashion! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... discovered another sign of Man. Behold the first road I had seen yet—a rough wagon-road ploughed deep in the chalky soil! We crossed this, and turned a corner of a hill. More signs of human life. Two small boys started up out of a ditch—apparently posted as scouts to give notice of our approach. They yelled, and set off running before us, by some short cut, known only to themselves. We turned again, round another winding of the valley, and crossed a brook. I considered it my duty to make myself acquainted ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... slippers) Paris Garden ditch Pavine Pedlars' French Peele's Hunting of Cupid Peeterman Persius quoted Pharo, by the life of (This oath occurs in first edition, 1601, of Every Man in his Humour: in the revised edition it was altered ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... behaved, one had to admit that he had put himself more grossly in the wrong than at any moment of his life. He had begun by insulting the matchless Mulvilles for these more specious protectors, and then, according to his wont at the end of a few months, had dug a still deeper ditch for his aberration than the chasm left yawning behind. The chasm at Wimbledon was now blessedly closed; but the Pudneys, across their persistent gulf, kept up the nastiest fire. I never doubted they had a strong case, and I had ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... proper, but——" Her steely calm broke. She burst out in a screaming, hysterical voice: "You've just got to, Emma Hulett! You've just got to! If you don't I won't never go back to 'Niram's house! I'll lie in the ditch by the roadside till the poor-master comes to get me—and I'll tell everybody that it's because my own twin sister, with a house and a farm and money in the bank, turned me out to starve—" A fearful spasm cut her short. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... time has come for spinning, And the time has come for weaving, In the village seek not counsel, Do not cross the ditch for teaching, Seek it not in other households, Nor the weaver's ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... of all, he accomplished nothing at any point. Celer vigorously repulsed Grosses. Flaccus, being unable to preserve the whole circuit of the ditch intact by reason of its size, constructed another within it. This fixed in his opponents' minds the impression that he was afraid, and so he enticed them within an outer ditch, where by a charge upon them when they were not looking for it he slaughtered many ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... and the more it grows, The more it finds the dogs becoming wolves, This maledict and misadventurous ditch. ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... Crane, "my geography was as good as your arithmetic. It is all the same whether you fall into the ditch from this side ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... Mr. Hansen their agent to make the projected improvements; and they, it may be supposed, worked a little more steadily and lived a little more frugally in San Francisco. He employed Spaniards and Indians as laborers; and what he did was to dig a ditch seven miles long to lead water out of the Santa Anna River, with four hundred and fifty miles of subsidiary ditches and twenty-five miles of feeders to lead the water over every twenty-acre lot. This done, he planted on every farm eight acres of grapes and some ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... tangle of hedges, rank bushes, vines, and shrubs that appeared to constitute a rough sort of boundary between irregular fields. A tiny swift stream of water hurried by between the straight banks of an obviously artificial ditch. ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... bridegroom to appear in drawers at their castle, and plunge into a ditch of mud; and sometimes they were compelled to beat the waters of the ponds to hinder the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... still 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
... had stepped into the carriage. "Do be quick, dear!" she cried; "either come in or stay out. Really you are as dull as ditch-water ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... know," said another, "If the swallow who flies so far in her many journeys to foreign lands, ever met with a better climate than this. What delicious moisture! It is as pleasant as lying in a wet ditch. I am sure any one who does not enjoy this has no love for ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... something 'at your pride'll earn some day, I'm the biggest fool this side o' the big ditch. Here's your pay. You've been a fair hand, but don't forget that I never hire a man twice, an' I've ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... reflection, I am even now hardly able to realize the monstrous outrage that has been committed at the instance of a theologic imbecile, helped by a travesty on law enacted by a general assembly of ditch diggers ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... dead in the morning in a field, near a farmyard, in a ditch. Their horses even were found lying on the roads with their throats cut by a saber stroke. These murders seemed to have been accomplished by the same men, who ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... the first the cool courage and dogged tenacity of his race. "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 a luckless commander, and no general had to ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... ditch as surely as they did in the war," he said to Darcy, rubbing his hands in great glee. "I tell you, old chap, it was a lucky thought of starting just as we did. You see, we shall come up with the good times; for I do honestly believe the ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... Halifax, the First Commissioner, was urgent in favor of the proposition; he was an ignorant, arbitrary man, who laid out a plan for the subjugation of the colonies as lightly and willfully as he might have directed the ditch-digging and fence-building on his estates. Murray, afterward Lord Mansfield, held that Parliament had the requisite power; but in the face of the united protest of the colonies, that body laid the measure aside for the present. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... no better course for you to take than to dig a deep ditch all around the trees, say three feet wide and as many deep, and just within the outer reach of the limbs, and fill this in with half the earth removed and the other half made up of vegetable matter, ashes, road dirt, and such ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... he sat and held his magnifying glass before his eye, and looked at a drop of water that was taken out of a little pool in the ditch. What a creeping and crawling was there! all the thousands of small creatures hopped and jumped about, pulled one another, and pecked ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... talks of '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
... Ursulines, or with the Jesuits; redoubts were raised, loop-holes bored and patrols established. At Ville-Marie no fewer precautions were taken; the governor surrounded a mill which he had erected in 1658, by a palisade, a ditch, and four bastions well entrenched. It stood on a height of the St. Louis Hill, and, called at first the Mill on the Hill, it became later the citadel of Montreal. Anxiety still prevailed everywhere, but God, who knows how to ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... construction, particularly where the cistern is located near a privy or cesspool. Pollution of cistern water is often due to the cracking of the cement lining. Overflows of cisterns should never be connected with a drain, sewer, or cesspool. Run the overflow into some surface ditch and provide the mouth with a fine wire screen, to exclude small animals. It is not recommended to build cisterns ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... general, our clergy is excellent, although this or that man be faulty. As if an army be constantly victorious, regular, &c. we may say, it is an excellent victorious army: But Tindal; to disparage it, would say, such a serjeant ran away; such an ensign hid himself in a ditch; nay, one colonel turned his back, therefore, it is a corrupt, cowardly ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... widened in scope by the national government. The projects of the reclamation service now include practically all of the available waters of the Yakima valley for irrigating the lands therein. In Yakima county alone there are probably [Page 41] 260,000 acres now under ditch, and probably 50,000 more will be reclaimed this season. This is probably not more than half the lands in the county capable of irrigation. The fact that the general government is in control of these projects insures as wide and just a distribution of the ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... all things, push on with the war! It is by our victories that slavery will be in the beginning most thoroughly attacked. If the South, as it professes, means to fight to the last ditch, and to the black flag, all discussion of emancipation is needless; for in the track of our armies the contraband assumes freedom without further formula. But we are by no means convinced that such will be the case. The first ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... had so nearly won the Sheriff's prize, had often in these days envious thoughts for the outlaws in their free life. Anything was better, to his mind, than oak-bark and ditch-water and the smell of half-tanned hides. Also he was ambitious to beat Robin at his own game. By dint of perseverance Arthur had once come very nigh to emulating that masterly feat of archery by which Robin had wrested ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... in diet, of child-culture; one may strike a lofty attitude and speak of the Home (capital H), and how it is the corner stone of Society. I can but agree, but I must remind the indignant ones that ditch diggers, garbage collectors, sewer cleaners are the backbone of sanitation and civilization, and ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... great hedge at the end of this field, all covered with snow and icicles; but the children found a place where there was a hole, and as no bears or wolves seemed to be just in that part of the hedge, they crept through and scrambled out of the frozen ditch on the other side. And then they stood still and held their breath ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... clearly this important process, we may compare the embryo to a fortress with its surrounding rampart and trench. The ditch consists of the outer part of the germinative area, and comes to an end at the point where the area passes into the vesicle. The important fold of the middle germinal layer that brings about the formation of the body-cavity spreads beyond the borders of the embryo over the whole germinative ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... possible purchaser into thinking the place "improved." But the cement walks were crumbling, the trees had died, and rank thorny weeds choked about their roots. The cross streets were merely lined out, a deep ditch on either ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... they do at meal-time after sunset, but we are more used to flushing them amid dry bracken or in the course of some frozen ditch. Quite apart, however, from its exhilarating effect on the sportsman, the bird has quieter interests for the naturalist, since in its food, its breeding habits, its travels, and its appearance it combines more peculiarities ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... Capt. Lossier and bade him take fifty men and advance to the right and post himself in an advantageous ditch and to maintain his ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... intercept, as they fled from a large number of their enemies, who had got them separated from their comrades. Boccagh ran across a field, in order to get before them in the road, and was in the act of climbing a ditch, when one of them, who carried a spade-shaft, struck him a blow on the head, which put an end to ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... few pike-men with us, who, springing to the front, knelt down to receive the horses. Those with pistols formed the second rank, while those with arquebuses and musketoons drew up behind them. We thus presented a formidable front, while a deep ditch on either side prevented our being taken in flank. The Spaniards, nothing daunted, however, galloped forward. We received them firmly. Several saddles were emptied of their riders, and five or six of the leading horses slain or badly wounded. The ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the morning rain was pouring down. This in itself might not have prevented us from travelling, but the state of the trail did. It had been raining the greater part of the night and the trail was little more than a ditch of slimy, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... was happy, quite, Until the toad for fun Said, 'Pray which leg comes after which?' This worked her mind to such a pitch She lay distracted in a ditch, Considering ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... sense to stay there to-night, then," said George. "He'll fall off his horse in a fit coming home drunk some of these nights, and be found dead in a ditch!" ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... thrown over some planks of carved wood, with a shining bit of fantastically formed iron at the prow, "without" the water. And I tell him that, without these, the water would be nothing but a clay-colored ditch; and whoever says the contrary deserves to be at the bottom of that where Pope's heroes are embraced by the mud nymphs. There would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington, were it not for ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... of September we set out for Rheims. There it was said the Germans would meet with strong resistance, for the French intended to die to the last man before giving up that city. But this proved all fudge, as is usual with these "last ditch" promises, the garrison decamping immediately at the approach of a few Uhlans. So far as I could learn, but a single casualty happened; this occurred to an Uhlan, wounded by a shot which it was reported was fired from a house ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... painful remembrance: "There were twenty-six of us—twenty-six living machines, locked up in a damp cellar, where we patted dough from morning till night, making biscuits and cakes. The windows of our cellar looked out into a ditch, which was covered with bricks grown green from dampness, the window frames were obstructed from the outside by a dense iron netting, and the light of the sun could not peep in through the panes, which were covered with flour ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... of the Roman military system consisted in the use of fortified camps. Every time the army halted, if only for a single night, the legionaries intrenched themselves within a square inclosure. It was protected by a ditch, an earthen mound, and a palisade of stakes. This camp formed a little city with its streets, its four gates, a forum, and the headquarters of the general. Behind the walls of such a fortress an army was always at liberty to accept or decline a battle. As a proverb said, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... in spite of his antagonist's agility, the bear managed to get his "holt," and puss, wrapped in his strong arms, was practically whipped; not without protest—she was a "last-ditch" warrior. The bear settled back as grim and stolid as General Grant might have done, while the chivalry of the wood shed applied her hind claws to his waistcoat. However, the bear could do a little in this line himself. The effect was that each ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... without defences; no habitation, in that disturbed period, could have been so, without the risk of being plundered and burnt before the next morning. A deep fosse, or ditch, was drawn round the whole building, and filled with water from a neighbouring stream. A double stockade, or palisade, composed of pointed beams, which the adjacent forest supplied, defended the outer and inner bank of the ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... regretted having done so little with the faculties he enjoyed, and the more weary he became of the daily task of galvanising the dull minds of his pupils into a spasmodic activity, just sufficient to leap the ditch that separates the schoolboy from the undergraduate. He had not only educated his children and seen them provided for in the world; he had also saved a little money, and he had insured his life for five hundred pounds. There was no longer ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 Longstreet's ...
— Lee's Last Campaign • John C. Gorman
... cares if he was a Jew? I won't have my churchyard defiled by that blackguard's corpse. Only a week before he died, I saw him with my own eyes fling two or three pieces of white-hot metal to some ducks that were looking for worms in the ditch outside his smithy, and the wretched birds gobbled them down and died in agony. I cursed him where he stood, and the judgment of God has struck him low, and never shall he rest in holy ground if I can keep him out ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... Lancelot, with a groan; "O King!"—and when he paused, methought I spied A dying fire of madness in his eyes— "O King, my friend, if friend of thine I be, Happier are those that welter in their sin, Swine in the mud, that cannot see for slime, Slime of the ditch: but in me lived a sin So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure, Noble, and knightly in me twined and clung Round that one sin, until the wholesome flower And poisonous grew together, each as each, Not ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... miles a day. Between Oldendorf and Bueckeburg, we experienced a remarkable preservation from danger. Our postillion being a little sleepy, had not sufficient care of the reins, and the horses suddenly turned off towards an inn, but missing the turn, instantly fell into a deep ditch, one horse quite down, and the other nearly so; the carriage wanted only a few inches further to go, and then it would have come upon the horses, so that a few plunges must have upset the whole concern. We ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... the road came Araminta—may the saints preserve us!—with a man! Miss Mehitable quickly placed him as that blackmailing play-doctor who now should never have his four dollars and a half unless he collected it by law. Only in the last ditch would she surrender. ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... did, over hedge an' bog an' ditch, wid all our money, th' dhirrty dog. But I cud run tu, in thim days, an' whin I caught up I shure did play a tchune on th' nob av um!" concluded the sergeant thoughtfully. In pursuance of his daily round of the wards, Dr. Sampson presently came swinging in amongst them and saluted the ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... later young Joe Crowfoot, Frank Merriwell, Bart Hodge, and Dale Sparkfair arrived. They found a horse, with the shafts of a smashed wagon attached, calmly grazing by the roadside. The wrecked wagon was in the ditch. Near by lay the body of a man. A few yards away sat a woman, holding an ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... head. She had an ardent interest in her fellow creatures, and whenever they strayed from the strict path of rectitude, she was consumed with a desire to set them straight. If Olive had seen a drunken man lying in a ditch, she would scarcely have looked at him, much less inquired his name. Nancy would have sat by until he recovered himself, if possible, or found somebody to take him to his destination. As for the delightful opportunity of persuading him of his folly, she would have jumped ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... often howled at as Atheists, and then worshipped as Deities. The Atheists are the vanguard of the army of Freethought, on whom falls the brunt of the battle, and are shivered the hardest of the blows; their feet trample down the thorns that others may tread unwounded; their bodies fill up the ditch that, by the bridge thus made, others may pass to victory. Honour to the pioneers of progress, honour to the vanguard of Liberty's army, honour to those who to improve earth have forgotten heaven, and who in their zeal for ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... the 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 ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... beginning an excavation at the border of the marsh in autumn, sufficiently wide for a cart path, throwing the muck out upon the surface on each side, and on a floor of boards or planks, to prevent it from absorbing moisture from the wet ground beneath; this broad ditch to be carried a sufficient length and depth to obtain the requisite quantity of muck. Thus thrown out, the two piles are now in a convenient form to be covered with boards, and, if properly done, the muck kept covered till the succeeding autumn, ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... far as his surly humour would give him leave, made his submission and promised more obedience and better behaviour for the future. They then took him in, and were in some hopes that they should now reclaim him. Accordingly they placed him with a sawyer, by Fleet Ditch, which at his first coming to the business seemed to him to be a much lighter work than that he had endured in the space of his being at sea. He served four years honestly, indeed, and with as much content as a person of his unsettled mind ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... his being does his best—or his worst —in spite of his own light and knowledge, to foist upon the reader as something generous and noble. I am not merely bringing this charge against that sort of fiction which is beneath literature and outside of it, "the shoreless lakes of ditch-water," whose miasms fill the air below the empyrean where the great ones sit; but I am accusing the work of some of the most famous, who have, in this instance or in that, sinned against the truth, which ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was so easy to dissipate and the effects of which must be so terrible, where is the excuse of Providence? Is it not true that grace failed man here? God, whom faith represents as a tender father and a prudent master, abandons us to the fatality of our incomplete conceptions; he digs the ditch under our feet; he causes us to move blindly: and then, at every fall, he punishes us as rascals. What do I say? It seems as if it were in spite of him that at last, covered with bruises from our journey, we recognize our road; as if we offended his glory in becoming more intelligent ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... poor mother! On either side the road was a broad, deep ditch, and the rough, uneven soil caused the carriage to jolt fearfully, which was another great danger; and, as it so often happens in the country, the road was deserted, and no one to be seen who might ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... fire could not heat them from without, nor battering-ram loosen a single block in a single course; and many assaults were repelled, and many a brave soldier fell writhing and broken into the deep ditch with his ladder ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... mid-day prayer. At this moment, from the breach opposite the battery on the plain, descended, or rather rolled down, supported by ropes, a horseman on a white horse, who immediately leaped over the half-filled ditch, dashed to the left between the batteries, flew over the intrenchments, over the soldiers dozing behind them, who neither expected nor guessed any thing like this, and, followed by their hasty shouts, plunged into the woods. None of the cavalry had time to glance at, much less to pursue ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... 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, and, taking the little girl by the arm, she ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... road to Verdun. And all day, calling at little villages upon the way, where he had business, she drove with the caution of the newcomer. It seemed to her that she had need for caution. She saw a Ford roll over, leave the road, and drop into the ditch. The wild American who had driven it to its death, pulled himself up upon the road, and limping, hailed a passing lorry, and went ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... fair use and a good profit out of Patrasche; being human, he was wise, and left the dog to draw his last breath alone in the ditch, and have his bloodshot eyes plucked out as they might be by the birds, whilst he himself went on his way to beg and to steal, to eat and to drink, to dance and to sing, in the mirth at Louvain. A dying dog, a dog of the cart—why ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... Where he came in he put to shameful flight The fearful watch, and o'er the trenches leaped, Even with the ground he made the rampire's height, And murdered bodies in the ditch unheaped, So that his greedy mates with labor light, Amid the tents, a bloody harvest reaped: Clorinda went the proud Circassian by, So from a piece ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... House. JOHN MORLEY been here for short while to-night, but as soon as he saw House comfortably in Committee he, too, departed. Seemed as if Opposition, thus deserted, would stagger blindly on till it fell in some ditch. At critical moment BOBBY SPENCER quietly appeared on scene; naturally and irresistibly dropped into seat of Mr. G. on otherwise almost empty front Bench. No sounding of drums or braying of trumpets. BOBBY quietly walks up, brushing past ATHERLY JONES standing at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various
... near a small ditch in Atterbury's meadow is a very beautiful, tall, conical tree, over 80 feet high, with an excurrent trunk which is very large and ridged near the ground. It tapers rapidly upward, so that the circumference ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... poured down a destructive fire. The infantry suffered terribly. It was impossible to advance along the narrow track; and when the guns were ordered up the situation was in no way bettered. Nearly every horse was killed or wounded. A deep ditch, cut across the road, hindered effective action, and the only position where reply to the enemy's fire was possible lay beyond this obstacle. Despite the losses of his command Jackson managed to lift one gun across by hand. But his men became demoralised. They left their ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... keeping this sort of thing up two or three hours, and your little velvet-head intimated that nothing suited him like exercise and noise, what did you do? ["Go on!"] You simply went on until you dropped in the last ditch. The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and the frost grew keen; and Bensington had not long been left behind when old Berthold lay down in the ditch at the road-side. He had sung his last song, and could go no further. He could only wait for the chariot of God—for the white-winged angels to come silently over the white snow, and carry ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... twelve-foot-high stockade of the bright red, burnished wood which had attracted Weeks on the shore. Each paling was the trunk of a tree and it had been sharpened at the top to a wicked point. On the field side was a wide ditch, crossed at the gate by a bridge, the planking of which might be removed at will. And as Dane passed over he looked down into the moat that was dry. The Salariki did not depend upon water for a defense—but on something ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... steward opened the park gate in such a hurry, that he hung up his pony's chin upon the spikes, and, for aught I know, it hangs there still; but he jumped off, and gave chase to Tom. The ploughman left his horses at the headland, and one jumped over the fence, and pulled the other into the ditch, plough and all; but he ran on, and gave chase to Tom. Sir John looked out of his study window (for he was an early old gentleman) and up at the nurse, and a martin dropped mud in his eye, so that he ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... hatred against another gentleman, named Aubry de Montdidier, his comrade in service. These two having met in the Forest of Bondi, near Paris, Macaire took an opportunity of treacherously murdering his brother-officer, and buried him in a ditch. Montdidier was unaccompanied at the moment, excepting by a dog (probably a wolf-hound), with which he had gone out, perhaps to hunt. It is not known whether the dog was muzzled, or from what other cause it permitted the deed to ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... could throw them into the ditch," said Porthos, "after having assured ourselves they have nothing ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... island was Fort Moultrie, an irregular fort, without ditch or counterscarp, with a brick scarp wall about twelve feet high, which could be scaled anywhere, and this was surmounted by an earth parapet capable of mounting about forty twenty-four and thirty-two pounder smooth-bore iron guns. Inside the fort were three two-story brick barracks, ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... all for do here, when you leff? 'speck ebbery ting be dull, wuss nor ditch-water. No more fun—no more shuffle-foot. Old maussa no like de fiddle, and nebber hab party and jollication like udder people. Don't tink I can stay here, Mass Ra'ph, after you gone; 'spose, you no 'jection, I go 'long wid you? You leff me, I take to de swamp, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... refuse the leap, in which case I imagined I might pull her in. The pace at which we were going soon brought us near the spot, when I was glad to perceive that the wall was a more formidable obstacle than I had at first imagined, being fully six feet high, with a ditch in 43front of it. I therefore selected a place where the ditch seemed widest, got her head up by sawing her mouth with the snaffle, and put her fairly at it. No sooner did she perceive the obstacles before her than, slightly moderating her pace, she appeared to collect ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... you see those soldiers lying down in a ditch?" Percy asked, pointing to a line of Mobiles, not fifty ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... central court is the home of the unmarried women. This, and the rooms for their work, open on a separate square where there is shade from orange and fig trees and a bathing pond supplied by the zanja, or water ditch. Here square-figured, heavy-featured Indian girls are busy spinning and weaving thread into cloth. Others are cutting out and sewing garments. Some, squatted on the ground, are grinding corn into a coarse meal for the atole, or mush. At the zanja several ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... single creature to show him the slightest compassion. At length, he was so fortunate as to encounter a shepherd-boy, who appeared in scarcely less distress than himself; for one of the sheep belonging to his flock had fallen into a ditch, the sides of which were so steep that he was unable to pull ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... been tumbled over the pony's head, Miss Lottie," she said, "and he's been lying in a ditch nobody knows how long; but the dog's saved his life—him and Gus together—and the doctor hopes he won't be very bad, no bones being broken, only bruises and knocks of the head. He don't quite know himself, you see, yet, poor young gentleman! and we have to keep him quiet, so you must go ...
— My Young Days • Anonymous
... them to pull the canoe along the nae, or farther side of the Puunui stream. By this course the canoe was brought down as far as Kaalaa, near Waikahalulu, where, when daylight came, they left their burden and returned to Waolani. The canoe was left in the ditch, where it remained for many generations, and was called Kawa-a-Kekupua (Kekupua's canoe), in honor of the ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... body of brave veterans, arraying themselves in a ring on a little mound, beat off every charge of the Germans, and prolonged their honorable resistance to the close of that dreadful day. The traces of a feeble attempt at forming a ditch and mound attested in after-years the spot where the last of the Romans passed their night of suffering and despair. But on the morrow this remnant also, worn out with hunger, wounds, and toil, was charged by the victorious Germans, and either massacred ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... sudden swerve. Of course the car skidded. It skidded all over the place, as if it were drunk, and, aided by Marigold, described a series of ghastly half-circles. At last he performed various convulsive feats of jugglery, with the result that the car, which was nosing steadily for the ditch, came to a stand-still. Then Marigold informed me in unemotional tones that the steering ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... what had happened, were surrounded by cavalry and brought in tied to the horses' tails. Many a knight, better accoutred than his fellows, was despatched in a more summary manner and stripped of his armor, after which his body was carelessly thrown into a ditch by the roadside.[829] La Renaudie was so fortunate as to escape this fate and the yet more cruel doom that awaited him at Amboise, by meeting a soldier's death, while courageously fighting against a party ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... for him, waiting to welcome him after this horrible night. The sky was now clear, and looked like a large blue eye, dewy with tears and full of sweetness. The road no longer dismayed the child. Besides, it was a smooth highway, without ditch or pavement, intended, it seemed, for the carriages of the wealthy. Superb residences, with grounds carefully kept, were on both sides of this road. Between the white houses and the vineyards were green lawns that led down to the river, whose surface reflected the tender blue and rosy tints of ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... weakened by events. You must buy my full obedience, Zaemon, if you want it. Promise me Nais—and your arts I know can snatch her—and I will be true servant to the High Council of the Priest, and will die in the last ditch if need be for the carrying out of order. But let me see Nais given over to the fury of that wanton woman, and I shall have no inwards left, except to take my vengeance, and to see Atlantis piled up ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... who dashed his stick into a wet ditch. The drops of water splashed up to the green leafy roof, and the clerk thought of the million of ephemera which in a single drop were thrown up to a height, that was as great doubtless for their size, as for ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... on the edge of a dry ditch and looked down. In the bottom were two men, strays from the fight, grappled together and still fighting. They were weeping out of sheer fatigue and helplessness, and the blows they only occasionally struck were ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... near'd that old soak'd hay, They saw across the only way That Judas, Godmar, and the three Red running lions dismally Grinn'd from his pennon, under which In one straight line along the ditch, They ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... a knave and liar, but a genuinely honest man! Peace to him. Did he not, in spite of all, accomplish much for us? We walk smoothly over his great rough heroic life; step-over his body sunk in the ditch there. We need not spurn it, as we step on it!—Let the Hero rest. It was not to men's judgment that he appealed: nor have men judged him ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... 1, 1915, the French were in their last ditch before Verdun—that is, on the east bank—but on July 1, 1916, there began that allied offensive at the Somme which changed the whole face of the western operations. Thus, by August 1, 1916, the Germans had been compelled to remove many troops from Verdun and the French were able ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... adverse 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
... he spoke. Alongside the road at this point lay a ditch that was a couple of feet lower than the surface of the pike. Straggly bushes partly over-ran the watercourse; and caught on the twigs of these was some sort of object that had attracted the attention of ...
— Fred Fenton on the Track - or, The Athletes of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... humans which made the Professor's part so incredibly base, so gratuitously cruel and treacherous to Finn, would have given in long before. Finn fought with the courage of a brave man who has reached the last ditch, and with the ferocity that came to him out of the ancient days in which his warrior ancestors were never known either to give ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... of doubt. He did it up by Tippet's Barrow, just beyond the cross-roads where the scarlet gig used to meet the coach and take the mails for Castle Cannick and beyond to Tolquite. Billy Phillips, that drove the gig, was found in the ditch with his mouth gagged, and swore to Hughie's being the man. The Lord Chief Justice, too, summed up dead against him, and the jury didn't even leave the box. And the moral was, "Hughie Best, you're to be taken to the place whence you come from, ancetera, and may the Lord have mercy ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... go out in the road and sit with our feet in the ditch, like the tramps do," said Jack. "I'll bring the tea in my sponge bag. Rosher used to carry it about in his pocket, full of water for a little squirt he was always firing off in the French class. Pilson had the sentence, 'Give me something ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... genealogists, a link wanting is a chain broken. This blank then made Uncle Fountain miserable, and he cried out for help. Lucy came with her young eyes, her woman's patience, and her own complaisance. A great ditch yawned between a crocheteer and a rotten branch he coveted. Our Quinta Curtia flung herself, her eyesight, and her time into ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... which they were proceeding opened into Gracechurch Street, leading still up the hill and away from the Thames. It was a fairly broad highway, but totally unpaved, and disgraced by a ditch or "kennel" into which found their way the ill-smelling slops thrown from the windows and doors ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... a side street where a number of men were at work digging a long and deep ditch in which ...
— The Woggle-Bug Book • L. Frank Baum
... Ditch your tent as soon as you can, particularly a shelter tent, even if you camp for one night only. Otherwise a little rain may ruin ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... associations with that word have been formed in States east of the Rocky Mountains. Imagine an extensive inclosure on the side of a mountain, with its barren-looking soil strewn with rocks of all sizes, from a pebble to a bowlder, cut across by an irrigating ditch or a mountain brook, dotted here and there by sage bushes, and patches of oak-brush, and wild roses, and one has a picture of a Salt Lake pasture. Closely examined, it has other peculiarities. There is no half way in its growths, no shading ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... a walled city from the time of the deys until the close of the 19th century. The French, after their occupation of the city (1830), built a rampart, parapet and ditch, with two terminal forts, Bab Azoun to the south and Bab-el-Oued to the north. The forts and part of the ramparts were demolished at the beginning of the 20th century, when a line of forts occupying the heights ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... huts are all beneath the water, and they all open into one common ditch, which is purposely dug in the bed of the river, and is too deep to be entirely frozen. In the summer time the huts are vacated, and the beavers make their abode in burrows on the banks of the stream, which serve ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... Orange County, New York; and you may see for yourself the vegetable fiber found in its teeth in his museum in Boston.[127] Does any one believe that the vegetable fiber and maple twigs have kept their shape one hundred thousand years? The mammoth found in the ditch of the Tezcucoco road must have fallen in after the Incas had dug that ditch. The Indians have a tradition that their fathers hunted a huge deer with a hand on his face, which slept leaning against the trees. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... personally. He decided rapidly whom among them he could trust, and once having arrived at that conclusion, his decision was irrevocable. He would stand by a friend, without regard to its effect upon himself, to the last ditch. ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... hills, he observed to his companion, "If there be any broken ground about the foot of these hills, we may find SHARK'S TEETH;" and they had not proceeded far, before they picked up six from the white bank of a new fence-ditch. As he afterwards said of himself, "The habit of observation crept on me, gained a settlement in my mind, became a constant associate of my life, and started up in activity at the first thought of a journey; so that I generally went off ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... a roadside ditch or pool in spring-time, take from it any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish. One of these ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various |
