"Mud" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perplex opinion, and even caused Chladni temporarily to renounce his. Many high authorities, headed by Laplace in 1802, declared for the lunar-volcanic origin of meteorites; but thought on the subject was turbid, and inquiry seemed only to stir up the mud of ignorance. It needed one of those amazing spectacles, at which man assists, no longer in abject terror for his own frail fortunes, but with keen curiosity and the vivid expectation of new knowledge, to bring ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... many foes, and unable to escape either up or down the river, should return to her couch, he made certain of striking her. At first there seemed little chance of such an occurrence, for Fogg, who had gone a hundred yards higher up, suddenly dashed into the stream, and, plunging his spear into the mud, cried out that he had hit the beast; but the next moment, when he drew the weapon forth, and exhibited a large rat which he had transfixed, his mistake ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the latitude was 9 deg. 30'. The course was altered, at three, to the north-west; and at dusk, they hove to, for the night: soundings from 70 to 56 fathoms. The same course being resumed on the 22nd, the latitude, at noon, was 8 deg. 48'; and the depth 30 fathoms, on a bottom of sand, mud, and shells. From noon to five p.m., when they anchored, the ships appear to have steered W. by S. The land had been seen at one o'clock; and at two, the water had shoaled suddenly, from 30 to 10 fathoms, and afterwards diminished to 5, which continued to ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... when he saw I could not answer, "I guess you don't know where I can swap the yellow mud for balm of Gilead. I won't bother you with my troubles any longer. I will go up-town and see the little girl whose happiness Tom Reinhart needed in his business. I will go up and show her the pictures in this week's Collier's of the fine ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... sense of hunger began to oppress him. He allayed it with a few wild berries. Then fatigue began to tell, for walking from root to root sometimes on short stretches of solid land, sometimes over soft mud, often knee-deep in water, was very exhausting. At last he came to what appeared to be the end of the swamp, and here he discovered a small patch of ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... way, I cursed them in French, then in German, and finally in good round English oaths for cowards, and I know not what. They looked very startled and recoiled into the ditch. I must have looked alarming—a gaunt, dirty, unshaven figure towering above my motor-cycle, without hat, bespattered with mud, and eyes bright and weary for want of sleep. How I hated the French! I hated them because, as I then thought, they had deserted us at Mons and again at Le Cateau; I hated them because they had the privilege of seeing the British Army in confused ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... lighter for carrying soil or mud, with a hopper or receptacle in its centre, to contain ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... torrents. 'I got a lantern,' wrote one of Gore's aides-de-camp afterwards, 'fastened it to the top of a pole, and had it carried in front of the column; but what with horses and men sinking in the mud, harness breaking, wading through water and winding through woods, the little force soon got separated, those in the rear lost sight of the light, and great delays and difficulties were experienced. Towards morning the rain changed to snow, it ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... within sight, and, since he made no effort to avoid it, presently again into the street of a mud-built village. Few people were astir. A man slept in an angle of a wall, flies about his head; a dog in an entry scratched himself with ecstasy; a woman at a doorway was combing her child's hair, and looked up to ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... another nation's interests to the dignity of his own country. At all events, he had the troops withdrawn, and the Little Sarah, now rejoicing in the name of the Petit Democrat, dropped down to Chester. Hamilton and Knox, being neither afraid nor un-American, were for putting a battery on Mud Island and sinking the privateer if she attempted to go by. Great saving of trouble and bloodshed would have been accomplished by the setting up of this battery and the sinking of this vessel, for it would have informed the world that though ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... in mud were sticking fast, As through a boundless prairie passed A youth, who drove a two-mule team, While on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... back from their heads, a glorified presentment of the Mayo woman's working dress. Here and there, a touch of realism creditable to the Reverend Mother's talent for stage management, one sat in bare feet—not, of course, dust or mud stained, as bare feet are apt to be in Connaught, but clean. The careful observer of detail might have been led to suppose that the Sisters improved upon the practice of the Holy Father himself, and daily washed the feet of ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... amphibious otter feasts. Just is his fate Deserved; but tyrants know no bounds; nor spears That bristle on his back, defend the perch From his wide greedy jaws; nor burnished mail The yellow carp; nor all his arts can save The insinuating eel, that hides his head Beneath the slimy mud; nor yet escapes 370 The crimson-spotted trout, the river's pride, And beauty of the stream. Without remorse, This midnight pillager ranging around, Insatiate swallows all. The owner mourns The unpeopled rivulet, and gladly hears The huntsman's early call, and sees ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... the rear liked them much better than the stories written in the dark and covered with mud, that came out of the trenches. The visions of a Barbusse had not yet dawned to show the truth to these talkative shadows. There was no difficulty for Clerambault, he shone in these eloquent contests. For he had the fatal gift of verbal and rhythmical facility which separates poets from ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... were no trains, everything had to be sent by road. The roads were so bad that even carts could not go along them very much, for the wheels stuck in the mud. Everything was carried on horseback, in sacks ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... possibility of disastrous fall. Only one thing does,—'Hold Thou me up, and I shall be safe!' John Bunyan saw a door opening down to hell hard by the gates of the Celestial City. When a man that has been had in reputation for wisdom and honour shames the record of his life by a great splash of mud on the white page, near its end, he seldom returns. An old apostate is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... set the patriots a-dancing. "Carrier's insolent secretaries emulate the intolerable haughtiness of a ci-devant minister's lackeys. Carrier himself lives surrounded by luxury, pampered by women 'and parasites, keeping a harem and a court. He tramples justice in the mud. He has had all those who filled the prisons flung untried into the Loire. The city of Nantes," he concluded, "needs saving. The Vendean revolt must be suppressed, and Carrier ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... long exertions, he set his course straight for that glimmering sheen of water. Encircling it were heavy shadows. Tall trees pressed close to the verge, where lay here a fallen branch, and there a rotten log, half sunken in mud and ooze, and again a great tangle of vines that had grown smiling to the summer sun, but now, with the slow expansion of the lake which was fed by a surcharged bayou, quite submerged in a fretwork of miry strands. The margin was fringed with saw-grass, thick and prickly, ...
— The Crucial Moment - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... chief of the peasant poets of Scotland, was born in a little mud-walled cottage on the banks of Doon, near "Alloway's auld haunted kirk," in the shire of Ayr, on the 25th day of January, 1759. As a natural mark of the event, a sudden storm at the same moment swept the land: the gabel-wall of the frail dwelling gave way, and the babe-bard ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... theme for laughter, and for awhile chatted gaily with her companions; but it was evident that she was fast becoming weary, and that her thin-shod feet were wounded by constant contact with the twigs and sharp stones that it was impossible to avoid in the darkness. Her dress was torn, and heavy with mud and moisture, and the two young men were pained to perceive that, in spite of her efforts and their watchful care, she stumbled frequently with exhaustion, and leaned heavily on their arms as she labored through ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... 'and if anybody does - well, you didn't, don't you see, and there's an end. The fact is, this has been going on too long. Stir up the mud, and you'll get K- into the most unholy trouble; you'll be in a shocking box yourself. So will I, if you come to that. I should like to know how any one of us would look, or what the devil we should have to say for ourselves, in any Christian witness-box. For me, you know there's one thing certain ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... plants in his hands, the white cats licking themselves in the sun or running to meet the young ladies who brought them plates of milk. Then the race-horses were always going to or coming from the downs. Sometimes they came in so covered with white mud that part of their toilette was accomplished in the yard; and from her kitchen window she could see the beautiful creature haltered to the hook fixed in the high wall, and the little boy in his shirtsleeves and hitched-up trousers, not a ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... been emptying my pond, which was more in my head than the honour of my kitchen; and in the mud of the troubled water I have found all my gold, as Dunning and Barr'e(503) did last year. I have taken out fifteen young fish of a year and a half old for Lady Ailesbury, and reserved them as an offering worthy of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... her husband to Sheffield, and Paul scarcely saw her again. Walter Morel seemed to have let all the trouble go over him, and there he was, crawling about on the mud of it, just the same. There was scarcely any bond between father and son, save that each felt he must not let the other go in any actual want. As there was no one to keep on the home, and as they could neither of them bear the emptiness of the house, Paul took lodgings in Nottingham, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... Lillie, when the first gilding begins to wear off, if the man who has taken one of them shall be at liberty to cast her off and seek another? Have we not enough now of miserable, broken-winged butterflies, that sink down, down, down into the mud of the street? But are women-reformers going to clamor for having every woman turned out helpless, when the man who has married her, and made her a mother, discovers that she has not the power to interest him, and to help his higher spiritual development? It was because woman ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... purity and cleanness is that which God reconciled in Christ takes to be so, and that which in Christ is accepted, and is a fount of his clean Spirit dwelling in the heart. The heart formerly was a troubled fountain, that sent out filthy streams, as a puddle. Corruption was the mud among the affections and thoughts, but now a pure heart is like a clear running water, clean and bright like crystal. Now this purity consists in the washing of regeneration, and sanctification by the Spirit of holiness. Jesus ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... passed. The gray mud of the chalk roads dried up into white dust almost beneath the travellers' feet as they came out again after temporary shelter; and that brightest, tenderest smile, with which, on such days, the sun makes evening atonement for his absence, shone and sparkled, danced and glowed ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Duruy's "History" in the asparagus bed all water soaked and mud bespattered. Before the storm the snails, exhilarated no doubt by the promise of rain, had crawled over the book and they had left their slimy, glistening traces ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... points, and, the wind puffing up, we went plowing along at a pretty fair speed, passing the light so wide that we could not make out what manner of craft it marked. Suddenly the Mist slacked up in a slow and easy way, as though running upon soft mud. We were both startled. The wind was blowing stronger than ever, and yet we were almost ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... out and carried Fanie in with his clothes all draggled and his beard full of mud. They laid him on the table, and I saw his face. . . . Dear God! . . There was terror on that face, carven and set in dead flesh, that set my blood screaming in my body. Sometimes even now I wake in the night all shrinking with fear of ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... the shore,' he continued, 'watching the divers at work, on the day they drew up the Medusa. I helped the man who drew her up to clean the slime and mud from them, and the vixen glared at me all the time, as though she thirsted to take vengeance upon us all. She had had time to think about it,—for she sank perhaps ten years after the Crucifixion,—while Mary still lived in the ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a pet pig just as white as it can be. It likes to roll in the mud, and then it gets black and dirty like other pigs. Sometimes it bites my brother Harry's toes, and then I think ...
— Harper's Young People, September 7, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... afterward they encamped on the margin of Mud River, nearly a hundred and fifty miles from where they had met the impudent Crows. Now the party began to believe themselves beyond the possibility of any further trouble from them, and foolishly relaxed their usual vigilance. The ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... strong little man?" he called out cheerfully. "In Korea I once bathed in a mud puddle and enjoyed ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... consider the conditions under which the work of this unit was carried out—often under a burning sun and again in bitter cold, mud and torrential rain—conditions which might well appal the stoutest heart, but here I note that the gallant author, as I expected, makes light of the many hardships and vicissitudes that he and his comrades ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... Miss Pickett's superior and Miss Pickett knew this; her instinctive knowledge of it placed her at a disadvantage and forced her to listen to a few elegantly worded remarks on charity, the folly of playing the part of guardian of a sister's morals and the innate nastiness of throwing mud. It was a rare grueling that Donna gave Miss Pickett; the pity of it was that Mr. Hennage could not have been there to ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... tons are taken from the quarries every year, yet the inhabitants say that no great change takes place in their appearance. The Avon has a prodigious rise of tide at Bristol, and at low water the bed of the river is a mere brook, with immense banks of mud. The country all around is exquisitely attractive, and affords us an idea of cultivation and adornment beyond what we are accustomed to at home. In these rocks are found fine crystals, which are known every where as Bristol diamonds. We obtained some specimens, which reminded us of the crystals ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... going forward as rapidly as the semi-darkness would permit. The ground was more or less uncertain, and once the youngest Rover went into a mud hole, splashing the mud up into Jack ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... grunt, turned his head till he managed to wipe the mud and blood from his eyes upon my shoulder, then he peered at the silent three. Their motionless forms fascinated him. It was hard to connect them with the three bounding devils who had brought us on a gallop that was more painful ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... bird-lime, hang in stringy ropes. They oft, 'tis said, in dark retirements dwell, 50 And work in subterraneous caves their cell; At other times the industrious insects live In hollow rocks, or make a tree their hive. Point all their chinky lodgings round with mud, And leaves must thinly on your work be strow'd; But let no baleful yew-tree flourish near, Nor rotten marshes send out steams of mire; Nor burning crabs grow red, and crackle in the fire: Nor neighbouring caves return the dying sound, Nor echoing rocks the doubled voice rebound. 60 Things thus ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... quickly up behind the unsuspecting boy and struck one of the apples out of his hand. But before he could pick it up, Johnny gave him a shove that sent him sprawling in the mud. Johnny stooped to regain his apple, but half a dozen of the other boys ran up and began striking him from all sides. His knife was open in his hand, and some one struck him a blow on the hand that knocked the ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... feet wide, deep, and what was of more consequence, bordered with weeds. We stripped, tied our clothes on the top of our heads and our boots to one end of our fishing lines, carrying the other end with us. When we got across we pulled our boots through mud and water after us. Alas! to our grief we found we could not get them on, and we were obliged to walk without them. Swimming we had been taught by an old sailor, who gave lessons to the school, and at last I could pick up an egg from the bottom of the overfall, a depth of about ten feet. I have ...
— The Early Life of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... descend to the house of darkness, to the dwelling of Irkalla, To the house from which there is no exit, The road on which there is no return, To the house whose dwellers long for light, Dust is their nourishment and mud their food, Whose chiefs are like feathered birds, Where light is never seen, in darkness they dwell. In the house which I will enter There is treasured up for me a crown, With the crowned ones who of old ruled ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... at the petitioner; the latter stood before him, covered more with mud than with clothes, and, trembling with intoxication, waited obstinately, staring at ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... mind giving you a hand at that. I hate to see such a fine machine lying in the mud like a ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... round his belly, thrusts his elbow hard against his throat, and throttles the wretched victim, who meanwhile is patting his shoulder; that will be a form of supplication; he is asking not to be quite choked to death. Regardless of their fresh oil, they get all filthy, smother themselves in mud and sweat till they might as well not have been anointed, and present, to me at least, the most ludicrous resemblance to eels ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... assuring myself of this, the door opened again, and between two men-at-arms, white as death, her garments stained with mud and all but reduced to rags, and her eyes wild with a great fear, ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... sedately home from church with his amused niece on his arm, "I wanted a few of them mussels. There was a mud bottom and so the water was black. Just as I reached for the first mussel I felt something creeping around my left leg. I thought it was eel-grass; then I ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... open forest land, the figure was much plainer. So was his own, as he looked down and saw in dismay that it would soon be broad daylight, that they were some miles from the Heronry, and that Pan was covered with mud, his face smeared with ruddy stains, and that he, Sydney Belton, known as "the young gentleman up at the house," was in very ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... true. We soon sailed to convoy a fleet of transports destined to attack Saint Juan de Nicaragua. Up a muddy river we pulled, led by our captain, with a hot scorching sun striking down on us. We arrived before a fort. Captain Nelson leaped on shore, sword in hand, leaving his shoes in the mud, to attack it. The fort was taken, and so was San Juan itself; and though the grass did not grow under our feet, it was soon growing over the heads of numbers of the fine fellows who composed the expedition—both redcoats and seamen; ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... sconces on either side of the old piano. This and her anxiety about the venison fretted Miss Deborah so much, it was a great relief to hear the first carriage, and catch a glimpse of Mrs. Dale hurrying across the hall and up the stairs, her well-known brown satin tucked up to avoid a speck of mud or dust. ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... upon the ground. He generally wore an old linen duster, a black slouch hat, and a pair of light blue pants thrust into the tops of heavy boots which were seldom blacked, but often splashed with Cairo mud. But everybody stepped respectfully aside to let him pass, and the spruce young staff officers never failed to salute. It ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... his father, "In the hunt you never help me; Every bow you touch is broken, Snapped asunder every arrow; Yet come with me to the forest, You shall bring the hunting homeward." Down a narrow pass they wandered, Where a brooklet led them onward, Where the trail of deer and bison Marked the soft mud on the margin, Till they found all further passage Shut against them, barred securely By the trunks of trees uprooted, Lying lengthwise, lying crosswise, And forbidding further passage. "We must go back," said the old man, "O'er these logs we cannot clamber; Not a woodchuck could get through ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... manners and characters of the times to which the story refers, it is impossible to avoid noticing, as a separate excellence, the faithful representation of general nature. Looking not merely to the litter of novels that peep out for a single day from the mud where they were spawned, but to many of more ambitious pretensions—it is quite evident that in framing them, the authors have first addressed themselves to the involutions and developement of the story, as the principal object of their attention; and that in entangling and unravelling ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... compelled to fight and force their way. Their carriages were stopped and broken; the wheels wrenched off; the glasses shivered to atoms; the panels beaten in; drivers, footmen, and masters, pulled from their seats and rolled in the mud. Lords, commoners, and reverend bishops, with little distinction of person or party, were kicked and pinched and hustled; passed from hand to hand through various stages of ill-usage; and sent to their fellow-senators at last with their clothes ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... open the apartment to anybody. I understood nothing of all this superstition, but I was forced to rest content in my ignorance. Louville, who had entered with the King, had told me that the place contained only five or six dark chambers, and some holes and corners with wainscots plastered with mud; without tapestry, when he saw it, or any kind of furniture; thus I did not ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... the bones at the same time. We had a tent and provisions for four days, and we pitched on one of the firmer places. To think of it brings that odd tarry smell back even now. It's funny work. You go probing into the mud with iron rods, you know. Usually the egg gets smashed. I wonder how long it is since these Aepyornises really lived. The missionaries say the natives have legends about when they were alive, but I ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... was very bad—thunder and lightning, torrents of rain—the road knee-deep in mud and water, and often blocked up with waggons "come to grief." I pitied the wretched plight of the unfortunate soldiers who were to follow us. Our progress was naturally very slow indeed, and we took eight hours ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... made of, as a matter of fact, was what heightened the effect of remoteness she produced—a hard dark wood unknown to the lower Karun, cut in lengths of not more than two or three feet and caulked with reeds and mud. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... called upon to sustain. The designer is often the constructor as well, and he is always a man of great practical experience. He has in his time stepped out on a foot-wide girder over a rushing stream, directing his men, and he has floundered in the mud of a river bottom in a caisson far below the surface of the stream, while the compressed air kept the ooze from flowing in and drowning him and ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... organized nations. In came cities of unprecedented bulk, but held together so closely by a web-work of steel rails and copper wires that they have become more alert and cooperative than any tiny hamlet of mud huts on the banks of ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... portentous paraphernalia of court and prison can touch nothing more than my body—my spirit is unscathed. It is the ancient consolation, coming down through poetry and history even to me. The Government—the Nation—can destroy my life, separate me from my people, throw mud on my name; but they cannot take away one atom of my consciousness of the truth. And it is better to have that consciousness than to retain all the rest without it. Blessed ethical truisms, which come to our succor when all ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... perched on the bed, and when they finished, surreptitiously wiped their fingers on the brown-covered hay mattress. Before we were through, they had run to the street and back to warm their cold legs inside the fender till the floor was tracked with mud from the street, ashes from the grate, and bits of ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... my cursed fault—just because I'm a fierce, strong brute, who ought to be anywhere but among civilised people. I've killed the man who meant me nothing but kindness. Am I going to drag your name into the mud—to set people grinning ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... led them roundabout and roundabout, through mud and brambles and swamps; over little brooks and through big miry ponds where they were nearly drowned,—roundabout and roundabout all night long. They wanted to rest, but she went so fast that they could not catch ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... would thrash her if she didn't. I guess she never had a "hockey stick" play round her ankles in recess, because she got above a fellow in the class. I guess she never had him twitch off her best cap, and toss it in a mud-puddle. I guess she never had to give her humming-top to quiet the baby, and had the paint all sucked off. I guess she never saved up all her coppers a whole winter to buy a trumpet, and then was told she must not blow it, because it ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... best to be too grateful to people," said Ferris, "but I think we must allow that if we were in any danger, sticking there in the mud, Don Ippolito got us out of it by putting his shoulder ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... all that it cares to know. The question is how and why it got to care to know just these things and no others. Two cheeky goats came tumbling down upon me and demanded salt, and the man came from the saw-mill and, with his great brown hands, scooped the mud from the dams of the rills that watered his meadow, for the hour had come when it was his turn ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... found a miserable inn with bad wine, scanty fare and high charges, we took a hasty breakfast, and procuring a guide we walked out to see the curiosities of the place. It rained hard and the road was excessively bad, sometimes almost ankle-deep in mud. Notwithstanding the forbidding weather and bad road, we labored up the deep ravine on the sides of which the excavations are made. Dark peaks frowned above us capped with clouds and snow; white patches midway the sides showed the ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... total overthrow of paganism, and put an end to the age of religious persecution. On this memorable day the seven-branched golden candlestick which Titus had taken from the temple of Jerusalem, according to tradition, was thrown into the Tiber, where it lies under a vast accumulation of mud in the bed of the river. It would thus seem as if the Jewish religion, too, of which the golden candlestick was the most expressive symbol, had come finally to an end in this triumph of Christianity. Of ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... finished, the cattle are taken thither by the young women and girls,—often twenty and sometimes forty miles away,—where they stay during the summer and make butter and cheese, gather hay, knit stockings, and embroider linen. The dwelling is usually a rude hut with a single room, mud floor, an open fireplace without chimney, and a few pieces of rough furniture. Sheds and pens surround the hut, and there are patches of enclosed ground where hay is made and where the younger members of the flock are protected. The cattle are called at night by a horn made of birch bark. ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... in garments, which was a great part of ancient Eastern wealth. Rust rather means corrosion, or corruption, and applies to the other great kind of primitive wealth, in food and the stores of the harvest. And the thieves who dig through the mud wall of the house, and carry away the owners' little hoard of gold and silver, point also to a primitive condition of society. But whatever may be the special force of these different words, they suggest to us this, that all that is here has its ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... anatomical evidence of gradual development. In his own words: "Man is no up-start in the creation. His limbs are only a more exquisite organization—say rather the finish—of the rudimental forms that have been already sweeping the sea and creeping in the mud. The brother of his hand is even now cleaving the arctic sea in the fin of the whale, and innumerable ages since was pawing the marsh in the flipper of the saurian." A view afterwards condensed into ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... with a tape line and Chris calculates the number of feet of lumber in each tree. Then we estimate the trees in an acre and guess at the number of acres. At least that's the way the business looks to me. Sometimes the walking is easy, but to-day we had to wade through mud waist-deep and the moccasins were pretty thick. I watched out for the ugly things and it kept me on the jump, but Chris marched straight ahead and paid no attention to them, excepting once when a big cotton-mouth that was coiled on top ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... Spencer thought he might want some muffins cooked for tea, did he? Kennedy earnestly advised Spencer to give up thinking, as Nature had not equipped him for the strain. Thinking necessitated mental effort, and Spencer, in Kennedy's opinion, had no mind, but rubbed along on a cheap substitute of mud and putty. ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... on through the autumn mud, and that was one chance lost. He was sure that the first Findelkind had not felt ashamed when he had knocked at the ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... Lamotte's room lamps are burning brightly, and the fumes of strong liquor fill the air. On the bed lies Evan, with flushed face, and mud bespattered clothing; he is in a sleep that is broken and feverish, that borders in fact, upon delirium; beside him, pale as a corpse, with nerves unstrung, and trembling, sits Frank Lamotte, fearing to leave him, and loath to stay. At intervals, the sleeper grows more restless, and then starts ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... possessed themselves of it. Judge of his surprise when, in the course of a few seconds, he beheld a cloud of two or three hundred swallows arrive, with the rapidity of thought throw themselves before the nest, discharge at it some mud which they had brought in their bills, and retire to give place to another battalion, which repeated the same manoeuvre. They fired at two or three inches from the nest, thus preventing the sparrows from giving them any blows with ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... was stormy and dark. The rain was falling, and the ground in Alec's camp was heavy with mud. The faithful Swahilis whom he had brought from the coast, chattered with cold around their fires; and the sentries shivered at their posts. It was a night that took the spirit out of a man and made all that he longed for seem vain and trifling. ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... en monolithe,' as it has been aptly called, for it is literally scooped out of one mountain block—live about two hundred poor people, foddering their wretched goats at carved piscina and stately sideboards, erecting mud beplastered hovels in the halls of feudal princes. Murray is wrong in calling the place a mediaeval town in its original state, for anything more purely ruinous, more like a decayed old cheese, cannot possibly be conceived. The living only inhabit ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... of this poem so bespatters the theologian's God with his own mud that we dread the image and recoil. From the unsparing vigor of these lines we turn for relief to "Rabbi Ben Ezra" and "Prospice." In both of these we have glimpses of Mr. Browning's true theology, which is the faith of his whole soul in the excellence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... attention upon. According to his story, certain men who lived just outside of Chicago, in its early history, had great difficulty walking to and from work during stormy weather, because of the almost impassably muddy conditions of the sidewalks. After trudging through mud and slush for a long time, they conceived the idea of laying a plank walk through the worst sections. And so they laid two six-inch planks side by side. The scheme helped wonderfully, except on short winter days when the men had to go to work in the darkness of early morning and ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... careless manager, and he had a good foreman in Tim Turner. The big boss had ridden down to the bend in a mud-splashed buggy, and was even prepared to take a personal hand in the work, if need be. The foreman was coming down the river bank on the Pine Camp side of the stream, watching the leading logs of the drive, and directing the foreguard. Among ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... and on, and down and down, until we found ourselves on the edge of the river. A log lay conveniently on the bank, and there we seated ourselves. The tide was out, and the river bed was a bed of mud except for a narrow stream of water that ran down the middle. But, ah! how the mud glistened in the evening sunshine which was reflected on it in prismatic colours. Little figures were dotted here and there over its surface, ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... South Australian Government despatched an expedition in charge of David Lindsay to complete the survey of Arnhem's Land. Lindsay left the Katherine station, and proceeded to Blue Mud Bay. On the way the party had a narrow escape of massacre at the hands of the blacks, who speared four horses, and made an attempt to surprise the camp of the whites. Lindsay had trouble with his horses in the stony, broken tableland that ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... was terrible; a thaw had begun and it was raining in torrents. The Champ de Mars was a sea of mud. The courtiers who, on the 2d of December, had so belauded the sun, representing it as a sharer in the festival, a docile slave of the Emperor, were obliged to acknowledge that it was raining. ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... service. He therefore forbade the match; on which the priests told him that when they had made up their minds to do anything, nobody had power to turn them from it; and the chaplain presently added that he cared no more for the governor than for the mud on his shoes.[107] He carried his point, and married Duvivier ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... our camps without any unusual event, the weather being wet and mild, and the roads back to the steamboat landing being heavy with mud; but on Sunday morning, the 6th, early, there was a good deal of picket-firing, and I got breakfast, rode out along my lines, and, about four hundred yards to the front of Appler's regiment, received from some bushes in a ravine to the left front a volley which killed ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... the nature of that part. Unless one were to say that the solution is taken from all the parts of the body, and that it retains the nature of each part. Thus the semen would be a small animal in act; and generation of animal from animal would be a mere division, as mud is generated from mud, and as animals which continue to live after being cut ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... of the most fertile agricultural districts of Ireland. The situation is fine, and an American naturally expects to see a charming rural town, planted with trees and filled with clean, comfortable homes; but he finds instead a wretched place, smitten with a plague of filth and mud, and offering but one object upon which the eye can dwell with pleasure, and that is the ruins of an old castle, "Mallow Castle over Blackwater," which dates back to the time of Queen Elizabeth. It stands amid noble trees on the banks of the river, and its walls, some ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... single farms, and many scattered houses along the verge of the forest, contain upwards of six hundred and seventy inhabitants.* We abound with poor; many of whom are sober and industrious, and live comfortably in good stone or brick cottages, which are glazed, and have chambers above stairs: mud buildings we have none. Besides the employment from husbandry the men work in hop gardens, of which we have many; and fell and bark timber. In the spring and summer the women weed the corn; and enjoy a second harvest in September by hop-picking. Formerly, in the dead months ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... his private opinion that the nigger was the smarter man of the two. When Tryphena playfully ordered him out of the house, he expressed intense sorrow for Sylvanus' future, but was glad to hear he was getting a present rest, paddling his mud barge round the Simcoe pond. Mr. Pawkins was offensively personal, but kept the table lively, and parted with them, regretting that, having left his catechism at home, he was unable to favour his dear children with a little much-needed religious instruction. The door was slammed ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... some revelation of the character of a man. Many men may will to avoid the mud; but not all of these can will to avoid it by ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... social revolution. On the manner of its accomplishment depends the character of all that follows. Either we shall start on a good road leading straight to anarchist communism, or we shall remain sticking in the mud of ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... the latest marsupial. Also, I might boast that I have the largest pocket of them all. But there is nothing in that.]—one, the "Tasmanian devil;" that is, I think he was one of them. And there was a fish with lungs. When the water dries up it can live in the mud. Most curious of all was a parrot that kills sheep. On one great sheep-run this bird killed a thousand sheep in a whole year. He doesn't want the whole sheep, but only the kidney-fat. This restricted taste makes him an expensive bird to support. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... on foot, with many stupid people, attending to breakwaters, protective banks, and all sorts of nonsense. This is, in general, a day of vexations; this morning I dreamed so charmingly that I stood with you on the seashore; it was just like the new strand, only the mud was rocks, the beeches were thick-foliaged laurel, the sea was as green as the Lake of Traun, and opposite us lay Genoa, which we shall probably never see, and it was delightfully warm; then I was ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... beast were slung his guns. He was eagerly looking forward to his holiday. He had been toiling really hard with his fellahin, often almost up to his knees in mud and water, driving the sand-plough, working the small and primitive engines, digging, planting, even following the hand-plough drawn by a camel yoked to a donkey. He was in grand condition, hard as nails, burnt by the sun, joyful with the almost ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... continued, after a pause); I did at fust. I used to let people come and sit 'ere with me of an evening talking, but I got tired of it arter a time, and when one chap fell overboard while 'e was showing me 'ow he put his wife's mother in 'er place, I gave it up altogether. There was three foot o' mud in the dock at the time, and arter I 'ad got 'im out, he fainted ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... perfect than the outward man, which his honor exhibited to the gaze of his constituents. Neatly-fitting boots, square toed, and of the most elaborate manufacture, encased his feet. Not a speck defiled their high polish; the very dust and mud which introduces itself cosily into the habiliments of your common, warm hearted men, seemed to shrink away chilled and repulsed by the immaculate coldness that clung like an atmosphere around the Mayor of ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... Walter exclaimed. "We are in the lowest dungeon, and below the level of the river. See how damp are the walls, and the floor is thick with slimy mud. The river must run but just below that loophole, and in times of flood probably ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... discovery I made was the imprint in the mud of footsteps, half obliterated by the rain. The tracks were very large and very far apart, proving that the owner of the boots that made them was a big man, and that he had gone off at a great pace; a discovery which tended ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... walls away. Other shells fell in the front yard, and blew the trees out by the roots. Later other shells exploding blew dirt back into the other excavations. Little by little, the ground was turned into a mass of mud. Not a single landmark remained. Finally the old man conceived the idea of beginning back on the country road, and measuring what he thought would have been the distance to his garden. But even that device failed ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... was driving a load of mud through a village street. Here on this side is a hospital. There on that side is another hospital. Down the middle of the road walks an idiot of a sergeant carrying a new type of grenade with which we were experimenting. ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... marked three mountains 'Spanish Peaks' on our map, that we might not miss our way. One day a pious soldier saw the barbarian with his face in a pool of water, talking with the devil. After that we were suspicious. After many days' journey we found the city, but alas, it was mud huts, and the only metal was a copper plate around the old chief's neck and by which he sat great store. There were no golden vessels, no image of the Virgin, no golden dais and ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds |
