"Ditch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wisdom of the Egyptians. We do not, but we do know that the biggest thing in an arid country is the ditch. America's triumph to date in the twentieth century is the completion of the Panama Ditch. The ditch is in Idaho more valuable by far than the land, for without it the parched soil is practically worthless, being an area of shimmering sand, where the ash-colored and dust-covered ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... was situated on the edge of an extensive tract of marsh,—lagoon would be a more descriptive word for it, perhaps,—a splashy, ditch-divided district, extending along the borders of a lake for miles. Snipe-shooting was my motive there; and dull work it was in those dark, Novembry, October days, with "the low rain falling" half the time, and the yellow leaves all the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... remonstrance against such a waste of human life. Aide-de-Camp canters up a third time: 'Feldmarschall Munnich is for trying a scalade; hopes General Keith will do his best to co-operate!' 'Forward, then!' answers Keith; advances close to the glacis; finds a wet ditch twelve feet broad, and has not a stick of engineer furniture. Keith waits there two hours; his men, under fire all the while, trying this and that to get across; Munnich's scalade going off ineffectual in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... Mailie, an' her lambs thegither, Was ae day nibbling on the tether, Upon her cloot she coost a hitch, An' owre she warsl'd in the ditch: There, groaning, dying, she did lie, When Hughoc he cam ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... excited my ungratified curiosity; Newgate gaol replaced by the facade of a dingy Italian church; the dimensions of the locale considerably diminished; and a small section of the dark alleys between the prison and Farringdon Street, bounded by the Fleet-ditch uncovered; you will have a very fair impression of the ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... saddle, and I was recommended to mount outside the little enclosure, on a patch of open ground, where my steed would not be able to brush me off. The moment I mounted, the "Hermit" as he was called, made for a dry ditch and tried to lie down, but a sharp cut from a stock-whip brought him out of it, and then he laid his ears well back and started for a good gallop, to endeavour to get rid of his strange rider. However, his head was turned in the right direction; there were no obstacles in the way, and before ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... struggle over all these realms; there came out, after fifty years' struggling, what we all call the "Glorious Revolution," a Habeas Corpus Act, Free Parliaments, and much else! Alas, is it not too true, that many men in the van do always like Russian soldiers, march into the ditch of Schweidnitz, and fill it up with their dead bodies, that the rear may pass over them dry-shod, and gain the honor? How many earnest, rugged Cromwells, Knoxes, poor Peasant Covenanters, wrestling, battling for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... out the seed beds.—A suitable piece of land is to be enclosed quadrilaterally by boundaries, ploughed two or three times, cleared of all weeds and roots, made somewhat sloping, and surrounded by a shallow ditch, the bed of which is to be divided by drains about two feet wide. The soil of the same must be very fine, must be ground almost as fine as powder, otherwise it will not mix freely and thoroughly with the extremely fine tobacco seed. The seed is to be washed, and ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... grading perfect for streets and sidewalks, for drainage and for irrigating ditches. The whole town appears perfectly level, but the mesa has just enough descent towards the south and east to take water from the main irrigating ditch as it enters the town from the north-west, and carry it freely throughout the whole city on each side of every street; four of the main streets and avenues have twelve miles of open boxed ditches about two feet wide running in absolutely straight lines. The lawns and gardens ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... OF LAMACHUS Slaves of Lamachus! Water, water in a little pot! Make it warm, get ready cloths, cerate greasy wool and bandages for his ankle. In leaping a ditch, the master has hurt himself against a stake; he has dislocated and twisted his ankle, broken his head by falling on a stone, while his Gorgon shot far away from his buckler. His mighty braggadocio plume rolled on the ground; at this sight he uttered these doleful words, ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... side of a ditch, and made a wreath of flowers. She sang a little song, hoping that it would attract the shepherd, and he would begin the game over again—but that was very far from his thoughts. When she found he did not come, she ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... you pass a roadside ditch or pool in spring-time, take from it any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the stick: eggs of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... science, unto you The call for service now has come! Mechanic, banker, lawyer, too, Have you not heard the stirring drum? Oh, humble digger in the ditch, Bend to your spade and do your best, And prove America is rich In manhood fine for ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... of its shy ways and rustic beauty, and left it boldly staring with open eyes and gaping with wide-stretched mouth at the men who turned from it. We put in about two thousand feet of tile drainage on both sides of what Polly called "that ditch," and this completed the improvements on the low lands. The land, indeed, was not too low to bear good crops, but it was lightened by under drainage and yielded more each ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... encampments, buildings, and other fortifications, which are indeed very agreeable to a traveller that has read anything of the history of the country. Old Sarum is as remarkable as any of these, where there is a double entrenchment, with a deep graff or ditch to either of them; the area about one hundred yards in diameter, taking in the whole crown of the hill, and thereby rendering the ascent very difficult. Near this there is one farm-house, which is all the ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... And so do you, if you do. It is not because of the "me," of course, but because of the great patience and faithfulness of Him who is the Light. A very rickety cheap lantern may carry a clear light, and the man in the ditch find good footing in the ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... Master Baintons place at Bromeham full four miles of," and after Cromwell had "slighted" it, the remnants, goodly enough even then, were used as a free quarry by anyone desiring to build. The mound and ditch that surrounded the outer walls and a few fragments of the masonry of a dungeon is all that can be seen to-day, but the mound is crowned by a modern and rather ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... enough," he declared. "Know the anatomy of the darlin' beast as well as I do my own, inside and out. But, be dashed, if the wheels without the horse aren't beyond me quite. Lord love you, but the skittish animal's given me some ugly knocks, cast me away, it has, in the wayside ditch, covering me soul with burning shame, and me ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... seized him, but to his horror he saw something approach him that made his hair stand on end. He could not at first make it out, but he soon clearly saw that it was a horse that was madly dashing towards him. He had only just time to step on to the ditch, when, horrible to relate, a headless white horse rushed past him. His limbs shook and the perspiration stood out like beads on his forehead. This terrible spectre he saw when close to Tan'rallt, but he dared not turn into the house, as he was travelling on Sunday, so on he went ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... public roads into a private track through paradise. I do not mean that he was a road-hog; far from it. He had the most exquisite manners of the road, He would slow down for a hen in the distance and upset himself into the ditch to avoid a rabbit. I have known him (with his first car) give a lift to any filthy tramp between Midhurst and Portsmouth. I mean that the act of motoring transported him; and he did these things instinctively, mechanically, without interruption ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... are not, or hats would need very wide brims; yet as sure as eggs are eggs, faults of some sort nestle in every bosom. There's no telling when a man's sins may show themselves, for hares pop out of the ditch just when you are not looking for them. A horse that is weak in the legs may not stumble for a mile or two, but it is in him, and the driver had better hold him up well. The tabby cat is not lapping milk just now, but leave the dairy door open, and see if she ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... open, and in an instant he is in the street, flying from the scene of his imprisonment like the wind. The streets are cleared, the open fields are gained and the broad, wide country lies before him. Onward he dashes in the midst of darkness, over hedge and ditch, through mud and pool, bounding from spot to spot with a speed and lightness, astonishing even to himself. At length he pauses; he must be safe from pursuit now; he will stretch himself on that bank ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... work; the nymphs had tied up their hair afresh, and the swains were preparing for a carousal. My mule made a dead point. ''Tis the pipe and tambourine,' said I—'I never will argue a point with one of your family as long as I live;' so leaping off his back, and kicking off one boot into this ditch and t'other into that, 'I'll take a dance,' said I, 'so stay ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fresh from the S.E. The ditch is completely blocked up with vegetation: thus we made only 250 yards. Before us, as usual, is the hopeless sea of high grass, along which is a dark streak which marks the course of the ditch through which we slowly clear a passage. How many days or months we may require ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... neither; this mortal house I'll ruin, Do Caesar what he can! Know, sir, that I Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court, Nor once be chastis'd with the sober eye Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up, And show me to the shouting varletry Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt Be gentle grave to me! Rather on Nilus' mud Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies Blow me into abhorring! Rather make My country's high pyramids my gibbet, And hang me up ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... coarse green crops. Sometimes the land is made to filter large quantities of sewage by special arrangements of drains and ditches. The land is first carefully and evenly graded down a gentle incline. At the top of the field the sewage is conducted along an open ditch from which it is permitted to escape, by the force of gravity, by several smaller ditches running at right angles from the main ditch. By means of stops which may be shifted at will, the sewage can be directed to flow over different parts ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... by making me laugh and running us all into the ditch. I know just how sustaining you can be. Never mind. I'll forgive your slighting remarks about me, and give you the vacant place on the front seat. Now, good people," she put on the business-like expression ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... down to Delhi (I'd always pictured the besiegers looking up at the walls). How astonishingly fresh it all is; the living deadly interest. Gracious—the stones on the wall haven't yet rolled into the ditch from the bombarding—you can almost smell the powder smoke in the ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... almost impossible to believe that human nature can endure such hardships and sufferings as the slaves have to go through: I have seen them driven into a ditch in a rice swamp to bail out the water, in order to put down a flood-gate, when they had to break the ice, and there stand in the water among the ice until it was bailed out. I have often known the hands to be taken from the field, sent down the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... kind of lizard; for the Crocodile, that huge animal with its green glaring eyes, and its armour made of bony plates with sharp ridges, is but an overgrown lizard. If you wish to form some idea of what it is most like, you can look at one of the beautiful little newts which live in some pond or ditch near you, and fancy it magnified many, many times, and then you will not have a bad notion of the crocodile, the lizard of Africa, or of the Cayman or Alligator, the great lizard of the ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... meditate really an addition to the 'Elegant Extracts'—mind this last joke is none of mine but my father's; when walking with me when a child, I remember, he bade a little urchin we found fishing with a stick and a string for sticklebacks in a ditch—'to mind that he brought any sturgeon he might catch to the king'—he having a claim on such a prize, by ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... is sweet this mean and noisome ditch, When on my belly I must issue out Into the night, inscrutable as pitch— I wish to Heaven that I was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... veterans, arraying themselves in a ring on a little mound, beat off every charge of the Germans, and prolonged their honorable resistance to the close of that dreadful day. The traces of a feeble attempt at forming a ditch and mound attested in after-years the spot where the last of the Romans passed their night of suffering and despair. But on the morrow this remnant also, worn out with hunger, wounds, and toil, was charged by the victorious Germans, and either ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... constantly renewed. The stone floor was stained a deep brick red, and that, too, would often be applied freshly during the night. At a time when the very word "sanitation" was unknown, Gilles had properly constructed conduits leading from an adjoining apartment to the castle ditch. The chimney was wide as a peasant's whole house, and the vast fireplace could hold on its iron dogs an entire waggon-load of faggots. Indeed, that amount was regularly consumed every day when the marshal deigned ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... back in fifty-six, before the water-ditch companies had fairly got started. It was as dry as Sahara on these mountains then, and it is no ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... suddenly serious and confidential undertone. "No business for them! They haven't the strength, in the first place, and they haven't—well, they're too nervous, in the second. Mouse cross the road," said Martin, sucking in deep breaths as he lighted a cigar, "and—whee! Over she goes into a ditch. No," he said, kindly, "I'm a great friend of all the ladies, but I think they make a mistake when ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... life; patched breeches, torn coats, slouched hats, and washed gold rings have taken their places, and ragged garments in place of silk dresses for the poor Gipsy women. The Gipsy men "lollock" about, the women tell fortunes, and the children gambol on the ditch banks with impunity, nobody caring to interfere with them in any way. This kind of thing, as regards dash and show, is to a great extent passed, and those men who put on a show of work at all, it is as a general thing at tinkering, chair-mending, peg-splitting, skewer-making, and donkey ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... you, come forth, and (without any pause, or staggering) take this basket on your shoulders: y done, trudge with it in all hast, and carry it among the Whitsters in Dotchet Mead, and there empty it in the muddie ditch, close by the ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... said to himself. "And, if there was, I'm a juggins to be trying to find it now. I'd better keep my mind on this old machine, or it will ditch me! I know what I've got to do, anyhow, even if I ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... plan was absolutely simple, and yet, had it been carried out as conceived, absolutely effective. It was not his intention to go near any of that entanglement of ditch and wire which had been so carefully erected for his undoing. The weaker party, if it be wise, atones for its weakness by entrenchments. The stronger party, if it be wise, leaves the entrenchments alone and uses its strength to go round them. Lord Roberts ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... were surrounded on the outside with a vast ditch, full of water, and lined with bricks on both sides. The earth that was dug out of it made the bricks wherewith the walls were built; and therefore, from the vast height and breadth of the walls may be inferred ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... whistling, four more of the gang came up, seized him, and knocked him down. They stripped him stark naked and carried away all his clothes, tying him hand and foot in a cruel manner and leaving him in a ditch hard by. However he was relieved, and Reeves and Hartly being soon after taken, they were both tried and convicted ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... a bar, Half a bar onward! Into an awful ditch Choir and precentor hitch, Into a mess of pitch, They led the Old Hundred. Trebles to right of them, Tenors to left of them, Basses in front of them, Bellowed and thundered. Oh, that precentor's look, When the sopranos took Their own time and hook From ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... sat on the horse, and rode merrily on. After a time he thought he should like to go a little faster, so he smacked his lips and cried, "Jip." Away went the horse full gallop; and before Hans knew what he was about, he was thrown off, and lay in a ditch by the roadside; and his horse would have run off, if a shepherd who was coming by, driving a cow, had not stopped it. Hans soon came to himself, and got upon his legs again. He was sadly vexed, and said to the shepherd, "This riding is no joke when a man gets on a beast like this, ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... our route, thanks to the floods which have been very bad this year and are still out enormously—the upper floors of two-storied houses only being visible in many places,—was most intricate. We had to be pioneered over a ditch into a wood, supposed to be cleared, with the stumps of trees left sticking about six inches out of the ground for your wheels to pass over, on to a track, and then through a ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... passengers escaped all injury, while the brave engineer was so badly hurt that he died in a few hours. Such heroism as this should not go unnoticed." The Cincinnati Inquirer says: "He remained in the car until the engine leaped into the air and was dashed into the ditch, when he attempted to spring to the ground, but had his foot caught between the frames of the engine and tender, striking his head on the ground and causing the fatal injuries. Railroad men say that the act of detaching the engine as he did, not even derailing ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... Persia, stands on a plain near the Elburz Mountains, 70 m. S. of the Caspian Sea; is surrounded by a bastioned rampart and ditch, 10 m. in circumference, and entered by 12 gateways; much of it is of modern construction and handsomely laid out with parks, wide streets, and imposing buildings, notable among which are the shah's palace and the British Legation, besides many of the bazaars and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... replied, 'Because in getting up from the ditch thou hast opened the water-course, thenceforth shalt thou be called Uddalaka as a mark of thy preceptor's favour. And because my words have been obeyed by thee, thou shalt obtain good fortune. And all the Vedas shall shine in thee ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... remitted him to the sentence of the warden; who, by virtue of his dictatorial power, ordered the rioter to be loaded with irons, and confined in the strong room, which is a dismal dungeon, situated upon the side of the ditch, infested with toads and vermin, surcharged with noisome damps, and impervious to the least ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... the mountebank of history, Mr. Pitt, all are to me but impostors in their various ways. Fame or interest is their object; and after all their parade, I think a ploughman who sows, reads his almanack, and believes the stars but so many farthing candles, created to prevent his falling into a ditch as he goes home at night, a wiser and more rational being, and I am sure an honester than any of them. Oh! I am sick of visions and systems, that shove one another aside, and come over again, like the figures in a moving picture. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... a while. At last they came back to the house, and Jake said, 'I can't catch Fanny, Father. She has jumped the ditch a dozen ...
— A Hive of Busy Bees • Effie M. Williams
... moment a man vaulted clean over the gate, tore a pitchfork out of a heap of dung that luckily stood in the corner, and boldly confronted the raging bull just in time; for at that moment Zoe lost heart, and crouched, screaming, in the side ditch, with her ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... it was an unfrequented part of the town with no residences for many blocks until one reached the little, tumbledown section in the Hollow. Here and there were heavy drifts, and now and then an unexpected ditch in the path gave Carol a tumble into the snow, but, laughing and breathless, she was pulled out again and they plodded ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... Jughi's force took by a kind of stratagem. A certain engineer, whom he employed to make a reconnoissance of the fortifications, reported that there was a place on one side of the town where there was a ditch full of water outside of the wall, which made the access to the wall there so difficult that the garrison would not be at all likely to expect an attack on that side. The engineer proposed a plan for building some light bridges, which ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... hope of safety but in one who was cultivating with his own hand a little plot of scarcely three acres of ground. For when the messengers of the people came to him they found him ploughing, or, as some say, digging a ditch. When they had greeted each the other, the messengers said, "May the Gods prosper this thing to the Roman people and to thee. Put on thy robe and hear the words of the people." Then said Cincinnatus, being not a little astonished, "Is all well?" and at the same ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... rose before him in the distance. Jeff was master of the ground here! He was entering the shadow of the woods—Miss Mayfield's woods! and there was a cut off from the road, and a bridle-path, known only to himself, hard by. To find it, leap the roadside ditch, dash through the thicket, and rein up by the road again, was ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... springing to my feet; "look at this arm, is it the arm of a sick man? No, no—I am well enough, but what of him we found in the ditch, you and I—the miserable creature who lay ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... I fell into a kind of doze, and dreamed that I was walking in a beautiful meadow, which was traversed by a wide and deep ditch. Wishing to pass to the other side I attempted to leap the ditch, but jumped short, and buried myself in mud and mire to the waist! I awoke with a start, which I accompanied with a cry of distress. I had moved the broken limb, and ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... staggered against the wall, and has his hand upon his liver: the fellow hurts himself with smoking, that is clear, and is as sick as sick can be. See, Port is making away from the storm, and Double X is as flat as ditch-water. Against these, awful in their white robes, the ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... find his wife in the bold Irishman's arms and the two men had gone out of the house together to fight in the road. The woman, weeping in the house, followed to ask forgiveness of her husband. Running in the gathering darkness along the road she had found him cut and bleeding terribly, lying in a ditch under a hedge. On down the road she ran and appeared at the door of a neighbour, screaming ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... ugly corner of an uphill reach I came on the wreck of a chaise lying on one side in the ditch, a man and a woman in animated discourse in the middle of the road, and the two postillions, each with his pair of horses, looking on and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... somewhere 'pon the road; an' his mare gettin' to find this out, as dumb animals do, had picked up a comfortable way of canterin' hard by Four Turnin's and stoppin' short, slap in the middle of her stride, close by th' hedge, so 's her master 'd roll over it into the plantation there, where the ditch is full of oak-leaves. There he'd lie, peaceful as a suckin' child; and there, every Sabbath mornin' in the small hours, one o' the farm hands 'd be sent to gather 'em in wi' the new-laid eggs. So ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the top av the Fort an' we'll pershue our invistigations into M'Grath's shtable." The relieved Guard strolled round the main bastion on its way to the swimming-bath, and Learoyd grew almost talkative. Ortheris looked into the Fort ditch and across the plain. "Ho! it's weary waitin' for Ma-ary!" he hummed; "but I'd like to kill some more bloomin' Paythans before my time's up. War! Bloody war! North, East, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... feet thick and 350 feet high, on which were 250 towers, or, according to some writers, 316. The top of the wall was wide enough to allow six chariots to drive abreast. The materials for building the wall were dug from a vast ditch or moat, which was also walled up with brickwork and then filled with water from the River Euphrates. This moat was just outside of the walls, and surrounded the city as ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... consequently he bolted and barred the gate on the inside, and hastily erected a barricade under an arch leading to the apartments of the abbe. Just as these preparations were complete, Esprit Seguier caught sight of a heavy beam of wood lying in a ditch; this was raised by a dozen men and used as a battering-ram to force in the gate, which soon showed a breach. Thus encouraged, the workers, cheered by the chants of their comrades, soon got the gate off the hinges, and thus the outside court was taken. The crowd then ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... silence. This is an awful business,' added the Squire, with a very long face. 'Brother Masham, we must do our duty; but this is an awful business. At any rate we must try to discover the body. A Peer of the realm must not be suffered to lie murdered in a ditch. He must have Christian burial, if possible, in the vaults ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... the goat down the bank into the dry ditch. It was a good thing he had stopped to "bawl," else maybe he'd have missed the goat who had been having her fill of Mrs. McEnroe's after-grass. Still he wondered now at his temerity since the bawlin' might have brought them upon him disturbin' ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... that 'we,' Jerry," said Roger soberly, putting his arm over my shoulder, and I realised suddenly and completely that I had taken the jump and cleared my last ditch: Roger's interest in to-day's event, for good ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... scribbled in pencil. Someone expected me at once outside the castle. The note was signed "Friar Ange, unworthy Capuchin." I went as quickly as I could, and found the little friar seated on the bank of a ditch in a state of pitiable dejection. Wanting strength to get up, he looked at me with his big dog's eyes, nearly human and full of tears; his sighs moved his beard and chest. In a tone which really ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... garrison. I cannot ascertain the loss the enemy may have sustained, but judging by our own, it cannot be inconsiderable. Our approaches were carried by two trenches and a mine to within a few feet of the ditch of their strongest fort, and our troops once took possession of it, but their works were too strong to be escaladed. Instances of consummate bravery were exhibited, but their fire was too fatal for our people to remain in their fosse, ...
— A sketch of the life and services of Otho Holland Williams • Osmond Tiffany
... married too long not to know that whatever at the moment engaged her husband's mind required an audience. Her sons also had expected her to watch and applaud them did they in infancy so much as jump a small ditch, and she knew that it was the maternal duty, and admitted, also, that it was the maternal pleasure to watch and applaud until such time as the several wives of her five sons should ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... hiding for the last six weeks?" he asked her. "And haven't I been thankful to sleep in a ditch? And wasn't I campaigning before that? I tell you I couldn't sleep in a bed. It's ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... the Crane, "my geography was as good as your arithmetic. It is all the same whether you fall into the ditch ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... a man lying flat on his face in a small ditch, and I remarked that I didn't think he seemed dead; this drew General Lee's attention to the man, who commenced groaning dismally. Finding appeals to his patriotism of no avail, General Lee had him ignominiously set on his ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... gravely enough. "I suppose when the trees wave their arms and shake themselves so violently they are saying to each other something like this: 'See how these good-for-nothing children go in good-for-nothing boats over this good-for-nothing ditch.'" ...
— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... his way across Hanging Ditch to a little row of houses bearing the baldly appropriate name of Half Street. It ran along the eastern side of the Cathedral close. First came the houses, small, irregular, with old beams and projections here and there, then a paved footway, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... slowly stepping backwards, I half carried, half dragged him, seeking a place where I could lay him down. I saw the dark line of the railroad grade, and made wearily toward it. I walked blindly into the water of the ditch beside the track, and had scarcely strength to pull myself and my burden out upon the bank. Then I stopped and peered into his face, and saw uncertainly that it was Jim—with a dark spot in the edge of the hair on his forehead, from which black streaks kept stealing down as I wiped them off; and ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? I received a letter from him the day before yesterday. My dear Scrope, if you can spare a moment, do come down to me—I want a friend. Matthews's last letter was written on Friday,—on Saturday he was not. In ability, who was like Matthews? How ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... remarked the other day that Garfield would get as enthusiastic in digging a six-foot ditch with his own hands, as when making a speech in Congress. Such was my observation. Going down the lane, he seemed to forget for the time that there was any Presidential canvass pending. He would refer, first to one ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... myself, that I was forced to make independence my chief good. I soon saw that if I followed my heart to and fro, wherever it led me, I should be the creature of every breath—the victim of every accident: I should have been the very soul of romance; lived on a smile; and died, perhaps, in a ditch at last. Accordingly, I set to work with my feelings, and pared and cut them down to a convenient compass. Happy for me that I did so! What would have become of me if, years go, when I loved Godolphin, I had thrown the whole world of ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that the enemy was gaining upon them. In their rapid flight they came to a deep gulley which Yates cleared at a bound, but young Downing failed in the attempt. His breast struck the opposite almost precipitous bank, and he rolled to the bottom of the ditch. Some obstruction in the way prevented the Indians from witnessing the fall of Downing. They continued the pursuit of Yates, crossing the gulley a few yards below where Downing had met his mishap. Thus in less time than we have occupied in ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... to swing his pick. In a few moments the Empire State Express came whirling along. Thomas threw down his pick and started up the track ahead of the train as fast as he could run. The train overtook him and tossed him into a ditch. Badly shaken up he was taken to the hospital, where ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... that indignant damsel. "Just because Mother's nervous and thinks I'm going to run her into the ditch! Wait till I've had my course of motoring lessons! I'll take the shine out of ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... tap Bulstrode to any amount, knows all his secrets. However, he blabbed to me at Bilkley: he takes a stiff glass. Damme if I think he meant to turn king's evidence; but he's that sort of bragging fellow, the bragging runs over hedge and ditch with him, till he'd brag of a spavin as if it 'ud fetch money. A man should know when to pull up." Mr. Bambridge made this remark with an air of disgust, satisfied that his own bragging showed a fine sense ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... technical or scientific about ditch- water," he had expressed himself in the bosom of his family. "I never analyzed it, but analyzers, I gather, consider it dull. If anything could be duller than ditch-water, I should say it was ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... I don't mind that, if you don't. The Church people here are mostly as dull as ditch-water. I have heard such a lot about you; and there are so jolly few people to talk to. I thought you perhaps wouldn't mind. Do you mind? for of course I'll go like a shot if I'm in ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... aflame with fury, and great gouts of froth dripping from its heavy muzzle. For a moment the soldiers seemed paralysed with terror, the next they all turned as with one accord, and, leaping an irrigation ditch that ran alongside the road, sought safety in flight across a field of young wheat. The buffalo paused a moment in mid-career, as though hesitating whether he should pursue them or charge the wagon and its team of oxen; but the next moment the ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... for in most cases there was no chance of making out from what scrap of cover the shots had been despatched; while it became evident that, from sheer malignity, the undisciplined members of the enemy's force would crawl in the darkness to some clump of rocks, or into some ditch-like donga, or behind one of the many ant-hills, and lie there invisible, firing as he saw a chance, and only leaving it when the darkness ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... to understand clearly this important process, we may compare the embryo to a fortress with its surrounding rampart and trench. The ditch consists of the outer part of the germinative area, and comes to an end at the point where the area passes into the vesicle. The important fold of the middle germinal layer that brings about the formation of the body-cavity spreads beyond the borders of the embryo over the whole ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... in wonder; but as he rode across the shallow ditch that ran between the road and the fence behind which the farmer stood, he did not neglect to give his right leg a shake to loosen his revolver, which during his long ride had worked its way down into his boot. Of course the farmer had made a mistake of some ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... inheritance were the crown of some archaic king. I myself feel that strongly. If it came to the point, though I have said that I am too old to fight for distressed Virtue, I should very likely die in the last ditch for every inch of land and every worthless object I ever owned. When Vetch talks about taxing property more heavily I am utterly and openly against him because it is my instinct to be. I refuse to give up my superfluous luxuries in the cause of equal ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... the brushwood. 'Twas half-dark below; but, above the bushes, the sun was playing as through a green curtain. I went on and on. The bushes here grew thick now and the tiny path was lost. After long creeping and stumbling, I leapt across a ditch and entered the wide drove. It did not seem strange to me that 'twas even darker here and that the light, instead of from above, came streaming low down from between the trunks of the trees. The vault was closed leaf-tight ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... to south-west, and as the width and tortuousness began to decrease—a sure indication that the country was rising—we soon made another six miles. But after this the boats could no further proceed—the inlet, in short, having become a mere ditch at low-water. The head of a large alligator was found on the bank near the upper part; where might be seen an occasional acacia mingled with the mangroves. Behind, the country was very open, consisting ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... fear of a sound thrashing, threw himself on his knees, and so earnestly implored us to try the road again, that we consented. The difficulty was, how to get back into the road, and many a false start was made before we effected it. In crossing a ditch the carriage was so violently shaken, that the coachman and our dragoman were thrown from their seats, the latter falling upon the pole in such a way that he was not easily extricated. His cries for help, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... battle give England the control of the sea, and relieved her from all danger of a French invasion. Even the "wet ditch," as Napoleon was wont contemptuously to call the English Channel, was henceforth an impassable gulf to his ambition. He might rule the continent, but the sovereignty of the ocean and its ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... with the steering gear, the car swerved and the front wheels stuck in the ditch. The driver was shot out and Alan flung against the back of the front seat. The man was unhurt and on his feet in ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... making our way into the inner-most depths of the forest. Yegor only rarely looked upwards, and walked on serenely and confidently. I saw a high, round rampart, enclosed by a half-choked-up ditch. ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... give them sufficient extent for the upper leaves to develop out of the water; then its lower leaves only will be divided into hair-like joints, while the upper ones will be simple, rounded, and a little lobed.[169] This is not all: when the seeds of the same plant fall into some ditch where there is only water or moisture sufficient to make them germinate, the plant develops all its leaves in the air, and then none of them is divided into capillary points, which gives rise to Ranunculus hederaceus, which botanists regard as ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... owing to the house having stood for some time unoccupied, people had tended to use it as a short cut. The kindly farmer obviated this by putting up a little notice-board, to indicate that the path was private. A day or two afterwards it was removed and thrown into a ditch. I was perturbed as well as surprised by this, supposing that it showed that the notice had offended some local susceptibility; and being very anxious to begin my tenure on neighbourly terms, I consulted my genial ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... feeling of disappointment in that first trench. I don't know what I expected to see, but what I did see was just a long, crooked ditch with a low step running along one side, and with sandbags on top. Here and there was a muddy, bedraggled Tommy half asleep, nursing a dirty and muddy rifle on "sentry go." Everything was very quiet at the moment—no rifles popping, as I had expected, no bullets flying, and, ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... and work to do, are riding warm by this fireside, and the orange-tip butterflies with that curious pertinacity of flight which is speed without haste are keeping up their incessant, rippling patrol, to and fro along the length of every sunny lane, above the ditch-side border of ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... discipline more strict than that of any modern army; and if he would not hew the wood, or drive the bullocks, as he ought, then the abbot would have him flogged soundly till he did; which was better for him, after all, than wandering about to be hooted by the boys, and dying in a ditch at last. ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... shape of refreshment, quite the most remarkable things they had met with anywhere this season. The company was select and distinguished. Mrs. JIPPLING, who brought her two chubby-faced, pretty daughters, both in ditch-water-coloured cotton, was a simple blaze of Birmingham paste and green-glass emeralds, and with her pompadour of yellow satin bed curtain, trimmed with chiffons of scarlet bell-ropes, looped up tastefully ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... him, rushed him with what seemed demoniac strength to the open door and flung him away out on his back into the muddy ditch that served as a street. For a moment there was a hush of expectation, then Bent was seen to gather himself up painfully and move out of the square of light into the darkness. But Muirhead did not wait for this; hastily, with hot face and hands still working with ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... females of the dark race and the most recklessly dominant males of the white. "He enters a world in which there was no place prepared for him." His father was about as sensible of his parental obligations towards him as a toad towards its spawn in the next ditch. To him he "was a broken wineglass from last night's feast." "Often without a family, always without a nation or race, without education or moral training, and despised by the society in which he was born," is it any wonder that the half-caste is the curse of the community in which ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... Ultrajectum of the Romans, selected for its site a long raised spur running out from the solid ground of older and higher land into the water-soaked alluvium of the Netherlands. It was the most important town of all this region before the arts of civilization began the conquest by dike and ditch of the amphibian coastal belt which now comprises one-fourth of the area and holds one-half the population of the Netherlands.[413] So ancient London marked the solid ground at the inner edge of the tidal flats and desolate marshes ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... sank long ages ago to the level and capacity of a common ditch, and was almost hidden from view by the overhanging boughs and branches of the park trees on the opposite side, and the half- decayed trunks of former monarchs of the forest that filled its bed—a ditch covered with a superstratum ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... craned his head out of the buggy, as if to see whether he could safely drive into the ditch, and pass Mrs. Munger. He said politely, as he started, "Don't disturb yourself! I ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... youth. It was all round me as I walked out to Ealing. It was in the orchards as I rode on that old horse-omnibus that used to run between Ealing and Brentford. And next day I left the hotel and went out to where we used to live, on the Northern Heights, Gentility's last ditch before they succumbed to the onward rush of the street car and the realty agent! Spring was whispering there too, creepers were growing over new villas, new streets were scored across our old cricket and tennis ground by the church, an old tavern had been ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... winner so near home. Instead of taking the stake-and-bound at the weakest place, he rode at the strongest; his horse swerved to the gap, took the fence sideways, and came down heavily into the ditch of the winning field. The representative of Cambridge, who came next, riding a good steady hunter, not fast, but safe at his fences, cantered in by himself. I remember he was so bewildered by his unexpected victory that one of his backers had to hold him fast in the saddle, or he would have dismounted ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... me at last!" groaned the fear-stricken man. "Heaven be merciful to me, the greatest of sinners! And must I die in a ditch, after all? He! ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... Sophronia, daughter of the governor of Abydos, was visited by a dream. She thought, that while walking out on a beautiful evening, breathing the fragrant air, and gazing on the brilliant stars, she fell into a loathsome ditch, in which she remained an hour, terrified, and unable to move. At length, a handsome youth passed, and she implored him to rescue her. She did not implore in vain; the young man assisted her out, cleaned her clothes, and comforted her with pleasant words. They then proceeded ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... all summer until it was done—part of it—so that we could have a room. First they dig a ditch, just like this one, around the mount, and they make a palisade of forest trees—whole trunks set close together—to keep off enemies. When they have time to build a stone wall, of course the ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... there! However, in the confusion of the mist, I found myself at last too far to the right, and consequently had to try back along the river-side, on the bank of loose stones above the mud and the stakes that staked the tide out. Making my way along here with all despatch, I had just crossed a ditch which I knew to be very near the Battery, and had just scrambled up the mound beyond the ditch, when I saw the man sitting before me. His back was towards me, and he had his arms folded, and was nodding ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... compared to the riding of English and American women. The Spanish riding horse is a pacer rather than a trotter, and this cradle-like motion is certainly better suited to the Spanish women. Few, if any, of them aspire to follow the hounds, a ditch or a gate would present difficulties which would be truly insurmountable, and they never acquire the ease and grace in this exercise which are the mark ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... remarkable way, with very sharp, angular turns. No car had ever been up it, and few carriages. We reached the top in due time, saluted the old man and started back. My friend was at the wheel and did a few turns all right, till we came to a straight shoot, very narrow, a ditch on one side, trees on the other, and just here the brake refused to work. Reaching over I touched his shoulder and suggested that he should go slower. No reply; he was speechless, and we knew at once that he had lost control, and realized ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... a ditch, they tell me, but two months after he sailed with his company of Foot Guards, in the spring of this year. It seems 'twas a ditch that the Marshal Turenne had the ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and followed them at a distance, and their voices still acted as a guide to him through the swamp. But he feared to keep too close, as, although the darkness would conceal his figure, he might at any moment tread in a pool or ditch, and so betray his presence. Putting his foot each time to the ground with the greatest caution, he moved quietly after them. They spoke little more, but their heavy footsteps on the swampy ground were a sufficient guidance for him. At ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... eats the swimming frog, the toad, the todpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets; swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is whipped from tithing to tithing, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned; who hath had three suits to his back, six shirts to his body, horse to ride, and weapons to wear;— But mice and rats, and such small deer, Have been Tom's food for ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... of great speed, it cannot jump, neither can it lift all four legs off the ground at the same time; this peculiarity renders it impossible to cross any ditch with hard perpendicular sides that will not crumble or yield to pressure, if such a ditch should be wider than the limit of the animal's extreme pace. If the limit of a pace should be 6 feet, a 7-foot ditch would effectually ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... out for Dunkirk. It is clear, then, that its compilers were not so ignorant as that consequential tailor, Francis Place, represented them. Their chief mistake lay in concluding that Bonaparte intended to "leap the ditch." As we now know, his tour on the northern coast was intended merely to satisfy the Directors and encourage the English and Irish malcontents to risk their necks, while he made ready his armada at Toulon for the Levant.[490] Meanwhile the United Britons and United Irishmen sought to undermine ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... I became aware of something jolting up and down behind me. My hand went back in search: there was no time to look: the prairie just here was cut up with little gopher-holes and criss-crossed by tiny canals from the main acequia, or irrigating ditch. It was that wretched Smith & Wesson bobbing up and down in the holster. The Colt revolver of the day was a trifle longer, and my man in changing pistols had not thought to change holsters. This one, made for the Colt, was too long and loose by half an inch, and ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... unparalleled punishment that awaits her husband should he be identified, for to undergo the "burial of an ass" is the supremest indignity that can be offered to a Jew. The body of the offender is dragged along the ground to the cemetery, and there it is thrown into a ditch made for the purpose behind the wall enclosing the grounds. But was not her father the head of the community? Could he not annul the verdict? She discloses the secret to him, and the effect is to fill him with instantaneous rage: What! to that wicked fellow he has given his daughter, ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... the direction of a large orchard, "is a plot of land which Zoltan, the Aga, willed to his four sons. As you can see, twelve trees grow upon it, and the whole is surrounded by a deep ditch. Now, according to the will of Zoltan, that plot of land is to be divided equally into four parts, each to be of the same size and shape, and each to contain three of the twelve trees; the trees to be located in the same position in ...
— Bright-Wits, Prince of Mogadore • Burren Laughlin and L. L. Flood
... and tools. The engineers marked out the work in the form of a triangle; and, from the noble volunteer to the meanest artisan, all lent a hand to complete it. On the river side the defences were a palisade of timber. On the two other sides were a ditch, and a rampart of fascines, earth, and sods. At each angle was a bastion, in one of which was the magazine. Within was a spacious parade, around it were various buildings for lodging and storage, and a large house with covered galleries was built on the side towards the river ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... forests, and cut up into a thousand islands by ruts and pools of stagnant water. There is a small cleared space along the river's channel but even this being only partly reclaimed from the surrounding marsh, is often inundated. It is cut up into square patches, round each of which runs a ditch of black mud and refuse, which, lying exposed to the rays of an almost tropical sun, sends forth unwholesome odors, ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... dispose the day.] At the battle of Agincourt, having chosen a convenient spot on which to martial his men, the king sent privately two hundred archers into a low meadow, which was on one of his flanks, where they were so well secured by a deep ditch and a marsh, that the enemy could not come near them. Then he divided his infantry into three squadrons, or battles; the van-warde, or avant-guard, composed entirely of archers; the middle-warde, of bill-men only; ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... recommenced their fire with fresh ardor. Although even this fort had not been constructed with the same strength in the rear as they all presented in the front, the resistance was most vigorous. A premature attempt to throw a pontoon across the ditch was defeated with the loss of sixteen men. The coolie corps here came to the front, and, rushing into the water, held up the pontoons while the French and some English troops dashed across. But all their efforts to scale the wall ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... moments later he saw the car round the bend in the road just beyoud him. It came tearing along, swerved unsteadily from one side of the road to the other, then was brought to a sudden, grinding stop, narrowly missing a plunge into the roadside ditch. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... mother sees one of her careless children fall into a ditch, her first proceeding is to pull him out; her second, to box his ears; her third, ordinarily, to lead him carefully a little way by the hand, or send him home for the rest of the day. The child usually cries, and very often would clearly prefer remaining in the ditch; and if he understood ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... arisen, viz., the capture of the fort by our troops. I therefore went with the colonel up to the fort to listen for the mining operations, and got the men who claimed to have heard the subterranean noises, down in the bottom of the ditch of the fort, which was ten feet deep, and at the angles formed a fairly good listening gallery, but nothing unusual could be heard. I therefore made arrangements to sink a line of pits in the bottom of the ditch, something like ordinary wells; the bottoms of these pits ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... abruptly took her out of the company and up to London to have each day an hour of singing, an hour of dancing, and an hour of fencing. "You'll ruin her health," protested Freddie. "You're making her work like a ditch digger." ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... must buy my full obedience, Zaemon, if you want it. Promise me Nais—and your arts I know can snatch her—and I will be true servant to the High Council of the Priest, and will die in the last ditch if need be for the carrying out of order. But let me see Nais given over to the fury of that wanton woman, and I shall have no inwards left, except to take my vengeance, and to see Atlantis piled up in ruins ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... islands and along the coast, with the great mountains on the mainland standing up above everything else. After a while we got to the Crinan Canal, which is in reality a short cut across the field. It is nine miles long and not much wider than a good-sized ditch, but it saves more than a hundred miles of travel around an island. We was on a sort of a toy steamboat which went its way through the fields and bushes and grass so close we could touch them; and as there was eleven locks where the boat had to stop, we got out two or three times and walked along ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... resemblance to the unequalled neighbourhood of Warwick. Down and down we trotted—hills and heights of all kinds left behind us—trees, shrubs, hedges, all in the fullest leaf, lay for miles and miles on every side; and the scenery had about as much resemblance to our ideal of a Welsh landscape, as ditch water to champagne. Through this wilderness of sweets, stifling and oppressive from its very richness, we drove for a long way, looking in vain for the hilly region where the Three Cocks had taken up their abode. At last we saw, a little way in front of us, at the side of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... it, the churches which tower over it, the palaces which line and the gondolas which glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical than Rome itself? . . . Without these the water would be nothing but a clay-coloured ditch. . . . There would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... find him, Mrs. Houghton, to a moral; and do you stick to me. They generally go straight away to Thrupp's larches. You see the little wood. There's an old earth there, but that's stopped. There is only one fence between this and that, a biggish ditch, with a bit of a hedge on this side, but it's nothing to the horses ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... were seen larger than any before observed, built on eminences near the sea, and fortified on the land side by a bank and ditch, with a high paling within it, carried all round; some of them had also outworks. They were supposed to be the fortified villages called by the natives Pahs or Hippahs. There seems to have been much doubt in the minds of the officers of the Endeavour as to whether ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... completed according to the original design, it cost not less than thirty millions of livres. It was environed, two miles and a half in circumference, with a stone wall from thirty to thirty-six feet high, and a ditch eighty feet wide. There was, as you will see, six bastions and eight batteries, with embrasures for 148 cannon. On the island at the entrance of the harbour, which we just passed, was a battery of thirty twenty-eight pounders, and at the bottom of the port another mounting thirty-eight ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... shorn, uplifted its topmost branches to the dull gray sky, here and there, like some transformed prophetess raising her gaunt arms in appeal or malediction; an occasional five-barred gate marked the entrance to some by-road to the farm; on one side of the way a deep black-looking ditch lay under the scanty shelter of the low hedge, and hinted at possible water rats to the traveller from cities who might happen to entertain a fastidious aversion to ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... shout it was! The wind got hold of it as if it had been a sparrow's twitter, and tossed it mockingly over their heads and far away behind them, who knows where? "It's no go," said Wraysford. "Hullo, here's the meadow ditch. Hadn't we better follow it up and down? Stephen and I will take ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... scientific gentleman walked out into the garden, Mr. Pickwick had run down the lane as fast as he could, to convey a false alarm that somebody was coming that way; occasionally drawing back the slide of the dark lantern to keep himself from the ditch. The alarm was no sooner given, than Mr. Winkle scrambled back over the wall, and Arabella ran into the house; the garden gate was shut, and the three adventurers were making the best of their way down the lane, when they were startled by the scientific ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... fight for the church. Why they pay us to do their fighting instead of training you for that purpose I will never understand. Either one of you looks as strong as a bull and with that habit in the ditch, a helmet on your head, wearing corselet and sword you might pass as a soldier. Here come two more of your order; not only the cities but the mountains are full of you. No wonder there is so much ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... commanded the bridegroom to appear in drawers at their castle, and plunge into a ditch of mud; and sometimes they were compelled to beat the waters of the ponds to hinder the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... puddin' race; Aboon them a' ye tak your place, Painch, tripe, or thairm, Weel are ye wordy of a grace As langs my arm. His knife see rustic labor dight, An' cut you up with ready slight, Trenching your gushing entrail bright Like onie ditch, And then, O! what a glorious sight, Warm reekin' rich. Ye powers wha mak mankind your care, And dish them out their bill of fare, Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware That jaups in luggies, But if ye wish her grateful pray'r, Gie her a ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... appointed day. I had been loading in the wood that day, and sending the team forward, I went to see the business—and a pretty piece of business it turned out. All the food was eaten, the drink swallowed to the last drop, the ship drawn about three roods, and then left in a deep ditch. By this time night was coming on, and the multitude went away, some drunk, some hungry for want of food, but the greater part laughing as if they would split their sides. The merchant cried like a child, bitterly lamenting his folly, and told me that he should have ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... was completed in 1790. In 1768 Briudley, the celebrated engineer, planned out the Birmingham and Wolverhampton Canal, proposing to make it 22 miles long; but he did not live to see it finished. The work was taken up by Smeaton and Telford; the latter of whom calling it "a crooked ditch" struck out a straight cut, reducing the length to 14 miles, increasing the width to 40 feet, the bridges having each a span of 52 feet. The "Summit" bridge was finished in 1879. The Fazeley Canal was completed in 1783, and so successfully was it worked that in nine years the shares were at a ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... (1) Danavirke. The Danish work was a wall of earth, stones, and wood, with a deep ditch in front, and a castle at every hundred fathoms, between the rivers Eider and Slien, constructed by Harald Blatand (Bluetooth) to oppose the progress of Charlemagne. Some traces of it still ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... to him, and joking him pretty hard sometimes. 'If I had this farm, I'd show you enterprise. You wouldn't see the hogs in the garden half the time, just for want of a good fence to keep 'em out. You wouldn't see the very best strip of land lying waste, just for want of a ditch. You wouldn't see that stone wall by the road tumbling down year after year, till by and by you won't be able to see it for ...
— The Man Who Stole A Meeting-House - 1878, From "Coupon Bonds" • J. T. Trowbridge
... him that perchance it might have wandered into some thicket to graze, or to some grassy ditch which it would not leave till it had filled its belly; and to the end that he might the better see, without running hither and thither, whether his surmise was right, he chose the highest and thickest tree that ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... go out to meet a crisis before it had become acute. The thing it would emphatically not do is to dam up an insurgent current until it overflowed the countryside. Fight labor's demands to the last ditch and there will come a time when it seizes the whole of power, makes itself sovereign, and takes what it used to ask. That is a poor way for a nation to proceed. For the insurgent become master is a fanatic from the struggle, and as George Santayana ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Creek, that heads up at Lost Chief Springs, all summer. He built a brush dam and threw the water out of our creek into his own ditch, whenever he felt like it. I didn't want to start a fight going. That's not a Mormon's business. We are peaceful folks, homesteading the wilderness. It was a wet summer and we managed to get enough water out ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... moment mounted the rampart and seen the assailants advancing in unbroken ranks, with heads lowered and weapons at the charge. He fired his cannon among them. He even had time to load and fire again, when the light-limbed Olotoraca bounded forward, ran up the glacis, leaped the unfinished ditch, and drove his pike through the Spaniard from breast to back. Gourgues was now on the glacis, when he heard Cazenove shouting from the gate that the Spaniards were escaping on that side. He turned and led his men thither at a run. In a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... was one of his father's patients, and Dr. Bird esteemed her very highly, Frank had postponed the reckoning just as long as he could endure the insults of the bully. But he believed the last ditch had been reached, and was determined to no longer raise a hand ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... mill, at a heap of stones on the north easterly side of said road, thence northeasterly on said SAMUEL CHASE'S line by said road to a heap of stones, thence northeasterly on said CHASE'S line, to a stake and stones at the end of a ditch at a brook; thence down said brook to Nashua River, thence up said river, to the bounds first mentioned, together with the inhabitants thereof, be, and they are hereby set off from the town of Groton and annexed to the town of Shirley, there to do duty and receive ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... far up the River Han I saw a large buffalo with four boys on his back, grazing by the side of a water-ditch, which lay between him and a steep bank some ten feet high. The grass being very soft, my close approach was unobserved, until a hare getting up I fired off my gun. Instantly the buffalo dashed through the ditch and up the bank, when the boys, having nothing ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... brought home to me that we were not the only persons involved in the risk of this joyous adventure. Just outside the bombarded hamlet ahead of us we were stopped by some Belgian [? French] soldiers hidden in the cover of a ditch by the roadside, which if it was not a trench might very easily have been one. They were talking in whispers for fear of being overheard by the Germans, who must have been at least a mile off, across the fields on ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... transcribe the title: "The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, which far Exceeds Every Thing of the Kind Ever yet Published ... By a Lady. London: Printed for the Author; and sold at Mrs. Ashburn's, a China Shop, the Corner of Fleet Ditch. MDCCXLVII." The lady was no other than Mrs. Glasse, wife of an attorney residing in Carey Street; and a very sensible lady she was, and a very sensible and interesting book hers is, with a preface showing that her aim was to put matters as plainly as she could, her ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt |
