"Pit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... set we came to the utmost border of the ocean. Then I bade two of my comrades make ready the sheep for sacrifice; and I myself dug a pit of a cubit every way, and poured in it a drink-offering of honey and milk, and sweet wine, and water, and sprinkled barley upon the drink-offering. Afterwards I took the sheep and slew them, so that their blood ran into the trench. And the dead were gathered ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... pure-hearted the divine privilege of foreseeing the coming of those beneficent revolutions, which exalt and dignify humanity. Ambitious and selfish men are left to go blindly on and fall into their own pit. At present there will be chaos I The people will not follow those who have been accustomed to lead, notwithstanding those leaders will have power greatly to embarrass the action of those who do not follow ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... holding a soiled chart in his hands; further aft on the elliptical railed platform of the conning tower a tall, angular, grey-haired man, clad in civilian garb, stood talking to the First Lieutenant. A Yeoman of Signals, his glass tucked into his left arm-pit, was securing the halliards to the telescopic mast, at which fluttered a frayed White Ensign. A couple of figures in sea-boots and duffle coats were still coiling down ropes and securing fenders, crawling like flies ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... sunshine and the green, Enters the solid darkness of a cave, Nor knows what precipice or pit unseen May yawn before him with its sudden grave, And, with hushed breath, doth often forward lean, Dreaming he hears the plashing of a wave Dimly below, or feels a damper air From out some dreary chasm, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... game, but not very often. They are obliged to lie in wait for it, and wound it with their poisoned arrows, and then they follow its track and look for it the next day. Subtle as the poison is, they only cut out the part near the wound, and eat the rest of the animal. They dig pit-holes for the hippopotamus and rhinoceros, and occasionally take them. They poison the pools for the game also; but their living is very precarious, and they often suffer the ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... making a hurried search for Laurie Armitage. Unluckily, he had gone, for the moment, to the front of the house. Professor Harmon, too, was not in sight. He also had gone to the front to take his place in the orchestra pit. What could she do? The performance was about to begin. To leave the theatre on a search for Charlie meant disaster to Laurie's operetta. To leave Charlie to wander about the streets alone was even more terrifying. She flitted past the waiting choristers, drawn up for action, without a word of ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... defer the rehearsal of your tragedy, for the gentleman who plays the first ghost is not yet up; and when he is, he has got such a churchyard-cough he will not be heard to the middle of the pit. ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... deepness &c adj.; profundity, depression &c (concavity) 252. hollow, pit, shaft, well, crater; gulf &c 198; bowels of the earth, botttomless pit^, hell. soundings, depth of water, water, draught, submersion; plummet, sound, probe; sounding rod, sounding line; lead. bathymetry. [instrument to measure ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... fact that he can do a hundred marvels which are far and away beyond their own powers; and they speak with the same pride of the fact that in his wrath he is able to drive a thousand men before him. But does that make him one of them? No; the raggedest tramp in the pit would smile at the idea. He couldn't comprehend it; couldn't take it in; couldn't in any remote way conceive of it. Well, to the king, the nobles, and all the nation, down to the very slaves and tramps, I was just that kind of an elephant, and nothing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... British. We think that the position of the Crown in South Africa, and let me add the position of Agents and Ministers of the Crown in South Africa, should be just as much above and remote from racial feuds, as the position of the Crown in this country is above our Party politics. We do not seek to pit one race against the other in the hope of profiting from the quarrel. We hope to build upon the reconciliation and not upon the rivalry of races. We hope that it may be our fortune so to dispose of affairs that these two valiant, strong races ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... thought of taking a chance. The odds would be with him, since he had the revolver ready to his fingers. But before that indomitable ease his courage ebbed. He had not the stark fighting nerve to pit himself against such a man ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... he began digging at one end with his hands, scooping back quantities of wet leaves. There was snow down there in the pit,—a foot or more of it. After a few minutes of vigorous clawing, a hole in the side of the fissure was revealed,—an aperture large enough for a man to crawl into. He knew where it led to: down into ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... such things are: it has come home to you, and to every one else, no doubt, except a few ignorant girls such as I was yesterday. But there are some,—yes, thousands and thousands,—who even now, at this moment, are feeling sorrow like that, are sinking deep, deeper into the bottomless pit of their soul's degradation. And yet men who know this, who have seen it, laugh, talk, are happy, amuse themselves—how can they, how can they?" I stopped with a catch in my voice, and then stretching out my ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the lilies of France on his shield. But let us on to the sweets, for we have dined well, and need a toothsome morsel. If you could see, mon vieux, and had set eyes on her, I should have my doubts of you also, for she is as the fairy light that draws the unwary into the Pit of Death. Can you guess? No! Then I will tell you. What think you of the Demoiselle de Paradis? Yes! Hiss, hiss! Sus, sus! On to ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... And then after a long time the return of reason, the consciousness that his feet were set upon the road to Los Muertos, and that he was fleeing terror-stricken, gasping, all but insane with hysteria. Then the never-to-be-forgotten night that ensued, when he descended into the pit, horrified at what he supposed he had done, at one moment ridden with remorse, at another raging against his own feebleness, his lack of courage, his wretched, vacillating spirit. But morning had come, and with it the knowledge ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... call across lots to our next-door neighbor. The men water the lawns and the flower boxes and get together in little, quiet groups to discuss the new street paving. I have even known Mrs. Hines to bring her cherries out there when she had canning to do, and pit them there on the front porch partially shielded by her porch vine, but not so effectually that she was deprived of the sights and sounds about her. The kettle in her lap and the dishpan full of great ripe cherries on the porch floor by ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... ringing there, ... and the children sing in the streets. It is all fair, and smiling and beautiful, all but one spot, one black, black, black spot. I will tell you." She sunk her voice to a whisper and looked fearfully around. "The mouth of the Pit is there, the Bottomless Pit that the Preacher tells about. It is a small room, dark, dark, ... and there is a heavy smell in the air, ... and there are fiends with black cloth over their faces. They hold a draught of hell to your mouth, and they ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... rivalry and a multitude of pushing men, when the Day of Judgement was near at hand, when riches would count for nothing and when the good serf would enter the golden gates of Heaven while the bad knight was sent to do penance in the deepest pit of Inferno? ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... o'clock the vast theatre was crowded,—pit, gallery, boxes, stage, all were thronged; thousands of faces,—boys, gentlemen, teachers, workingmen, women of the people, babies. There was a moving of heads and hands, a flutter of feathers, ribbons, ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... orders, and in a rich curling head of hair—how we sang God save him! How the house rocked and shouted with that magnificent music. How they cheered, and cried, and waved handkerchiefs. Ladies wept; mothers clasped their children; some fainted with emotion. People were suffocated in the pit, shrieks and groans rising up amidst the writhing and shouting mass there of his people who were, and indeed showed themselves almost to be, ready to die for him. Yes, we saw him. Fate cannot deprive us of THAT. Others ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... came a picture of a burning pit of fire in which great flames leaped about the heads of the people who writhed in the pit. "Art Sherman would be there," thought Sam, materialising the picture he saw; "nothing can save him; ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... upon the House, and flashed a glance towards Lord Faramond, who, turned round on the Treasury Bench, was looking up at him. He began slowly to pit against his former startling admissions the testimony of his few principles, and to buttress them on every side with apposite observations, naive, pungent. Presently there came a poignant edge to his trailing tones. After giving the subject ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... thegither, and when Halfpenny got his sunstroke in that weary march, 'twas White who gave him his last sup of water, and brought me his bit Bible. So I'd be fain to tend his daughter in her sickness, if you could spare me, my leddy, and I'd aye rin home to dress Missie Primrose and pit her to bed, and ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... chuckled. It gave me a queer feeling in the pit of my stomach to hear him. I began to wish I had not come, but there was nothing for it now but to follow him into the afterhouse. The cabin itself might have been nine feet square, with three bunks occupying the port side. To the right opened the master's ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... have to do is to crawl to the poorhouse gate. Or to go dig a pit in the graveyard, as it is short till we'll be stretched there with ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... representative contests did take place in the favourite pastime of cock-fighting—or "cocking" as it was always called in the last century—in which contests the Hertfordshire side of the town brought its birds into the pit against those of the Cambridgeshire side. Of this the following is ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... should therefore necessarily be inside it, the temple of the Drama may, after all, be as empty as was Mr. Crummles' Theatre, when somebody, looking through a hole in the curtain, announced, in a state of great excitement, the advent of another boy to the pit. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... tale, but a wild, savage drama, primeval, the picture of a soul battling with itself on the little lonely isle. She could see the hot, angry sun, feel its scorching rays, hear the hissing of the waves. All the man's strength for good, for ill, went into the story; the isle became as the pit of Acheron; at first there were no stars overhead. The girl was very pale; she could not have left now; she had never imagined anything like this. She had looked into Greek books, seen pictures of men chained to rocks and struggling against the anger of the gods—but they had appeared the ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... iy a daytime, thinkin' always so busy how he'd git the little rid hin, an' carry her home an' bile her up for his shupper. But the wise little rid hin nivir went intil her bit iv a house, but she locked the door afther her, an' pit the kay in her pocket. So the ould rashkill iv a fox, he watched, an' he prowled, an' he laid awake nights, till he came all to skin an' bone, on' sorra a ha'porth o' the little rid hin could he git at. But ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... slightly over three or four of our immediate Fore-fathers, whom we knew by Tradition, but were soon stopped by an Alderman of London, who, I perceived, made my Kinsman's Heart go pit-a-pat. His Confusion increased when he found the Alderman's Father to be a Grasier; but he recovered his Fright upon seeing Justice of the Quorum at the end of his Titles. Things went on pretty well, as we threw our Eyes occasionally ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... whether there are many such pit-holes in this part of the world. It resembles the fissures in the mountains of ice which I have read that the Arctic explorers ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' and 'immortal ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Church have taken the sayings on oaths, non-resistance, and love of enemies to mean what they say and to be obligatory. Yet all feel that the line of ethical and social advance must lie in the direction traced by Jesus, and if society could only climb out of the present pit of predatory selfishness and meanness to that level, it would ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... patriarchal prince, rich in cattle, and feared by his neighbors. His favorite son was Joseph, and his father's partiality excited the envy of the other sons. They conspired to kill him, but changed their purpose through the influence of Reuben, and cast him into a pit in the wilderness. While he lay there, a troop of Ishmaelites appeared, and to them, at the advice of Judah, they sold him as a slave, but pretended to their father that he was slain by wild beasts, and produced, in attestation, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... straight lank hair of the Mongolian peoples and of the various tribes of American Indians, in whom the hair possesses these peculiarities because each element grows as a nearly perfect cylinder from the cells of the skin at the bottom of a tiny pit or hair-follicle. The familiar wavy hair of white men owes its character to the fact that the individual elements are formed by the skin, not as pencil-like rods, but as flattened cylinders. They are oval or elliptical in cross-section, and when they emerge from the skin ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... tights and symmetrical rows the legs of the chorus ladies were arranged about the stage; the low comedians cracked jokes close to the footlights; the stalls laughed, the pit applauded. ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... assumed the aggressive, charging us until we were compelled to retire to a ravine and act on the defensive. The attack was made with such caution that the soldiers fell back without undue haste, and had ample opportunity to secure their horses in the natural pit, which was a ravine that during wet seasons formed a branch of ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... Usually a second cleaning is sufficient, but to insure safety it should be again examined at the end of a few days, before final oiling. The swabbing solution should always be used, if available, for it must be remembered that each puff when the bore "sweats" is an incipient rust pit. ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... and this ragged 'pent up little Utica' rends itself, but not without much more scratching and much swearing. O, the cold-blooded oaths that rang from those young lips! As the passage to the pit is by a sort of cellar door, I lost sight of the young scamps as the last one pitched ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... of idealists. Never had artist known such magnificent exaltation, none had ever so resolutely bounded from the summit of spiritual altitude to the rapt orb of heaven. He had gone to the two extremes. From the rankest weeds of the pit he had extracted the finest essence of charity, the mordant liquor of tears. In this canvas was revealed the masterpiece of an art obeying the unopposable urge to render the tangible and the invisible, to make manifest the crying impurity of the flesh ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... on the principle of self-preservation, and not on any arrogant pretension of superior sagacity, knowledge, and ability. In the power to inform the people of their rights and teach them their duties, we would be willing to pit one Mayhew against a score of Cushings and Rhetts, of Slidells and Yanceys. The fact that Mayhew's large and noble soul glowed with the inspiration of a quick moral and religious, as well as common, sense, would not, in our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... Hackney's quarters: You shall have the city, from White-Chapel to Temple-Bar, and she shall have to Covent-Garden downwards: At the play-houses, she shall ply the boxes, because she has the better face; and you shall have the pit, because you can prattle best out of a ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... sky was as the pit, black and empty; there was not a glimmer of light, though the moon was surely up. He had seen her four hours before, a red sickle, swing slowly out from Thabor. Across the plain, as he looked from the ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... describes in vivid and powerful language the scene presented to the view at the very mouth of the crater. A large space, one mile in circumference, which a few days before had been one fathomless pit, from which issued masses of smoke, was now absolutely filled up to within a few feet of the brim all round. A great mass of lava, a portion of the contents of this immense pit, was seen to detach itself by degrees from one behind. "It opened like an orange, and we saw the red-hot fibres ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... alone; and there, among happy faces, walked to and fro, and heard the tunes go up and down, and saw Berger beat the measure, and all the while he heard the flames crackle, and saw the red fire burning in the bottomless pit. Of a sudden the band played Hiki-ao-ao; that was a song that he had sung with Kokua, and at the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... streak of red and the close roar of a shot. Pete, with his gun out and going, leapt straight into the foremost deputy. They crashed down. Staggering to his feet, Pete broke for the outer doorway. Behind him the room was a pit of flame and smoke. Boca's pony reared as Pete jerked the reins loose, swept into the saddle, and down the moonlit street. He heard a shot and turned his head. In the patch of moonlight round The Spider's place ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... thirty feet across at top and five feet at the bottom. On the west, about one-third of the circumference was wanting from a point six feet above the lowest level, thus enabling one to be at a distance or to stand close by, and yet see to the bottom of the pit. The ground all around and the shrubs and trees were dotted thick with flakes of dry mud, which gave, at a distance, a curious stippled look to the mud-spattered surfaces. As I stood watching the volcano I could see through the clouds of steam it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... are more or less magnetic, and because of the slight magnetic properties of the nickel ore itself. In a large-scale exploration of this type, conducted some years ago, a favorable magnetic belt was discovered, and a pit was sunk to water level but not to bedrock. Years later, the extension of this pit by only a few feet disclosed one of the great ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... reached down and drew from his uniform his automatic. He popped a fresh clip into the pocket fold of his girdle. The pistol he slung high up beneath his arm-pit. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... would not be difficult to point out modes of employing it which might enable us to turn nearly the whole of the south of England into a brickfield, as we have already turned nearly the whole of the north into a coal-pit. I say "nearly" the whole, because, as you are doubtless aware, there are considerable districts in the south composed of chalk renowned up to the present time for their downs and mutton. But, I think, by examining carefully into the conceivable ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... fix themselves upon the memory more forcefully than others, and one feels as though one might carry these impressions intact to the grave. In this tomb there was nothing so impressive as this view across the well and through the entrance in the opposite wall. At one's feet lay the dark pit; around one the gaudy paintings gleamed; and through the window-like aperture before one, a dim suggestion could be obtained of a white-pillared hall. The intense eagerness to know what was beyond, and, at the same time, the feeling that it was almost desecration to climb ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... the graves they proceeded to open the large pit, but the sight was too horrible, and they carried Imre away by force. He could not have looked on what was there and still ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... and his second are standing on the Falkenhohe, at the edge of the vast circular pit, blasted out by some explosion which has torn the slate into mere dust and shivers, now covered with a thin coat ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... odious and formidable light. It was the universal sentiment both of the church and of heretics, that the daemons were the authors, the patrons, and the objects of idolatry. [38] Those rebellious spirits who had been degraded from the rank of angels, and cast down into the infernal pit, were still permitted to roam upon earth, to torment the bodies, and to seduce the minds, of sinful men. The daemons soon discovered and abused the natural propensity of the human heart towards devotion, and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... peculiar attitude towards the nobler and showier sides of national life. They will read of the Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they assist at a performance of the Lyons Mail. Persons of substance take in the Times and sit composedly in pit or boxes according to the degree of their prosperity in business. As for the generals who go galloping up and down among bomb-shells in absurd cocked hats—as for the actors who raddle their faces ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... looked like grim demons of the fiery pit as they labored at the coal, which they were shoveling into the mouths of ...
— Frank Merriwell's Nobility - The Tragedy of the Ocean Tramp • Burt L. Standish (AKA Gilbert Patten)
... young, and strong, and proud like you, fearing nothing and wanting everything, but something was wrong. I was climbing up as I thought, and then all at once I saw I had been climbing down—down into a pit I never could get out of. You will be there if you kill me." He sank back ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... who he is," he said to himself "In this neighbourhood the first comer will take his shirt and trousers. They will suppose he has been killed and robbed, no uncommon matter in these days, and his body will be thrown into the public pit, and no one be any the wiser. I will burn the coat and waistcoat as soon ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... there was a knock on the door. Constance opened, and an icy blast swept into the room. The postman stood on the steps, his instrument for knocking (like a drumstick) in one hand, a large bundle of letters in the other, and a yawning bag across the pit ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... peg; the open part is opposite the right side, so as to leave the right arm and shoulder quite unconfined, in the male; the female throws it over the back and left shoulder, and brings it round under the right arm-pit, and when tied in front by a string passing round the cloak and the back, a pouch is formed behind, in which the child is always carried. [Note 58 at end of para.] In either if the skin be a handsome one, the dress ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... barque dash on, till it reached, in the morning, a distant shore covered with a gloomy forest. Here Rinaldo, surrounded by enchantments of a very different sort from those which he had lately resisted, was entrapped into a pit. The pit belonged to a castle which was hung with human heads, and painted red with blood; and as the Paladin was calling upon God to help him, a hideous white-headed old woman, of a spiteful countenance, made her appearance on the edge ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... considered remarkable is a stairway to a cistern cut in the rock. Inside of this spiral staircase, instead of concentric circles which twist around with each complete turn, the involutions become wider as they proceed, in such a way that the bottom of the pit is three times as large as the opening. Is it an architectural freak, or did some reasonable cause determine such an odd construction? It matters little to us. The result was to cause in the cistern that vague reverberation which anyone may hear upon placing a shell at his ear, and to make you ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... the land lay, and finding himself thus beset, old Simon falls to his usual artifices, turning this way and that, like a rat in a pit, to find some hole for escape. First he feigns to misunderstand, then, clapping his hands in his pockets, he knows not where he can have laid them; after that fancies he must have given them to his man Peter, who is gone out of an errand, etc.; ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... the 1st century A.D. they imagined it to have the shape of an inverted round boat or bowl, the thickness of which would represent the mixture of land and water (ki-a) which we call the crust of the earth, while the hollow beneath this inhabitable crust was fancied as a bottomless pit or abyss (ge), in which dwelt many powers. Above the convex surface of the earth (ki-a) spread the sky (ana), itself divided into two regions:—the highest heaven or firmament, which, with the fixed stars immovably attached to it, revolved, as round an ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... goat-herder to assist me across the streams, of which I learn there are two, a mile or thereabout apart, and his compatriots are accompanying us to see us cross, as well as being impelled by prying curiosity to see how many kerans he gets for his trouble. The first stream is found to be arm-pit deep, with a fairly strong current. My sturdy Khorassani crosses over first, to try the bottom, feeling his way with a long-handled spade; he then returns and carries the bicycle across on his head, afterward carrying me across astride his shoulders, landing me safely ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... the present novel is not so bad as Wurthuring Heights in the matter of animal ferocity and impish diabolism; but still most of the characters, to use a quaint illustration of an eccentric divine, "are engaged in laying up for themselves considerable grants of land in the bottomless pit," and brutality, blasphemy and cruelty constitute their stock in trade. The author is not so much a delineator of human life as of inhuman life. There are doubtless many scenes in The Tenant of Wildfield Hall drawn ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... apt to set him off with the same energy in a much worse direction," answered Fisher; "a pretty endless sort of direction, a bottomless pit as deep as ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... this singlehanded combat with the Primate of Christendom and the Princes of Italy, the martyrdom to which Savonarola now looked forward fell upon him. Growing yearly more confident in his visions and more willing to admit his supernatural powers, he had imperceptibly prepared the pit which finally ingulfed him. Often had he professed his readiness to prove his vocation by fire. Now came the moment when this defiance to an ordeal was answered.[1] A Franciscan of Apulia offered to meet him in the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... the pit, the candles are already lighted, the musicians are gathered in the orchestra. The theatre is filled, people talking in confusion, some ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... with their wives and children. I tried to go up to speak to them, but a young Boer, seeing me, shot at me with his gun, so I thought it safer to lie hid. At nightfall, however, I met the driver of one of the waggons, a Kaffir man, at some distance from the laager, where he was watching by a pit made to catch bucks, and fell into talk with him. He told me that this was a party of the Boers who had trekked from Cape Colony, and were taking possession of Natal, and that there were other such parties scattered about the country. He said that in this party there were five-and-twenty ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... and depart across the river ere many days be fallen. As for me, I will fight no more, yet neither will I speak unto thee again, for thou didst hide from my son the tokens of his father, of thine iniquity thou didst lead him into this pit." ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... rocky pit, was not yet buried under the snow, although the white masses came quite close to it, balked, however, of their prey by the pine woods which protected the hamlet. From his vantage point the low houses looked like paving-stones ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... Emplacements had been constructed in many more places than there were guns available to fill them, and, in order to ensure that the exact positions from which shells would be actually thrown should be unknown to the British commander, the guns were shifted from gun-pit to gun-pit the night before the battle. The artillery at the disposal of General Botha was far less numerous than that of his opponent. On the day of the fight a 120 m/m howitzer was mounted on the crest of Vertnek (or Red Hill) on the right, a field ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... she was wondering when her husband would be down, when all at once she heard a soft, stealthy pit-a-pat. Nearer came the steps, and then a little white-robed form, with a tiny finger on her ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... of the First Principle. When the Principle of Existence made Himself Creator, He produced by emanation an ideal Yōd; and to make room for it in the plenitude of the uncreated Light, He had to hollow out a pit of shadow, equal to the dimension determined by His creative desire; and attributed by Him to the ideal ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... loike. No matter what ye've done or where ye've been or who ye've been with, a mither's heart welcomes ye back jist the same as when yes were a babby an' slept on me breast. A mither's heart ud quench the fires o' hell. I'd go inter the burnin' flames o' the pit an' bear ye out in me arms. So niver fear. Now that I've found ye, ye're safe. Ye'll not run away from me ag'in. I'll hould ye—I'll hould ye back," and the poor creature clasped Alida with such conclusive energy that she ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... men and a boy were entombed for nine days, from noon on Wednesday, April 11th, to mid-day on Friday, April 20th, in the Tynewydd Pit, Rhondda Valley. They were at length rescued by the almost super-human efforts of a band of brave workers, who, at the risk of their lives, cut through 38 yards of the solid coal-rock in order to get at their companions, working day and night, and, ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... impresses, now, a great and noble deed of a truly noble man; now a kindly act with a double blessing in it; again, a warning to those who unknowingly set foot upon the devil's ground and find it a miry or slimy pit; or, it may be a lesson from one of the world's great poets or historians, for the author has evidently been a reader of great books with a mind to recall many ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... might be able to describe a woman who had fallen down in the street seized by the plague, and had at once been carried off and buried. The boy would guess that that must have been his mother; and yet he could never be quite certain, for she had been buried in a plague-pit with dozens of others, and he would never see her. Perhaps he would beg a little oatmeal, and run back hastily to his brothers and sisters, and when he got there find them all frightened and crying, for the eldest girl was very sick. ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... plain-spoken, matter-of- fact man; he immensely loved and honoured his minister, but he could not help reminding him after one of his specially enraptured letters that 'Hall-binks are slippery seats.' The golden mean lay somewhere between the hall-bink and the ash-pit; somewhere between Rutherford's ecstasy and Gordon's depression. But as the Guide said in the exquisite conversation, the wise God will have it so, some must pipe and some must weep: and, for my part, I care not for that profession that begins not with heaviness of mind. Only, ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... bade his servants throw Gunnar, with hands bound, into a den of venomous snakes; but this did not daunt the reckless Niblung, and, his harp having been flung after him in derision, he calmly sat in the pit, harping with his toes, and lulling to sleep all the reptiles save one only. It was said that Atli's mother had taken the form of this snake, and that she it was who now bit him in the side, and silenced his ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... cunning! What desire! I have often been upon the edge of a steep place, such as a chalk pit or a cliff above a plain, and watched them down below, hurrying around, turning about, laying down, putting up, leading, making, organizing, driving, considering, directing, exceeding, and restraining; upon my soul I was proud to be one of them! I have said to myself," said Wandering ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... desolate sea, although the giant lizards were new to me, it was a pleasure to pit my knowledge of war against their brute strength and courage. Ever since the first men did their business upon the great waters, they fulfilled their instincts in fighting the beasts with desperation. Hiding coward-like in a hold was ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... PIT. In the University of Cambridge, the place in St. Mary's Church reserved for the accommodation of Masters of Arts and Fellow-Commoners is jocularly styled the ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... her head vigorously: that she would not do—go on pouring money into the bottomless pit of Clark's Field! Of course the trust company had considered this point and made up its mind already to advance the estate the necessary funds up to a safe amount, which would become another lien on the little girl's income from her mother's ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... evil carry along with them the springs of their own destruction, upon which they will tread, in spite of every caution, and their imagined security is but the brink of the pit into which they are to fall. It was so with the captain of this slave-ship. He arrived in Africa, took in a considerable number of slaves, and in order to complete his cargo, went on shore, leaving his mate in charge ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... The pit, as usual, was no doubt divided; those who delight in heroic virtue and perfect character objected to the producing such instances of villany, without punishing them very severely for the sake of example. Some of the author's friends cryed, "Look'e, gentlemen, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... airy, and there was ample space for the party. At meals they consisted of the three lieutenants, the surgeon, purser, and seven midshipmen. As he had never been accustomed to a rough life in the cock-pit of a British man-of-war, the contrast to his former condition was not so strong as it would have been to a midshipman in the royal service; but the somewhat stiff courtesy that prevailed among the Chilian officers in their relations to each other differed widely from the frank heartiness at Captain ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... to-day comes just from this, that so many who call themselves Christians have never once got a glimpse of themselves as they really are. I remember once peering over the edge of the crater of Vesuvius, and looking down into the pit, all swirling with sulphurous fumes. Have you ever looked into your hearts, in that fashion, and seen the wreathing smoke and the flashing fire there? If you have, you will cleave to that Christ, who is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to swell, almost beyond calculation, the future harvest of prosperity. In this progress what seems to be fiction is found to fall short of experience.... When I come to the moment of deciding the vote, I start back with dread from the edge of the pit into which we are plunging. In my view, even the minutes I have spent in expostulation, have their value, because they protract the crisis, and the short period in which alone we may resolve to ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... real semblance to a defensive work. The edge of the new attack swirled up to it, lipped over and fell bodily into it. For a bare minute the defence fought, but it was overborne and wiped out in that time. The British flung in on top of the defenders like terriers into a rat-pit, and the fighters snarled and worried and scuffled and clutched and tore at each other more like savage brutes than men. The defence was not broken or driven out—it was killed out; and lunging bayonet or smashing butt caught and finished the few that tried to struggle ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... into the station square, all smelling of hay and the rain, the deluge slowly withdrew its forces, recalling them gradually so that the drops whispered now, patter-patter—pit-pat. A pigeon hovered down and pecked at the cobbles. Faint colour threaded ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... with an appreciative audience! Believe me, gentlemen, I pray of you; give me a year, only one year, and I'll get out of this nervousness and this nightmare, and the world of music will hear of me. Only give me time." Feodor Wilkins placed his hand desperately on the pit of his ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... how they scream and shiver, While devils push them to the pit wide-yawning Hideous and gloomy, to receive them headlong ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... same bullet made more than one or two holes. Two were found to have struck in the left shoulder about the same place. One of these came out at the back and the other passed around the chest wall and lodged near the spine near the waist. One went externally in the chest and came out of the arm-pit, and another made a ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the trees. Then the boy answered me, 'My king, why should I fear when you are with me?' I was ashamed, and took Harek's harp from him—for he carried it—and went forward boldly, singing the song of Gunnar in the snake pit. And it seemed to me that Harek would have chosen that song as fitting my case; for, putting Danes for snakes, I was in a close place enough. The warriors came out when they heard me; and I was well treated, and listened as I drank. ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... ago I wrote a Play, about which the chief matter I care to recollect at present is, that a Pit-full of good-natured people applauded it:—ever since, I have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better reward their attention. What follows I mean for the first of a series ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... do unexpected things. Didn't you always adore the man who slew a lion in a pit on a snowy day? But about this unfortunate innocence. Well, quite long ago, when I'd been quarrelling with more people than usual, you among the number—it must have been in November, I never quarrel with you too near Christmas—I had an idea that I'd like to write a book. It was to be a book of ...
— Reginald • Saki
... errors? How walk cautiously, and go around the pit into which, as it seems to us, others have fallen? I may as well tell the reader frankly that he sets his hope too high if he expects to avoid all error and to work out for himself a philosophy in all ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... something to say in reprobation of the views suggested by Owen. Harlow, in a brief but powerful speech, bristling with numerous sanguinary references to the bottomless pit, protested against any interference with the sacred rights of property. Easton listened with a puzzled expression, and Philpot's goggle eyes rolled horribly as he glared silently at the circle and ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... a perfect utterance. The narrow vault of the Sistine Chapel opens into immensity, and every one who looks upon it is lifted out of himself into new worlds. Shakespeare's plays were enjoyed by the apprentices in the pit and royalty in the boxes, and so all the way between. The man Shakespeare, of such and such birth and training, and of this or that experience in life, is entirely merged in his creations; he becomes ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... the night of the 6th of February, 1821: "The king went to the play (Drury Lane) for the first time, the Dukes of York and Clarence and a great suite with him. He was received with immense acclamations, the whole pit standing up, hurrahing and waving their hats. The boxes were very empty at first, for the mob occupied the avenues to the theatre, and those who had engaged boxes could not get to them. The crowd on the outside was very great.... A few people called 'The Queen!' but very few. A man in the gallery ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... qualification, with none of the qualities of head or heart that make great and wise men, and, at the same time, filled with all the narrow conceptions and bitter intolerance of political bigotry. These die; and the world is none the wiser for what they have said and done. Their names sink in the bottomless pit of oblivion; but their acts of folly or knavery curse the body politic and at ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Vaudeville, the Varietes, the Opera-Comique relieved him of some sixty francs, although he always went to the pit. What student could deny himself the pleasure of seeing Talma in one of his famous roles? Lucien was fascinated by the theatre, that first love of all poetic temperaments; the actors and actresses were awe-inspiring creatures; he did not so much as dream of the possibility of crossing the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... protested Mrs. Chatterton, an angry light coming into her cold eyes, and turning around on him sharply, "that this isn't very friendly in you, Mr. Vandeusen, to pit that upstart boy against me. Now there will be ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... higher than this in which I have discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do; but I dared not. God did not play in tempting me; neither did I play when I sunk, as it were, into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell took hold on me; wherefore, I may not play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... loved the actors, especially the old actors, from his youth; and this was the last of the Romans. Accordingly Lamb and his sister went to the Drury Lane; but there being no room in the ordinary parts of the house (boxes or pit), Munden obtained places for his two visitors in the orchestra, close to the stage. He saw them carefully ushered in, and well posted; then acted with his usual vigor, and no doubt enjoyed the plaudits wrung from a thousand hands. Afterwards, ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... when Jack boldly resolved to destroy him. He therefore took a horn, a shovel, pickaxe, and a dark lantern, and early in a long winter's evening he swam to the mount. There he fell to work at once, and before morning he had dug a pit twenty-two feet deep, and almost as many broad. He covered it over with sticks and straw, and strewed some of the earth over them, to make it look just like solid ground. He then put his horn to his mouth, and blew such a loud and long ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... That *nought but only his believe can*. *knows no more So far'd another clerk with astronomy: than his "credo."* He walked in the fieldes for to *pry Upon* the starres, what there should befall, *keep watch on* Till he was in a marle pit y-fall. He saw not that. But yet, by Saint Thomas! *Me rueth sore of* Hendy Nicholas: *I am very sorry for* He shall be *rated of* his studying, *chidden for* If that I may, by Jesus, heaven's king! Get me a staff, that ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... dog, and quite prepared to take its part against the car, if that ruffian hadn't been so outrageous. With four hours fast becoming five, and still no Fleur, all the old car-wise feelings he had experienced in person and by proxy balled within him, and sinking sensations troubled the pit of his stomach. At seven he telephoned to Winifred by trunk call. No! Fleur had not been to Green Street. Then where was she? Visions of his beloved daughter rolled up in her pretty frills, all blood and dust-stained, in some hideous catastrophe, began to haunt him. He went to her room and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... humanity, don't examine it too closely. That's what we have to do in the newspaper game, and that's why we're all cynics. Shakespeare said 'All the world's a stage,' and the same might have been said of the press. The show looks pretty good from the pit, but when you get behind the scenes and see the make-up, and all the strings that are pulled—and who pulls them—well, it makes you suspicious of everything. You no longer accept a surface view; you are always looking for ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... to say it, yet I do not know but that you are right, my dear," agreed Mrs. Blake. "Strong men, if unhampered, have a chance to fight their way up out of the social pit. But women and girls, even when they escape the—the worst down there, can hardly hope ever to attain—And of course those that fall!—Our dual code of morality is hideously unjust to our sex, yet it still is the code ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... the National Galleries; and they had fed buns to the bears in the Zoo, and in doing so had laughed heartily. They thought it was because the bears were so ridiculous that they laughed. Later they appreciated that the reason they were happy was because they were together. Had the bear pit been empty, ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... of structure in common. Among these families of higher plants, over two hundred in number, is one known as the rose family. Notwithstanding their close relationship, the modes of seed dispersion are varied. The seeds of plums and cherries and hawthorns are surrounded by a hard pit, or stone, which protects the seeds, while animals eat the fleshy portion of the fruit. When ripe, raspberries leave the dry receptacle and look like miniature thimbles, while the blackberry is fleshy throughout. The dry, seed-like fruits of the strawberry are carried ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... of the bottomless pit (Rev. ix. 11). The word is derived from the Hebrew, abad, "lost," and means the lost one. There are two other angels introduced by Klopstock in The Messiah with similar names, but must not be confounded with the angel referred to in Rev.; one is Obaddon, the angel of death, and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... might think it possible to do something with such parts of their land, also. So, one of the first things that was done with Cousin Harriet's "alkali sink" was to make some redwood drains, shaped like the letter V, and place these about three feet below the surface. A "sump," or drainage pit, was dug, too, into which the drains might discharge the alkali water. The hired men expected Claude to help dig the "sump," and it proved quite hard work. So did the pounding of the "hard pan" on the alkali tract, itself. The tough, hard clods of earth were so difficult to pulverize that they had ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... go home and tell the Pit: For once you met your master, A man who carried in his soul Three charms against disaster, The ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... birth, and fruitless industry. Let virtuosos in five years be writ;— Yet not one thought accuse thy toil—of wit. Let gentle George in triumph tread the stage, Make Dorimant betray, and Loveit rage; Let Cully, Cockwood, Fopling, charm the pit, And, in their folly, show the writer's wit: Yet still thy fools shall stand in thy defence, And justify their author's want of sense. Let them be all by thy own model made Of dulness, and desire no foreign aid; That they to future ages may be known, Not copies drawn, but issue of thy own. Nay, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... lashing and cutting—and again, and many times again, until the poor thing rolled on the floor whimpering and sobbing. I shall have to give an account of this some day. I shall have to whip my master with a red-hot serpent round the blazing furnace of the pit, and I shall do it with agony, because here my love and ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... to his seat in the stalls of the Straw Exchange Theatre and turned to watch the stream of distinguished and distinguishable people who made their appearance as a matter of course at a First Night in the height of the Season. Pit and gallery were already packed with a throng, tense, expectant and alert, that waited for the rise of the curtain with the eager patience of a terrier watching a dilatory human prepare for outdoor exercises. Stalls and boxes filled slowly and hesitatingly with a crowd ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... "fell very short to those of the preceding years." At the close of the season he went abroad, and was away for nearly two years. In Rogers's "Table Talk," it is recorded—"Before his going abroad, Garrick's attraction had much decreased; Sir W.W. Pepys said that the pit was often almost empty. But, on his return to England, people were mad about seeing him." His popularity did not ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... beating under the blue overall. She had come down from Atlas faster than she had gone up. After all, the climate there is frightfully cold, and there are passes on that lonely mountain which overhang the bottomless pit, where some have perished very miserably. Katherine had escaped the abyss, and left behind her the dreams and the golden mists and the starry peaks of ice. It was dark in the studio, and a voice was heard inquiring whether the young ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... hammer and crowbar piece after piece, and brought it up to me, till I had my load. We then carried it ashore, and spread it out in the sun to be blistered there for two weeks or so. Having thus secured twenty or thirty boat-loads, and had it duly conveyed round to the Mission Station, a huge pit was dug in the ground, dry wood piled in below, and green wood above to the height of several feet, and on the top of all the coral blocks were orderly laid. When this pile had burned for seven or ten days, the coral had been reduced to excellent lime, ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... serpents, to hiss with your tongues, and to smite with your stings, bow yourselves down to your native dust, and acknowledge that yours have been the thoughts of ignorance, and the words of vain foolishness. Lo! ye are caught in your own snare, and your own pit hath yawned for you. Turn, then, aside from the task that is too heavy for you; destroy not your teeth by gnawing a file; waste not your strength by spurning against a castle wall; nor spend your breath in contending in swiftness with a fleet steed; and let those weigh the "Tales of my Landlord," ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... hot into a long harangue. He had been urging that he must have more money for his works at Calais. He was agitated because a French chalk pit outside the English lines had been closed to his workmen. They must bring chalk from Dover at a heavy cost for barges and balingers. This was what it was to ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... whom, in his anecdotage, he referred, who sold oranges at the gate or blew up footballs or performed other jobicular functions, was the only Jobey. That was enough. Instantly in poured other infuriated old Etonians, also in anecdotage, to pit their memories against his. Everything was forgotten in the struggle: the KAISER'S illness, Sir IAN HAMILTON'S despatch, the Compulsion Bill, the Quakers and their consciences, the deficiencies of the Blockade. Nothing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... if God had but to carry out my wild schemes. I remembered all my unreasonable murmurings and anger; I remembered the dreadful words I was on the point of uttering tonight, and for a moment it seemed as if the pit would open and ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... to Alfred Domett, says: "The first night was magnificent ... there could be no mistake at all about the honest enthusiasm of the audience. The gallery (and this, of course, was very gratifying, because not to be expected at a play of Browning) took all the points quite as quickly as the pit, and entered into the general feeling and interest of the action far more than the boxes.... Altogether the first night was a triumph."—Robert Browning and Alfred Domett, 1906, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... recognised and which makes me wonder to-day at the legend of the native neglect of him. Was he not even at that time on all lips, had not my brother, promptly master of the subject, beckoned on my lagging mind with a recital of The Gold-Bug and The Pit and the Pendulum?—both of which, however, I was soon enough to read for myself, adding to them The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Were we not also forever mounting on little platforms at our infant schools to "speak" The Raven and Lenore and the verses ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... thoughts of practical men were turned thereby to the long-neglected possibilities of steam. Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping, because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, because at any time the labourers might be obliged to sit at the pit's mouth for weeks together, whistling for a gale or waiting for the water to be got under again. But steam had already been used for pumping upon one or two estates in England—rather as a toy than in earnest—before the middle of the seventeenth ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... the spiritual director of a congregation and parish. Similarly, the laudable ambition which, in the case of a humble Scotch matron, is expressed in the wish and exertion to see her Jamie or Geordie "wag his pow in the pou'pit," produces, when realized, salutary effects in the whole family connection. These effects, which Mr. Froude would doubtless allow and commend in their case, he finds it creditable to ignore the very possibility ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... however, gained the shelter of their wagons, and from behind them and the piles of dead horses which literally covered the ground, they returned a vigorous fire upon their assailants, meanwhile digging a rifle pit as they fought. It was a fierce morning's battle, and the foe, in largely superior numbers, had nearly surrounded and captured them when reenforcements arrived. So hot was the attack, that one of the tents ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... one point in what Mr. Stenson has been saying which I think we might and ought to consider a little more fully, and that is, what guarantees have we that Freistner really has the people at the back of him, that he'll be able to cleanse that rat pit at Berlin of the Hohenzollern and his clan of junkers—the most accursed type of politician who ever breathed? We ought to be very sure about this. Fenn's our ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... think, daddy," said Eppie; "and if there wasn't stones enough to go all round, why they'll go part o' the way, and then it'll be easier to get sticks and things for the rest. See here, round the big pit, what ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... Yanan territory is formed by a range of mountains a little west of Lassen Butte and terminating near Pit River; the northern boundary by a line running from northeast to southwest, passing near the northern side of Round Mountain, 3 miles from Pit River. The western boundary from Redding southward is on an average 10 miles ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... Michelangelo now stands, with the inscription, 'Exemplum salutis publicae cives posuere 1495. No example was more popular than that of the younger Brutus, who, in Dante, lies with Cassius and Judas Iscariot in the lowest pit of hell, because of his treason to the empire. Pietro Paolo Boscoli, whose plot against Giuliano, Giovanni, and Giulio Medici failed (1513), was an enthusiastic admirer of Brutus, and in order to follow ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... spirit that has borne calamity and misfortune with a sweet and gentle trust. A little farther on in the village is another extraordinarily beautiful thing. The road, while still almost in the street, passes across a little embankment; and on the left hand you look down into a pit, like a quarry, full of ash-trees, and with a thick undergrowth of bushes and tall plants. From a dozen little excavations leap and bicker crystal rivulets of water, hurrying down stony channels, uniting in a pool, and then moving off, a full-fed stream, among quiet water-meadows. ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... face was a compound of expressions. She instantly acquiesced, however, and went down with her brother, her heart, it must be confessed, going very pit-a-pat indeed. She took him into the library, which was not this evening thrown open to company; and sent a servant for Mr. Lindsay. While waiting for his coming, Ellen felt as if she had not the fair use of ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... gnaw at the pit of our stomachs, we had cut down our meals to the minimum amount of food that would keep us alive; we were so weak we no longer were sure where our feet were going to when we put them down. But all the fish we had to smoke was two or three. And on Friday night ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... "The pit rose at me!" exclaimed Edmund Kean in a wild tumult of emotion, as he rushed home to his trembling wife. "Mary, you shall ride in your carriage yet, and Charles shall go to Eton!" He had been so terribly in earnest with the study of his profession ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Bridge, that the Martians had resumed the offensive. So far as one can ascertain from the conflicting accounts that have been put forth, the majority of them remained busied with preparations in the Horsell pit until nine that night, hurrying on some operation that disengaged huge volumes of ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... something," said all Europe, when it was too late. For Napoleon was himself again—alert, indomitable, raising a new army, calling on France to rise to such heights of energy and vitality as only France can compass; for the colder nations of the North lack the imagination that enables men to pit themselves against the gods at the bidding of some stupendous will, only second to the ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... when he throws in his hook it is dollars to buttons that "in the near future" he will get a bite. The bullhead is democratic in all its instincts. If the boy's shirt is sleeveless, his hat crownless, and his pants a bottomless pit, the bullhead will bite just as well as though the boy is dressed in purple and fine linen, with knee breeches and plaid stockings. The bull head seems to be dozing—bulldozing we might say—on the muddy ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... faces!—faces mounting from the pit below him, up and up to the sky-blue ceiling, where painted goddesses danced and scattered pink roses around the enormous gasalier. Fauns piping on the great curtain, fiddles sawing in the orchestra beneath, ladies in gay silks and jewels leaning over the ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... this wicked lord abducted her, Scroggs?" he added thoughtfully. "A man of spirit, until the Puritans got after him and showed him the burning pit and frightened him to that virtue which was foreign to his inclinations. My lady was right in refusing to honor such a paltry scoundrel with her hand. But it takes courage, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... daughter, the mean appellation of leather-dresser will soon be forgotten and lost in the glorious title of the son-in-law of your lordship; I shall be promoted under your protection, and purified from the odour of the tan-pit, so that my offspring will smell as sweet ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... the coming of the beast. The blessed hope to meet Him, would lose its blessedness. Instead of being a bright outlook to be with Christ in glory, it would be the worst pessimism, for believers would not face immediate glory, but tribulation, judgments, and the persecutions of the beast from the pit. Everything in Scripture is against this teaching, which has been accepted by not a few, that the church must pass through the tribulation, and after all it is an important truth for the spiritual life of a believer. ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... return to Mike. By a happy thought, he had suddenly remembered that whilst working some days before in the hole, his pick had let in daylight on one side, and the desperate hope presented itself to his mind that he might make a passage into the next pit, which he knew led into others, and thus escape. His success was beyond his expectation; and he regained the open air at a sufficient distance from his late quarters to escape observation. Once able to reflect calmly upon the event of the ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... years, he had been stupid and illiberal, but nothing worse; in his old age, he seemed to seek out opportunities of wickedness and outrage, and at last he gave way to transports which could only be likened to those of a fiend from the Pit, permitted for a season to afflict the earth. He was as base as he was wicked; a thief, and perjured, as well as an insatiable murderer. The only trait that seems to ally him with manhood is itself animal and repulsive. He had wholly ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... heart stopped beating. For out of a pile of straw which Olie had dumped not a hundred feet away from the house, to line a pit for our winter vegetables, a man suddenly erupted. He seemed to come up out of the very ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... morning found Maggard busied about his dooryard, albeit with his rifle standing ready to hand, and to-day he wore his shirt with the arm-pit pistol holster ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... all carried off, and the pit was empty, then came out these two dragons, and made great din, and fought fiercely down in the dyke. Never saw any man any loathlier fight; flames of fire flew from their mouths! The monarch saw this fight, their grim gestures; then was he astonished in this worlds-realm, what ...
— Brut • Layamon
... appeared. Boldly facing the creature, he approached its jaws, and, throwing his saddle at it, the alligator jumped partly out of the water to catch it. At that instant the daring Llanero plunged his dagger up to the very hilt into the arm-pit—the most vital part of the monster—when, with a tremendous splash, it instantly sank beneath ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... superior wickedness on earth who was thrust down into Po, but who was really both inferior and posterior to Manua. This inferno, this Po, with many names, one of which remarkably enough was Ke-po-lua-ahi, the pit of fire, was not an entirely dark place. There was light of some kind and there was fire. The legends further tell us that when Kane, Ku, and Lono were creating the first man from the earth, Kanaloa was present, ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... shining hair, roll to the bank's edge; then Down the beetling banks, like water in waterfalls, It stooped and flashed and fell and ran like water away. Her eyes, oh and her eyes! In all her beauty, and sunlight to it is a pit, den, darkness, Foam-falling is not fresh to it, rainbow by it not beaming, In all her body, I say, no place was like her eyes, No piece matched those eyes kept most part much cast down But, being lifted, immortal, ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... caught his game, and that the spider was a great hunter, and the man said "If I had hunted as this spider hunts, if I had made a trap like that and put it in the bush and then gone aside and let the game get into it and weary itself to death quickly,—quicker and safer than they do in pit-falls—that bush cow would not have gored me." And so after a time he tried to make a net like the spider's, out of bush rope, and he did this thing and put his net into the forest, and caught bush deer ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Hell! I know thee now; thou cam'st But once in thine own form, and ever since Hast been too near me in a worser one. Back to the pit, I say! No ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... same still. He will stand the great test that one can go into the world with him and not be ashamed of him. I know, dearest, even without that shake of the head, the small value you attach to this, but it is a great element in that droll contract, by which one person agrees to pit his temper against another's, and which we are told is made in heaven, with angels as sponsors. Mr. Walpole is sufficiently good-looking to be prepossessing, he is well bred, very courteous, converses extremely well, knows his exact place in life, and takes it quietly ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... was packed, both in the smart orchestra boxes and in the pit, as well as in the more plebeian balconies and galleries above. Gluck's ORPHEUS made a strong appeal to the more intellectual portions of the house, whilst the fashionable women, the gaily-dressed and brilliant throng, spoke to the eye of those who cared but little for ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... been shut up in a coal work, from the falling in of the pit, and have had nothing to eat for two or three days, have been as much intoxicated by a bason of broth, as a person in common circumstances with two ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett |
