"Dry rot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ship of which he was in command, as "iron-sick"; the wood was too rotten, that is, to hold the iron bolts, so that "not a man in the ship had a dry place to sleep in." His men were "tumbling down with scurvy"; his mainmast was so pulverised by dry rot that a walking-stick could be thrust into it. Of another ship, the Ramilies—his favourite ship, too—he says, "It became water-logged whenever it blowed hard." The ships' bottoms grew a rank ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... not reflect that of the dry rot in old Tom's soul this deception was a typical symptom. He knew that in the old days Tom Burton's word had been a synonym for inflexible honesty; that it was as good ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... up the main trunk and all but out through the top. Here and there it pierced through the outer bark, so that slants of pale light served to carry the eye up and up until it became lost in inky blackness. Now and then dust and little showers of dry rot descended softly upon the upturned face; and if you put your ear close to the wood you could hear, as through the receiver of a telephone, things that were going on among the upper branches; as when the breeze puffed up and they ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... question the opinion we hold about the gods, and ask reason and demonstration for everything." Such an attitude means mistrust, it means at bottom a fundamental unfaith. The house is beautiful; do not touch it; it is riddled by white ants, by dry rot, and it would fall. That is not faith; it is a strange confession; but all who hesitate at changes, I think, make that confession sooner or later. There is a line of Kabir which puts the essence of ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... observed Burlingham, in the light, jovial tone that would most quickly soothe her agitation, "but I think I'd take my chances with the worms rather than with the dry rot of a backwoods farm. You may not get your meals so regular out in the world, but you certainly do live. Yes—that backwoods life, for anybody with a spark of spunk, is simply being dead and knowing it." He tore ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... our ecclesiastical contemporary, The Guardian, recently appeared one asking for an effectual way of "exterminating dry rot, and preventing its re-appearance in a church." Why doesn't the reverend inquirer try somebody else's Sermons? Or have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 18, 1893 • Various
... strong roots into the eternal rocks because they are tempest-tossed by the wildest winds of heaven, then the next twenty years were destined to test the very fiber of Canada's national spirit. All that was weak snapped and went down. The dry rot of political theory was flung to dust. Special interests, pampered privileges, the claims of the few to exploit the many, the claims of the many to rule wisely as the few—the shibboleth of theorists, the fine spun cobwebs of the doctrinaires, governmental ideals of brotherhood ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... trouble is that we women are changing, developing, while you men are not: you are the same. We, as a sex, are growing up, at last; your sex is standing still. The ideas our grandmothers held, the lives they led, would kill us of dry rot. But you men are just where your grandfathers were in relation to your homes and your beliefs as to the duty of your wives. Of course, your old-time wife looked up to her over-lord with reverence; she hung on his every word with profound respect; she swore by his every careless opinion, ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... stone bridge a beam affected by dry rot or a stone weakened by the effects of frost may lie hidden from the inspection of even the most vigilant observer until, when the process has gone far enough, the bridge suddenly gives way under a not unusual strain, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... hundreds of wealthy business concerns today who are slowly dying from dry rot because they have not the nerve to break away from the precedent that built up their businesses. They let sentiment outweigh common sense. They maintain the same old lines and follow the same policy because that policy years ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... years that have succeeded his dismissal, a certain dry rot, due to the tendency of the Prussian Government to distribute its diplomatic offices among highborn but incompetent Junkers,—une petite gentilhommerie pauvre et stupide, as Bismarck once described them—had affected the efficiency of German ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... Up to his dismissal he had led the peddling and sordid life that a small government clerk on the Continent leads if he has nothing to save him from himself and from his fellows: the dry rot of official life had left him useless for anything but official life. A sensualist in a small way, he enlarged his sphere on the day of his dismissal, when he found himself cut off from work and adrift in the world, with five hundred francs in his ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... a good place to die in. It would have been intolerable ten years ago, but it seems little short of paradise when a man has dry rot in him. And that girl looked remarkably well with those roses ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... small things is the "dry rot" of the soul. Is it not, then, somewhat unreasonable to expect God or Nature to strain and twist the immutable laws of Nature at the request of every healer in order to save us from the natural consequences of overeating, red meat eating, whisky drinking, smoking, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... has sailed his last cruise under the Jolly Roger, Councilor," put in Joe Hawkridge. "His timbers are full o' dry rot and he seeks a ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... upper part of the district since the previous summer of pathfindings, and at that time it was like a dozen other outlying and hardly accessible fields, scantily manned and languishing under the dry rot of isolation. ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... spoke showers of tiny hard nuts came down on the little creature, who ate them greedily. The traveller opened one; it was extremely small and tasted of dry rot. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... drifted far out of its way and had grounded on quicksands, and they thought that the sole way of saving the hulk was to cast all its precious lading into the sea. Christ's Church had been founded on a rock, it had withstood the rain and the flood, but was crumbling down with dry rot. Calvin would have neither the rock nor the sand. Into the mud he drove the piles by the strokes of his genius, on which to erect the platform that was to uphold the conventicle of his followers, and if that did not stand, it would at least mark its site by their ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... it isn't driftwood," I said to myself. "I'll bet——," and then I stopped short, for I remembered that my sole worldly wealth at the moment consisted of exactly three pennies. All the same I was right about it. Driftwood doesn't get the dry rot, nor does it come ashore covered with rich ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... when the incipient beginnings of pandemic that was later to scourge the country was reaping its first harvest; a strange malady carried on the stinking winds of war, shooting up in spouty little flames, that, no sooner laid, found new dry rot to feed upon. Spanish influenza, it was called, for no more visible reason than that it probably had its ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... people. Our political architects have taken a survey of the fabric of the British Constitution. It is singular that they report nothing against the crown, nothing against the lords: but in the House of Commons everything is unsound; it is ruinous in every part; it is infested by the dry rot, and ready to tumble about our ears without their immediate help. You know by the faults they find what are their ideas of the alteration. As all government stands upon opinion, they know that the way utterly ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... whenever and wherever I have encountered it, has not failed to bring back the scene in which I smelt it first. There is an odour less easy to define, but just as easy to recognise, in the air of the morning street; in the reek of horse and harness going up Snow Hill; in a mingling of wet rot and dry rot in the station; in the acrid, faintly-tinctured coffee smell at Oxford; in the scent of a London fog, or the fragrance of a London egg—any one of which will infallibly take me back to the scene and the time at which it was ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray |
