"The pits" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... did Julius Caesar; then with the help of one hand he entered forcibly into a boat, from whence he cast himself again headlong into the water, sounded the depths, hollowed the rocks, and plunged into the pits and gulfs. Then turned he the boat about, governed it, led it swiftly or slowly with the stream and against the stream, stopt it in its course, guided it with one hand, and with the other laid hard about him with a huge great oar, hoisted the sail, hied ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... was a row of rifle pits, four feet deep in the slaty white rock. On the opposite hill, across the marshy hollow, at a distance of two hundred yards, was a line of wooden targets, painted white with black circles. Poised at intervals on the forward edge of the pits were a number of automatic rifles of the type used by the French army. An American soldier and a French soldier attended each one, the former in the firing position and the ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... wonder, always, everywhere— Not that vast mutability which is event, The pits and pinnacles of change, But man's desire and valiance that range All circumstance, and ...
— Abraham Lincoln • John Drinkwater
... But he waited in vain for his triumph, nor dare I in my heavy months expect bright days. The book was heartily grateful, and square to the author's imperial scale. You have lighted the glooms, and engineered away the pits, whereof you poetically pleased yourself with complaining, in your sometime letter to me, clean out of it, according to the high Italian rule, and have let sunshine and pure air enfold the scene. First, I read it honestly through ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... pendants, so they show the mandarin was a gentleman of the third class under the emperor. They have been in Mr. Tang's family's possession for generations. You will notice this one of carved beads is made of beads which are formed from the pits of the Chinese olive. There are two hundred beads and on each is carved some figure or scene which in all represent the ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Entrance of the palace, beneath the room where, the year before, had been found the fresco of the Little Boy Blue gathering crocuses—an innocent figure to cover so grim a revelation—there came to light the walls of two deep pits, going right down, nearly 25 feet, to the virgin soil. The pits were lined with stone-work faced with smooth cement, and it seems most probable that these were the dungeons of the palace, in which we may imagine that the miserable captives brought back by the great King's fleet ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... Only rarely was there time to go from the Tyne or the Wear or the Clyde to my home in London. Coal is shipped and ore discharged in the North. But even the North meant little to me beyond the staiths where the coal came down from the pits, and the dirty, rain-swept back streets where the shipping-offices were. Once or twice I tried to get quit of the ship and went inland by rail. I saw cathedrals and castles and temperance hotels. A bleak and unfriendly land! Somehow I could ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... my right and began to mass troops behind them, and General Gilbert, fearing that my intrenched position on the heights might be carried, directed me to withdraw Hescock and his supports and return them to the pits. My recall was opportune, for I had no sooner got back to my original line than the Confederates attacked me furiously, advancing almost to my intrenchments, notwithstanding that a large part of the ground over which they ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... properly washed, the contained reefs will present this wall-like appearance. The dimensions are ten feet long by the same height and half that thickness, and the slope shows an angle of 40. We passed onwards to the top of the ridge, winding among the pits and round holes sunk by the native miners in order to work the casing of the reef. One of these, carefully measured, showed 82 feet. About sixty yards to the north-north-east we reached the crest of what Mr. Ross calls 'Ponsonby Hill.' He notices that the strike of the quartz, which shows ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... stand there and ask me what about it, and haven't the sense to alter it? Couldn't you set up a proper Government to-morrow, if you liked? Couldn't you contrive that the pits belonged to you, instead of you belonging to the pits, like so many old pit-ponies that stop down till they are blind, and take to eating coal-slack for meadow-grass, not knowing the difference? If only you'd learn to think, I'd respect you. As you are, I can't, not if ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... evidently thrive upon meat and rice. Flesh is retailed in the bazar, and mutton is cheap, especially when the Bedawin are near; a fine large sheep being dear at ten shillings. Water is exceptionally abundant, even without the condenser's aid. The poorer classes and animals are watered at the pits and the two regular wells near the valley's mouth, half an hour's trudge from the town. The wealthy are supplied by the inland fort, which we shall presently visit: the distance going and coming would be about four slow hours, and the skinful costs ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... In the summer-time, after the sash are stripped, the old beds may be used for the growing of various delicate crops, as melons or half-hardy flowers. In this position, the plants can be protected in the fall. As already suggested, the pits should be cleaned out in the fall and filled with litter to facilitate the work of making the new bed in ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... not been built for such harmless spectacles as those first described. The fierce Romans wanted to be excited and feel themselves strongly stirred; and, presently, the doors of the pits and dens round the arena were thrown open, and absolutely savage beasts were let loose upon one another—rhinoceroses and tigers, bulls and lions, leopards and wild boars—while the people watched with savage curiosity to see the various kinds of attack and defense; or, if the animals ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... indoctrinate his comrades with a spirit of revolt. His influence grew, and he became the acknowledged leader of the strike which followed. The result was disastrous. After weeks of misery from cold and hunger the infuriated workmen attempted to destroy one of the pits, and were fired upon by soldiers sent to guard it. Many were killed, and the survivors, with their spirits crushed, returned to work. But worse was yet to come. Souvarine, an Anarchist, disgusted with the ineffectual struggle, brought about an inundation of the pit, whereby many ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... them, scattered along the river's bars, waist high in the pits. Here and there a tent showed white, but a blanket under a tree, a pile of pans by a blackened heap of fire marked most of the camps. Some of the gold-hunters had not waited to undo their packs which lay as they had been dropped, and the owners, ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... Hezekiah—but he forgot to say that he had first make cherries of the red-coats, by putting the pits into them." ...
— The Yankee Tea-party - Or, Boston in 1773 • Henry C. Watson
... one survived to carry the tidings to their Lord. When the people of Hormos heard of this they went forth to bury the bodies lest they should breed a pestilence. But when they laid hold of them by the arms to drag them to the pits, the bodies proved to be so baked, as it were, by that tremendous heat, that the arms parted from the trunks, and in the end the people had to dig graves hard by each where it lay, and ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... excavation of tombs which has gone on in Egypt during the last few years; and it is also easy to see that he, in common with many other Coptic writers, misunderstood the purport of them. The outer darkness, i.e., the blackest place of all in the underworld, the river of fire, the pits of fire, the snake and the scorpion, and such like things, all have their counterparts, or rather originals, in the scenes which accompany the texts which describe the passage of the sun through the underworld during the hours of the night. Having once misunderstood ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... they call them Perlerinos. Indeed, to say the truth, the damsel is like any oriental pearl, and looked at on the right side seems a very flower of the field; but on the left not quite so fair, for on that side she wants an eye, which she lost by the small-pox; and though the pits in her face are many and deep, her admirers say they are not pits but graves wherein the hearts of her lovers are buried. So clean and delicate, too, is she, that to prevent defiling her face, she carries her nose so hooked up that it seems to ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... 'the human form divine,' in order to make fantastic playthings for the amusement of the noble-born. But history does not state that these deformities were inherited; certainly no race of monsters has resulted. The pits from small-pox are not inherited, though many successive generations must have been thus pitted by that disease before the beneficent discovery of the immortal Jenner. Children born with scars left by pustules have had small-pox in the womb, acquired through the system of ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... in the pits of despondency, even as one that yieldeth without further struggle to the waves of tempest at midnight, when he was ware of one standing over him,—a woman, old, wrinkled, a very crone, with but room for the drawing of a thread between her nose and her chin; she was, as is cited of them who ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hoped against hope. At least he could be revenged, and in his wrath it seemed to him that he was equal to the task of wiping out the entire population of that terrible city. It was nearly noon when he reached the great bowlder at the top of which terminated the secret passage to the pits beneath the city. Like a cat he scaled the precipitous sides of the frowning granite KOPJE. A moment later he was running through the darkness of the long, straight tunnel that led to the treasure vault. Through this he passed, then on and on until at last he came to the well-like shaft upon ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in its top a tripod fitted with a "nigger head" operated by a rope sheave. This arrangement is shown by Fig. 56. An engine on the bank operated by a rope drive all the tripod sheaves for a row of six or eight caissons. The arrangement is indicated by Fig. 55. The clay hoisted from the pits was dumped into 1 cu. yd. hoppers with which the stands were fitted, as shown by Fig. 56; when a hopper was full it was dumped into a car running on a 24-in. gage portable track. Side dump Koppel cars of 1 cu. yd. capacity were used; they dumped their load into an opening connected with the tracks ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... nothing, absolutely nothing—just that seemingly endless stretch of sand, circled by the blazing sky, the wind sweeping its surface soundless, and hot, as though from the pits of hell; no stir, no motion, no movement of anything animate or inanimate to break the awful monotony. Death! it was death everywhere! his aching eyes rested on nothing but what was typical of death. Even the heat waves seemed fantastic, grotesque, assuming spectral ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... the local painters of what they have to point out. East from White Hill you may follow a single track, sometimes grass, sometimes modern road. There is a puzzle at Godstone Quarry, where the chalk pits have cut the hill to pieces, and the tiny path which perhaps still keeps the line across the pits is a perilous slippery place in the rain. On the far side of to-day's road by the chalk pit you may pick up the green track again, though you will lose it rounding the spur of the hill that lies half way between Godstone ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the pits increased in size. At first they were about as large as a threepenny-piece, but ended by measuring more than two ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... Gorman mounted the platform, the narrow strip of platform left for him in front of the pits occupied by Tim's apparatus. The clatter of general conversation ceased, and the Cabinet Ministers, sitting in the front row with Ascher, clapped their hands. The rest of the audience, realising that applause ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... hear the whistle of boats on the surface, and also their propellers when running close, to the boat. At 3.30 the temperature had dropped to eighty-five degrees. At 3.45 found a little sign of carbonic acid gas, very slight, however, as a candle would burn fairly bright in the pits. Thought we could detect a smell of gasoline by comparing the fresh air which came down the pipe (when hand blower was turned). Storage lamps were burning during the five hours of submergence, while engine ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... raking the field right and left. Our sharpshooters gave the cannoneers a telling fire, and as the enemy's infantry in the fort rose above the parapets to deliver their volley, they were met by volleys from our sharpshooters in the pits, now in rear of the assaulting columns, and firing over their heads. When near the fort the troops found yet a more serious obstruction in the way of stout wires stretched across their line of approach. This, however, was overcome and passed, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... done. There was no hope save in prayer. Restlessness seized Benita, and taking the lantern she wandered round the cave. The wall that they had built remained intact, and oh! to think that beyond it flowed the free air and shone the blessed stars! Back she came again, skirting the pits that Jacob Meyer had dug, and the grave of the old monk, till she reached the steps of the crucifix, and holding up her candle, looked at the thorn-crowned brow ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... distant from his ancient abode, was a point on which neither Mervyn, nor any of those with whom I had means of intercourse, afforded any information. Whether he had shared the common fate, and had been carried by the collectors of the dead from the highway or the hovel to the pits opened alike for the rich and the poor, the known and the unknown; whether he had escaped to a foreign shore, or were destined to reappear upon this stage, were questions involved ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... her cerements—erased her plague-marks. The dead-cart's dreadful bell no longer sounded in the silence of an afflicted city. Coffins no longer stood at every other door; the pits at Finsbury, in Tothill Fields, at Islington, were all filled up and trampled down; and the grass was beginning to grow over the forgotten dead. The Judges came back to Westminster. London was alive again—alive and healed; basking in the sunshine ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... was turned to her, just as if he had been sitting squarely in front of her. Some laughed at this foolish notion; but others, who knew more of the nebulous sciences, told her it was like's not jes' so. Folks had read letters laid ag'in' the pits o' their stomachs, 'n' why should n't they see out o' ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... bury our dead; which was done by digging large pits, sufficient to contain about a hundred corpses. Then taking off their clothes, with heavy hearts, we threw them into the pits, with very little regard to order, and covered them ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... of time in transferring the ingots, after allowing for this loss, there remains a surplus, which goes into the brickwork of the soaking pits, so that this surplus of heat from successive ingots tends continually to keep the pits at the intense heat of the ingot itself. Thus, occasionally it happens that inadvertently an ingot is delayed so long on its way to the pit as to arrive there somewhat short of heat, its temperature will be raised by ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... either side. Some of the Christian native infantry soldiers suffered from the bamboo spikes (Spanish, puas) set in the ground around the stockades, but the enemy had not had time to cover with brushwood the pits dug for the attacking party to fall into. In about two months the operations ended by the submission of some chiefs of minor importance and influence; and after spending so much powder and shot and ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... when the great tree had been sawn into lengths, and with the aid of many teams brought home, and the pits and the hoisting tackle were being prepared and strengthened to deal with it, Mr. Gundry, being full of the subject, declared that he would have his dinner in the mill yard. He was anxious to watch, without ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... the pits at Hurstbourne was evidently a cooking-hole, where the pit dwellers prepared their feasts, and bones of the Celtic ox (bos longifrons), pig, red deer, goat, dog, and hare or rabbit were found near it. One of the bones had evidently been bitten by teeth. The ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... effective unless fired from very close quarters, but even its possession made the guerrillas stronger than the people of the country and undoubtedly had much to do with securing their cooeperation, not only as bolomen but also in the digging of the pits which were placed in the trails and also set about the towns. These were required to be constructed by the local authorities. In the bottom was set a sharp spike of bamboo, sometimes poisoned; and the pit was covered with leaves and soil upon a fragile ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... were discussing the resolution passed by the Corporation regarding the main street, viz., that the inhabitants were to fill up the pits and ditches in the street, and that neither manure nor the dead bodies of domestic animals should be used for the purpose, but only broken tiles, etc., from the ruins of ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... easy work, either," said Hans. "After the trees have been cut down, the pits have to be made with the greatest care, and the wood must be burned just so slowly to change it into charcoal. I once spent a day in the forest with some charcoal-burners. They told such good stories that night came before I had thought ...
— Bertha • Mary Hazelton Wade
... as in an old English park. Along the top of this ridge ran a solid stone wall, thicker and of heavier stones than any we saw in the neighborhood. Where the wall ended rifle pits had been dug. Behind the massive trunks, and in the branches of the old trees, behind this wall and in the pits, were crowded the sharpshooters of the rebels. The ascent from the bridge out of the valley on the enemy's side, was too steep for a straight road up the ridge. If ever a bridge could be defended, that should have been; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... shall float Upon the abhorred sea, that mankind hate, With thee and thine." She answered: "God forbid! For, sir, though men be evil, yet the deep They dread, and at the last will surely turn To Him, and He long-suffering will forgive. And chide the waters back to their abyss, To cover the pits where doleful creatures feed. Sir, I am much afraid: I would not hear Of riding on the waters: look you, sir, Better it were to die with you by hand Of them that hate us, than to live, ah me! Rolling among the furrows of the unquiet, Unconsecrate, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... ashore with the pinnace, and having caused three pits to be dug he at last found fresh water forcing its way through the sand; we used our best endeavours to take in a stock of the same; about 400 paces north of the farthest of the pits that had been dug, they also found a small fresh-water lake, but the water that collected in the pits was found to be a ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... the name; and now he seemed to see the burning tents at Ludlow; the fleeing women and children, shot down by barbarous thugs and gunmen, ghouls in human form! He saw the pits of death, where the charred bodies of innocent victims of greed and heartless rapacity lay in mute protest under the far Colorado sky. And more he saw, east and west, north and south, of this man's inhuman work; and his thoughts, projected into the future, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... them just skinned, for she meant playing a trick upon her father. Then she dug four pits for us to lie in, and sat down to wait till we should come up. When we were close to her, she made us lie down in the pits one after the other, and threw a seal skin over each of us. Our ambuscade would have been intolerable, for the stench of the fishy seals was most distressing {45}—who would go to bed with a sea monster if he could help it?—but here, too, ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... was in the long ago when man was young, we lived beside great swamps, where the hills drew down close to the wide, sluggish river, and where our women gathered berries and roots, and there were herds of deer, of wild horses, of antelope, and of elk, that we men slew with arrows or trapped in the pits or hill-pockets. From the river we caught fish in nets twisted by the women of the bark ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... to be caused by flanges projecting from the under surface, almost like stands. They are sometimes connected in such a way that the parallel flanges appear like the letter 'h' with the two down-strokes much prolonged. In the morning the chalky rubble brought from the pits upon the Downs and used for mending gateways leading into the fields glistens brightly. Upon the surface of each piece of rubble there adheres a thin coating of ice: if this be lightly struck it falls off, and with it a flake of the chalk. As it melts, too, the chalk splits and crumbles; ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... about, according as we wished to fire, it also meant that we should probably be able to mislead the enemy as to our numbers—which, by such shifting tactics might, for a time at least, be much exaggerated. The pits for fire to the north and south were nearly all so placed as to allow the occupants to fire at ground-level over the veldt. They were placed well among the bushes, only just sufficient scrub being ...
— The Defence of Duffer's Drift • Ernest Dunlop Swinton
... they set off to visit the pits, accompanied by the boys. In rather more than an hour they came back, Leo and Natty dragging a beautiful little animal between them, while the two men brought the head and skin and a quantity of meat of another. David, who was with me, ran out ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... the open vessels in the hardwoods, free resin ducts in the softwoods, and possibly the intercellular spaces, the cells of green wood are enclosed by membranes and the water must pass through the walls or the membranes of the pits. Heat appears to increase this transfusion, but experimental data ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... ago, the celebrated Decatur superintended, during many weeks, the casting of twenty-four pounders, to be used in the famous contest with the Algerine pirates whom he humbled; and the echoes of the forest were awakened with strange thunders then. As the great guns were raised from the pits in which they had been cast, and were declared ready for proof, Decatur ordered each one to be loaded with repeated charges of powder and ball, and pointed into the woods. Then, for miles between the grazed and quivering boles, crashed the missiles of destruction, startling bear ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... at the end o' the year, if we're spared, we'll see what we'll see. We'll have among ourselves a little sup o' tay, plase goodness, an' we'll be comfortable. Now, Barny, go an' draw home thim phaties from the pits while the day's fine; and Katty, a colleen, bring in some wather, till we get the pig killed and scalded—it'll hardly have time to be good bacon for the big markets at Christmas. I don't wish," she continued, "to keep it ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... and the fickle goddess will perhaps remain faithful to him longer than to many others, for he is busy from early till late, and is his father's right-hand. At least he won't fall into one of the pits ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... rival was quite open to view; a garden exposed to the sun; cabinets with glass walls, shelves, cupboards, boxes, and ticketed pigeon-holes, which could easily be surveyed by the telescope. Boxtel allowed his bulbs to rot in the pits, his seedlings to dry up in their cases, and his tulips to wither in the borders and henceforward occupied himself with nothing else but the doings at Van Baerle's. He breathed through the stalks of Van Baerle's tulips, quenched his thirst with ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... the beauty or completeness of an object is a blemish, whether original, as squinting eyes, or the result of accident or disease, etc., as the pits of smallpox. A blemish is superficial; a flaw or taint is in structure or substance. In the moral sense, we speak of a blot or stain upon reputation; a flaw or taint in character. A ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Vittoria! Countess Alessandra Ammiani! pity me. Hear this:—I hated you as the devil is hated. Yesterday I woke up in prison to hear that I must adore you. God of all the pits of punishment! was there ever one like this? I ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Remove the pits from a large cup of stewed prunes and chop fine. Add the whites of three eggs and a half cup of sugar beaten to a stiff froth. Mix well, turn into a buttered dish and bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven. Serve with whipped cream. If it is desired to cook this in individual ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum
... flames from cavernous throats; huge birds, enormous reptiles, flew or crawled in their appointed places. Two-headed men wielded clubs of stone; men with no heads at all, but one great eye in the centre of their breasts, glared malevolently from the pits wherein they had their habitation. The little company in the tavern parlour shivered with affright, and cast uneasy glances at the doorway. Then—wonderful Rob!—a sinewy, thumbless hand swept the ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... is sometimes taken by children in eating the pits of stone fruits or bitter almonds which contain it. The antidote is to empty the stomach by an emetic, and give water of ammonia or chloric water. Affusions of cold water all over the body, followed by warm hand friction, is often a remedy ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... see that there had once been considerable excavations, but the good layers were now deeply covered by talus, and could only be exposed after much digging. It was about thirty years since the pits had been worked. Dr. Bacmeister found for us a strong country youth, Max Deschle, who dug under our direction all next day in the quarry near the house. The rock is not so easy to work as that at Florissant, and it does not split so well into slabs, but we readily ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... the meantime prepare for a sporting excursion, and order a number of pits to be dug on the road sufficiently large to hold Rustem and his horse, and in each several swords must be placed with their points and edges upwards. The mouths of the pits must then be slightly covered over, but so carefully that there may be no appearance of the earth underneath having been removed. Everything being thus ready, Rustem, on the pretence of going to the ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... hardly been resumed when there was another attack; but this time the pits near the old blockhouse got the range of the malignant marksmen and shattered them with a few shots. The Texas and Panther shelled the brush to the eastward, but the chaplain kept right on with the service, and from that time until ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... surveyor's level can be relied on, the same may be said of the Cavern Pit and some others." The rivers of the Cave were unknown at the time of Mr. Lee's visit in 1835, but they are unquestionably lower than the bottom of the pits, and receive the water which flows from them. According to the statement of Lee, the bed of these rivers is lower than the bed of Green River at its junction with the Ohio, taking for granted that the report of the State ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... by means of shafting, gearing, or belting, but I mean transmission over long distances. In 1831, we had for this purpose flat rods, as they were called, rods transmitting power from pumping engines for a considerable distance to the pits where the pumps were placed, and we had also the pneumatic, the exhaustion system—the invention of John Hague, a Yorkshire-man, my old master, to whom I was apprenticed—which mode of transmission was then used to a very considerable extent. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... throughout the East of storing grain in covered pits, the supply obtained as forage for the horses largely exceeded expectations, for the peasants regarded the British as deliverers from their oppressors, and upon being assured by the sheik that they paid well for everything that they required, the pits that had escaped the French searchers were thrown open at once. General Hutchinson, on his return to carry out the siege of Alexandria to a conclusion, reported to Admiral Keith his very warm appreciation of the services that Lieutenant Blagrove had rendered him. Long before ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... huts of the natives; this being the first time the coffle had entered a town since leaving Gambia. As soon as the rain was over, went with Mr. Anderson to see the gold pits which are near this town. The pits are dug exactly in the same manner as at Shrondo; a section of the pit ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... Born, no doubt, like insects which breed on The very fruit they are meant to feed on. 360 For the earth—not a use to which they don't turn it, The ore that grows in the mountain's womb, Or the sand in the pits like a honeycomb, They sift and soften it, bake it and burn it— Whether they weld you, for instance, a snaffle 365 With side-bars never a brute can baffle; Or a lock that's a puzzle of wards within wards; Or, if your colt's forefoot inclines to curve ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... that," Cairns said, "but there have been multitudes to tell Woman her faults. Bedient restores the dreams of women.... It is Woman who has turned the brute mind of the world from War, and Woman will turn the furious current of the race to-day from the Pits of Trade, where abides the ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... and launched themselves in a solid mass upon the two. Chet saw Anita for one instant as he felt himself lifted in air. About him was a pandemonium of flailing wings; ahead and below was the red of hidden fires. They were being lifted out and over the pits. ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... reaches its final dimensions. If we pass an attentive lens between the two humps at the lower end, we very often see, encrusted in the earthy mass, the remains of the shell of the egg. This is the potter's mark. The arrangement of the spiral ridges, the number and the shape of the pits enable us almost to read the name of the maker, Clythra ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... New-Year to civilized, people,—mere white folks. Our festival has come and gone, with perfect success, and our good General has been altogether satisfied. Last night the great fires were kept smouldering in the pits, and the beeves were cooked more or less, chiefly more,—during which time they had to be carefully watched, and the great spits turned by main force. Happy were the merry fellows who were permitted to sit up all night, and watch ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... summer-houses in which nearly a whole tribe might be sheltered. The horizon in the background was shut out by pine-clad mountains, having here and there red, barren spots. Columns of smoke rose out of the dark foliage from the pits of ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... charge came. Nothing could stop it. Down went man and horse, line upon line of them swept to death by the pitiless English arrows, but still more rushed on. They fell in the pits that had been dug; they died beneath the shafts and the hoofs of those that followed, but still they struggled on, shouting: "Philip and St. Denis!" and waving their golden banner, the ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... his young life. His parents sent him to work in a coal-pit; people in these days will scarcely credit such a thing, but it is nevertheless true; nor was this an extraordinary case, for children of poor parents were commonly sent to work in the pits at that early age, when Abe was a child. The work which they did was not difficult; perhaps it might be the opening or shutting of a door in one of the drifts; but whatever it was our hearts revolt at the idea of sending a child of such tender years into a coal mine, and thanks to the ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... following, Aiai and his wife went with their child to the brook. She left her son upon the bank of the stream while she engaged herself in catching opae and oopu from the pits. But it was not long before the child began to cry; and as he cried, Aiai told his wife to leave her fishing, but she talked saucily to him. So Aiai called upon the names of his ancestors. Immediately a dark and lowering cloud drew near and ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... from the vaults doth leap; We will measure its height By the strokes of our flight, Its span by the tempest's sweep. What matter the hail or the clashing winds! We know by the tempest we do not lie Dead in the pits of eternity. Brothers, let us be strong in our minds, Lest the storm should beat us back, Or the treacherous calm sink from beneath our wings, And lower us gently from our track To the depths of forgotten things. Up, brothers, up! 'tis the ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... and a gun placed in position to defend the passage. Colonel Coleman, who was at home on furlough, gave it as his opinion that these precautions must be supplemented and supported by rifle-pits on the north side, or no successful defence could be made. The pits were hastily dug, but, when volunteers were called for, the extreme danger prevented a hearty response. None appeared except a few old soldiers and six or seven school-boys, whose ages ranged from fourteen to sixteen. The Yankees advanced in line, in an open plain, about two thousand ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... a cap a little longer than broad, so that it is almost oval in outline. Sometimes it is nearly round but again it is often slightly narrowed in its upper half, though not pointed or cone-like. The pits in its surface are more nearly round than in the other species. In this species the pits are irregularly arranged so that they do not form rows, as will be ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... and was the means of preventing a duel between him and a mad young Frenchman, who wanted to fight Mr. Higginbotham with pistols, because that gentleman resented the idea of being taken for an Egyptian, through wearing a fez cap. I had a talk with Capt. Warren at Jerusalem, and descended one of the pits with a sergeant of engineers to see the marks of the Tyrian workmen on the foundation-stones of the Temple of Solomon. I visited the mosques of Stamboul with the Minister Resident of the United States, and the American Consul-General. I travelled over the Crimean battle-grounds with Kinglake's glorious ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... scoundrels, the masters, they won't give in; but we're bound to beat 'em—bound to. If they don't come to our terms we mean to call the engine-men, and the hands they've got to keep the ways clear, out of the pits. That'll bring 'em to their senses quick enough. I've been for ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... night and morning, The pits of air, the gull of space, The sportive sun, the gibbous ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... Jock—hands deep in his pockets. "Here, Sergeant-major—this man hasn't the foggiest notion how to use a pick. I've just been showing him." "I've been watching ye, sir. I'm thinking it wad need tae be war time for you to earn ten shillings a day in the pits." ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... Baggs saw that he was old and incredibly worn; his skin clung in dry yellow patches to his skull, the temples were bony caverns, and the pits of his eyes blank shadows. He felt forward with a siccated hand, on which veins were twisted like blue worsted over fleshless tendons, gripped Harry Baggs' shoulder, and lowered himself to ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Thunder Bay, and immediately contiguous to the Grand Portage, where the canoe route to Rainy River, so late as our own century, started from Lake Superior. According to the American Geologists the traces for a mile are found of an old copper mine on this Island. One of the pits opened showed that the excavation had been made in the solid rock to the depth of nine feet, the walls being perfectly smooth. A vein of native copper eighteen inches thick was discovered at the bottom. Here is found also, unless ...
— The Mound Builders • George Bryce
... difficulties are not so formidable as they seem. He is not a stranger to the district. He has twice lodged at Tavistock in the summer. The opium was probably brought from London. The key, having served its purpose, would be hurled away. The horse may be at the bottom of one of the pits or old mines upon ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... such were found defective. It appears therefore that the free miners valued their rights, and not only took thought for the morrow, but provided for it. They added a proviso that the servants of the Deputy Constable should have the benefit of always being supplied first at the pits, showing that they knew something also of public diplomacy. This "Order" has the names of forty-eight miners attached, all severally sealed, but ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... passes into the pit, and the moisture promotes decomposition. The bottom of the pit is perforated and the water impregnated with the dust from the bones is filtered through charcoal and becomes thoroughly disinfected before it is allowed to pass through a sewer into the bay. The pits are the receptacles of the dust of generations, and I am told that so much of it is drained off by the rainfall, as described, that they have never been filled. The carriers are not allowed to leave the grounds, and when a man engages in that occupation he must ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... difficult to determine what quantity of salt is derived solely from the waters of the sea. The natives estimate it at a sixth of the total produce. The evaporation is extremely strong, and favoured by the constant motion of the air; so that the salt is collected in eighteen or twenty days after the pits are filled. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... their origin. Besides the annual fines due to the King and the feudal lords, and in addition to the general subsidies, such as the quit-rent and the tithes, these communities had to provide for the repair of the walls or ramparts, for the paving of the streets, the cleaning of the pits, the watch on the city gates, and the ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... yet he had preserved a native sincerity and wrought under the guidance of an ideal. Like all men who are worth anything, either in public or private, he possessed a keen sense of humour, and was too awake to the ludicrous aspects of charlatanry to fall into the pits it offered on every band. His misfortune was the difficulty with which he uttered himself; even when he got over his nervousness, words came to him only in a rough-and-tumble fashion; he sputtered and fumed and ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... English songs, and the Scotch songs she poured forth without stint, for she sang more for them than for her baby. No wonder they adored her. She was so bright, so gay, she brought light with her when she went into the camp, into the pits—for she went down to see the men work—or into a sick miner's shack; and many a man, lonely and sick for home or wife, or baby or mother, found in that back room cheer and comfort and courage, and to many a poor broken wretch that room became, as one ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... strict balance of impartial justice. New days bring new issues and old passions are unsafe counselors. Twenty years have gone by. England has paid the cost of her mistakes. The Republic of Mexico has seen the fame and the fortunes of the Emperors who sought her conquest sink suddenly—as into the pits which they themselves had digged for their victims—and the Republic of the United States has come out of her long and bitter struggle, so strong that never again will she afford the temptation or the opportunity ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... rifle-pits; but the troop had gotten under the fire, and it all passed over their heads. On they pressed, their blood now quickened by excitement, crawling up the steep, while volley on volley poured over them. Within nine feet of the pits was a rim-rock ledge over which the Indian bullets swept, and here the charge was stopped. It now became ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... indescribable; and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering foully here and there over all these,—remnants broadcast, of every manner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered bill, festering and flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... warmth, however, may be proven by the fact that when a warm rain comes some night in February or March, thawing out the crust of the earth, the next morning reveals in our dooryards the mouths of hundreds of the pits or burrows of these primitive tillers of the soil, each surrounded by a little pile of pellets, the castings of the active artisans of the pits during the ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... "inventions" at his saddle-bow (labelled "Homogeneity-Heterogeneity," "Unknowable," "Ghost Theory," "Presentative-Representative"), which don't seem, somehow, as helpful as their inventor assumes. And 'tis certain he took tosses into many of the pits of his dangerous deductive method. I don't present this as Mr. ELLIOT'S view. He is respectful-critical, and makes perhaps the best case for his old master's claim to greatness out of the assumption that SPENCER himself, stark enemy to authority and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... entice the Islesmen to pursue him. He informed Duncan of his own intention to retreat and commanded him to be in readiness with his archers to charge the enemy whenever they got fairly into the moss and entangled among the pits and bogs. ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... the 'Elizabeth', in June, 1834. They erected huts on shore for the whalers. The 'Henry' was wrecked; but the whales were plentiful, and yielded more oil than the casks would hold, so the men dug clay pits on shore, and poured the oil into them. The oil from forty-five whales was put into the pits, but the clay absorbed every spoonful of it, and nothing but bones was gained from so much slaughter. Before the 'Elizabeth' left Portland Bay, the Hentys, the first permanent settlers in Victoria, arrived in the schooner 'Thistle', on November ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... he mentioned the shaft, on which he pretended to have come in his rambles. Remarking on the danger of such places, he learned that this one served for ventilation, and was still accessible below from other workings. Thereafter he begged permission to go down one of the pits, on pretext of examining the coal-strata, and having secured for his guide one of the most intelligent of those whose acquaintance he had made at the inn, persuaded him, partly by expressions of ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... white man, and over a wide district with David as a center, discredits the statements of De Zeltner in respect to the form illustrated in Fig. 4, and states that generally the graves do not differ greatly in shape and finish from the ordinary graves of to-day. He describes the pits as being oval and quadrangular and as having a depth ranging from a few feet to 18 feet. The paving or pack consists of earth and water worn stones, the latter pitched in without order and forming but a small percentage of the filling. He has never seen such stones used in facing the walls of the ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... as much on account of the Makalaka strangers at the kraal as the Zulus. As a matter of fact, after the alarm was given late in the afternoon, as many of the Makalakas as could be communicated with had assembled here. Scouts had reported in the evening that the strangers were looting the corn from the pits, and only a couple of hours before Kondwana called a halt in the darkness, the fires that the Zulus had lighted were still to be seen burning brightly. Moreover, Kondwana had been very careful in preventing the huts being burnt, lest the ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... works. The division moved forward. They had never failed in such an undertaking. Their charge had always pierced the enemy's line. This had been their record during three years of warfare. But men can not accomplish impossibilities. Baffled by the swamp, cut by the merciless fire that blazed out from the pits, they are driven back, rally, re-form and charge the second and third time, and then retire to the position from which they had ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... Roman "art-life" of one's early dreams. Everything was somehow in the picture, the rickety sheds, the loose paraphernalia, the sunny, grassy yard where a goat was browsing; then the queer interior gloom of the pits, frilled with little overlooking scaffoldings and bridges, for the sinking fireward of the image that was to take on hardness; and all the pleasantness and quickness, the beguiling refinement, of the three or four light fine "hands" ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... past physical actions shows that these were similar to those which now obtain. Ancient beaches are met with whose pebbles are like those found on modern shores; the hardened sea-sands of the oldest epochs show ripple-marks, such as may now be found on every sandy coast; nay, more, the pits left by ancient rain-drops prove that even in the very earliest ages, the "bow in the clouds" must have adorned the palaeozoic firmament. So that if we could reverse the legend of the Seven Sleepers,—if we could sleep back through the past, and ...
— Time and Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... up in the air and a white magnesium cluster descended slowly, lighting up all the trenches in a sudden blaze which made the pioneers look like ghosts peering over the black brink of the pits. Then the light went out, and the eyes trying in vain to pierce the darkness saw nothing but glittering fiery red circles. The Japanese batteries on the other side opened fire. The air-ship had entirely disappeared, and no ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... went down into that deep place, and dug many pits in it, and in one of the pits he lay hidden with his sword drawn. There he waited, and presently the earth began to shake with the weight of the Dragon as he crawled to the water. And a cloud of venom flew before him as he snorted and roared, so that it would have been ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... repeated. Trina rose and went fearfully to the window. The little court below was bright with moonlight, and standing just on the edge of the shadow thrown by one of the cherry trees was McTeague. A bunch of half-ripe cherries was in his hand. He was eating them and throwing the pits at the window. As he caught sight of her, he made an eager sign for her to raise the sash. Reluctant and wondering, Trina obeyed, and the dentist came quickly forward. He was wearing a pair of blue overalls; a navy-blue ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... explained to Willet, "but anyhow he's begun to show his age." He pointed the muzzle which had the run forward look of an old horse and to the pits above the eyes. The grooming was finished but neither Gething came to the stable from the big house nor the trench diggers from Break-Neck to say that ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... the dogs became demons; at one time, sullen and stubborn; then wildly excited and savage; and in our handling of them I fear we became fiendlike ourselves. Frequently we would have to lift them bodily from the pits of snow, and snow-filled fissures they had fallen into, and I am now sorry to say that we did not do it gently. The dogs, feeling the additional strain, refused to make the slightest effort when spoken to or touched with the ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... expectation of reinforcements, and surrounded by a multitude which increased in size by the moment, for the officer in charge of the detachment sent to the church tower told me that the roads leading to the town were full of miners from the pits of Jemmapes, heading for the town of Mons. My little troupe and I were at risk of being wiped out if I had not taken decisive action. My address had produced a marked effect among the rich noblemen, the promoters of this disturbance, ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot |
