"Backwater" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that's what I say. Every year they are shallower and shallower, and there are not the deep holes there used to be. And do you see the bushes yonder?" the old man asked, pointing to one side. "Beyond them is an old river-bed; it's called a backwater. In my father's time the Pestchanka flowed there, but now look; where have the evil spirits taken it to? It changes its course, and, mind you, it will go on changing till such time as it has dried up altogether. There used to be marshes and ponds ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... bridal ornaments. Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people are Cimbri, and holds that it is "more consonant to all the evidence of history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders at different periods deposited this backwater of barbarians" in the district they now inhabit. "The whole space, which in addition to the seven burghs contains twenty-four villages, is bounded by rivers, alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are the Brenta to the east, and the Astico to the west."] They are, of course, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... give it a trial. Setting to work with our axes, we soon had a raft built, lashing the poles together with the fibre which grows in abundance all over the district. When it was finished, we pushed it out of the little backwater where it had been constructed, and the young engineer jumped aboard. All went well until it got out into midstream, when much to my amusement it promptly toppled gracefully over. I helped my friend to scramble quickly up the ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... setting is the Deanery of St. Paul's, that frowning and melancholy house in a backwater of London's jarring tide, where the dust collects, and sunlight has a struggle to make two ends meet, and cold penetrates like a dagger, and fog hangs like a pall, and the blight of ages clings to stone ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... — N. regress, regression; retrocession^, retrogression, retrograduation^, retroaction; reculade^; retreat, withdrawal, retirement, remigration^; recession &c (motion from) 287; recess; crab-like motion. refluence^, reflux; backwater, regurgitation, ebb, return; resilience reflection, reflexion [Brit.] (recoil) 277; flip-flop, volte-face [Fr.]. counter motion, retrograde motion, backward movement, motion in reverse, counter movement, counter march; veering, tergiversation, recidivation^, backsliding, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and their Behaviour towards the Different Paper Fibres—Coal Tar Colours, which rank foremost, as far as their fastness to light is concerned; Colour Combinations with which colourless or nearly colourless Backwater is obtained; Colours which do not bleed into White Fibres, for Blotting and Copying Paper Pulp; Colours which produce the best results on Mechanical Wood and on Unbleached Sulphite Wood; Dyeing of ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... am convinced, before he had well considered the situation he had fallen into the habit of attending a rendezvous in a backwater of the stream about a mile above Artenberg. Victoria never went out unaccompanied, and never came back unaccompanied; it was discovered afterward that the trusted old boatman could be bought off with the price of beer, and used to disembark and seek an ale house so soon ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... pile of firewood had been collected on the shore, for boughs of trees and drift-wood, brought down by the river, often came into the backwater, and these were always drawn ashore, however busied the men might be at the time in fishing. All through the summer every scrap of wood that came within reach had been landed, and the result was a great pile that would, they calculated, with the blubber they had stored, be sufficient ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... this scenery. Now and then we had to muster all our energy to get round a point, where the river broke rippling over rocks, and the maples trailed their branches in the stream, but there was generally a backwater or eddy on the side, of which we took advantage. The river was here about forty rods wide and fifteen feet deep. Occasionally one ran along the shore, examining the country, and visiting the nearest ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... was her secret, the belief in her own power. He had faced his difficulties bravely enough, but he had not had the courage to hope; therein lay his weakness, and this girl, this princess, had shown it to him. He had allowed himself to drift into a backwater; it was time he pulled out into the stream again, and fought his way back to his rightful place, inch by inch, against ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... the stream known as Gold Creek, which entered the Lewes from the southeast. It was some miles up this confluent that Colonel Snow's land lay, and by direction of Swiftwater the Indian boatmen skilfully rounded the batteaus out of the current of the Lewes into the Creek and into a little backwater formed by a projecting sandy point between the two streams. Here the water was fairly deep, and as no trees came down to the water's edge two of the Indians held the boat up to the bank, while the third sprang ashore with coils of rope and two long iron stakes which he drove ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... of the camp was a beaver dam fully half a mile wide, built with astonishing skill and strength. The backwater flooded the country for many square miles, and gave the remarkable animals just the place they wanted for their curious huts, of which I shall have something ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... kings are kings of the stationary, law-abiding, state-reforming type; Cecrops, Erechtheus, Theseus, are not splendid, flashing, all-conquering figures like Achilles and Agamemnon. Athens might, it would seem, but for the coming of Homer, have lain stagnant in a backwater of conservatism, content to go on chanting her traditional Spring Songs year by year. It is a wonderful thing that this city of Athens, beloved of the gods, should have been saved from the storm and stress, sheltered from what might have broken, even shattered her, spared ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... critical period, life at Darmstadt bored him considerably. His presence there was valued highly by Queen Victoria, one of whose daughters had married the Grand Duke; but Morier felt himself to be in a backwater, far from the main stream of European politics, and society there was dull. So he welcomed in 1871 his transference first to Stuttgart, and a few months later to Munich, the capital of the second state in the new Empire and a great centre of literary culture. Here lived Dr. ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... of our men went out to some cabins on the bluff, about one quarter of a mile below the fort, to bring a grind-stone. The backwater of the Mississippi, rendered it so they went in a canoe. On their return they were attacked by a party of Indians, supposed to be about fifty in number; they killed and tomahawked three and wounded ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... below). The town of Wau (7deg 42' N., 28deg 3' E.), on the Jur, is the capital of the Bahr-el-Ghazal province of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Meshra-er-Rek, the chief station and trading centre of the first European visitors to the country, is on a backwater south of this lake. Between the Jur and the Nile, and following a course generally parallel with these rivers, several streams run north from the Congo-Nile watershed and join the Bahr-el-Ghazal. The Tonj, the most westerly of these rivers, joins ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... other lads rejoiced over their mission. It was better to ride ahead than to remain with an army that was pulling itself along slowly through the mud. The fort itself was only about three miles away, and as it stood upon low, marshy ground, the backwater from the flooded Tennessee had ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of those books which, for some reason or other, have failed to come down to us, as they deserved, along the current of time, but have drifted into a literary backwater where only the professional critic or the curious discoverer can find them out. "The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy;" and nowhere more blindly than in the republic of letters. If we were to inquire how it has happened that the true ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... Bellini was the king of opera-writers and the emperor of composers. To pass a few hours with people who consider Bellini to have written the last note in music is as restful and refreshing as to dream away an August afternoon in a peaceful backwater, forgetting that there is a river running to the sea. After Bellini, the gentleman mentioned Beethoven, who, it seems, studied in Italy, and that is why his music is so melodious. The more accessible writers on Beethoven know as little about this studying in Italy as they know about the Palermitan ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... to have proceeded until Ibsen reached his twenty-first year. In this quiet backwater of a seaport village the passage of time was deliberate, and the development of hard-worked apothecaries was slow. Ibsen's nature was not in any sense precocious, and even if he had not languished in so lost a corner of society, it is unlikely that ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... street. The air was soft and golden; the sun warm with the Indian summer. The clock on the Metropolitan tower was booming nine. As the two set out at a slow saunter down the backwater of the side street, ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... off, and listened to the sounds of a London morning. Their house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of buildings separated it from the main thoroughfare. One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating. Though the promontory consisted of flats—expensive, with cavernous entrance halls, full of concierges and palms—it fulfilled its ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... only feel my life unspeakably empty. No one to live for any more. (Gets up restlessly.) That is why I could not stand the life in my little backwater any longer. I hope it may be easier here to find something which will busy me and occupy my thoughts. If only I could have the good luck to get some regular work—office work of ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... a room on the bank of the Adour, overlooking the Promenade des Baignots. A charwoman took care of it for me. She worked also for an old gentleman, a retired Examining Magistrate, President of the Roger-Ducos Society, which was a vague scientific backwater, in which the scholars of the neighborhood applied themselves with prodigious incompetence to the most whimsical subjects. One afternoon I stayed in my room on account of a very heavy rain. The good woman was energetically polishing the copper latch of my door. She used a paste called ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... sprang out into the water and raced with fury to kill them, though the boat contained three times their own number. It is good to read how they wiped out all but those who escaped in terror by swimming! At last only fourteen of the English were left alive and they got hopelessly penned in a backwater. These men charged the army of Sepoys on the banks and made them keep their distance. They secured themselves in a tiny temple on the margin of the river and killed all who approached. At length, seeing preparations made for blowing them up with gunpowder, they charged out; seven who could swim ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... rounded the corner he saw the black bushiness of its garden and then, barring the night sky, the skeleton of a new building. The sight gave him a disagreeable shock; anything that let more life and light into that secluded backwater was a menace. He approached, anxiously scanning it. It took the place of old rookeries, demolished in his absence, one side rising gaunt and high against Mrs. Meeker's. He leaned from the front steps and looked over the ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... palace and call it ennui, and it may drive you to commit peccadillos and indiscretions of various sorts. You may be attacked in a middle-class apartment house, and call it various names, and it may drive you to cafe life and affinities and alimony. You may have it wherever you are shunted into a backwater of life, and lose the sense of being borne along in the full current of progress. Be sure that it will make you abnormally sensitive to little things; irritable where once you were amiable; glum where once you went whistling about your work ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... War, was so anxious to escape that he turned over the command to Pillow, who declined it in favor of Buckner. That night Floyd and Pillow made off with all the river steamers; Forrest's cavalry floundered past McClernand's exposed flank, which rested on a shallow backwater; and Buckner was left with over twelve thousand men to make what terms he could. Next morning, the sixteenth, he wrote to Grant proposing the appointment of commissioners to agree upon terms of surrender. But Grant had made ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... of their wildness was exuberant vitality; their mistakes were magnified, their mad pranks exaggerated. If I'd been married to you, my dear, while Dick was growing up, I wouldn't have let you keep him here in this little backwater of life; he needed more room, more movement. They wouldn't have been so down on ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... side, when we got there, did not seem much worth reaching, being a swampy fringe at the bottom of a steep hillside, and after a few yards the path turned into a stream or backwater of the river. It was hedged with thickly pleached bushes, and covered with liquid water on the top of semi-liquid mud. Now and again for a change you had a foot of water on top of fearfully slippery harder mud, and then we light-heartedly took headers into the bush, sideways, or sat down; and ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... somewhere on the water front of Quebec. It stood in a backwater where the busy tide of seafaring traffic passed it by. But it was sufficiently adjacent to permit its clientele swift and convenient access to the docks, at once a safety valve and the source ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... fuel. You know they've made rockets with it. You've met them! And Intelligence says they're building a fleet of space ships—not for space exploration, but simply to smash the Platform and get set for an ultimatum to the United States to backwater ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... compiling "impressions" of America devoted one of their longest chapters in the heyday of Elijah Pogram and Jefferson Brick. But the War between the States has changed all that, and Lichfield endures to-day only as a pleasant backwater. ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... things I want to do," she said. "But most of them ought to wait until Jim comes home." She thought for a moment. "I don't want to miss any more time with Bobs than I have to—could we ride over to the backwater, Dad, and muster up the cattle there? You know you said you were going to do ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Bar Harbour, some in the elaborate rusticity of an Adirondack camp. Even Gerty Farish, who welcomed Lily's return with tender solicitude, would soon be preparing to join the aunt with whom she spent her summers on Lake George: only Lily herself remained without plan or purpose, stranded in a backwater of the great current of pleasure. But Carry Fisher, who had insisted on transporting her to her own house, where she herself was to perch for a day or two on the way to the Brys' camp, came to the rescue ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... style. Everybody speaks in antitheses, and the intolerable fancy similes, drawn from a kind of imaginary natural history, are sometimes as prominent as in Euphues itself. Lyly's theatre represents, in short, a mere backwater in the general stream of dramatic progress, though not a few allusions in other men's work show us that it attracted no small attention. With Nash alone, of the University Wits proper, was Lyly connected, and this only problematically. He was an Oxford man, and most of them were of ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... crowd that continued to chaff us good-naturedly—"joshing" they called it. Then we managed to struggle into a sort of backwater at the side of the dais upon which an alleged string band was trying to make good, as ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... this was the true aspect of things, as Courtenay discovered when he had successfully brought the ship past three ugly reefs and dropped anchor in the backwater of a small sheltered bay. He speedily abandoned the half-formed hope that the Kansas might have run into an ocean water-way which communicated with Smyth Channel. The rampart of snow-clad hills had no break, while a hasty scrutiny of the chart showed him ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... when Maud and Reggie Byng set out on their journey, shone on the West-End of London with equal pleasantness at two o'clock. In Little Gooch Street all the children of all the small shopkeepers who support life in that backwater by selling each other vegetables and singing canaries were out and about playing curious games of their own invention. Cats washed themselves on doorsteps, preparatory to looking in for lunch at one of the numerous garbage cans which ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... reassuringly. "She has told me that she is not marrying me for love, if that is what you are trying to say. She has given me to understand, quite conscientiously, that she is merely accepting the opportunities I can offer her—I, a dull, middle-aged, dyspeptic don in a backwater college!" he chuckled. "But," he added—and the glow in his eyes was quite boyish—"I have had occasion to observe in Jemima certain symptoms—a proprietary interest in my belongings, for instance, my rooms, my welfare, my health, my—er—personal ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... of humiliation Bob could not avoid a fleeting inner smile over this last remark. Responsibility! In this sleepy, quiet backwater of a tenth-floor office, full of infinite little statistics that led nowhere, that came to no conclusion except to be engulfed in dark files with hundreds of their own kind, aimless, useless, annoying as so many gadflies! Then he set his ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... Jaffery left us with a "See you as soon as ever I get back," and the day after that he sailed for China. We felt sad; not only because Jaffery's vitality counted for something in the quiet backwater of our life, but also because we knew that he went away a less happy man than he had come. This time it was not sheer Wanderlust that had driven him into the wilderness. He had fled in the blind hope of escaping ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... thousand all told, who have retired out of the stress of the world into the fastnesses of the Nilgiri Hills, in southern India, where they spend a safe but decidedly listless life. They are in a backwater, and are likely to remain there. At any rate, their religion is not such as to make them more enterprising. Gods they may be said to have none. The bare names of certain deities of the hill-tops are retained, but whether these ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... together after the death of Brentano's wife in 1806, but that each projected his individuality into his literary work rather than into a common polemic ideal. The path-finding and discovery had already been done; in the quieter backwater it was possible to develop well-rounded works of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... last century of an age, was a backwater in education as in literature. The great revival was to come. The fifteenth century was indeed a century of revolution in so far as under the almost placid surface of continuity and conformity, there were forces of revolt at work, probing, accumulating knowledge and experience, ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... give you the full story of Vivie's trial. I have got so much else to say about her, before I can leave her in a quiet backwater of middle age, that this must be a story which has gaps to be filled up by the reader's imagination. You can, besides, read for yourself elsewhere—for this is a thinly veiled chronicle of real events—how she was charged, and how the magistrate refused bail though it was ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... of the Jomsborg vikings were both larger, and higher in the gunwale, than were those of Earl Hakon, but nevertheless were they boldly beset from both sides. Vagn Akason pressed the ships of Svein Hakonson so hard that Svein let his men backwater & came nigh to fleeing, whereupon Earl Eirik came up into his place & thrust himself into the battle against Vagn, and Vagn backed his ship, and the craft lay again as ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... came up because I had to see you. You pay no attention to my letters. I never dreamed that you would stay a month in this backwater. What is wrong? What is the matter ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... question. Where?" And he winked suggestively. "How can I tell you where he is? If I could tell you that, you don't suppose I 'd be wearing myself to a shadow with uncongenial and ill-remunerated labour, in an obscure backwater of the country, like this, do you? If I could tell you that, I could tell you the secretest secrets of the sages, and I should be making my everlasting fortune—oh, but money hand over fist—as the oracle of a general information bureau, in Bond Street, or somewhere. I should be ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... a passage which exists to this day near Trinity schools. This passage led him to a water-brink, where there was a roughly built quay with a parapet, and to the right he made out a bridge. It was the bridge over the Wey, connecting Weymouth with Melcombe Regis, and under the arches of which the Backwater joins the harbour. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... to mention, but I was hugely relieved to learn that so far there was no suspicion as to who was really responsible for the damage to the creek. Apart from the inconvenience which it would have entailed, to be arrested for blowing up a bit of mud in a Thames backwater would have been a sad come-down for a ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... Regression. — N. regress, regression; retrocession[obs3], retrogression, retrograduation[obs3], retroaction; reculade[obs3]; retreat, withdrawal, retirement, remigration[obs3]; recession &c. (motion from) 287; recess; crab-like motion. refluence[obs3], reflux; backwater, regurgitation, ebb, return; resilience reflection, reflexion (recoil) 277[Brit]; flip-flop, volte- face[Fr]. counter motion, retrograde motion, backward movement, motion in reverse, counter movement, counter march; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... through the ages. Do you see to it that your little task is in the same line of direction as the great purpose which God is working out—the increasing purpose which runs through the ages.' An individual life is a mere little backwater, as it were, in the great ocean. But its minuteness does not matter, if only the great tidal wave which rolls away out there, in the depths and the distance amongst the fathomless abysses, tells also on the tiny pool far inland and yet connected ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... a rapid river, was swept away by the current and carried a long way downstream in spite of his struggles, until at last, bruised and exhausted, he managed to scramble on to dry ground from a backwater. As he lay there unable to move, a swarm of horseflies settled on him and sucked his blood undisturbed, for he was too weak even to shake them off. A Hedgehog saw him, and asked if he should brush away the flies that were tormenting him; but the Fox replied, "Oh, please, no, not ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... underthought that she and Comte were odd fish to be at home together in that placid backwater of the Latin Quarter. Next door to the old-fashioned house in which she rented three rooms was a cabaret, a mere wreck of a wineshop, apparently cast there by the torrent of the Boule Mich, which roared a few yards ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... bird," said the old lady. Grangerville was a backwater place, badly served by the railway, and it would take the best part of a day to ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... keep your eyes skinned if you have to swim any bits of backwater, now the creeks are up. Don't cross anywheres unless you have some cattle to send in fust, and keep clost up to their tails if yous can't get in among 'em. 'Gaters like man and horse ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... the stir and sweep of social life and duty, of official and political ambition-heart-hungry, for she had no child; heart-lonely, though she had scarce recognised it in the duties and excitements round her—she had floated suddenly into this backwater of a motionless life in Hamley. Its quiet had settled upon her, the shackles of her spirit had been loosed, and dropped from her; she had suddenly bathed her heart and soul in a freer atmosphere than they had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... her about his sentimental journey, and how he found all the creations of his childhood's imagination still so alive and kicking in a forgotten backwater of his mind that they all hopped out and took objective form—the sprites, the starlight express, the boundless world of laughter, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... young Briton now made the mistake of his life. He sent a prisoner, Samuel Phillips, over to the frontier settlements, to Colonel Isaac Shelby, with the insolent message that, if the "backwater" men did not quit resisting the royal arms, he would march his army over the mountains, and would straightway lay waste their homes with fire and sword, ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... said simply, "you could call him that—just in the same way you could call Napoleon a soldier or Lincoln a statesman. He is a detective, if you like to call him that, the master detective of the world. He has a great house in one of the backwater squares of New York, for his office. He has wireless telegraphy, private chemists, a little troop of spies, private telegraph and cable, and agents in every city of the world. If he moves against any gang, they break up. No one can really understand him. Sometimes ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... difficult; the swirling flood carried us in-shore and then swept us out again; the willow branches tore our hands as we seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled many a yard of sandy bank into the water before at length we shot with a great sideways blow from the wind into a backwater and managed to beach the bows in a cloud of spray. Then we lay panting and laughing after our exertions on hot yellow sand, sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun, a cloudless blue sky ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... Charles,—I know that from your superior standpoint as a Londoner you are disposed to regard us as dwellers in a quiet backwater, unswayed by the currents of political strife, but you must not imagine that the stirring events of the past few weeks have failed to leave their mark on the life of our little town. A study of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... gave a moment's respite, one more chance for an extra pull with the oars. The big log, thus poised, made a backwater eddy on the surface of the river, checking the force of the current. Ross reached back for another stroke, with every ounce ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... with a broken mantle flickered above Graham's head and the stove crackled, but the outer office, the door of which was open, was dark, and the building was strangely quiet. No sound rose from the narrow street below, which ran like a still backwater among the tall warehouses. Foster, putting his hand in his pocket as if to feel for matches, touched the small Browning pistol he had brought. He was not afraid of Graham, but somebody might come in. At length the man sealed two envelopes and ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... quietest part of Wainwright; business stopped short of it, and the "fashionable residence section" had overleaped this "forgotten backwater," leaving it undisturbed and unchanging, with that look about it which is the quality of few urban quarters, and eventually of none, as a town grows to be a city—the look of still being a neighborhood. This friendliness of appearance was largely the emanation of the homely and beautiful ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... discharged its load of soldiers or citizens, and ran up through the deep cut in the steep, caving river-bank. From there, over the western end of the Lancaster quarter, across the coulee under a hub-depth of muddy backwater—at the only point where the sumach-grown sides sloped gradually—it ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... a neighbourhood where a flower show and a cricket match formed the social landmarks of the year, the feeling of exile might not be very crushing, might indeed be lost in the sense of change and adventure. But Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre of things to regard life in a backwater as anything else than stagnation, and stagnation while one is young he justly regarded as an offence against nature and reason, in keeping with the perverted mockery that sends decrepit invalids touring ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... that sort of thing had vanished from men long and long ago, after the first few bitter weeks of war and of realisation of the meaning of war. War was now an affair—a sordid, ugly affair, and Maubert knew it as well as any man. Living in his backwater of a village, keeper of the principal wine-shop of the village, his zinc counter rang every night under emphatic fists, emphasising emphatic remarks about the war, and the remarks were true but devoid of romance. ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... solitary poplar-trees, formerly haunts of Corot and Daubigny. I could see the spots where they had set their easels—that slight rise with the solitary poplar for Corot, that rich river bank and shady backwater for Daubigny. Soon after I saw the first weir, and then the first hay-boat; and at every moment the river grew more serene, more gracious, it passed its arms about a flat, green-wooded island, on which there was a rookery; and sometimes we saw ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... himself daily admiring the cleverness of Phyllis Ayrton when she had the punt pole in her hands. He also admired the gradual tinting of her fair face, through the becoming exertion of taking the punt up the lovely backwater or on to the placid reaches beyond. Sometimes the punt contained three or four of the party in addition to Herbert, but twice he was alone with her, and shared his admiration of ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... making her afraid that she was turning into a suspicious creature, like jealous brides she had read about. She determined to be silent as a self-punishment, and firmly steered the Monarchic into a backwater of her thoughts, while Knight talked of the Valley House party and ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... had been rowing well in toward the Kentucky shore, to avoid the swift current of the Kentucky River which rushes into the Ohio at Carrollton. A few yards below its mouth, in the quiet stretch of backwater along shore, lay the wharf-boat, little more than a landing stage. The hotel was but a hundred feet away, at the top of the steep levee. It was midnight, so everyone in the village had long been asleep. After several minutes of ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... hunch of bread and some fish-hooks; but as they ran Speug had dropped the word Woody Island, and a day on Woody Island was a work of art. It lay a couple of miles above the town, long and narrow, formed with a division of the river into its main current and a sluggish backwater. It was covered with dense brushwood, except where here and there a patch of green turf was left bare, and the island was indented with little bays where the river rippled on clean sand and gravel. It was only a little island, but yet you could lose yourself in it, so thick was the wood and so mazy, ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... come round by way of Victorine's small, tight-fenced garden of crape-myrtles, oleanders and pomegranates—where also the water was in the streets, backwater from the overflowed swamp-forests between city and lake—and had sent her to Charlie's bedside. Pleasant it would be for us to turn back with the damsel and see her, with heart as open as her arms, kiss the painted grandam, and at ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... in all were wrecked at this spot. One split on the reef. Another was caught in the backwater. Others sank in the whirlpool below the rapids. Others went under at the first leap into the cataract. Two of the canoes had foolishly been lashed abreast. They sidled, shipped a billow, and sank. ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... as he approached that street—one of those little old streets, so beautiful, that belonged to a vanished London. It was very narrow, there was no shelter; and he thought confusedly of what he could say, if met in this remote backwater that led nowhere. He would tell some lie, no doubt. Lies would now be his daily business. Lies and hatred, those violent things of life, would come to seem quite natural, in the violence of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the tale began. By the time it was ended the boat was at a standstill on the little backwater below the pretties ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... its long course and the novelty will be more striking still. It will not seem to him a river at all (if he be from Northern Europe); it will seem a chance flood. He will come to it through marshes and through swamps, crossing a deserted backwater, finding firm land beyond, then coming to further shallow patches of wet, out of which the tree-stumps stand, and beyond which again mud-heaps and banks and groups of reeds leave undetermined, for one hundred ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... her. Was it possible that the ocean upheaval had stirred even the quietest backwater so little? "Well, anyhow, it's the biggest war that ever was ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... stepped out to the platform, summoned an inspector, and gave a few brief orders. Slowly the saloon was backed out of the station again on to a neglected siding, a sort of backwater for spare carriages and empty trucks,—an ignominious resting place, indeed, after its splendid journey through the night. The doors at both ends were closed and two policemen placed on duty to guard them. The doctor and the station-master seated themselves out of sight ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fearful or foreboding mood. In truth, bile is the prolific mother of moods. The stream of life flows through the biliary duct. When that is obstructed, life is obstructed. When the golden tide sets back upon the liver, it is like backwater under a mill; it stops the driving-wheel. Bile spoils the peace of families, breaks off friendships, cuts off man from communion with his Maker, colors whole systems of theology, transforms brains ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... we contrived to get into a creek, or backwater, near the Major's gate. Here the men ran the boat up, and we all climbed out, stiff, battered, and terrified, but doing our best ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... cottage by the side of the river kept a ferryboat, and with his help I crossed again to the other bank. Wandering on with a somewhat vague purpose, I soon found myself—now under a gray sky—on a marshy flat, which a backwater of the Dordogne had almost made an island. Here there were many low shrubs of dwarf elder covered with berries; pools, and wide ditches, where the dark water scarcely moved, all fringed with tall reeds; while here and there was the gleam of a white ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... missed an important first night in London, my inherent weakness for obscure studies and another motive to which I may refer later had caused me to abandon my chambers in the Temple and to retire with my library to this odd little backwater where my only link with Fleet Street, with the land of theaters and clubs and noise and glitter, was the telephone. I scarcely need add that I had sufficient private means to enable me to indulge these whims, otherwise as a working ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... a down-at-heel, out-of-elbow sort of look, it was Calvary Alley. At its open end and two feet above it the city went rushing and roaring past like a great river, quite oblivious of this unhealthy bit of backwater into which some of its flotsam and jetsam had been caught and held, generating crime and disease and sending them out again ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... between them and the creek, Laramie prudently said nothing. It was the worst of the journey. Two stretches were filled with backwater. Across these they cautiously waded and swam the horses. When they gained high ground adjoining the creek, Kate breathed more freely. There was a halt for reconnaissance. For this, Laramie and Hawk, after placing Kate where she would be ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... that in a quiet backwater off the High Street there was a little confectioner's shop, where tea might be had at a reasonable sum, and also, what was more ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... so bad, though, of course, we're in a backwater here," said Lowell. "An Indian reservation gives you a queer feeling that way. The tides of civilization are racing all around, but here ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... can save yourself and your business," I said. "Knowing what is before you, you can—you need not lend money, accept obligations. You can gradually draw out of the stream of credit in which your fortune is involved, get into a backwater for a while. You have time enough. I am expressing myself all wrong; but you know what ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... He spent some moments with each gang, afterwards returning to his house. For nearly an hour things went on as before, and then Mr. Coburn reappeared at his hall door, this time accompanied by his daughter. Both were dressed extraordinarily well for such a backwater of civilization, he with a gray Homburg hat and gloves, she as before in brown, but in a well-cut coat and skirt and a smart toque and motoring veil. Both were carrying dust coats. Mr. Coburn drew the door to, and they walked ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... faced the backwater of traffic, and was very silent. He disliked dogs, but a dog even would have been company. His gaze, travelling round the walls, rested on a picture entitled: 'Group of Dutch fishing boats at sunset'; the chef d'oeuvre of his collection. It gave him no pleasure. He closed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Carl wrote short honest notes to Gertie, to his banker employer, to Bennie Rusk, whom he addressed as "Friend Ben." He found himself writing a long and spirited letter to Bone Stillman, who came out of the backwater of ineffectuality as a man who had dared. Frankly he wrote to his mother—his mammy he wistfully called her. To his father he could not write. With quick thumps of his fist he stamped the letters, then glanced at the Turk. He was gay, mature, business-like, ready for anything. "I'll ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Mlle. Snouck Hugronje plays you forget all about self-determination, syndicalism, guild-control, proletariats, sunspots and even Mr. SMILLIE. If you are a poet, and we are all poets nowadays, you dream yourself into a punt on the Sonning backwater, wondering if the summer was ever so amazing before, nearly being shipwrecked on a sandy spit, startling moorfowl or it may be dabchicks, sending a frisson into the fritillaries, losing and regaining your punt-pole, always believing that the next bend —— Mr. FILSON ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... became a chantry on the New England coast, the alley the wintry sea soon to embrace our ship, the saw-horses—which stood between a coal-bin on one side and unused stalls filled with rubbish and kindling on the other—the ways; the yard behind the lattice fence became a backwater, the flapping clothes the sails of ships that took refuge there—on Mondays and Tuesdays. Even my father was symbolized with unparalleled audacity as a watchful government which had, up to the present, no inkling of our semi-piratical intentions! The cook and the housemaid, though remonstrating ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... HOLMES:—Lord Backwater tells me that I may place implicit reliance upon your judgment and discretion. I have determined, therefore, to call upon you and to consult you in reference to the very painful event which has occurred in connection with my wedding. Mr. ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... search of the craft's tiny cabins and forecastle, they were invited to sample a bottle of choice Madeira, on some four or five dozen of which Leslie willingly paid duty. The next day her sails were unbent and she was taken up the Backwater and laid up, in charge of Simpson; and a month or two later her ballast was taken out of her and stowed away in a shed under which she also was hauled up. A certain portion of this ballast was soon afterwards packed ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... line of smooth backwater just in the wake of the island, they drove their canoes up by main force, and fastened them safely by the side of the Indian's, while Amyas, always the foremost, sprang boldly on shore, whispering to the Indian boy ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... a kind of backwater of the great river of town life which swept past its entrance with speed and clamour without disturbing the peace within. One long, narrow street led from a roaring thoroughfare into a silent quadrangle of tall grey houses, occupied by ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... conditions. The works were still a thing apart, a new and somewhat romantic area from which anything, however startling, might any day materialize. Sometimes a few Indians paddled up to trade and, leaving Filmer's store, would slip silently up stream, and edging into the backwater at the foot of the rapids, lay their paddles across the thwarts and stare silently at the great structures that began to arise. And this, in a way, was the attitude of most of the folk of St. Marys. They were in ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... monotony of camping in lonely places for a young girl to whom her mother wished to give every opportunity of settling in life, whatever might be her own ideas respecting a vocation. Muktiarbad, though a rural backwater of Bengal, and pronounced by the gay-minded, a penal settlement, had matrimonial possibilities not to be despised by anxious parents with daughters to be happily ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... keeping its equilibrium, was edged away both across and down the stream. At last it began to move more slowly, and Sakalar found himself under the shelter of a huge iceberg, and then impelled up stream by a backwater current. In a few minutes the much wished-for shore ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... keeper was a noted slowcoach. With this knowledge, and the presence under his eye of a basket containing ground-bait kneaded in the woodhouse while the breakfast rashers were frying, S. opined that he might snatch an hour or so of honest reaching in the backwater while the rabbit people ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... backwater in which they were paddling, a sluggish stream which moved between dark houses. Sometimes it scraped against their sides and lapped their balconies; sometimes it was held in check by walls and narrow terraces. For Billy the water between the dark houses, the mirrored stars, ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... every one in it belonged to the old army. They were gathered there, the salvage of the Mons retreat, of the Marne, of the glorious first battle of Ypres, broken men every one of them, debris tossed by the swirling currents of war into this backwater. ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... jogging past towards the valley. School children were recklessly sliding down the cross street into the main road. Sol Short was coming over from his shop to get his paper... Here the old world was moving along its wonted grooves in this backwater community. But over it all like the color swimming over the hills was SOMETHING more,—some aspect of life unseen! And faintly, very dimly, Isabelle began to realize that she had never really been alive,—these thirty ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... She remembered that there was a shabby little house standing by itself on the bank where boats could be hired, for they had put in there once to replace an oar, having lost one down a weir in the neighborhood. The weir had not been on the main stream, but they had come upon it in exploring a backwater. It could not be ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... the Smithsons were on the platform waiting to receive us and welcome us as strangers and pilgrims in an unknown land. They have only remained here to meet us, and they proceed to Kashmir to-morrow, sleeping in a carriage in the quiet backwater of a siding, to save themselves the worry of a desperately early ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... in 1959, the economy has been run in the Soviet style of government ownership of substantially all the means of production and government planning of all but the smallest details of economic activity. Thus, Cuba, like the former Warsaw Pact nations, has remained in the backwater of economic modernization. The economy contracted by about one-third between 1989 and 1992 as it absorbed the loss of $4 billion of annual economic aid from the former Soviet Union and much smaller amounts from Eastern ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... away, was a thick scrub of sandalwood trees, in which they imagined the terrified horses had taken refuge. The rushing, foaming waters guided them on their way, though every now and then they had to make a detour round the heads of some gullies, which were bank high with backwater from the swollen creek. As soon as there was a lull in the storm they again Coo-eed, but received no answer from Jacky. Grainger, who had the most implicit faith in the judgment of his blackboy, now began to fear that the ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... boat's head lies south, and we have been going right away from the steamer. Here, pull hard starboard, backwater port!" he cried; and as the oars dipped he bent down and watched the compass till he found the boat's head pointing north-east, when he shouted, "All together: ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... hour we had reached Pitt Street, a quiet little backwater just beside one of the briskest currents of London life. No. 131 was one of a row, all flat-chested, respectable, and most unromantic dwellings. As we drove up we found the railings in front of the house lined by ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Mississippi. The main origin of the St. Lawrence in the west is Lake Superior, the largest sea of fresh water in the world, which is connected with Lake Nipigon on the north. The waters of Lake Superior are carried over the Sault Ste. Marie rapids into Lake Huron and find a huge backwater in Lake Michigan.[9] Out of Lake Huron again they flow past Detroit into Lake Erie. From Duluth, at the westernmost extremity of Lake Superior, to Buffalo, on the easternmost point of Lake Erie, ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... Thame to Isis. Beyond is Dorchester, the abbey of the oldest see in Wessex, and the Abbey Mill. The feet of the hills are clothed by Wittenham Wood, and above the wood stretches the weir, and round to the west, on another great loop of the river, is Long Wittenham and its lovely backwater. Even in winter, when the snow is falling like bags of flour, and the river is chinking with ice, there is plenty to see and learn, or in the floods, when the water roars through the lifted hatches and the rush of the river throbs across the misty flats, and the weeds and sedges smell rank ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... the chances at a glance, and sped off across the narrow neck to the mainland, tore along the cliff round Pegane and Port a la Jument, then away past the head of Saut de Juan, and down the cliff-side to where the black shelves overhang the backwater of the Gouliot. ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... and by the advice of Argus Jason bade them enter a shaded backwater and let the ship ride at anchor off shore; and it was near at hand in their course and there they passed the night. And soon the dawn appeared to ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... swimming in a gigantic cup of tea. From this initial experience I proceeded, somewhat precipitately, to induce an analogy; and it seemed to me, at the time, as if I had forsaken the roar and tumble of the hoarse, tumultuous world, for the inland disassociated peace of an unaware and loitering backwater. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all. Don't ever refer to it again, please. Now then! Here's our backwater at last, where we're ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... incantation. I got a picture of a nubile waif, too freakish to fit where she'd been raised. What had her Hegira been like? In what frightful places had she found herself welcome? From her talk, it could have been an Ozark backwater. I didn't want to know what backwoods crone had taught her some mnemonic rendition of ...
— Vigorish • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the Sobat forms a distinct line as it cuts through the clear water of the main river, and the floating rafts of vegetation brought down by the White Nile, instead of continuing their voyage, are headed back, and remain helplessly in the backwater. The sources of the Sobat are still a mystery; but there can be no doubt that the principal volume must be water of mountain origin, as it is coloured by earthy matter, and is quite unlike the marsh water of the White Nile. The expeditions of the slave-hunters have ascended the river as far as it ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... here," said Senhouse, "for three years or more; but I've lived so for over twenty. I've wandered for most of that time, and know England from end to end; but now I seem to have got into a backwater, and I find that I travel farther, and see more, than I did when I was hardly for a week together in the same place. But that's reason-able enough, if you think of it. If you can do with-out time, space goes with it. If it don't ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... the water seemed shallower. It was probably only a tributary or backwater of the main stream. But it was sprinkled with smaller vessels—sloops, and yawls, and luggers—all filled with people and ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... Vincent at the end of Rotten Row, Mark Ashburn continued his walk alone through Kensington High Street and onwards, until he came to one of those quiet streets which serve as a sort of backwater to the main stream of traffic, and, turning down this, it was not long before he reached a row of small three-story houses, with their lower parts cased in stucco, but the rest allowed to remain in the original yellow-brown brick, which time ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... Polo, commonly called in the neighbourhood Old Kayal, and erroneously named Koil in the Ordnance Map of India, is situated on the Tamraparni River, about a mile and a half from its mouth. The Tamil word kayal means 'a backwater, a lagoon,' and the map shows the existence of a large number of these kayals or backwaters near the mouth of the river. Many of these kayals have now dried up more or less completely, and in several of them salt-pans have been established. The name of Kayal was naturally given to ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Jason's counsel that they should not at once appear before King AEetes, but visit him after they had seen the strength of his city. They drew their ship into a shaded backwater, and there they stayed while day ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... come in with me yourself, and doss here for a few hours. You can report to your C.O. later in the day, when he arrives. This is my pied-a-terre,"—rapping on the door. "You won't find many billets like it. As you see, it stands in this little backwater, and is not included in any of the regular billeting areas of the town. The Town Major has allotted it to me permanently. Pretty decent of him, wasn't it? And Madame Vinot is a dear. Here she is! Bonjour, Madame Vinot! Avez-vous un feu—er—inflamme ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... murrain of idleness. I should paralyze the work of the place if I were resident." To return—it appears that the best of men, especially of youthful men, feel the subtle charm of an invitation to laziness. The man who says, "It's a sin to be indoors to-day; let us row up to the backwater and try a smoke among the willows;" or the one who says, "Never mind mathematics to-night; come and have a talk with me," is much more pleasing than the stern moralist. Well, it happens that the most dangerous species of bad ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... in the backwater a great peace descended after the hilarity of their feast. Clouds of cigarette smoke kept midges at bay. In the deepening stillness small sounds asserted themselves—piping of gnats, the trill of happy birds, snatches of disembodied ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... musician with the non-musical world is now more intimate and conscious than ever before. Forty or fifty years ago—in spite of brilliant individual exceptions—musicians were, in the main, self-centred craftsmen; they were inclined to drift into a backwater, away from the chief currents of the intellectual, or often indeed of the general artistic life of their day, and they seem on the whole to have been content to have it so. In England we were somewhat behindhand, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... coxswain pulling hard with his right line, when suddenly there was a shock in the Parrett's boat, followed by a loud shout from Parson, and next moment the boat was shooting helplessly straight towards the bank, from which it was only saved by a prompt order to "Backwater all!" from Bloomfield. ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... and I,' said Winifred, 'went out of the house at the back, walked across a roughly paved stable-yard, and passed through a gate and entered a meadow. Then we walked along a stream about as wide as one of our Welsh brooks, but I found it to be a backwater connected with a river. For some time neither of us spoke a word. He seemed lost in thought, and my mind was busy with what I intended to say to him, for I was fully determined to get some light thrown upon ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the truth, the more he thought of it, the more he shrank from the ordeal. Once he had hoped Mr. Bronson would be the one to show him the way out of the backwater of Crawberry. Hiram had not forgotten how terribly disappointed he had been when he could not find the gentleman's card in the ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... a little narrow street on the south side of the Strand. Many people must have noticed these things, few have had the curiosity to explore further; yet it is well worth while to get down from omnibus or cab and venture into this little backwater of the Savoy. Between eleven and one, and two and four o'clock every day the garden gate is open, and the verger is in the chapel, ready to answer questions. The little graveyard garden, with its waving trees, is a veritable oasis in the desert of brick and mortar, and the quaint ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... me with him into the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, and threading his way without hesitation through its maze of unsavoury slums, paused before a narrow three-storeyed house overlooking a stagnant backwater. ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... increased by women and dogs, we proceeded on our way, until choosing a high sandy bank overlooking the estuary of the small lake on the South, the creek to the North-West, and a backwater to the North, we halted and prepared to make camp. This was attended by some difficulty, for our native friends, now in considerable numbers, evidently wished to look upon it as their camp too. They soon became so tiresome ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... the beast's own tactics. When it gathered itself for the thrust and started in to hurl the doomed vessel the full length of its mighty arms, the sloop's only safety lay in widening the space. A cushion of backwater would then receive the sloop's forefoot in place of the snarling teeth of ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... pathetic ugliness, redeemed by a certain consistency of quality. And then the poky, comfortable arrangements, the bath-chair in the coach-house, the four-post bedsteads, the hand-rail on the stairs, the sandbags for the doors, all spoke of a timid, invalid life, a dim backwater in the tide of things. There had been children there at some time, for there were broken toys, collections of dried plants, curious stones, in an attic. The little drama of the house shaped itself for me, as I walked through the frowsy, faded rooms, with a touching ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... reckless administration of punishment that still characterizes these Mountain people. A tory appeared in the road one day near the home of Colonel William Campbell, of the "Backwater settlement." The Colonel at once gives him chase; after a brief absence he returns to his home, and his wife eagerly asks "What did ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 10. October 1888 • Various
... demand restatement in contemporary phraseology, and revision in the light of contemporary facts. He opened out Socialism. It is easy to quibble about Marx, and say he didn't see this or that, to produce this eddy in a backwater or that as a triumphant refutation of his general theory. One may quibble about the greatness of Marx as one may quibble about the greatness of Darwin; he remains great and cardinal. He first saw and enabled the world to see capitalistic production as a world ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... village help till morning and that man can never cling there so long. He will freeze to death, for it is growing colder every minute. His only chance is to swim ashore if he can swim. The danger will be when he comes near shore; the undertow of the backwater on the quicksand will sweep him away and in his probably exhausted condition he may not be able ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... crowns of dwarf acacias. A spell of warm weather seemed at last to have begun, and clouds of gnats floated over the grass, their minute wings glittering in the sunshine. Despite the nearness of teeming streets, this was a backwater of ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... the river shore, and Jack chose a big roomy boat, fitted with the softest of red cushions. He pulled for a mile or more up the rippling Thames, chatting gaily with Madge, who sat opposite to him and deftly managed the rudder-ropes. A little-known backwater was the goal, and suddenly he drove the boat under a screen of low-drooping bushes and into a miniature lake set in a frame of leafy trees that formed a canopy of dense ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... signification. It appears in fact that the stables of Augeas was another name for the sign of Capricorn through which the Sun passes at the Winter solstice (1)—the stable of course being an underground chamber—and the myth was that there, in this lowest tract and backwater of the Ecliptic all the malarious and evil influences of the sky were collected, and the Sungod came to wash them away (December was the height of the rainy season in Judaea) and cleanse the year towards ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter |
