"Muck" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the men from giving the old chief as much liquor as they were ready to bestow on him, lest he might get drunk, and take it into his head to run a-muck or jump overboard. He had taken enough, however, to send him fast asleep in the bottom of the boat, where he lay, as Jerry observed, "like a porpus in ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... Hinkey is still running. If he runs long enough he'll probably fall in with some muck-raking magazine writer, who'll get out of Hinkey a startling story of why some soldiers insist on deserting ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... he exclaimed. Then he dropped his whip, clasped his hands, and stood as if in ecstasy. A faint color illuminated his coarse face, and his eyes shone like diamonds dropped on a muck-heap. "Is it really the brave girl from Cottin?" he muttered, in a voice so smothered that he alone heard it. "You are fine," he said, after a pause, using the curious word, "godaine," a superlative in the dialect of those regions used ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... humble family attribute this visit?" I inquired, despising that tone of mockery into which I had fallen yet seeming unable to drag myself out of its muck-bottom depths. ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... this surmise is right; I merely am wondering. In any event, we do not want to see the close-up overdone. We don't want too much of the Griffith staccato. It leads to what a certain friend of mine once called Tom Lawson's method of muck-raking—'The method of ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... son-in-law, but she will have him at her feet out of revenge. I have just spoken to the wretched woman as she deserves. She is a shameless courtesan; I have told her that I am leaving her house, that I would not have my honor smirched in that muck-heap.—I owe myself to ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... sort of a meal over an alcohol stove. Zerkow was a Polish Jew—curiously enough his hair was fiery red. He was a dry, shrivelled old man of sixty odd. He had the thin, eager, cat-like lips of the covetous; eyes that had grown keen as those of a lynx from long searching amidst muck and debris; and claw-like, prehensile fingers—the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses. It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know instantly that greed—inordinate, insatiable greed—was the dominant passion of the man. He was ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... Out of such blackening and blasting fumes comes our civilization. That weapons of war and of destructiveness should come out of such pits and abysses of hell-fire seemed fit and natural, but much more comes out of them—much that suggests the pond-lily rising out of the black slime and muck ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... channel and moved into the marsh grass again. Rick followed closely, careful to make no noise. In spite of their best efforts there was an occasional sucking sound as his foot or Scotty's pulled out of the muck, and there was a steady rustle of marsh grass. He hoped that the sounds were drowned out by the steady ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... half the length of the rapids we encountered the usual troubles that overtake the tracker—those of clearing our lines of trees and bushes, slipping into the muck of small inlets, stumbling over stones, cutting the lines upon sharp rocks, or having them caught by gnarled roots of driftwood. As we approached the last lap of white water the canoes passed through a rocky basin that held a thirty- or forty-yard section of the river in a slack ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... Club, mate, for me; that means money, and rules, sportsman form, and sech muck. I likes to pick out my own pals, go permiskus, and trust to pot-luck. A rush twelve-a-breast is a gammock, twelve squeakers a going like one; But "rules o' the road" dump you down, chill yer sperrits, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... upon the molten mixture from which the things were to crystallise, I hit upon some researches of Daubree's at the Paris Laboratorie des Poudres et Salpetres. He exploded dynamite in a tightly screwed steel cylinder, too strong to burst, and I found he could crush rocks into a muck not unlike the South African bed in which diamonds are found. It was a tremendous strain on my resources, but I got a steel cylinder made for my purpose after his pattern. I put in all my stuff and my explosives, built up a fire in my furnace, put the whole concern in, ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... back to her.] Listen! I worked right in our mine with my father when I was only eight years old! That's why I ain't better educated—I worked for ten years there down in the dirt and muck! ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... 'barney.' If this ruffian rout Of cheats and 'bashers' now surround the Ring, You'd better stop it as a shameful thing. In JACKSON'S time, and even in my day, It did want courage, and did mean fair play— Most times, at least. But don't mix up this muck With tales of rough-and-tumble British pluck. I'd like to shake ENTELLUS by the hand, And give that DARES—wot he'd understand Better, you bet, than being fair or "game," Or trying to keep up the Old Country's name! But anyhow, if Boxing's sunk so low ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... wink, and she walked demurely after him, a bright young thing, flowing over with life, yet dropping her soul to a higher one, and led by love to anything, as the manner is of such creatures, when they know what is best for them. Then Winnie trod lightly upon the straw, because it had soft muck under it, and her delicate feet ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... from low objects. 'What do I care about being confessed before the angels, or about the Holy Spirit to teach me? What I want is my share of the paternal acres. A rabbi who will help me to these is the rabbi for me.' John Bunyan's 'man with the muck-rake' had his eyes so glued to the ground and the muck that he did not see the crown hanging above him. How many of us find the sermon time a good opportunity for thinking about investments ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... you, an' bring you to your knees, an' that 'fore your gray hairs be turned, as mine, to white. Oh, Christ Jesus, look you at this blind sawl an' give en somethin' better to lay hold 'pon than his poor bally-muck o' religion what's nort ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... Disposal.—The conditions affecting the disposal of the muck, after blasting, were quite different at the two ends, the grade descending in the direction of the loads at Weehawken and ascending at the Hackensack end. At the Weehawken end the mouth of the tunnels was at the bottom ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Bergen Hill Tunnels. Paper No. 1154 • F. Lavis
... end whereof is to have no order at all, but to grind with the clack of some demagogue. Is he providing already for his golden thumb? Lift up your heads; away with ambition, that fulsome complexion of a statesman, tempered, like Sylla's, with blood and muck. 'And the Lord give to his senators wisdom; and make our faces to shine, that we may be a light to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide their feet in the way of peace.'—In the name of ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... information respecting their secret beliefs and superstitions direct from the Indians. The attempts I have made thus far have, at least, been unsuccessful, partly, perhaps, because the topic was not properly apprehended by them, or by my ordinary office interpreter, who, I find, is soon run a-muck by anything but the plainest and most ordinary line of inquiry. A man of the Indian frontiers, who has lived all his life to eat and drink, to buy and sell, and has grown old in this devotion to the means necessary to secure the material necessaries of ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Ah, I'd "progress" 'em, pack o' perposterous hasses, A regular pollyglot lot, breeding strife 'twixt the classes and masses. The masses is muck; that's my motter, as who should have learnt it more betterer? BUMBLE could hopen the heyes of them BOOTHSES, JOHN BURNSES, ancetterer. Snow? Is it me brings the snow, and the hice, and the peasoupy slushiness, Making the subbubs one slough? ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... yet that mare, although, as you say, Miss Catharine, she was never healthy, has the most wonderful pluck, as you know. I remember once I had two ton o' muck in the waggon, and we were stuck. Jack and Blossom couldn't stir it, and, after a bit, chucked up. I put in Maggie—you should have seen her! She moved it, a'most all herself, aye, as far as from here to the gate, and then of course the others took it up. That's blood! ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... procuring manures of all kinds from every available source. Remember that anything which will rot will add to the value of your manure pile. Muck, lime, old plastering, sods, weeds (earth and all), street, stable and yard sweepings—all these and numerous others will increase your garden ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... is excellent of its kind, resembles more the humour of Rowlandson than that of Hogarth. The Bedford Court House on the sweltering Midsummer Day, the Puritan recusants, reeking of piety and the cow-house conventicle, the Judges at high jinks upon the bench—to whom, all in a muck-sweat and ablaze with the fervour of conversion, enter Black Ned, the stout publican, and big Tab, his slut of a wife,—these are drawn after the broad British style of humorous illustration, which combines a frank exaggeration of the characteristic ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... to the driver for pleasure to find in rainy weather almost bottomless muck and mud on portions of the main travelled highway between New York and Buffalo, but that, for the present, is normal. The manufacturer may regret the condition and wish for better, but he cannot be heard to complain, and if ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... want to set them free. How can I lie? How can I crawl through the muck and filth of a divorce? I can't. (Moves to end of table and stands there facing front.) But I must set them free somehow. They're such good people, my wife and Victor. I ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... like a large parrot, with a white bill, and black legs and feet. The carrion crow is as big as a small turkey, which it perfectly resembles in shape and colour; but its flesh smells and tastes so strong of muck that it is not eatable. The pelican is almost as big as a swan, being mostly white with brown tips to the wings, having a long bill with a large cross joining the lower part of the bill, and hanging down the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... horses exhausted with struggling under the pole. The other, saved only from drowning by the fact that its collar had held its head against the bank, had evidently kicked and splashed until the water was thick with the black muck ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... habitable surfaces; and it's a good quota—a land that some future generation will love, and swear by, and fight for, if need be. And to think that for one man's narrow-mindedness and another's greed we've got to christen it in blood and muck and filth and dishonesty—it makes me sore, ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... "Why, whatever is the world coming to next? We shall have them spirit-rapping and table-turning and such-like muck, I suppose." ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... quarter so suitable to colonial requirements. Of course she is independent, often even cheeky, but a mistress learns to put up with occasional tantrums, provided the general behaviour and character are good. When we were first out here we used to run a-muck with our servants about once a week; but now we find it better to bear the ills we have than fly to others which we know not of. Our present Lizzie is impertinent to a degree when reproved; but then ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... abandon; but he had to run her down when he caught sight of her, for she fled like a wild thing before him. Floundering in a cedar swamp, soaked to the knees, little blue be-furred suit heavy with black muck, he came up with her. She was kneeling, shaking with terror, face hidden by her loosened hair, when he bent over her and ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... dawn, Nix Naught Nothing set to work at his task; but, as fast as he cleared the muck, it just fell back again. So by breakfast-time he was in a terrible sweat; yet not one whit nearer the end of his job was he. Now the Magician's daughter, coming to bring him his breakfast, found him so distraught and distracted that he ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... an hour, till Eliza, the German nurse, comes to take her to bed. The cows merely stand there, and do nothing; yet the mere sight of them is all-sufficient for Jean. She requires nothing more. The other evening, after contemplating them a long time, as they stood in the muddy muck chewing the cud, she said, with deep and reverent appreciation, "Ain't this a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... he gave me condensed essence of mixed farming, with excursions into sugar-beet (did you know they are making sugar in Alberta?), and he talked of farmyard muck, our dark mother of ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... recent sheets of glacial drift in the northern states; and more numerous than the lakes which still remain are those already thus filled with carbonaceous matter derived from the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere. Such fossil lakes are marked by swamps or level meadows underlain with muck. ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... enough for you to want me to muck up out of the window, wasn't it?" demanded the obstinate barbarian, becoming passionate in his bearing rather than reluctantly, but with courteous grace, lessening the price to a trifling degree, as we regard the proper way of carrying on ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... day by the laird and lady of Muck, one of the western islands, two miles long, and three quarters of a mile high. He has half his island in his own culture, and upon the other half live one hundred and fifty dependants, who ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... teaching, he is not always gentle, but he is always sincere. He speaks soft words to persuade; but if that is not enough, he does not scruple to knock the muck-rake out of sordid hands with a fine, sudden stroke, if so he may make men look up from the rubbish under their feet to the flowers that bloom around them and the stars that glow above and the God ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... was christened, so let her stay, I say. So it was with the Cassandra, as brought us all safe home from Malabar, after England took the Viceroy of the Indies; so it was with the old Walrus, Flint's old ship, as I've seen a-muck with the red blood and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle at each end) run a muck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was the last night he should ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... from the market, swinging her right arm and with the left clasping the basket of provisions to her side; the air grows thick with the smell and smoke of kitchens. It again becomes clear to our Lane that the real and normal consist solely of herself, her houses, and their muck-heaps. ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... game fairly begins: Whish! sound the brooms as they are whisked here, there, every where, in attempts to strike the hog; one man giving a strong blow, strikes another one who was stooping down to arrange his garters, where he dislikes to be struck, and instantly the one struck runs a muck, hitting wildly left and right. Two or three men charge on one another and brooms fly in splinters all round. One champion got a head-blow and had his wind knocked out by another blow simultaneously; round they go, and at it they go, beating the air and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Malays, when infuriated to madness with bang (a preparation from a species of hemp), of sallying into the streets, or decks, to murder any whom they may chance to meet, until they are either slain or fall from exhaustion.—To run a-muck. To run madly and attack all we meet (Pope, Dryden). As in the case of mad dogs, certain death awaited them, for if not killed in being ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Lord God: Behold, I will bring a King of kings from the north, with horses and with chariots, and with horsemen and companies and muck people. He shall slay with the sword ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... absently. "F'r instance, Aunt Julia, I don't see what you want to go walking with Newland Sanders for, when you said yourself you wished he was dead, or somep'n, after there got to be so muck talk in the family and everywhere about his sayin' all that about the Bible when you hurt your thumb. All ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... for a spare coin. She had a kindly, intelligent face, and spoke volubly in patois, having very little command of French. It was, indeed, necessary for me to converse by the medium of an interpreter. On approaching the village we were overtaken by a slight, handsome youth conducting a muck-wagon. This was her younger son, and his easy, well-bred greeting, and correct French, prepared me for the piece of intelligence to follow. The wearer of peasant's garb, carting manure, had passed his examination of Bachelor of Arts and Science, had, in fact, received the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... that word, whether I would or no; and in so strong a measure was this temptation upon me, that often I have been ready to clap my hand under my chin, to hold my mouth from opening; and to that end also I have had thoughts at other times, to leap with my head downward, into some muck hill hole or other, to keep my mouth ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... a mania reported to exist in some parts of the east, in which a man is said to run a muck; and these furious maniacs are believed to have induced their calamity by unlucky gaming, and afterwards by taking large quantities of opium; whence the pain of despair is joined with the energy of drunkenness; ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... herself upon a slight rise or swell from which she made out a group of cattle in the distance, and with this promise of success before her she put her horse to a gallop and set out for it, slapping him with the reins. Presently, the ring of black muck becoming plainly visible, she knew her quest was at an end; and her thirsty animal quickened his pace as if he ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... the Bishop's son approvingly. "This is the stuff. Conventionality be tabooed. They're going to the other extreme, and that's the way to do. If you don't want an altar and candles, and a high-mucky-muck at the organ, have a hay-wagon. Gee!—Let me get up here next to Ben Hur and ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... to whom the Muck-Rakers referred as a Baron, had a Daughter who started out as Katie when she carried the Hot Coffee ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... while priests are cutting capers— Priests of beetles, cats, and tapirs, Brutes, who would thy beauty truck, For an inch of yellow muck. ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... engines, all more or less disabled and sent there for repair; one to have a burst steam-pipe removed and replaced, another to have a wheel, or a fire-box or a cylinder changed; and one, that looked as if it had recently "run a-muck" against all the other engines on the line, stood sulkily grim in a corner, evidently awaiting its sentence of condemnation,—the usual fate of such engines being to be torn, bored, battered, chiselled, clipt, and otherwise cut to pieces, ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... Muck Book. The American Muck Book; treating of the Nature, Properties, Sources, History, and Operations of all the principal Fertilizers and Manures in Common Use, with Specific Directions for their Preservation, and Application to the Soil and to Crops; drawn from Authentic ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... aren't meant for that sort of thing. They're supposed to be for kids who steal buns at the shop or muck about generally. Not for a chap who curses a fellow who runs him out. I tell you what, there's just a chance Firby-Smith won't press the thing. He hadn't had time to get over it when he saw me. By now he'll ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... afraid of the wrongness that inhabited this muck of house and grove and matted bush. He said this loudly to the prostrate form; then, waiting a little, repeated it. He would smash the print with its fallacious expanse of peace. The broken glass of the smitten picture jingled thinly on the floor. Woolfolk ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... can't propose your health, friend, Or drink to the 'Thirteen's' luck. I must dine on—Eucalyptus, And Sulphur, or some such muck. I have no Salt to be spilling; My only knife is a spoon; And I have not the smallest notion If there ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... a trap door the cleanings of the horse and cow stable should be thrown into the basement, which, by a solid brick partition, should be so divided as to leave ample room for a dark cellar in which to store roots and apples. Through this trap door in the stable rich earth and muck from the banks of the creek could be thrown down also, covering the manure, and all could be worked over and mixed on rainy days. By this method I could make the most of my fertilizers, which may be regarded as the driving-wheel ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... of that, fellows?" he exclaimed, in dismay when he had rammed the seven foot pole down until three fourths of its length had vanished in the unfathomable depths of soft muck. ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... be carried out quietly without fuss, feathers or publicity. Shun the spectacular and remember it is the morality of the boy and girl that is in question. Keep away from muck-raking, be constructive and pure and business-like in the ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... of our own speech and in the moulds of Western thought, we may say that matter existed before mind and the gods came forth, as it were, by spontaneous evolution. The first thing that appeared out of the warm earth-muck was like a rush-sprout, and this became a kami, or god. From this being came forth others, which also produced beings, until there were perfect bodies, sex and differentiation of powers. The "Nihongi," however, not only ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... temporary command until she can get to Blois herself—and then! Why, then she will certainly take them in hand personally, or I don't know her as well as I ought to, after all these years of intimacy. That will be a sight to see—that fair spirit in her white armor, delivering her will to that muck-heap, that rag-pile, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... but if our minds fasten on the thing to be done, on commodity and safety, on getting and having, those avenues seem to close by which the soul was fed. Then we forget our incalculable chances and certainties; we go mad, and make the mind a muck-rake. If a man will direct his faculties to any limited and not to illimitable ends, he cripples his faculties. No matter whether he is deluded by a fortune or a reputation or position, if he does not give himself wholly to grow ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... flitting silent at his side. But in the cattle-market she shrank from the press of men, all men, all in heavy, filthy boots, and leathern leggins. And the road underfoot was all nasty with cow-muck. And it frightened her to see the cattle in the square pens, so many horns, and so little enclosure, and such a madness of men and a yelling of drovers. Also she felt her father was embarrassed by ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... you never hear of a man gathering the stones off his field, and then having to lead them back again?" "Yes, I have; but then they were natural to the soil." I said, "What does manuring land mean, but putting something into it of which it is deficient? You don't till a muck-midden. If in stony land stones are essential for the vigorous growth of the crop, is it not exceedingly probable that they will be still more beneficial on stiff land which has ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... time," said Jonah, "I appeal to you all to let that dog-eared mountebank rake over his muck-heap, and ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... look on a heap of accumulated work with indifference; when he is also ambitious he rolls up his sleeves and forgets everything in the debris of vouchers and figures. Like a mole he works away, his eyes blinded (to keep out the muck); unlike the mole he never succeeds in building a nest for himself. The heap diminishes gradually before him and he thinks he sees rock-bottom, when suddenly an avalanche comes down, obliterating marks of previous effort and storing ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... a thing to be raffled for! What a comment, what a satire on our institutions! The conclusion will be, that mankind will hang itself upon a tree. And have all the precepts in all the Bibles taught men only this? and is the last and most admirable invention of the human race only an improved muck-rake? Is this the ground on which Orientals and Occidentals meet? Did God direct us so to get our living, digging where we never planted,—and He would, perchance, reward ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... to say that my Job's comforter turned out a false prophet; snow soon gave place to sleet, and sleet to rain, and before midnight the muck was complete. Next morning, at three, we got into the 'bus, and soon after four the cars came in, and we found ourselves once more en route for Pittsburg. I think this was about the most disagreeable day's journey I ever had. The mixture of human and ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... explain the reason why Frazer's charge that a Plato director owned land used by saloons was eagerly whispered for a little while, then quite forgotten, while Frazer's reputation as a "crank" was never forgotten, so much does muck resent the muck-raker; to describe Carl's brief call on Frazer and his confusing discovery that he had nothing to say; to repeat the local paper's courageous reports of the Frazer affair, Turk's great oath to support Frazer "through ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... by instinct, confound 'em," lamented Dank; "they know the real article, and you can't fool 'em. She knows that he is the high muck-a-muck in this party and she won't even look at me, you take ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Ames has never been worldly-wise enough to become an avowed cynic on the question. He probably knows as well as anybody that to clean up Montreal is in the same category as making Europe safe for the League of Nations; a much harder city to regenerate than even Philadelphia. Muck-raking has no effect, when two-thirds of the population read French papers which never use the rake, and when the boss of three-fourths of the rest is himself often a target for the yellows. Mr. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... well to talk about compensation. How do I know what your compensation will be? How do I know you will make it worth my while? I don't want no compensation. I want my 'ouse. Cheek I calls it, to come down here wanting to muck me ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... persisted. Somehow, the romance of the land and the quest entered into their blood, the spell of it gripped hold of them and would not let them go. Man after man of them, after the most terrible privation and suffering, shook the muck of the country from his moccasins and departed for good. But the following spring always found him drifting down the Yukon on the ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... tops, and you know that underneath is a little cottage about the size of the Grand Central station. That's the style you live in when you've hit the stock-market right, or in case you've got to be a top-notch grafter that the muck-rakers ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... Church Fathers have named it the root of all Evil, the begetter of hate and bloodshed, the sure cause of the soul's damnation. It has been called "trash," "muck," "dunghill excrement," by grave authors. The love of it is denounced in all Sacred Writings; we find it reprehended on Chaldean bricks, and in the earliest papyri. Buddha, Confucius, Christ, set their faces against it; and they have been followed in more modern times by beneficed Clergymen, Sunday ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... entered your kitchen that night. But I did not know it. I loved you the night you brought the wallet. Still I did not understand. It was when I heard the lift door and knew you had gone forever that I understood. Loved you with all my heart, with all that poor old Stefani had fashioned out of muck and clay. If you held my head to your heart, if that is my blood there—Do you, can you ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... brought against Jefferson and himself? Not that he might not devoutly hope for an antidote to the poisonous doctrines of monarchy and aristocracy, though in very truth the existence of any such poison was only one of the maggots which, bred in the muck of party strife, had found a lodgment in his brain; not that it was not a commendable public spirit to wish for a good newspaper to circulate where it was most needed; not that it was not a most excellent thing in him to hold out a helping hand to the friend who had ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... you that you shall niver pass bottle full nor glass empty. God preserve the light av your onder-standin' to you, my jewel av a bhoy, that ye may niver forget what you mint to be an' do, whin you're wallowin' in the muck! May ye see the betther and follow the worse as long as there's breath in your body; an' may ye die quick in a strange land; watchin' your death before ut takes you, an' onable ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... neared the walls, half a huge double gate Lay prostrate, though the other by stone hinges Hung to its flanking tower. The path they followed Threaded an old paved road whose flags were edged With dry grass and dry weeds, even cactuses Had pushed the stones up or found root in muck heaps: The path struck up the slope of the fallen door, Basalt like midnight, o'er which dusty feet Had greyed a passage, for it rested on Some debris fallen from the left-hand tower, And from its upper edge rude blocks like steps Led down into the straight main street, that ran Past eyeless ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... "How? why wet as muck; my head all bumps, my cheek all cut, my nose big as two! forced to wear a plaister; half ruined in vinegar. Got a great cold; put me in a fever; ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... are? Why do people send the medicines to me? Why do perfect strangers assume that, because I have taken up the task of muck-raking the Atlantic Ocean, I am in need of antidotes for mal de mer? Even suppose that I do suffer thus at sea? Is it ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... and plunged it into the turbid mass, turning it round and round. As he lifted it up, the drops which trickled from it hardened into earth of their own accord; and thus dry land was formed. As Izanagi was cleansing his spear the lumps of muck and mud which had adhered to it flew off into space, and were changed into ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... an idle tradition, saying that the sap which produces the plant is such as "the tree doth excerne and cannot assimilate," and Browne ("Vulgar Errors") was of the same opinion. But the opposite opinion was perpetuated in the very name ("Mistel: fimus, muck," Cockayne),[163:1] and was held without any doubt by most of the writers ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... proceeded toward the centre of the village, where all the chiefs and braves stood ready to receive him, which they did in a cordial manner by shaking hands, recognizing him as an old acquaintance, and pronouncing his name, Nu-mohk-muck-a-nah (the first or only man). The body of this strange personage, which was chiefly naked, was painted with white clay, so as to resemble at a distance a white man. He enters the medicine lodge, and goes through certain ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... quiet receptiveness, an openness of eye, a simple readiness to take in these gentle impressions is, I believe with all my heart, of the essence of true wisdom. We have all of us our work to do in the world; but we have our lesson to learn as well. The man with the muck-rake in the old parable, who raked together the straws and the dust of the street, was faithful enough if he was set to do that lowly work; but had he only cared to look up, had he only had a moment's leisure, ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the maidens, while the older squaws, shut out from this by virtue of having fulfilled the end of their existence in reproduction, gossiped as they braided rope from the green roots of trailing vines. At their feet their naked progeny played and squabbled, or rolled in the muck with the tawny wolf-dogs. ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... "Well, it's a muck of a world," he declared cheerfully, taking off his coarse harvest hat and running his hand through his clustering fair hair. In the mellow light the almost brutal strength of his jaw was softened, and his sunburned face paled to ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... think it at all worth while to make troublesome enquiries of the people who reside there, but took Mr Case's account. There seems no doubt that the fire was caused by the maid-servant throwing cinders into a sort of muck-place into which they had been commonly thrown. I suppose there was after all this dry weather straw or muck drier than usual, and the cinders were hotter than usual. The whole was on fire in an exceedingly short time; and everything was down in less than ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... I had another adventure with a weasel that had its den in a bank on the margin of a muck swamp in the same neighborhood. We had cleared and drained and redeemed the swamp and made it into a garden, and I had built me a lodge there. The weasel's hunting-grounds, where doubtless he had been wont to gather his supply of mice, had been destroyed, and he had "got even" with me by preying ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... fleshy part of it; so, considering the skipper fired off no less than five shots out of the six which his revolver contained, it was a wonder more were not grievously wounded, if not killed, when he ran a-muck like that! ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... in no humour to clean out gutters. And where's the water to come from to keep a place clean? It costs many a one of us here a shilling a week the summer through to pay fetching water up the hill. We've work enough to fill our kettles. The muck must just lie in the road, smell or none, till the rain ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... followed in which his normal faculties were unseated, but with the passage of time he roused himself a little. Weakened as he was, his perception told him that the ship had buried itself deep in a swamp until it rested on bedrock. A dozen feet of muck and water lay over it. Even had they survived the crash they would have been helpless unless intelligent aid could be enlisted. He tried to drive out his thoughts in a cry for help, but the strength was gone from him. Within a radius of two miles there was no intelligent ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... the sunshine. They could not travel very close to its bank, for here the ground was uncertain. Once Sam left the highway to get a better view of the stream, and, before Cujo noticed it, found himself up to his knees in a muck which stuck to him like so ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... Sheffield loans,(3) 'T were same as bein' i' Hell: Furnaces thrast out tongues o' fire, An' roared like t' wind on t' fell. I've sammed up coals i' Barnsley pits, Wi' muck up to my knee: Frae Sheffield, Barnsley, Rotherham, ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... patent medicines had not been the target at which disturbed physicians and "muck-raking" journalists had taken aim, these ancient remedies were governed by provisions of the new law. In November 1906 the Bureau of Chemistry of the Department of Agriculture, in charge of administering ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... of . . . well, of inhibition. Freddie Drummond accepted the doctrine of evolution because it was quite universally accepted by college men, and he flatly believed that man had climbed up the ladder of life out of the weltering muck and mess of lower and monstrous organic things. But he was a trifle ashamed of this genealogy, and preferred not to think of it. Wherefore, probably, he practised his iron inhibition and preached it to others, and preferred women of his own type, ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... his laughing answer. "It seems to me that a few months since I was like the old man with the muck-rake in 'Pilgrim's Progress,' seeking to gather only money, facts, and knowledge—things of use. I now am finding so much that is useful which I scarcely looked at before that I am revising my philosophy, and like it much ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... The flatterer an earwig grows; Thus worms suit all conditions; Misers are muck-worms, silk-worms beaux. And ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... many of its unfair practices. At the same time and in the same publication Lincoln Steffens was exposing the seamy side of municipal affairs in "The Shame of the Cities." Between 1901 and 1906 one of the muck-rake periodicals increased its sales threefold, another ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... Come down and I'll moider yuh! Pullin' dat whistle on me, huh? I'll show yuh! I'll crash yer skull in! I'll drive yer teet' down yer troat! I'll slam yer nose trou de back of yer head! I'll cut yer guts out for a nickel, yuh lousey boob, yuh dirty, crummy, muck-eatin' ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... they want money for?" he boomed. "They'll only spend it on all kinds of muck they don't want; what the missionaries leave them, ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... One can't go anywhere without finding them standing around with a kind of "How-do-you-know?" and "Did-it-happen-to-you?" air every time a man says something he knows by—well—by seeing it—perfectly plain seeing it. One doesn't need to stand up to one's neck in experience, in a perfect muck of experience, in order to know things, in order to know they are there. People who are experienced within an inch of their lives, submerged in experience, until all you can see of them is a tired look, are always calling out to the man who sees ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... having taken so much trouble to get at the young man, was not going to be put off in this way. "Never mind your muck for a quarter of an hour," he said. "I have come here on purpose to find you, and I ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... rose early, to muck out the rock and clear the tunnel for a new round of holes; and each time as he came out with a wheel-barrow full of waste he cocked his eye to the west. Bible-Back Murray would be coming over soon, if he was still at ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... as prodigally as if they had been auctioneers' announcements. Fastidious people who did not read it gave it a bad name, not recognizing the classic and heroic attitude of those engaged in pitchforking up and turning over the muck of the Augean stables under the pretense ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... hands in their muck, to settle down and live my life according to their bourgeois standards, to have grossness of soft flesh replace able sinews, to submerge mentality in favor of a specious craftiness of mind which passes in the ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... natives of Venus for success. They were as much at home in the mud as they were in the dank, humid air above. They could distinguish one type of mud from another deep beneath the surface, and could carry a dredge-tube down to a lode of the blue-gray muck with the unfailing ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... were, they were still fearful savages. Messengers arrived from the neighbouring town to announce the death of their chief, Matiamvo. That individual had been addicted to running a-muck through his capital and beheading any one he met, till he had a large heap of human heads in front of his hut. Men were also slaughtered occasionally, whenever the chief wanted part of a body ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... Joe, let's take our tonic." Like most of his countrymen, Joe was not slow to learn the meaning of the word, and to this day the firm hold "tanuk" has on the language is only equalled by the thirst for the fluid which the name implies. Among the Asiatic Eskimo the word "um-muck" is common for "rum," while "em-mik" means water. Even words brought by whalers from the South Sea islands have obtained a footing, such as "kow-kow" for food, a word in general use, and "pow" for "no," or "not any." They also call their babies "pick-a-nee-nee," which to many persons will suggest ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... enough for a convict ship—biscuits as is dropping to pieces, salt junk as 'as been twenty years in cask, and which was mostly horse to begin with. No wonder as they grumbles and growls. A convict is a man, you see, though he be a convict; and it ain't in human nature to eat such muck ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... old man's voice. In the corner of the room, Nema looked up for a moment, and there was fear and worry in her eyes before she looked back to her weaving of endless knots. Sather Karf sighed in weariness. "If I knew what was happening to the sky, would I be dredging the muck of Duality for the likes ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... to properly enjoy. Deaf and blind to every other consideration, to this end they had degraded their intellects by concentrating them upon the minutest details of expense and profit, and for their reward they raked in their harvest of muck and lucre along with the hatred and curses of those they injured in the process. They knew that the money they accumulated was foul with the sweat of their brother men, and wet with the tears of little children, but they were deaf and blind and callous to the consequences ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... bladders of lard that did duty for their faces;" not to speak of the characterization of a "Sacred Heart" too revolting to reproduce? Surely when, after having reviled M. Tissot almost personally, he describes his works as painted with "muck, wine-sauce, and mud," it is difficult not to answer with a tu quoque as far as this word-painting is concerned—difficult not to see here some morbid and "frightful appetite for the hideous" struggling with the healthy appetite ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... answer it, sinner? Yea, I say again, if judgment must begin at them, will it not make thee think, What shall become of me? And I add, when thou shalt see the stars of heaven tumble down to hell, canst thou think that such a muck-heap of sin as thou art shall be lifted up to heaven? Peter asks thee another question: "If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?" Canst thou answer this question, sinner? Stand among the righteous thou ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... of the institution much work was done to increase the amount of grass land and tillage, and where the meadows bordered on the bush and stubble, the bush scythe was freely used. Muck was dug and spread in quantities. Mr. Ripley rather prided himself on the knowledge of the composition and improvement of soils, and when the experiment ceased, the farm had improved in amount of tillable surface and capacity of production. This progress was, much of it, to the Association's cost, ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... a Spitfire or a Thunderbolt. You just plow along through the muck and hope the boys will bat down all of the fighters coming ...
— A Yankee Flier Over Berlin • Al Avery
... have the reputation of not keeping the Sunday with ostentatious strictness. Eigg, the little island contiguous, is a little heaven below. The missionary there well deserves a word of commendation: the island of Muck is under his spiritual supervision, and with a sandwich and a sermon in his pocket, he often sets sail, scorning gust and current, to preach to his ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... distances in an adventurous way. Then what he called metamorphosis begins. The little tadpole waggles his way to a rock and fixes himself head downward. Then he undergoes the oddest changes, becomes indeed a mere vegetative excrescence on the stone, secretes a lot of tough muck round himself, and is altogether lost to free oceanic society. He loses the cheerful tail, loses most of his brain, loses ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... as Iver was a small boy, his father employed him about the farm, to assist him in ploughing, to hoe potatoes, and wield the muck-fork in the cow-house, or, to use the local term, the cow-stall. He kept the lad hard at work from morning rise till set ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... repeated with a sigh of satisfaction. "Always; and hyiu muck-a-muck when big salmon run. No more ever come that bad year ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... posterity! Pray, whom should we write for, in this age which makes its own epic upon sounding anvils, and whose lyric is yelled from the locomotive running a muck through forest and field and beside the waters no longer still? Write poetry now, when noise has become normal, and we are like the Egyptians, who never heard the roaring of the fall of Nilus, because the racket was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... crash and a roar behind. Dane balanced on the third of the minute islands to look back. He saw the lash of blaster fire on the top of the cliff, Tau on his knees on the first of their chain of steppingstones, and a graz sprawled head and forequarters in the sucking muck where it had dived past the two defenders above. Needler and blaster fired together again, and then Jellico swung over the cliff rim. Tau waved vigorously and Dane took off for the next islet, just making it by ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... out a thread with little din, And beeking my cauld limbs afore the sun. What brings my bairn this gate sae air at morn? Is there nae muck to ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... of fury burst from Duncan's labouring bosom. His broadsword flashed from its sheath, and brokenly panting out the words: "Clenlyon! Ta creat dufil! Haf I peen trinking with ta hellhount, Clenlyon?"—he would have run a Malay muck through the room with his huge weapon. But he was already struggling in the arms of his grandson, who succeeded at length in forcing from his bony grasp the hilt of the terrible claymore. But as Duncan yielded ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... and after these things had been somewhat digested by Christiana and her company, the Interpreter takes them apart again, and has them first into a room where was a man that could look no way but downwards, with a muck-rake in his hand. There stood also one over His head with a celestial crown in His hand, and proffered him that crown for his muck-rake; but the man did neither look up, nor regard, but raked to himself the straws, the small sticks, and dust ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... of us, indeed! That's a notion! Look at my hands. D'ye see how dirty they are? And they smell of muck, and of pitch—but yours, see, are white. And what ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... Can spot a Home Rule town far off as I can see it. Mud huts, whitewashed cabins with no upstairs, muck-heaps, and bad fences. Can spot a Home Ruler as far as I can see him. Darned if I couldn't track him by scent, like a foxhound. That's the rank and file—very rank, I should say, most of them. And old J. Bull concludes to let the dunghill folks, powerful lazy beggars ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... girl doing in that galley? What conceivable motive induced her to dabble those slender hands in the muck and ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... smelled it. His nose went up in the air and quested to windward along the wind that brought the message, and he read the air with his nose as a man might read a newspaper—the salt smells of the seashore and of the dank muck of mangrove swamps at low tide, the spicy fragrances of tropic vegetation, and the faint, most faint, acrid tingle of ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... [U.S.]. spawn, offal, gurry [U.S.]; lientery^; garbage, carrion; excreta &c 299; slough, peccant humor, pus, matter, suppuration, lienteria^; faeces, feces, excrement, ordure, dung, crap [Vulg.], shit [Vulg.]; sewage, sewerage; muck; coprolite; guano, manure, compost. dunghill, colluvies^, mixen^, midden, bog, laystall^, sink, privy, jakes; toilet, john, head; cess^, cesspool; sump, sough, cloaca, latrines, drain, sewer, common sewer; Cloacina; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... blank tyke?" And for all his respectable appearance, his features become debased, and he emits a jet of disgusting profanity and brings most of the Trinity into the thunderous assertion that he has paid his fare. Then a man passes wheeling a muck-cart. And he stops and talks a long time with the other uniforms, because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform. And the crowd never moves nor ceases to stare. Then the new arrival stoops and picks up the unclaimed, masterless puppy, and flings it, all soft and yielding, into the horrid mess ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... protests Rupert. "You see, I lived in a little town in southern Illinois. Father ran a general store. I had to help in it—sold shingle nails, molasses, mower teeth, overalls. How I hated that! But there was the creek and the muck pond. I had an old boat. I played smuggler and pirate. I used to love to read pirate books. I wanted to go ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford |
