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Rut   /rət/   Listen
Rut

verb
(past & past part. rutted; pres. part. rutting)
1.
Be in a state of sexual excitement; of male mammals.
2.
Hollow out in the form of a furrow or groove.  Synonyms: furrow, groove.



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"Rut" Quotes from Famous Books



... hisses of the crowd, the talk of the respectable classes, and the murmurs of Italy. For my part, I was in hopes, as I often used actually to say to you, that the wheel of the state chariot had made its revolution with scarcely any noise and leaving scarcely any visible rut; and it would have been so, if people could only have waited till the storm had blown over. But after sighing in secret for a long time they all began, first to groan, and at last to talk and shout. Accordingly, that friend of ours, unaccustomed to being unpopular, always used to an ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... he meant to end his sentence, bien entendu. But just then he plumped into a rut like the back door to China or—to the home of ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... reached the top, and the team plunged furiously down the slope. He straightened himself in his seat with both hands on the reins, and Agatha held her breath when she felt the light vehicle tilt as the wheels on one side sank deep in a rut. Then something seemed to crack, and she saw the off-side horse stumble and plunge. The other beast flung its head up, Hawtrey shouted something, and there was a great smashing and snapping of undergrowth and fallen branches as they drove in among the birches. Then the team stopped, and ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... of the encounter before crossing the snowy pass, and once their driver had, to use the horsey phrase, given them their heads, and urged them on to their top speed, their hot, wild blood had been bubbling through their veins, making them snort and tear along heedless of rock, rut, and the roughest ground. Marcus had told the driver to check them twice over, but as soon as Lupe was in the chariot and both Marcus and Serge busy seeing to his wound, the speed began to increase, till the chariot was bumping over the open plain faster than ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn

... Gaul saluted their general, Avi'tus, emperor, and the Roman senate and people at first acquiesced in the choice. Rut Avi'tus was soon found unfit to hold the reins of power at a time of so much danger and difficulty; the senate, influenced by Ri'cimer, the commander of the barbarian auxiliaries, voted his deposition. He died shortly after, whether by disease ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... be developed by remaining in a rut. Experience is not only the best teacher, but the very finest developer of thought, and of a vivid and facile imagination. Thus constant practice causes the building of plots to become a sort of ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... robbed of the might of two such lords As Peleus' son and Telamon's? What art Can drive the blood back to the stricken heart? Like huddled sheep cowed obstinate, as dull As oxen impotent the wain to pull Out of a rut, which, failing at first lunge, Answer not voice nor goad, but sideways plunge Or backward urge with lowered heads, or stand Dumb monuments of sufferance—so unmanned The Achaians brooded, nor their chiefs had care To drive them forth, ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett

... posting-horses could scarcely drag my light trap through the black slush of the highroad. One day, I remember, was particularly unlucky: three times we got 'stuck' in the mud up to the axles of the wheels; my driver was continually giving up one rut and with moans and grunts trudging across to the other, and finding things no better with that. In fact, towards evening I was so exhausted that on reaching the posting-station I decided to spend the night ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... is the month of gloom, despair, and many suicides. In the wild world, November is the Mad Moon. Many and diverse the madnesses of the time, but none more insane than the rut of the white-tailed deer. Like some disease it appears, first in the swollen necks of the antler-bearers, and then in the feverish habits of all. Long and obstinate combats between the bucks now, characterize the time; neglecting even to eat, they spend their ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton

... yet reached the sheltered road we were travelling, and the wheels rung against its frozen surface as they spun round with a velocity that seemed to add to the excitement of our flying steeds. Ever and anon we bounded and bumped over some rut or inequality that was deeper than usual. Twice we were within an inch of the ditch; once, for an awful hundred yards, we were balancing on two wheels; and still we went faster and faster than ever. ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... no more, and to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and applications, questions which will never fail to have due prominence given to them. Else criticism, besides being really false to its own nature, merely continues in the old rut which it has hitherto followed in this country, and will certainly miss the chance now given to it. For what is at present the bane of criticism in this country? It is that practical considerations ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... thoughtful, brooding through the hours of darkness with his head slightly bent and his eyes, so far as Casey could determine, fixed steadily on the uneven trail where the headlights revealed every rut, every stone, every chuck-hole. But Casey was not deceived by that quiescence. The revolver barrel never once ceased its pressure against his side, and he knew that young Kenner never for an instant forgot ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower

... fixed in the claws of some miserable pettiness, which interests them so greatly that they tramp on steadily forward, staring ahead, and there's not the slightest fear of their seeing anything outside the rut they are travelling. ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies

... shafts of such a cart he saw a thin little sorrel beast, one of those peasants' nags which he had often seen straining their utmost under a heavy load of wood or hay, especially when the wheels were stuck in the mud or in a rut. And the peasants would beat them so cruelly, sometimes even about the nose and eyes, and he felt so sorry, so sorry for them that he almost cried, and his mother always used to take him away from the window. ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... kindly and efficient, but professionally non-committal. The boy was badly injured, and he must be moved at once to the nearest house. Somehow they lifted Joseph and held him so as to break the jar of stone and rut as the doctor drove his car as carefully as he could down the road leading to ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer

... be sent to Colorado for almost two years for his health. He came back to school looking better but before his diploma was handed to him announcing to the world that he was a full-fledged Bachelor of Arts, he had fallen apparently permanently into the rut of ill-health. In fact I wondered, when we all sang Auld Lang Syne in the fraternity house at the close of college, if I'd ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat

... East Dennis four years I began to feel that I was getting into a rut. It seemed to me that all I could do in that particular field had been done. My people wished me to remain, however, and so, partly as an outlet for my surplus energy, but more especially because I realized the splendid work women could ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw

... almost any horse; and, although Mr. Trafton's fine roadster, "Billy," was pretty well trained, the combined effect was a little too much for his nerves. He gave a sidelong leap and started to run. His master checked him sharply, and veering from the road, he ran the wheels into a deep rut, and over went the buggy ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various

... misters, I didn't know," he managed to mutter, with a slash at his horse which was vainly endeavoring to pull the cart from the rut in which it had stuck. "I guess I'll go along to the hotel. I've a bag ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green

... from some place not far off, near the water's edge, and in the direction toward which the huge serpent had disappeared. Before the watcher had time to tell the others of what he had seen, one of the boatmen discovered the rut left in the soft ground by the reptile. Thereafter Knowlton kept his own counsel, listening to the excited curses of the men and observing their pallor and their nervous scanning of the shadows. Jose said the screech undoubtedly was the death shriek of some animal ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel

... since fallen into the way-station rut of desuetude—awoke with a start, bestirring themselves joyfully to meet the inspiriting conditions. At Midland City, Stephen Hawk, the new right-of-way agent, ventured to ask municipal help to construct a ten-mile branch to Lavabee: it was forthcoming promptly; ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde

... says, Sir, they'd have been here last night, but that the old wheezy-belly horse tired, and the two fore-wheels came crash down at once in Waggon-rut Lane. Sir, they were cruelly loaden, as I understand. My lady herself, he says, laid on four mail trunks, besides the great deal-box, which ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... and when the weight came on it, down it slumped into the mud, half-way up the calves; it was difficult to draw it out, and very fatiguing. To avoid these ruts we encroached on the grass at the sides of the paths, but often stepping on the unseen edge of a rut, we floundered in with both feet to keep the balance, and this was usually followed by a rush of bubbles to the surface, which, bursting, discharged foul air of frightful faecal odour. In parts, the black mud and foul water were cold, in others hot, according ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone

... some difficulty, we found that its floor was about 20 feet below that of the cavern above. It was equally level and covered to a great but unascertained depth with the same dry red earth which had been worn down about five feet in a hollow or rut. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... gone on doing this for ten years, I say. When I failed again I tried harder still. I still believed in myself—and others. Recognition, appreciation, might be delayed, but eventually it would come, it must; for this was my work,—to please others, to amuse them, to carry them temporarily out of the rut of their work-a-day lives and make them forget. I believed this, I say, believed and hoped and waited and worked on until the last few months. Then—I told you what happened. Then—" For the first time the speaker paused. He shrugged characteristically. "But what's the ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge

... adherence to the great divine truth contained in the inspired Book. The Bible text is God's part of our sermon; and the more thoroughly we get the text into our own souls, the more will we get it into the sermon, and into the consciences of our hearers. To keep out of a rut I studied the infinite variety of Sacred Scripture; its narratives and matchless biographies, its jubilant Psalms, its profound doctrines, its tender pathos, its rolling thunder of Sinai, and its sweet melodies ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... Bagdad force fell in a rut At Ctesiphon; Turks made things hum. We found that we had got to Kut, Whilst Russians found a way ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various

... money and deplored this luck. It seemed likely to trap himself and the Governor in a predicament they had not foreseen. All had taken a hand at first, and played for several hours, until Fortune's wheel ran into a rut deeper than usual. Wingo slowly became the loser to several, then Hewley had forged ahead, winner from everybody. One by one they had dropped out, each meaning to go home, and all lingering to see the luck turn. ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... as they were passing the priest, made the wheel of the wagon, which was going at full speed, sink into a rut, splashing the abbe with mud from head ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... Literature became intensely urban and partisan. It reflected city life, the disputes of faction, and the personal quarrels of authors. The politics of the Great Rebellion had been of heroic proportions, and found fitting expression in song. Rut in the Revolution of 1688 the issues were constitutional and to be settled by the arguments of lawyers. Measures were in {165} question rather than principles, and there was little inspiration to the poet in Exclusion Bills and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... yards, when they began opening their throats and flapping with their wings, which startled my horse and sent him off at full speed. I lost the rein on one side, and, in attempting to pull him up with the other, I brought his foot into a rut, and down he came, sending me head-foremost into a wet ditch! When I got on my legs, and shook myself a little, I saw each particular hen galloping across the field, screeching with all its might, while the horse was off in a different direction; and, casting ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid

... interests; wider than he knew. She had a belief that there were possibilities for a country newspaper, and she brought a fresh point of view to operate in a situation where Harkless had fallen, perhaps, too much in the rut; and she watched every chance with a keen eye and looked ahead of her with clear foresight. What she waited and yearned for and dreaded, was the time when a copy of the new "Herald" should be placed ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington

... would give the impression of vigilance on our part. And every creature that met us would rely upon us for quartering. [Footnote: "Quartering":—This is the technical word, and, I presume, derived from the French cartayer, to evade a rut or any obstacle.] All this, and if the separate links of the anticipation had been a thousand times more, I saw, not discursively, or by effort, or by succession, but by one flash of horrid ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... Thorarin of Acres, was healed; a stout man he was, and had to wife Steinun, daughter of Rut of Combeness; Thorleif of Lavadale, the father of Steinulf, was a very mighty man, and from him are come ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris

... how he did it he could never in subsequent days remember. He must have hoisted Jean upon his shoulders and crawled through the brush and brambles, falling a dozen times only to pick himself up and go on again, stumbling at every rut, at every pebble. His indomitable will sustained him, his dogged resolution would have enabled him to bear a mountain on his back. Behind the low wall he found Rochas and the few men that were left of the squad, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... it, actually, and quoted it in one of her great speeches. It made the reporter bug out his eyes. He said he had observed of late quite a vein of poetry running through Miss Wilbur's speeches, which lifted them out of the common rut." ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland

... going when I first came here, and—and so it grew to be natural for me to go. Then, of course, being the only lawyer you have, a considerable amount of my business is mixed up in one way or another with your membership; you see those are really the things which settle a man in a rut, and keep him there." ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... what was left to do since truth was unapproachable? Possibly fortune and honours would console him for it. But he was far enough from them too. He felt that he was on the wrong road, that he was getting into a rut at Carthage, as he had got into a rut at Thagaste. He must succeed, whatever the cost!... And then he gave way to one of those moments of weariness, when a man has no further hope of saving himself save by some desperate ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... twinkle in his eye.) I did, darling, just at the first. Rut only at the very first. (Chuckles.) I called you—stoop low and I'll whisper—"a little ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... no birds, anyhow, Tom," he exclaimed, dropping his butt to load. "Go and gather that bird, Frank, to save time; he lies in the wagon rut, there. How now? down charge, you Chase, sir! ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)

... not peculiar to the human female, being represented in the higher animals by what is familiarly termed the "rut." This is not usually a bloody discharge, however, as in the human female, though such a discharge has been observed in ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... of those who have passed away in the latter part of the period under study the power of initiative has gone. New proposals are hushed. Variation is discouraged; the rut of custom and convention is preferred. And a subtle stifling air of the impossibility of all active purposes pervades social and religious and business activity on ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... of the great cities in this country, the man who fell in love, and was in that city a character at least a little above the ordinary rut of men. He had talent and energy, and there had come to him a hard schooling in city ways, though he was born in the forest, and his youth had been passed upon a farm sloping downward to the shore of ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo

... a murderous place enough. Huge fir-trees roofed it in, and made a night of noon. High banks of earth and great boulders walled it in right and left for twenty feet above. The track, what with pack-horses' feet, and what with the wear and tear of five hundred years' rain-fall, was a rut three feet deep and two feet broad, in which no horse could turn. Any other day Hereward would have cantered down it with merely a tightened rein. Today he turned ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... of the house. Those of the neighborhood are various. Foremost among them is the cafetal, or coffee-plantation, of Don Juan Torres, distant a league from the village, over which league of stone, sand, and rut you rumble in a volante dragged by three horses. You know that the volante cannot upset; nevertheless you experience some anxious moments when it leans at an obtuse angle, one wheel in air, one sticking in a hole, the horses balking and kicking, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... "Give him a cut with the whip!" she exclaimed. The young man did not do that, but he urged on his horse and then, just as they were passing the Abbe, suddenly let the wheel of the gig drop into a deep rut. There was a splash, and, in an instant, the priest was covered with mud from head to foot. Rosalie laughed all over her face, and turning round, she shook her fist at the abbe as he stood wiping himself ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... is, "to take it upon himself" and erase all that affair, as it undoubtedly was interfering with his avocations and disturbing his peace of mind.—He did not find it so easy to put his resolution into effect.... More than a week elapsed before he got back again into his ordinary rut. Fortunately, Kupfer did not present himself at all, any more than if he had not been in Moscow. Not long before the "affair" Aratoff had begun to busy himself with painting for photographic ends; he devoted himself to this ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... you, Hugh; and I guess the rest of us ought to be ashamed to throw any stumbling block in the way of a chap who is trying to get out of his old rut. But it passes my comprehension how he can change, and play fair and square, when all his life he's been ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson

... will suit? Spindle-leg in great jack-boot? 20 Pismire crawling in a rut? Or a spigot in a butt? Thus I humm'd and ha'd awhile, When Madam Memory with a smile Thus twitch'd my ear—'Why sure, I ween, 25 In London streets thou oft hast seen The very image of this pair: A little ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... as thou wilt; I hear, But cannot stop the bursting tear.' The Minstrel tried his simple art, Rut distant ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... love sickness as I had occasionally observed in other people, I only succeeded for two days (and that at intervals, and mostly towards evening) in reminding myself of the fact that I was in love, and finally, when I had settled down into the new rut of country life and pursuits, I forgot about ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... winter—Pauline had in mind several plans for the winter. Those of the club members to stay behind must get together some day and talk them over. One thing was certain, the club motto must be lived up to bravely. If not in one way, why in another. There must be no slipping back into the old dreary rut and routine. It lay with themselves as to what their winter ...
— The S. W. F. Club • Caroline E. Jacobs

... accommodated. An English prison is a vast machine in which a man counts for just nothing at all. He is to the establishment what a bale of merchandise is to a merchant's warehouse. The prison does not look upon him as a man at all. He is merely an object which must move in a certain rut and occupy a certain niche provided for it. There is no room for the smallest sentiment. The vast machine of which he is an item ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell

... relation to that immortal past. One could hardly bring heroism into the potato-field and the cow-house; but after this lapse of time, it began to dawn upon her that the man who had fought at Gettysburg and the man who marked out for her the narrow rut of an unchanging existence were one and the same. And as if the moment had come for an expected event, she heard again the jangling of bells without, and the old vivid color rushed into her cheeks, reddened before by the fire-shine. It was as ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown

... the river. Now he knew this road to be seldom used, and therefore he wondered who could be riding it at a gallop in this blistering midday heat. A few rods farther on and his quick eye detected something else—something that brought him from his saddle. Out of the rut he picked a cigarette butt, the fire of which was cold but the paper of which was still wet from the smoker's lips. He examined it carefully; then he remounted and rode ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... down, Perfessor," he urged, with great cordiality. "Well, well, well! It's good to see you again, be hanged if it ain't now! How's things down to the bluffs? Joggin' along, joggin' along in the same old rut, the way the feller with the wheelbarrer went to market? Eh? Haw, haw, haw! Have ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... did make good, holding in spite of that fierce drag. The water soon got down to about its normal level, when the pull upon the hawsers ceased, and everything seemed to settle back into the old rut. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren

... get out of the old rut without twisting off the wheel, or snapping the shafts, or breaking the horse's leg, is a question not more appropriate to every teamster than to every Christian worker. Having once got out of the old rut, the next thing ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... of hooked thorns that overhung the broken path; I rode in advance, my face and arms bleeding with countless scratches, while at each rip of a thorn I gave a warning shout— "Thorn!" for those behind, and a cry of "Hole!" for any deep rut that lay in the path. It was fortunately moonlight, but the jungle was so thick that the narrow track was barely perceptible; thus both camels and donkeys ran against the trunks of trees, smashing the luggage, and breaking all that could be broken; ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... President known how much reason there was to fear that treachery might be exercised towards Maitland, he would surely not have suffered him thus to risk his valuable life. Rut he was ignorant of all the peculiar circumstances that had occurred to show that he was a special mark for the vengeance of Coubitant: and the confidence he felt in his courage and ability led him—on this ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb

... disgust at their closer relations into what promised to be ardent affection, but it drooped into bored routine. Yet she existed only for him and for the children, and she was as sorry, as worried as himself, when he gave up the law and trudged on in a rut ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... of wealth is not, except in very rare cases, the controlling motive in the lives of our wealthy men of affairs. It is rather the joy and the satisfaction of achievement. But nevertheless it is possible, as has so often proved, to get so much into a habit and thereby into a rut, that one becomes a victim of habit; and the life with all its superb possibilities of human service, and therefore of true greatness, ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... Borden with many kindly qualities looked at matters only as they applied to herself. When Marilla was eighteen she would come to the freedom of a bound-out girl, too old to begin another life, settled in a rut—if she lived. Was she not one of the little ones that might be rescued and live out a higher life? There were many who could not, but she felt she must ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas

... "I'm in a rut! I've got to figure out some way to ship a pirate crew without having to kidnap them. This ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster

... laminitis, etc., are predisposed to sprains of the fetlock. It generally happens from a misstep, stumbling, or slipping, which results in the joint being extended or flexed to excess. The same result may happen where the foot is caught in a rut, a hole in a bridge, or in a car track, and the animal falls or struggles violently. Direct blows and punctured wounds may also set up inflammation of ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... She is quite shut out! She might call and shout, But no one about Would ever call back, "Who's there?" There is never a hut, Not a door to shut, Not a footpath or rut, Long road or ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald

... closer together. Dead horses, shattered guns, wagons, and limbers lay overturned in the ditches. At one spot on the roadside the legs and buttocks of a man, all brown and shrivelled, slanted upwards from a deep, wide rut, many heavy wheels having passed across ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt

... told we should reach before sunset. You can hardly conceive the miseries of this cross-road journey. The route royale was, in fact, completely impassable; because they were repairing it. Alarmed at the ruggedness of the cross-road, where one wheel was in a rut of upwards of a foot deep, and the other elevated in proportion—we got out, and resolved to push on a-foot. We walked for nearly two leagues, before our conveyance overtook us—so harassing and so apparently insurmountable seemed to be the road. But the cunning aubergiste had now got rid of his ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... former plunging into the narrow, heavily shaded track that ran through ravine and over ridge, now beside the water and now in close woods of birch and hemlock. The road was bad, but Selim and his master bent to it grimly, with no nice avoidance of rut or stone or sunken place. To the horse there was before him food and rest, to the man his home. They took at the same pace the much of rough and the little of smooth, and the miles fell behind them. The sun was high, but there were threatening masses of clouds, with now and then a ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... impressing his heart. We are almost driven to fear that in the case of his rich talent the poverty of heart alone determined his choice of satire. And how could we otherwise explain the fact that he could pursue so long a road without ever issuing from its narrow rut? Whatever may be the variety of matter and of external forms, we see the inner form return everywhere with its sterile and eternal uniformity, and in spite of his so productive career, he never accomplished in himself the circle of humanity, that ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... while sorrow kept Marie much to the rut in which she had moved since Osborn's departure; but the grief for a parent is so natural and inevitable a grief; it is not as the grief for a husband or a child; and when the first warm days of April came Marie took some ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton

... golf links the coroner was bending over, examining something on the ground. When I reached him he grabbed me by the sleeve and pointed to two barely discernible tracks paralleling each other for almost a hundred yards. Between them ran a shallow, jagged rut, where the spade of an aeroplane had dug up ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny

... Cap returned, and Bud, with observant eye, soon timed his step to Margaret's on her other side and touched her elbow lightly to help her over the next rut. This was his second lesson in manners from Gardley. He had his first the Sunday before, watching the two while he and Cap walked behind. Bud was learning. He had keen eyes and an alert brain. Margaret smiled understandingly ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... a little out of the rut, that you have taken a hand, even if it is a dummy's hand, in the game of life! Do you ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... up a punk game. Never was much good at golf. But it will help get me back into the rut. Then I 'll sail about the first of August for New York and put ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... upon the side railing. A brace of truculent beasts of frighteningly saurian mien shuffled ponderously along in the loose harness. From time to time, one or the other would stumble over a turn in his rut and emit a menacing rumble as if he suspected his team mate of ...
— A Transmutation of Muddles • Horace Brown Fyfe

... think of his father's being attacked like that, hit with a lightning bolt out of a clear sky. The more he thought about it the more he resented it. Of course Dad would agree. He was a good sport as Mr. Cressy said. Rut that didn't make the thing ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... knowledge that the ships from France were returning every autumn with great supplies of fish cured and salted; for an adequate supply of salt fish was becoming a matter of great importance to the markets of western Europe. In 1527 Henry VIII sent two ships under the command of John Rut to explore the North-American coast, and Captain Rut seems to have reached the Straits of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Labrador (then blocked with ice so that he took them for a bay), and afterwards ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston

... that Time's wheel had been whirling on, fashioning her to a woman; that, while she had been living and learning and seeing the manners of men and cities, the Ghetto, unaffected by her experiences, had gone on in the same narrow rut. A new generation of children had arisen to suffer and sport in room of the old, and that was all. The thought overwhelmed her, gave her a new and poignant sense of brute, blind forces; she seemed to catch in this familiar scene ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... Indeed, there have been many instances in real life where the villain and the hero have been on excellent terms, and to the great benefit of the hero too. But in this case Balderstone was to follow in the rut, and become the rival of Osborne for the hand of Marguerite Andrews—the heroine. Balderstone was to write a book, which for a time should so fascinate Miss Andrews that she would be blind to the desirability of Osborne ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs

... matter what he did—just so he got out of this rut. In a dream he stepped from the elevator into the stock-room, and walking to an unused aisle, sat down on a box, covering his face ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... the same road was a refugee mother and several little children in a donkey cart; behind the cart, attached by a rope, trundled a baby buggy with the youngest child inside. The buggy suddenly struck a rut in the road and overturned, spilling the baby into the mud. Terrible wails arose, and the soldiers stiffened to attention. Then, seeing the accident, the entire company broke ranks and rescued the infant. They wiped the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... the owner of three steamers and ten barges. On the Volga he was respected as a rich and clever man, but was nicknamed "Frantic," because his life did not flow along a straight channel, like that of other people of his kind, but now and again, boiling up turbulently, ran out of its rut, away from gain—the prime aim of his existence. It looked as though there were three Gordyeeffs in him, or as though there were three souls in Ignat's body. One of them, the mightiest, was only greedy, and ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... us to Saint-Paul-du-Var along the road that began to avoid the valley after passing Villeneuve-Loubet. It was one of those routes nationales of which the France of motorists is so proud, hard and smooth and rounded to drain quickly, never allowing itself a rut or a steep grade or a sharp turn. This national highway was like all the easy paths in life. It meant the shortest distance comfortably possible for obtaining your objective. It eliminated surprises. ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... brother had been left in camp as guards. They were sitting idly warming themselves in the first sunbeams, when their attention was sharply drawn to four buffaloes that were coming to the pool to drink. The beasts came down a game trail, a deep rut in the bluff, fronting where they were sitting, and they did not dare to stir for fear of being discovered. The buffaloes walked into the pool, and after drinking their fill, stood for some time with the water running out of their mouths, idly lashing their sides with ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... do one of two things," saith Father: "either to fall into a rut, or to leave the road altogether. Either his charity contracteth, and he can see none right that walk not in his rut; or else his charity breaketh all bounds, and he would have all to be right, ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt

... a girl as you are!" exclaimed Winn, impatiently. "You are always making objections to my plans, and telling me that I'm only a boy. You'd rather any time travel in a rut that some one else had made than mark out a track for yourself. For my part, I'd much rather think out my own plans ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe

... flushed with exercise and animation; Arthur talking fast about the covers and the game, and Violet in such high spirits, that she volunteered a history of their trouble with Skylark, and 'some dear little partridges that could not get out of a cart rut.' ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... who take the Bible the way Islam took the Q'ran wind up in the same rut. But as a whole, Europe was sparked enough by the original Islamic explosion that the Renaissance resulted, with what world results we all ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... Probably it had once been a regular timbered entrance, like the one on the other side of the hill, but it had fallen in, the rocks wedging to form a low passage into the tunnel inside. The whole hillside was overgrown with brambles, down to the two-rut road below them, almost at the place where they ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... incomparably greater advantages of soil and climate than Ulster, with better harbours and a better trading position. But instead of working they stand with folded hands complaining. Instead of putting their own shoulders to the wheel they wait for somebody to lift them out of the rut. Instead of modern methods of agriculture, fishing, or what not, they cling to the ancient ways, and resent advice. The women will not take service; the men will not dig, chop, hammer. They are essentially bone-idle—laziness is in their blood. They will not exert themselves. As Father McPhilpin ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... means. Here we dined in a new inn, or rather tavern, kept by a French Canadian, and then pursued our journey for a few miles on a decent new road, amidst fine settlements and good farms, and, crossing a beautiful stream, plunged into the undisturbed forest by a road in which every rut was a canal, and every stone as big as a bomb-shell at the very least. How the waggon stood it, and the roots and stumps of the trees with which these boulders were diversified, I am still unable to explain; for my part, I walked the greater part of it, for ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... to leave that trail, for it seemed to her that a path along which people had ridden enough to make a deep rut in the sward must be a path that was more or less used all the time. She expected to meet somebody by sticking to this path, or else ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope

... vehicle which bore the lovely object of Ulick Brady's affections had not advanced very far, when, in the midst of a deep rut in the road, it came suddenly to with a jolt; the footman, springing off the back, cried 'Stop!' to the coachman, warning him that a wheel was off, and that it would be dangerous to proceed with only three. Wheel-caps had not been invented in those days, as ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray

... be, she settled back in the capacious, threadbare throne, a slender figure in its depths—more adapted to accommodate a corpulent Henry VIII!—and smiled gaily, as the wagon, in avoiding one rut, ran into another and lurched somewhat violently. Saint-Prosper, lodged on a neighboring trunk, quickly extended a ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... account. A calf once broke from me and foolishly tumbled into a water-pit, from which I delivered it at the hazard of my life. Another time, when the roads were heavy, my waggon was set fast in a clay rut, where I was detained above an hour; two drivers refusing to give me a pull because they had both lived with my malicious master; and a third being only prevailed on, for this master of mine was generally hated, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... of Winstoun speaks intelligibly would be a waste of her time and my own," said the haughty Constance, with the rudeness in which she then delighted, and for which she has since become known. Rut the duchess was not to be offended until she had ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... had been an expedition into the artistic fakery of London, and he would have dismissed the whole affair as a stimulating and amusing diversion from the ultra-aristocratic rut if the personality of Elise Durwent had not remained with ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... the strong Contrebia (south-east of Saragossa) had fallen. In vain the hard-pressed towns had sent message after message to Pompeius; he would not be induced by any entreaties to depart from his wonted rut of slowly advancing. With the exception of the maritime towns, which were defended by the Roman fleet, and the districts of the Indigetes and Laletani in the north-east corner of Spain, where Pompeius established ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... and done the illustrator's strongest asset is spirit. Technique and a grain of insight will help a man over many a rut in portraiture, and a knowledge of patting clay and using a chisel has saved many a sculptor, but technical equipment alone never made an illustrator, because he deals too directly with life in action. Slack drawing and impatience of method will always ...
— The Building of a Book • Various

... bend the knee, and bow the head To reverence the great unread, The great unread and much-reviewed, Whose lines are treasured like the lewd, His first editions prizes reckoned Because there never was a second. Obscurely famous in his rut, Unknown, unpopular, "uncut," Where Byron thrilled a continent, To thrill an auction-room content, He struggles through oblivion's bogs, To gain a place in—catalogues! And falls asleep and joins the dust In simple ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... fielding and pitching combined, we are obliged to make up a record of the percentage of victories as the only reliable figures at command on which to judge the pitching of the season. By and by the Committee of Conference will get out of the old rut in this respect, and then correct data will be available; until then we must do the best we can under the circumstances, and consequently the names of the pitchers of the League Clubs who took part in not less than ten games ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1889 • edited by Henry Chadwick

... his wagon along a miry country road after a heavy rain. The horses could hardly drag the load through the deep mud, and at last came to a standstill when one of the wheels sank to the hub in a rut. ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop

... fact," replied his chum, seriously. "For all we know they may have run across some sign of the rustlers, and thought it best to get out of the beaten rut ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson

... Political Science Quarterly declared this book a welcome addition to the literature of economic theory. "By its critical as well as by its constructive work it helps to force readers out of the deep rut in which Ricardian formulas have so long caused economic ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark

... something more about you. But it's high time we should wet our whistles, and it's but dry talking without something to wash a clear way for the slack. So, boys, be up, and fish up the jemmi-john—I hope it hain't been thumped to bits in the rut. If it has, I shall be ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... you should say so," continued the wise woman, "but you see, my girl, when you go back, you get right in the same rut again, and all those mill girls would just make life miserable for you. I am not encouraging you to stay away from home, but as Molly says, she is a leader in the scout girls you know—she always says when a thing goes wrong in one place it is best to try it in another. ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis

... Sutter decided life was too short to continue in the rut that had been his existence for more than twenty years. He withdrew his savings from the Explosion City Third Federal Bank, stopped in a display room and informed a somewhat surprised clerk he was taking the electric runabout with the blue bonnet. The ground-car, complete with extras, retailed for ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi

... the rest of her clothes matched. But over them the enterprising young man had raised one of those big old sunshades that had lettering on them. It kept wobbling about in the socket he had improvised; one minute we could see "Tea"; then a rut in the road would swing "Coffee" around. Their sunshade kept revolving about that way, and sometimes their heads revolved a little bit, too. We could hear a word occasionally and knew they were having a great deal of fun at our expense; but we were amused ourselves, so we didn't ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart

... papers are brought first to the chief. His decision is at once given and is sent down the hierarchy for elaboration. In other offices the younger men are given invaluable experience, and the elder men are prevented from getting into an official rut by a system which requires that all papers should be sent first to a junior, who sends them up to his senior accompanied not only by the necessary papers but also by a minute of his own suggesting ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas

... through the shallow water without mishap, save when the wheel struck a hidden stone or fell suddenly into a rut; but when they neared the body of the river MacLure halted, to ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren

... weakness. What's our studfee? What will you pay on the nail? You fee mendancers on the Riviera, I read. (The fleeing nymph raises a keen) Eh? I have sixteen years of black slave labour behind me. And would a jury give me five shillings alimony tomorrow, eh? Fool someone else, not me. (He sniffs) Rut. Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... cross-road; the way became frightfully bad; the cart lurched from one rut to the other; he said to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... fear. The text was senseless, I have beaten my head with my fist like a wild man, to try and knock some comprehension into it. For my life had worked itself out along one set groove, deep and narrow. I was in the rut. I had done those things which came to my hand and done them well; but the time was past; I could not turn my hand anew. I, who am strong and dominant, who have played large with destiny, who could buy body and soul a thousand painters and versifiers, was baffled ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... then, is now in a rut which affords no room for the one-act play, and if vaudeville is an empty cradle for this branch of dramatic art, where shall we turn? The one-act play to-day has found refuge and encouragement in the experimental theatres, and among the amateurs. The best one-act ...
— Washington Square Plays - Volume XX, The Drama League Series of Plays • Various

... Washington was too busy with its domestic programme to consider such a proposal seriously. "Your two letters," wrote Colonel House in reply, "have come to me and lifted me out of the rut of things and given me a glimpse of a fair land. What you are thinking of and what you want this Administration to do is beyond the power of accomplishment for the moment. My desk is covered with matters of no lasting ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... been compiled with one end in view: to arrange in a convenient and inexpensive form the fundamentals of verse—enough for the student who takes up verse as a literary exercise or for the older verse writer who has fallen into a rut or who is a bit shaky on theory. It is even hoped that there may be a word of help for some ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow

... something is going to happen," was Tom's comment, and scarcely had he spoken when they went down into a rut and Sam was flung up and over a wheel into some brushwood. Then the team ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)

... the ragman, or send them to the county or city poor house. There is nothing that will keep you in a rut of shabbiness more than ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... to this place through a kind of courtyard formed by the rear of the chateau and the walls of two low wings devoted to the stables and the servants' quarters. Within, a high clump of dark- green myrtle, ringed with muddy, rut-scarred turf, marked the theoretical limits of a driveway. Along the right-hand wall stood the rifles of the wounded, and in a corner, a great snarled pile of bayonets, belts, cartridge-boxes, gas-mask satchels, greasy tin boxes of anti-lice ointment, and dented helmets. A bright winter sunlight ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan

... that would please the King do make him believe that all is safe: and so he hath heard my Lord Chancellor openly say to the King, that he was now a glorious prince, and in a glorious condition, because of some one accident that hath happened, or some one rut that hath been removed; "when," says Sir W. Coventry "they reckoned their one good meal, without considering that there was nothing left in the cupboard for to-morrow." After this discourse to my Lord Sandwich's, and took a quarter of ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys

... buggy leapt high at a rut. For a frantic minute perhaps everything seemed to be going in leaps ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... agree on the task to be accomplished; but what are the best means to accomplish it—that is not always so easy to agree upon! The older worker may think the younger worker's plans wild and impracticable. The younger worker may think the older worker stodgy and in a rut. Perhaps both may be right. Happy the fellow workers who can learn to discuss their pet ideas without heat! Happy the fellow workers who can develop just the right combination ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson

... long red rut, went the narrow road, and was so deeply cut into the soil that a horseman passing down it could see nothing of its bordering fields; but about fifty yards from the first great oak the land suddenly dipped, and showed on the left a steep cup-like glen, choked with trees, ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow

... Rut whether the Elephant is wanted as a beast of burden, or it is only his great tusks that are desired, it is no joke to hunt him. He will not attack a man without provocation (except in very rare cases); when he does get in a passion it is time for ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... purpose, and to get the most direct and natural means. If this is too much of a task, just hunt for the obsolete features. Above all things, we must not try to follow another's work. We too often follow unwittingly and to our misfortune even when we try to keep out of the rut. ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness

... clumsily threw his arms around her. She recoiled in disgust, but he seized her, overpowered her by sheer brute strength, leered at her like some gibbering ape, polluted her lips with whiskey-laden kisses, claimed possession of her body with the unreasoning frenzy of a beast in rut. ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow

... these languages, the need of scrupulous search to find the nearest equivalents for words that differ widely in their scope of meaning from their derivatives in any modern vocabulary, the effort of lifting one's self out of the familiar rut of ideas into so foreign a world, all these things act as a tonic exercise to the brain. And it is a demonstrable fact that students of the classics do actually surpass their unclassical rivals in any field where a fair test can be made. At Princeton, for instance, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... them waxed fierce and hard. And remembering their (late) disgrace at the hands of Duryodhana, and proud of the strength of his arms, and conscious also of Krishna looking at him, Vrikodara began to swell in vigour. And fried with anger, Bhima seized the Rakshasa with his arms, as one elephant in rut seizeth another. And the powerful Rakshasa also in his turn seized his adversary, but Bhimasena that foremost of all men endued with strength, threw the cannibal down with violence. The sounds that in consequence of those mighty combatants pressing each other's hands, were frightful and resembled ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... in the circus business," began Mr. Preston. "I have a number of traveling shows, and several large museums in the big cities. I am always on the lookout for new attractions, for the public demands them. Once get in the rut of having nothing new, and your business will fall off. I know, for I've been in the business, man and boy, for nearly forty years. I began as a performer, and I can still do a double somersault over fifteen elephants in a row. I always ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton



Words linked to "Rut" :   furrow, oestrus, estrus, physiological state, channel, cut into, modus operandi, anestrus, physical condition, delve, routine, dig, turn over, be, groove, physiological condition



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