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More "Ditch" Quotes from Famous Books



... forbidding, sombre pass which is called the Thermopylae of Provence, he wished to enjoy the magnificent view which spread to the southern horizon a little longer, he went and sat down on the edge of the ditch which bordered the road, turning his back on the mountains which rise like an amphitheatre to the north of the town, and having at his feet a rich plain covered with tropical vegetation, exotics of a conservatory, trees and flowers quite unknown in ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MURAT—1815 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... her into Egypt. "Do so-and-so," said Abraham to Sarah, "that it may be well with me,—for thy sake." The history of the Chinese slave woman as she came in contact with the foreigner at Hong Kong and at Singapore proceeds all along a pathway labelled "protection," down to the last ditch of human degradation. "Well with me," was the motive in the mind of the "protector." "For thy sake," the argument for the thing as put before the woman and ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell

... situation, he continues:—'It was at this time that the heliographers of the Dublin's showed their pluck, for, fixing up their stand amidst shot and shell, they got their message through to Heidelberg.... We could watch every move of the Dublins, as the ditch ran in the line of their kopje.... Another bit of pluck well worth seeing happened just as there was a lull in the firing. Two of the Dublins ran from their entrenchments to their tents, quite a quarter of a mile, and carried all their bread in a blanket between them ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring

... scratch you, and bite you, and push you into the first available ditch, for a poor coward, who was afraid to take care of the interests of woman, in case she got too well able in the end to take care of ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page

... the hot-spirited cavaliers were eager for storming the breach sword in hand; others, more cool and wary, pointed out the rashness of such an attempt, for the Moors had worked indefatigably in the night; they had digged a deep ditch within the breach, and had fortified it with palisadoes and a high breastwork. All, however, agreed that the camp might safely be advanced near to the ruined walls, and that it ought to be done in return for the insolent defiance of ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving

... battlefields of this war are the marvels of military science. Made from the air they show every road and watercourse, every ditch and gully, every patch of woodland, every farmhouse, church, or stonewall. Much of the early work of the aviator is in learning to make such maps, both by sketches and by the employment of the camera. It is no easy task. From an airplane one thousand feet up the earth seems ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... his sector of fire. About two hundred yards to his left, he saw the top of a small ditch. Using the ditch for cover, the Belderkans could sneak to the top of ...
— The Green Beret • Thomas Edward Purdom

... in which Pope laid the famous diving scene in "The Dunciad"; celebrated also by Gay in his "Trivia." There is a view of Fleet Ditch as an illustration to "The Dunciad" in Warburton's edition of Pope, 8vo, 1751.—W. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... me out a little car a short time ago. But, alas! it had not been chosen with judgment, and is no use. It has been rather a bother to me, and now it must go back. Mr. Carlile drove it up from Dunkirk, and it broke down six times, and then had to be left in a ditch while he got another car to tow it home. Since then it ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan

... visited by a strong patrol; and on his return, his party was observed and hailed and fired on by a sentry. They ran away on all fours in the dark, and so doing plumped upon another sentry, whom Laupepa grappled and flung in a ditch; for the Sheet of Paper, although infirm of character, is, like most Samoans, of an able body. The second sentry (like the first) fired after his assailants at random in the dark; and the two shots awoke the curiosity of Apia. On the afternoon of the 16th, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... their enemies, who were behind breastworks. The troops of Tholouse fired wildly, precipitately, quite over the heads of the assailants. Many of the defenders were slain as fast as they showed themselves above their bulwarks. The ditch was crossed, the breastwork carried at, a single determined charge. The rebels made little resistance, but fled as soon as the enemy entered their fort. It was a hunt, not a battle. Hundreds were stretched dead in the camp; hundreds were driven into the Scheld; six or eight hundred ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... trees; past cottages and burns, and people going home from work. Yoho, past donkey chaises, drawn aside into the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, whipped up at a bound upon the little watercourse, and held by struggling carters close to the five-barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey

... paper which explains the aforegoing reference to "horse Races": "1763—Spring Meeting... Mr. Wilkes's horse, LIBERTY, rode by himself, took the lead at starting; but being pushed hard by Mr. Bishop's black gelding, PRIVILEGE, fell down at the Devil's Ditch, and was no where." The "Ship News" is on the same pattern. "August 25 [1765] We hear that his Majesty's Ship Newcastle will soon have a new figure-head, the old one being almost ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson

... wise, Philip, or I should not have taken the trouble to do so," said Venner, with much less acrimony. "So be a man always, Philip, and never a flunky. You have played your part admirably this morning. Let it be played as well, Philip, even to the finish—even to the last ditch!" ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter

... story, "Twenty-Six and One," he utilized this painful remembrance: "There were twenty-six of us—twenty-six living machines, locked up in a damp cellar, where we patted dough from morning till night, making biscuits and cakes. The windows of our cellar looked out into a ditch, which was covered with bricks grown green from dampness, the window frames were obstructed from the outside by a dense iron netting, and the light of the sun could not peep in through the panes, which were covered with ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky

... Offa drove the Welsh to the Wye it had been set in order, with a stockade halfway down the steep earthwork round the hill crest, so that men on its top could use their weapons on those who were trying to scale it. The dry ditch was deep and steep sided, and, so far as I could see in the moonlight, on this side at least it would need a strong force to take it by storm, were it fairly manned by say two hundred men. The gate had been made afresh of heavy timber, ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler

... know no better course for you to take than to dig a deep ditch all around the trees, say three feet wide and as many deep, and just within the outer reach of the limbs, and fill this in with half the earth removed and the other half made up of vegetable matter, ashes, road dirt, and such manure from the barn and stable as you ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... 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 ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... kicking and struggling, in a manner most undignified for a blue blood of Castile, while the Coloradoan stepped leisurely forward to the irrigating ditch which supplied water for the garden and the field of grain behind. This was now about two feet deep, and running strong. In it was deposited, at full length, the clapper little person of Don Manuel Pesquiera, after which Dick Gordon turned and went limping ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine

... any town. I believe the whole of it, or at any rate a great portion, has been paved with wood; but the boards have been worked into mud, and the ground under the boards has been worked into holes, till the street is more like the bottom of a filthy ditch than a road-way through one of the most thickly populated parts of a city. Had Quebec in Wolfe's time been as it is now, Wolfe would have stuck in the mud between the river and the rock before he reached the ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... the King, "will perhaps accept a reduced price. The island is not an amusing place. Dull, my friend, dull as ditch mud. By this time he has found out that Salissa is as respectable as Sunday, as golf, as what you call a seasonable ticket. He will not want to keep it. He will accept a price, perhaps, ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham

... up and let me think." He sat for a moment staring at one place, his face still lacking all emotion, but his eyes a trifle narrower than before. "You haven't got me yet," he cried, standing up. "By the eternal, I'll fight to the last ditch, and I'll win. I'll show Drayton he can't play this game on me. I'll show the Star. That dirty sheet has hounded me for years. I'll put it out of business. And I'll send the reformers howling into the alleys, sick of ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers

... host slowly across the sandy plain, till at length he halted it two bow-shots from the camp of the barbarians. The camp was shaped like a bow, and the river Sihor formed its string, and round it was a deep ditch and beyond the ditch a wall of clay. Moreover, within the camp and nearer to the shore there was a second ditch and wall, and behind it were the beaks of the ships and the host of Aquaiusha, even of his own dear people the Achaeans. ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

... the letter into a thousand fragments, and flung the volume of poems into the ditch below. She hastened to her room, and no one saw her again until the next morning, when she came down dressed in somber black, her face pale, and her ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy

... generally dispensed with and most of the women mounted astride. From the landing we rode slowly over a long stretch of loose sand, tiresome to the donkeys, and then along a good path on the embankment of an irrigating ditch. The sun was sending down hot rays by the time we reached our first halting place, the Temple of Kurna, and we were glad to dismount and seek shelter and rest in the shade of the great walls while we examined the beautifully executed reliefs ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob

... Shall? O God! but most vnwise Patricians: why You graue, but wreaklesse Senators, haue you thus Giuen Hidra heere to choose an Officer, That with his peremptory Shall, being but The horne, and noise o'th' Monsters, wants not spirit To say, hee'l turne your Current in a ditch, And make your Channell his? If he haue power, Then vale your Ignorance: If none, awake Your dangerous Lenity: If you are Learn'd, Be not as common Fooles; if you are not, Let them haue Cushions by you. You are Plebeians, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... hollows where brains belonged. The Oren creatures lived in their stolen homes long after the borrowed body died, and they could signal others to the vicinity. Morgan tossed the globular little creatures in the ditch where they lay squeaking faintly—helpless, once-removed from the body of the host who had long since ceased to exist as a ...
— Collectivum • Mike Lewis

... flight until they were swallowed up in the darkness, and the reflection of the artificial light on their wet rain-coats became too weak to give away their position. In their anxiety to leave the camp behind they tended to separate, but both fell headlong into a deep ditch, where they met again. In their first dash one of them dropped most of the provisions, which the Germans discovered and brought back to the camp in triumph. Six days afterwards they were recaptured, thirty kilometres from the border. Two officers cut ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight

... be only 107 ft. 590 m. from its mouth. It is one of the most crooked streams in the world, and its length in a straight line is less than half that by its curves. It is practically only a drainage ditch for the half-submerged, lake-flooded district it traverses. Its width is very uniform for 1000 m. up, and for 800 m. its depth is never less than 45 ft. It is navigable by steamers for 1648 m. as far as the little stream, the Curumaha, but only by light-draft craft. Chandless ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... 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 ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... its pointed nose, and stared in amazement after the hare. It had not heard any splash. For, according to all the rules of art, it had come creeping along the bottom of a deep ditch; and, as it was not conscious of having made any mistake, it could not understand the strange ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland

... no opinion," he replied. "I have no idea. I was lying in a ditch inanimate. This is a degrading confession, sir; I can only say in self-defence that perhaps (in your good nature) you have made yourself partly responsible for my shame. I am not used to these ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... young man with a chuckle, tightening the upper bandage until Rhoda's foot was numb. "But I always carry this little outfit with me; rattlers and scorpions are so thick over on the ditch. Somebody's apt to be hurt anytime. I'm Charley ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow

... had seventy horsepower, and sang songs. Since she had left Minneapolis nothing had passed her. Back yonder a truck had tried to crowd her, and she had dropped into a ditch, climbed a bank, returned to the road, and after that the truck was not. Now she was regarding a view more splendid than mountains above a garden by the sea—a stretch of good road. To her ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... 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 ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon

... pursuers would also bog down. The swamp was intersected by a series of small ditches and scattered bushes, which added to the difficulty of the passage. I heard Brumley floundering and swearing behind and went back to pull him out of a bottomless ditch. Simmons joined us while I was still struggling with him. In another hour Brumley's legs played out. We could still make out the lights of the laager. It was vitally necessary to push on; so we encouraged him as best we could and managed, somehow, to reach the edge of ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson

... every corner; Dr. Castleton piloted me safely through one expedition; but on the next, we had to part company, and I passed through a crowd of at least fifty, alone. They were playing cards in the ditch, and swearing dreadfully, these pious Yankees; many were marching up and down, some sleeping on the pavement, others—picking odious bugs out of each other's heads! I thought of the guerrillas, yellow fever, and all, and wished they were all safe at home with their mothers and ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson

... although he immediately resumed the solemn tone in which he had previously spoken.—"But I had hoped that two such old friends, as you both have been to me, would not altogether have made up their minds in cold blood, if advertised of their danger, to run the chance of dying like dogs in a ditch, without one preparatory thought towards that tremendous Being, before whom we may ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... answer, that they may either goe into the barne and thrash, fill or empty the maltfat, load and unload the kilne, or any other good and necessary work that is about the yard, and after they come from plowing, some may goe into the barne and thrash, some hedge, ditch, stop gaps in broken fences, dig in the orchard or garden, or any other out-worke which is needfull to be done, and which about the husbandman is never wanting, especially one must have a care every night to looke to the mending or sharpening of the plough-irons, and the repairing ...
— Agriculture in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Lyman Carrier

... up to, an' they'll rispict ye. I had no further trouble. That was the last o' thim. 'Tis the wake an' difinceless people they bate an' murther. I heerd there was talk o' shootin' me from the back iv a ditch; an' that one said, 'But av ye missed?' says he. 'What ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... although this or that man be faulty. As if an army be constantly victorious, regular, &c. we may say, it is an excellent victorious army: But Tindal; to disparage it, would say, such a serjeant ran away; such an ensign hid himself in a ditch; nay, one colonel turned his back, therefore, it is a ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... to occupy the intermediate defiles, and to intercept either the troops themselves, or their convoys of provisions. The camp of Valens, which he pitched under the walls of Hadrianople, was fortified, according to the practice of the Romans, with a ditch and rampart; and a most important council was summoned, to decide the fate of the emperor and of the empire. The party of reason and of delay was strenuously maintained by Victor, who had corrected, by the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... packs itself into the new Berline; two Body-guard Couriers behind. The Glass-coach itself is turned adrift, its head towards the City, to wander where it lists,—and be found next morning tumbled in a ditch. But Fersen is on the new box, with its brave new hammer-cloths; flourishing his whip; he bolts forward towards Bondy. There a third and final Bodyguard Courier of ours ought surely to be, with post-horses ready ordered. There likewise ought that purchased Chaise, with the two Waiting-maids and ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... on rising ground on the bank of the Agueda. The fortifications were fairly strong, and being protected by a very high glacis, it was difficult to effect a breach in them. The glacis is the smooth ground outside the ditch. In well-constructed works the walls of the fortification rise but very little above the ground beyond, from which they are separated by a broad and deep ditch. Thus the ground beyond the ditch, that is, the glacis, covers the walls from the ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty

... Across the ditch and through the wide-open gate in the moss-grown palisade, and they came into a broad grassy space that was more like a lawn than a court. Ahead of them rose the massive three-storied tower, built of mighty gray stones without ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... three in the morning. And, when you had been keeping this sort of thing up two or three hours, and your little velvet head intimated that nothing suited him like exercise and noise, what did you do? You simply went on until you dropped in the last ditch. The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... I had a dream. I saw my pen. It was standing up against a small willow in a bunch of grass in the road ditch; it was ...
— Personal Experiences of S. O. Susag • S. O. Susag

... could easily have walked unperceived until within a few yards of the place, had he but kept hidden by the trees; but such was not his course. Right across the clearing, and passing near the house, had been dug a great ditch a yard in depth, a year or two before, with the intent of draining a piece of lowland lately subjugated. This ditch had been overgrown with weeds until it was almost hidden from sight, and now in summer time its bottom was ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... to which they replied, and then rushed forward, attempting to storm the stockades. The fort, from one side to the other, was in a blaze of light. Each man was fighting with desperation, and hurling back those who crossed the ditch and endeavoured to climb the walls. After the Spaniards had made several desperate attempts, they were driven back; and again getting under shelter, contented themselves with keeping up a hot fire at us. We, of course, replied in the same fashion; but, except that both parties ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston

... sunlight on steel. He was the old Seagreave again whom Jose had once described to Gallito. The Seagreave whose mind worked with lightning rapidity, who ventured anything, as gay and invincible he fought in the last ditch, his back to the wall and all the odds ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... provide breathing-room for their gasping population. Besides, air, water, light, and cleanliness are modern innovations. The nose seems to have acquired its sensitiveness within a hundred years,—the lungs their objection to foul air, and the palate its disgust at ditch-water like the Thames, within a more recent period. Honestly dirty, and robustly indifferent to what mortally offends our squeamish senses, our happy ancestors fattened on carbonic acid gas, and took the exhalations of graveyards and gutters with a placidity of stomach that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... them. They only wish to love and be loved in return, reserving to themselves the right to punish them, when they deserve it. Countless cases are on record where (pictures or statues of) Madonnas and saints have been thrown into a ditch for not doing what they were told, or for not keeping their share of a bargain. During the Vesuvius eruption of 1906 a good number were subjected to this "punishment," because they neglected to protect their worshippers from the calamity according ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... of his spirit, for you went off at a tangent, crying out, 'Come along, papa!' and cleared the hedge at the roadside, crossed Slapperton's farm, galloped up the lane leading to Curmersfield, took the ditch, with the low fence beyond at Cumitstrong's turnip-field, in a flying leap— obliging me to go quarter of a mile round by the gate—and overtook the hounds just as they broke away on a false scent in the direction ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne

... have a curious method. A team of oxen hoists the buckets with a long rope running over a pulley, and every time they make a trip along the well-worn pathway they dump a barrel or more of much needed moisture into a ditch that feeds ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis

... where we will, Eternal London haunts us still, The trash of Almack's or Fleet-Ditch— And scarce a pin's head difference WHICH— Mixes, though even to Greece we run, With every rill from Helicon! And if this rage for traveling lasts, If Cockneys of all sets and castes, Old maidens, aldermen, and squires, WILL leave their puddings and coal fires, To gape at things in foreign ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... twice here in England, but without success. The first was in a slow running water with a muddy bottom. The second in a stagnant water at the bottom of a deep ditch. Being some time employed in stirring this water, I ascribed an intermitting fever, which seized me a few days after, to my breathing too much of that foul air which I stirred up from the bottom, and which I could not avoid ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley

... Two companies of troops, from the Third Vermont, were now ordered forward. Down from the woods they came, rushed into the water to their waists, and gallantly made for the rebel rifle pits. The first line of the works was gained and then the second. The fort was empty, but a ditch to their left was filled with men. They poured a volley among them and the gray coats fled. Thus the fort was actually in their possession, and was held for some minutes by the noble fellows, but when they looked ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens

... was ill travelling on a high-road in good weather, but on a cross-road in the spring!—that was a time to commend oneself body and soul to the Saints. He walked warily, picking his way in and out of the bog between fence and ditch, which was all that remained to show where the piety of the past once kept a road. The low land to his left was submerged, a desolate tract giving back a sullen grey sky, lifeless, barren, save where a gaunt poplar like the mast ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless

... the whole division considered savage and unjustifiable, which was also the official view. It was the act of a very young subaltern, mistakenly interpreting an order. In the other case an Arab was caught red-handed, lurking in a ditch on our line of march, with one of their loaded knobkerries for any straggler. I do not know what happened, but have no doubt ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... in shape, the shell having a rough, hard surface. So numerous are they, that Bates observes "it is scarcely exaggeration to say that the waters of the Solimoens are as well stocked with alligators in the dry season, as a ditch in England ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... as they were commanded; and when they came near the ditch they stretched out their hands, and with entreaties requested to be admitted into the city as Romans. When they were admitted, however (since no suspicion existed to hinder their admission), and were questioned as to the plans of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... to see, like an English park. I passed horrible tule swamps, and reached a cattle land with corrals and solitary cowboys. There was a quaint old Spanish Mission that lingers in my memory, then once again I came into the land of the orange-groves and the irrigating ditch. Here I fell in with two of the hobo fraternity, and we walked many miles together. One night we slept in a refrigerator car, where I felt as if icicles were forming on my spine. But walking was not much in their line, so next morning they jumped a train and we separated. I was very ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... fruit-trees, with branches intermingling, blended the white and pink of blossoms. There was the soft laughter of children in the garden. Strange birds darted among the trees. Their notes were new, but their song was the old delicious monotone—the joy of living and love of spring. A green-bowered irrigation ditch led by the porch and unseen water flowed gently, with gurgle and tinkle, with music in its hurry. Innumerable bees murmured ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey

... days best; misty Thrasymene and Cannae's fearful slaughter rise first in the memory. Then all at once, within ten years, the scale turns, and Caius Claudius Nero hurls Hasdrubal's disfigured head high over ditch and palisade into his brother's camp, right to his brother's feet. And five years later, the battle of Zama, won almost at the gates of Carthage; and then, almost the end, as great heartbroken Hannibal, defeated, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... retorted. "Go! Go and see, child, what it is!" She pointed to the door, but, before Anne could reach it, she raised her hand for silence. "They are crossing the ditch," she muttered, her eyes dilated. "One, two, many, many of them! Many of them! They are throwing down hurdles, and wattles, and crossing on them! And there is a priest ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... custom-house officer, who asked them what it was they had in the cart. Vitalis answered that it was a traveller's luggage, and the officer let them pass on. But soon after, afraid to risk another such experience, the guilty couple turned out the parcels into a ditch, covered them with stones and sand, ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... 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 Bevis! See if ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil

... monopolist. On his way to his carriage, on foot, he is hooted and menaced. He is first pelted with mud, and then with stones. The consuls in attendance, and the sub-delegate, who come to his assistance, are mauled and repulsed. Meanwhile, some of the most furious begin, before his eyes, "to dig a ditch to bury him in." Protected by five or six brave fellows, amidst a volley of stones, and wounded on the head and on many parts of his body, he succeeds in reaching his carriage. He is finally only saved because the horses, which are likewise stoned, run away. Foreigners, Italians, bandits, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... 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 ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready

... out in the cold. It's a country town now. The river strikes in below it; and a boat can't go up to the town except in high water. Well, they are going to build wing-dams in the bend opposite the foot of 103, and throw the water over and cut off the foot of the island and plow down into an old ditch where the river used to be in ancient times; and they think they can persuade the water around that way, and get it to strike in above Vicksburg, as it used to do, and fetch the town back into the world again. That is, they are ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... his bloody work, the body of the unhappy king, vain and pompous as he was to the very last, was stripped of all the jewels about it—the jewelled dagger, the jewelled girdle, the jewelled head-dress—and it was then cast into a ditch.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various

... Trust the mute bayonet and midnight skies, To stretch o'er craggy walls the dark surprise. With axes, handspikes on the shoulder hung, And the sly watchword whisper'd from the tongue, Thro different paths the silent march they take, Plunge, climb the ditch, the palisado break, Secure each sentinel, each picket shun, Grope the dim postern where the byways run. Soon the roused garrison perceives its plight; Small time to rally and no means of flight, They spring confused to every post ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... lino of skirmishers with men carrying scaling ladders, gabions, and fascines among them. The latter had their rifles slung on their backs, and were ordered in no case to fire but merely to run forward, fill up the ditch, and place their ladders behind. Then followed the second line in company column formation for the attack, followed by the third line to support the assault. At half-past two p.m. the attack was made by the Roumanians, and it is said that by some mistake the Russians arrived half ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... stone wall protected the land on either side of the road. Nearly behind the milestone there was a gap in this fence, partially closed by a hurdle. A half-ruined culvert, arching a ditch that had run dry, formed a bridge leading from the road to the field. Had the field been already chosen as a place of concealment by the police? Nothing was to be seen but a footpath, and the dusky line of a plantation beyond it. As she made these discoveries, the rain began to fall ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins

... what had seemed to be a tremendous while, we found ourselves brought up by an irrigation ditch; but we managed to clear it, and alighted at once upon soft earth, which we knew was cultivated ground, and ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn

... was a dreary one at that time; as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London. There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... school-boy. Glad I am they had not quite vanished from Scotland before I was sent thither, but remained to help me get ready for the kingdom of heaven: those dykes must still be dear to my brothers who have gone up before me. Some of the fields had only a small ditch between them and the road, and some of them had no kind of fence at all. It was a dreary road even in summer, though not therefore without its loveable features—amongst which the dykes; and wherever there is anything to love, there is beauty in ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... feet above the lake, stands the city of Oroomiah. It dates from a remote antiquity, and claims to be the birthplace of Zoroaster. It is built chiefly of unburnt brick, is surrounded by a high mud wall and a ditch, and has a population of twenty-five thousand, of whom the larger part are Mohammedans. The Nestorians of the plain were estimated ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson

... to the extremity of the harbor: the stone bridge of the river was hastily repaired; and the six battles of the French formed their encampment against the front of the capital, the basis of the triangle which runs about four miles from the port to the Propontis. [65] On the edge of a broad ditch, at the foot of a lofty rampart, they had leisure to contemplate the difficulties of their enterprise. The gates to the right and left of their narrow camp poured forth frequent sallies of cavalry and light-infantry, which cut off their stragglers, swept the country of provisions, sounded the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... sixth and seventh resolves, this last-ditch effort made no difference. The public printer, conservative Joseph Royle of the Virginia Gazette, refused to publish the resolves at all. What went into print outside the colonies were the four true resolves, ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... generous ideas which redeem the sins of youth. He had chosen this life of apparent splendor, but secretly gnawed by the canker worm of remorse, a life of fleeting pleasure dearly paid for by persistent pain; like Le Distrait of La Bruyere, he had descended so far as to make his bed in a ditch; but (also like Le Distrait) he himself was uncontaminated as yet by the mire ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac

... trickery so far, that he would sometimes mount his horse, and make believe he was going to St. Michael's; and, in thirty minutes afterward, you might find his horse tied in the woods, and the snake-like Covey lying flat in the ditch, with his head lifted above its edge, or in a fence corner, watching every movement of the slaves! I have known him walk up to us and give us special orders, as to our work, in advance, as if he were leaving home with a view to being absent several days; and before he got half way to the{168} ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... frequently changes its name in each division, and this part of the Calle de Tacuba is occasionally called the "Plazuela del Sopilote," "San Fernando," and the "Puente de Alvarado," which is the more classic of the three, as celebrating the valour of a hero; while a ditch, crossed by a small bridge near this, still retains the name of "el Salto de Alvarado," in memory of the famous leap given by the valiant Spaniard, Pedro de Alvarado, on the memorable night called the "noche triste," of the 1st of July, 1520, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... of young ducklings as they sidle along through grass beside a ditch—how like they are to a single serpent! I said in Life and Habit that a colossal being, looking at the earth through a microscope, would probably think the ants and flies of one year the same as those ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... the mail out of doubt. He did it up by Tippet's Barrow, just beyond the cross-roads where the scarlet gig used to meet the coach and take the mails for Castle Cannick and beyond to Tolquite. Billy Phillips, that drove the gig, was found in the ditch with his mouth gagged, and swore to Hughie's being the man. The Lord Chief Justice, too, summed up dead against him, and the jury didn't even leave the box. And the moral was, "Hughie Best, you're to be taken to the place ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... installing an inertialess drive, and shooting the whole neighborhood out into space, were perhaps feasible from an engineering standpoint. They were, however, potentially so capable of making things worse that they would not be tried save as last-ditch measures. In short, the control of loose vortices was very ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith

... at him; then he'd dare him to fight, an' thrash him till the others came in, an' got him away. Then he'd carry tales to his father, and one day old Westall beat Jim within an inch of 'is life, with a strap end, because of a lie George told 'im. The poor chap lay in a ditch under Disley Wood all day, because he was that knocked about he couldn't walk, and at night he crawled home on his hands and knees. He's shown me the place many a time! Then he told his father, and next morning he ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... and the graves you are sending them to. Think of the mother and the babe at her breast, think of the father and son, Think of the lover and the loved one too, think of them doomed every one To fall (as it were by your very hand) into yon fathomless ditch, Murdered by one who should guard them from harm, who now lies ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various

... camped not a great ways from us. One time I was playing in a gully—big red ditch. I spied the Federals coming. I flew out the ditch up the hill and across the field. They was calvary men camped back of our field. We all left that place and refugeed to another place. They didn't burn the house but they sent two bullets through the walls or that house. 'Old ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration

... when the engine came along I put my spurs to my horse and when near enough I let fly my lariat. The rope settled gracefully around the smoke stack, and as usual my trained horse set himself back for the shock, but the engine set both myself and my horse in the ditch, and might have continued to set us in places had not something given way, as it was the rope parted, but the boys said afterwards that they thought they would have to send for a wrecking train to clean the track or ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love

... a hundred yards further before I saw another man at a distance, and the hue and cry behind was as hot as ever. The hedge in this place was lower, and I jumped over it into the field on my right. There was a ditch on the other side, of which I had no intimation; and my feet alighting on the edge of it, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft

... the people were going round it. Public opinion, at the beginning of the strike, was about equally divided between the men and the company. Now and then a reckless striker or sympathizer would blow up a building, dope a locomotive or ditch a train, and the stock of the strikers would go down in the estimation of the public. Burlington stock was falling ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman

... well to motors. We decided to overhaul ours with a few brief excursions, just long enough to give an opportunity for having it towed home. One late afternoon we were hurrying across the mesa to supper, when our magneto flew off into the ditch, scattering screws in all directions. Fortunately, a kind of Knight Errant to our family appeared just in the nick of time to take us home and send help to the wreck. I once kept a garage in San Diego open half an hour after closing time ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane

... Anacreon. As to me, who for amusement have nothing but merlons, fascines and gabions, [Merlons are mounds of earth placed behind the solid or blind parts of the parapet (that is, between the embrasures) of a Fortification; fascines are bundles of brushwood for filling up a ditch; gabions, baskets filled with earth to be ranged in defence till you get trenches dug.] I pray God to grant me soon a pleasanter and peacefuler occupation, and you health, satisfaction and whatever your heart desires.—F." [OEuvres de ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... long columns, millions and millions of them. And when they come to a ditch, the front ones fall in, and more and more of them on top, till they fill up the ditch, and the rest cross over. We ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair

... bringing in a dead man, I went to the hall: I saw some persons, directed by one whom I guessed to be Dr. Darwin, carrying a man, who appeared motionless. "He is not dead," said Dr. Darwin. "He is only dead drunk. I found him," continued the doctor, "nearly suffocated in a ditch; I had him lifted into my carriage, and brought hither, that we might take care of him to-night." Candles came, and what was the surprise of the doctor and of Mrs. Darwin to find that the person whom he had saved was Mrs. Darwin's brother! who, for ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth

... me.' Oh, I know perfectly well who did the trick, and how it was done. Then I shall send in my resignation. They will accept it with polite words of regret, and will say to each other, 'Poor fellow, he had a brilliant career before him, but he got drunk, or something, and fell into the ditch.' Ah, well, we won't talk any ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr

... turned to the matter of houses and lodgings for "himself and men." Two miles inland he built a strong pale some 2 miles in length which ran from river to river making an island of the neck on which Henrico stood. Presumably this palisade faced a ditch hence the term—"trench and pallizado." Hamor related in 1614 that in 4 months he had made Henrico "much better and of more worth then all the work ...
— The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624 • Charles E. Hatch

... octopus had firmly closed about its victim, whose struggles, before the year 100 A.D., had practically ceased. A civilization which made no effort to civilize was forcibly planted upon the island. Where had been the humble village, protected by a ditch and felled trees, there arose the walled city, with temples and baths and forum, and stately villas with frescoed walls and tessellated floors, and hot-air currents converting winter ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele

... emperor of one loving and tender heart, and she the empress of yours, than to be king of the world. The man who has really won the love of one good woman in this world, I do not care if he dies in the ditch a beggar, his ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll

... I know thee, beast, or in what roadside ditch Lord Tristram found thee as he fled away This morning through the Morois from a man Who called ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... and the landlady without pausing, and rushed through the open door into the fields. By a single second, perhaps, he was too late. The boy was keenly aware, that if he continued in sight, he would have no chance of escaping from a powerful young man. He made, therefore, at once for a ditch, into which he tumbled headlong. Had the murderer ventured to make a leisurely examination of the nearest ditch, he would easily have found the boy—made so conspicuous by his white shirt. But he lost all heart, upon failing at once to arrest ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... "Fight 'em to the last ditch! If they've told Waseche we've got to sell, I wouldn't sell for a hundred million dollars—and neither would he! We'll fight 'em—and what's more we'll beat 'em—you wait an' see!" And with a yell the boy cracked his whip, and the dogs, with the great Leloo in the lead, sprang out ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx

... and sit firm to the saddle. But, my dear fellow, marriage is another thing. I see you now, led along at a slapping pace by Madame la Comtesse de Manerville, going whither you would not, oftener at a gallop than a trot, and presently unhorsed!—yes, unhorsed into a ditch and your legs broken. Listen to me. You still have some forty-odd thousand francs a year from your property in the Gironde. Good. Take your horses and servants and furnish your house in Bordeaux; you can be king of Bordeaux, you can promulgate there the edicts that we put ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac

... scattered the burning fragments among the barrels of gunpowder, it was found necessary to remove the cotton entirely. The only defence of the Americans in this battle was a bank of earth, five feet high, and a ditch in front.] ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.

... none very wise, and, besides, are without souls competent to receive instruction. There is not one of them that has understanding enough to direct the feet of his neighbour in the path he should go—it would be the blind leading the blind, and together would they fall into the ditch. What more would the bear do, if he were made ruler, than train his subjects to perform great feats of strength, or to climb a tree, or to suck their paws through the long nights of winter?—The panther would teach ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... New-market, Salisbury-plain, Hockley i' the Hole, Gadshill, and all the high places of any request: he has had his mares and his geldings, he, have been worth forty, threescore, a hundred pound a horse, would ha' sprung you over the hedge and ditch like your greyhound: he has done five hundred robberies in his time, more or less, I ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson

... several weeks in a country parish in Maryland, he had invitations to settle in Charleston and Pittsburg, and he had an opportunity to become the president of a college by subscribing to the doctrinal tests required, which he would not do; for "he would sooner die in a ditch than submit to human authority in matters of faith."[45] In June, 1784, he preached in the Brattle Street Church of Boston, and he anticipated becoming its minister; but his pronounced doctrinal position seems to have made that impossible. He also preached in Hingham, and some ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... that night I was dreaming about that canoe with the two fellows in it. I could hear them paddling just as clear as could be, only when I woke up before daylight, I knew it was just the sound of rain on the roof of our patrol cabin. It was dripping into the rain ditch, I guess. ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... 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 ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... in devising new schemes for the welfare of humanity. The most trivial events would often suggest to him measures conducive to the most beneficial results. It is said that Franklin saw one day in a ditch the fragments of a basket of yellow willow, in which some foreign commodity had been imported to this country. One of the twigs had sprouted. He planted it; and it became the parent of all the ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott

... that domain where once the cowboy reigned supreme have been turned into farms by the irrigator's ditch or by the dry-farmer's plan. The farmer in overalls is in many instances his own stockman today. On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and Texas and parts of Nevada we may find the cowboy, it is true, even ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough

... Minnie, and I passed the summer holidays at St. Leonards, and many a merry gallop had we over our favorite fields, I on a favorite black mare, Gipsy Queen, as full of life and spirits as I was myself, who danced gaily over ditch and hedge, thinking little of my weight, for I rode barely eight stone. At the end of those, our last free summer holidays, we returned as usual to Harrow, and shortly afterwards I went to Switzerland with some dear ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant

... return—were it only to tell her that, grim and dull as I seemed, I loved her—tried me with a subtle temptation almost beyond my strength to resist. All that was mean in me rose in arms, all that was selfish clamoured to know why I must die in the ditch while others rode in the sunshine; why I must go to the pit, while others loved ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... would come of the play-acting," said the Seigneur's groom, and was flung into the ditch by ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... 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 remains I could see ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe

... money, indeed!" Luckily, I was not; but, as I crushed the letters back into my pocket, I solemnly vowed that, rather than touch a penny of that man's money, at least whilst his state of mind remained what it then was, I would perish of starvation in a ditch. Then bewildered, stunned, and utterly crushed in spirit, I hastily excused myself to Courtenay upon the plea of having received distressing news from England, and, obeying the same impulse which impels a wounded animal to rush away and hide itself and its suffering in the deepest ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood

... smiting the hand-rail with his clenched fist. "Hah! I beg your pahdon, my deahs—a meah slip of the tongue." And then, to the full as savagely: "By Heaven, I hope that train will fly the track and ditch him before eveh he comes within ordering distance of the ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde

... Europe can provide. After that—if you let her plunge deep enough—you won't have any trouble; she will marry anything you offer. Of course, if you really believed in monarchy as a principle, and not as a mere expedient—a divine institution, and not as the last ditch in which the old class-barriers have to be maintained—you would let her marry any one she chose. It would do the monarchy no harm, and might ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... track. When they had gone a little away a quarrel broke out. Each man felt the others must be in some way responsible for his betrayal in the matter of the contest with Ed Hall and accusations flew back and forth. One of the men threw a heavy stone that ran down along the tracks and jumped into a ditch filled with dry weeds. It made a heavy crashing sound. Hugh heard heavy footsteps running. He was afraid the men were going to attack him, and climbed over a fence, crossed a barnyard, and got into an empty street. As he went ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson

... O'Malley in the ditch standing in a picturesque attitude. The Dutch General stands on the summit of a wall three feet high, and leaning over the battlements—which tower to the height of three inches—hands O'Malley a pardon. Enter ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various

... 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

... else beene perfect; Whole as the Marble, founded as the Rocke, As broad, and generall, as the casing Ayre: But now I am cabin'd, crib'd, confin'd, bound in To sawcy doubts, and feares. But Banquo's safe? Mur. I, my good Lord: safe in a ditch he bides, With twenty trenched gashes on his head; The least a Death ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... a small ditch in Atterbury's meadow is a very beautiful, tall, conical tree, over 80 feet high, with an excurrent trunk which is very large and ridged near the ground. It tapers rapidly upward, so that the circumference is only about half as great at the height of 6 feet, ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar

... engaged, while this work was going on, in pulling the briers out of his clothes and flesh, and being thirsty, he went down to a ditch that was near, and drank, taking up the water in his hands. As he drank, he groaned out, "Oh, can it be that ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott

... thrown into confusion. Some of the cavalry horses were wounded, and dashed wildly through the ranks, increasing the disorder. The artillery horses caught the infection, and, plunging wildly, overturned one of the gun- carriages in the ditch. At this moment a body of twenty Canadian militia arrived, and Fitzgibbon, to carry out his ruse of affected superiority of numbers, boldly demanded the surrender of the enemy. Colonel Boerstler, the American commander, thinking the British must be strongly supported, to Lieutenant ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow

... had become by disuse impassable.[217] Much of the eastern was only fit for ox-wagons. Along the face of this strategic fort ran the Tugela, an admirable moat, as completely commanded by the heights on its left bank as is the ditch of a permanent work by its parapet. West of Colenso this moat was traversable by guns and wagons at only five places, i.e., Robinson's, Munger's, Skiet's, Maritz, and Potgieters drifts. Of these the four first named were difficult for loaded wagons. ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice

... B.C.) this territory was erected into a Roman province, and a trench, the fossa regia, was dug to mark the boundary of the Roman province of Africa and the dominions of the Numidian princes. There have been discovered (1907) the remains of this ditch protected by a low wall or a stone dyke; some of the boundary stones which marked its course, and inscriptions mentioning it, have also been found. From Testur on the Mejerda the fossa regia can be followed ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... shutters. Up the road came Araminta—may the saints preserve us!—with a man! Miss Mehitable quickly placed him as that blackmailing play-doctor who now should never have his four dollars and a half unless he collected it by law. Only in the last ditch ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed

... course, that these men are afraid of bombast and Scott was not. A man will not reach eloquence if he is afraid of bombast, just as a man will not jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch. As the object of all eloquence is to find the least common denominator of men's souls, to fall just within the natural comprehension, it cannot obviously have any chance with a literary ambition which aims at falling just outside it. It is quite right to invent subtle analyses and detached ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... lady nodded her head in assent. "Nurse, I once saw a robin's nest when I was in England; it was in the side of a mossy ditch, with primroses growing close beside it; it was made of green moss, and lined with white wool and hair; it was a pretty nest, with nice eggs in it, much better than your Canadian ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill

... something? It wasn't Sexty's fault nigh so much as it was his. I wouldn't say it to you if it wasn't for starving. I wouldn't say it to you if it wasn't for the children. I'd lie in the ditch and die if it was only myself, because—because I know what your feelings is. But what wouldn't you do, and what wouldn't you say, if you had five children at home as hadn't a loaf of bread among 'em?" Hereupon ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... having this scope to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying his own divine essence. But when, by the balance of experience, it was found that the astronomer, looking to the stars, might fall in a ditch; that the enquiring philosopher might be blind in himself; and the mathematician might draw forth a straight line with a crooked heart; then lo! did proof, the over-ruler of opinions, make manifest that all these are but serving sciences, which, as they have a private ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney

... siege to it. They knew beforehand that French arms and gunpowder were rather formidable opponents, especially if they should happen to meet another de Maisonneuve, and, as usual, had recourse to concealment. They formed their ambuscade in a ditch which they dug on the very ground that now forms the garden of the Congregation convent. There they lay hid, reconnoitering the strength of the place, and having matured their plans, commenced hurlling stones and shooting poisoned arrows against ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.

... Granta-brygge; and this name, or something very like it, it retained when the great survey was made as the Norman Conqueror's reign was drawing to its close. By this time the town had moved across to the right bank of the river, and had become a town surrounded by a ditch and defended by walls and gates. Already it contained at least four hundred houses, and on the site of the old mound the Norman raised a new castle, and in doing that he laid some ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... which skirt it meeting overhead. Every day I gallop down that avenue, which they call by my name, on Midnight, my black horse, and I always clear the gate at a bound. I like such things, and there is not a fence or a ditch in the neighborhood which I cannot take. Hoidenish, do you call me? Well, perhaps I am, but I am a pretty nice girl, too, and I love you and want you to come here at once and be happy. Sir Jack has told me how different your life has been from ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes

... see in the pictures in Punch. The Thames, when he sallied out to see it, had been too good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had ever seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a marked accent and accosting some passer-by with the question, "Say! But is this little wet ditch here the Historical ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... too steep to be practicable for an enemy. On the fourth side there is a more gradual declivity, up which the fortress could be approached by means of a winding roadway. At the foot of this roadway was the town. The access to the castle from the town was defended by a ditch and draw-bridge, with strong towers on each side of the gateway to defend the approach. There was a beautiful stream of water which meandered along through the valley, near the town, and, after passing it, it disappeared, winding around the foot of the precipice ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... was made on a train near Ogallala Station in September, 1868. The ends of two opposite rails were raised so as to penetrate the cylinders, the engine going over into the ditch and the cars piling up on top of it. The fireman was caught in the wreck and burned to death, the engineer and forward brakeman, riding on the engine, escaped unhurt. The train crew and passengers being armed, defended the train, keeping the Indians off until a wrecking ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey

... I could be in any other, but with the risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild beast of Philistinism while I am trying to convert him, of being torn in pieces by him, and, even if I succeed to the utmost and convert him, of dying in a ditch or a workhouse at the ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... the sheathes of the minute corollas that I can no longer see. Tenderly I try to raise these petals, but they resist me and I only succeed in murdering the plant. Fool! Why could I not let these flowers live on the edge of their ditch? There they would have felt the fresh shrivelling of drinking in the sun, a bird would have touched them lightly, the proboscis of the mosquitoes would have sucked up their pollen, and they would have died gently by the side of ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes

... steam-engine, the mysteries of the printing-press, or the feats that may be performed with a bicycle,—of which "taking a header," or the method by which the rider learns to fly off the machine head foremost into a ditch with impunity, appeared to be the most desirable. Her patience in this respect was rewarded by that most precious possession to ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley

... was really a test of strength between industrial autocracy and militant unionism. The former was determined to restore the palmy days of peonage for all time to come, the latter to fight to the last ditch in spite of hell and high water. The lumber trust sought to break the strike of the loggers and destroy their organization. In the ensuing fracas the lumber barons came out only second best—and they were ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin

... the case may be, splits in two. Then there are two amoebae or vorticellae. In this way the necessity of the family, that middle-class institution so abhorrent to the artistic mind, is avoided. In my friend's drop of ditch-water, as in heaven, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. There are no waste parents, which should appeal to the scholastic mind, and the simple protozoon has none of that fitful fever of falling in love, that distressingly tender state ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... started again and we followed him. Presently a steeple rose among the trees; we crossed a stubble-field, climbed to the top of a ditch and caught a glimpse of a few of dwellings: the village of Pomelin. A rough road constitutes the main street and the village consists of several houses separated by yards. What tranquillity! or ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert

... family sat in a tea-shop at a little table, gay chatter and the perfume of women all about him. Through it he saw the trench where he had been bombarded for twenty-six days on end, unable to stir from the sticky ditch full of corpses which rose around him like a wall.... His mother laid her hand on his, he woke, saw the affectionate questioning glances of his people, and self-reproached for making them uneasy, he smiled and began to look about and talk gaily. His boyish high spirits ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... applies as well to motors. We decided to overhaul ours with a few brief excursions, just long enough to give an opportunity for having it towed home. One late afternoon we were hurrying across the mesa to supper, when our magneto flew off into the ditch, scattering screws in all directions. Fortunately, a kind of Knight Errant to our family appeared just in the nick of time to take us home and send help to the wreck. I once kept a garage in San Diego open half an hour after closing time by a Caruso sob in my voice over the ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane

... squatted in front of me. 'You're hard to kill, and oily as a bean,' said she. 'You've only to lie quiet in the sun like a handsome gentleman; I'm sure you couldn't wish for more. Air and water's the doctor for such as you. You've got the bound in you to jump the ditch: don't you fret at it, or you'll lose your spring, my ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... "Diary of a Lord Mayor,—that day-book, or blotter, as it may be commercially termed, of a gigantic mind? Who has ever perused the autobiography of the Lama of Guildhall, Cham of Cripplegate, Admiral of Fleet Ditch, Great Turtle-hunter and Herod of Michaelmas geese? We will take upon ourselves to answer—not one! It was reserved for PUNCH to give to his dear friends, the public, the first and only extract which has ever ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... What a detestable time that was in Scotland when such a man as William Gordon was fined, and fined, and fined; hunted out of his house and banished, till at last he was shot by the soldiers of the Crown and thrown into a ditch as if he had been ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte

... another present for you. The proverb says, 'Little kindnesses strengthen the bonds of friendship.' And this will be the smallest of gifts I could possibly make you. The handsome young man who gave me this ring, and is betrothed to me—or thinks he is—lies somewhere yonder in a ditch. His horse took fright at the tumult, and threw him so that he broke his ankle. His fleeing troops left him lying there; they stumbled over him and ran on; no one offered to help him up. They all hate ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai

... born on Sandy Island the first year of the Civil War, a visitor at Uncle Ben's: "Yes sir. All them rice field been nothing but swamp. Slavery people cut kennel (canal) and dig ditch through the raw swamp. All these fields been thick woods. Ditching man ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... far beyond its path by now; while you shall endure the whole visitation; and if you try to proceed, pass the night in a flea-pestered post-house, or in a ditch of water." ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... city walls, the old belt of forts and the new enceinture of the fortified camps, which have been advanced far outside of the reach of the old forts. The main wall, ten meters (33 feet) high, consists of ninety-four bastions and is surrounded by a ditch fifteen meters wide. Behind the wall a ringroad and a belt line run ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... of his dungeon at Olmutz were six feet thick and the air was admitted through openings two feet square secured at each end by massive iron bars. Before these loopholes was situated a broad ditch, which was filled with water only when it rained; at other times it was a stagnant marsh continually emitting disease; beyond this were the outer walls of the castle, so that the slightest breeze could never refresh the inmate. ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell

... had heard that the company assembled in the meadow to tell the pleasantest tales imaginable, and being fonder of pleasure than of their prayers, they had gone and hidden themselves in a ditch, where they lay flat on their bellies behind a very thick hedge; and they had there listened so eagerly to the stories that they had not heard the ringing of the monastery bell, as was soon clearly shown, for they returned in such great haste that they almost lacked ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre

... necessary to provide for one's own life, but even to do so at the sacrifice of the dearest friend. Often I noticed a dead body tied on a plank which a single porter carried on his back; at other times the object would be concealed within a bag, and then the grave was a ditch common to all, into which the porter would shake off his load and return for another. No priest or Imam there presided over the funeral scene; few or none were the prayers that were said over the remains: ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various

... attack to fear from lurking foes, for an act of Edward the First was still in force, by which every highway leading from one market-town to another was always to be kept clear, for two hundred feet on each side, of every ditch, tree, or bush in which a man might lurk to do harm; while, as any ill that happened to travellers was made payable by the township in which it occurred, there was a strong personal interest on the part of the inhabitants to suppress plundering bands in ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty

... destined to be held by this foot for many long days. He explained to his brother who the lady was whom he had taken up the hill, why he himself had first happened to be with her, and that he had slipped with one foot in a roadside ditch, and, thinking to catch her up, had run across a field and so missed the lane in the darkness. This was told in the meagre, prosaic way that left no hint of ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... first, largely because he was afraid of nothing, absolutely desperate, and willing to take any chance. He wasn't a hop-head, yet they all looked at him as sort of queer; though ready to follow him to the last ditch, yet some way they thought him off his head. And Swanson believes that his career of crime started after he reached Seattle, not before—that he hadn't grown up to crime like most of the men in his gang. He didn't know anything about ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall

... done if I'd been one, and this 'most makes me feel I am, just cryin': 'Child lost! Boy lost! Girl lost!' and a couple the neighborin' men j'inin' in the search, with our lanterns lit, sence we didn't know what sort of a hole or ditch you might fell into—" ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond

... Balin came within the castle's gate the portcullis fell down at his back, and there fell many men about the damosel, and would have slain her. When Balin saw that, he was sore aggrieved, for he might not help the damosel. Then he went up into the tower, and leapt over walls into the ditch, and hurt him not; and anon he pulled out his sword and would have foughten with them. And they all said nay, they would not fight with him, for they did nothing but the old custom of the castle; and told him how their lady was sick, and had lain many years, and she might not ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory

... the mountains on my left—the lower ridge of the Kapanja Sirt—and saw how the water-course went up and up and in and out, and I thought if I kept low and crawled round in this ditch I should come out at last close behind the firing-line, and then I could get in touch with the trenches. I could hear the machine-gun of the ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave

... begin to tell stories, or to argue, or to lean on their elbows, order the beguine to make them rise and take away their table, for the common folk have a saying 'when a varlet holds forth at table and a horse grazes in the ditch, it is time to take them away, for they have had ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... Quintius, the sole hope of the Roman people, cultivated a farm of four acres, at the other side of the Tiber, which are called the Quintian meadows, opposite to the very place where the dock-yard now is. There, whether leaning on a stake in a ditch which he was digging, or in the employment of ploughing, engaged at least on some rural work, as is certain, after mutual salutations had passed, being requested by the ambassadors to put on his gown, and listen to the commands of the senate, (with wishes) ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius

... necks. The dusty road was flowing very swiftly, and like a river it had risen. Never before had it been so easily visible. They saw the ruts the carts had made, the hedge upon the opposite bank, the grassy ditch where the hemlock grew in feathery quantities. They even saw loose flints upon the edge. But the actual road was higher than ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood

... quantities of hurdles and fascines being made; which, as I hear, are to be employed in one of two different plans. The first plan is, To attack the French retrenchment generally; the ditch which is before it, and the morass which lies on our left wing, to be made passable with these fascines. The other plan is, To amuse the Enemy by a false attack, and throw succor into the Town.—One thing is certain, in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... I must be in good form to-day. One really never can tell, you know. An opening that is a scream with some people falls as flat as ditch-water with others." She looked at him pensively for a moment or two, tapping her small white ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... glad of it!" snapped the farmer's wife. "Nuthin' could please me better. Las' time I went to town one o' them plagued nuisances come hootin' erlong an' made the old mare back us clean inter the ditch—an' I broke a dozen an' a ha'f of aigs right in the lap of my new bombazeen dress. Drat ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson

... foolish than anythin' else, because, if Michael Cassily should ever lay hands upon the man who stole his belongings, he'd shoot at him the way you'd shoot at a rabbit in a ditch and kill him as dead as one ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien

... you lost your senses?" thought the marionette. "I certainly will not ride on a bull. How long have bulls been used as horses? This beast will hurl me into the first ditch we come to. A fine regard you have for your emperor! I almost begin to believe that you want to get rid of me and ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini

... attacks of Uncle Roger and his sheep. On one side was a sort of precipice, where the chalk had been dug away, and a rather extensive old chalk pit formed a tolerable pond, by the assistance of the ditch at the foot of a hedge. On the glassy surface already marked by many a sharply traced circular line, the Sutton Leigh boys were careering, the younger ones with those extraordinary bends, twists, and contortions ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge

... who put both you & us in mind to send each to other, for verily had he rune on in that desperate & chargable course one year more, we had not been able to suport him; nay, both he and we must have lyen in y^e ditch, and sunck under y^e burthen, &c. Had ther been an orderly course taken, and your bussines better managed, assuredly (by y^e blessing of God) you had been y^e ablest plantation that, as we think, or know, hath ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford

... listening; I'm inclined to think it's my normal state," Foster answered with a smile. "The greasy thing cost forty guineas, and I wouldn't trust it to Jenkins after young Jimmy dropped it in a ditch. Jenkins can rear pheasants with any keeper I've met, but he's no ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss

... as great as that of St. Peter's in Rome, and a quarter of a million people could stand within it. It consists in the first place of a rampart of earth roughly circular in form and with a diameter of about 1200 feet. Within this is a ditch, and close on the inner edge of this was a circle of about a hundred upright stones. Within this circle were two pairs of concentric circles with their centres slightly east of the north-and-south diameter of the great ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet

... a walled city from the time of the deys until the close of the 19th century. The French, after their occupation of the city (1830), built a rampart, parapet and ditch, with two terminal forts, Bab Azoun to the south and Bab-el-Oued to the north. The forts and part of the ramparts were demolished at the beginning of the 20th century, when a line of forts occupying the heights of Bu Zarea ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... 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 ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... preferable to avoid it, and have recourse to substances which increase the bulk of the heap sufficiently to make it retain the whole of the liquid. For this purpose, clay, or still better, the vegetable refuse of the farm, such as weeds, ditch cleanings, leaves, and, in short, any porous matters, may be used. But by far the best substance, when it can be obtained, is dry peat, which not only absorbs the fluid, but fixes the ammonia, by converting it more or less completely into humate. ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson

... take my eyes off the sea, even for a moment. If you have ever been driven at sixty miles an hour over a bad road, and felt that if you looked away the car would go into the ditch, and if you will multiply that by the exact number of German submarines and then add the British Army, you will know how ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... said, "we'll reach the caribou grounds, and see the Indians yet. George and I will go with you to the last ditch; you can count on us ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace

... action. His plots are of the simplest, and betray indubitably a numbness or imperfect development of the inventive faculties of the brain. People who read novels for the denouement, who ride a steeple chase through them, leaping a five-page fence here, a ditch of a chapter there, and anon clearing at a mighty bound a rasper of some score or more paragraphs, resolute simply to be in at the death in the last chapter, anxious to see the wedding torches extinguished, and the printer ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... you kicked out of Wilkinson's house and starve in the ditch, I suppose? But now, if you can control your fine feelings for one moment, will you listen to me? I have never blamed you in the matter at all, and don't blame ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... mild-faced little man, more like a school-teacher than a soldier—and it was decided that, as the trenches were not under fire at the moment, we might go into them. He led the way into the communication trench—a straight-sided winding ditch, shoulder-deep, and just wide enough to walk in comfortably. Yellow clay was piled up overhead on either side, and there was a wooden sidewalk. The ditch twisted constantly as the trenches themselves do, so as not to be swept by enfilading fire, and after some hundreds of ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... the populace. Although the young Prince of Orange had rewarded their insurrectionary election of him to the Stadtholdership by redeeming them from the despair to which the French invasion and the English fleet had reduced them, although since his famous "I will die in the last ditch," Holland no longer strove to commit suicide by opening its own sluices, yet the unloosed floods of popular passion were only partially abated. A stone that grazed his cheek and plumped against the little hand-bag that held his all of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... the head of his innumerable cavalry, descended year after year on the rice-fields of Bengal. Even the European factors trembled for their magazines. Less than a hundred years ago, it was thought necessary to fortify Calcutta against the horsemen of Berar, and the name of the Mahratta ditch still preserves ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the distance; and the boy saw or heard no more. Bill Sikes had him on his back scudding like the wind. Oliver's head hung down, and he was deadly cold. The pursuers were close upon Sikes' heels. He dropped the boy in a ditch and fled. ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... he broke into an explanation. "I can go out here without expecting to be fired at from some hedge or ditch around the next corner, monsieur. You did not know those rascals as I knew them. They nearly got you once; but they tried a dozen times, and would have succeeded too, if Stampoff had not been too sharp ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy

... enemies, who were behind breastworks. The troops of Tholouse fired wildly, precipitately, quite over the heads of the assailants. Many of the defenders were slain as fast as they showed themselves above their bulwarks. The ditch was crossed, the breastwork carried at, a single determined charge. The rebels made little resistance, but fled as soon as the enemy entered their fort. It was a hunt, not a battle. Hundreds were stretched dead in the camp; hundreds were driven into the Scheld; six or eight hundred took refuge ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... with confidence; but Hob was outrageously ambitious, and mystery was delightful. He went to work in the Indian manner, and what with occasionally taking the cover, now of a bush, now of a pine tree, and now of a convenient hillock, Hob had got himself very comfortably lodged in the recess of an old ditch, originally cut to carry off a body of water which rested on what was now in part the public mall. Becoming interested in the proceedings, and hearing of the departure of Ralph, to whom he had been despatched, his head gradually assumed a more elevated position—he soon forgot his precaution, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... he drinks. He came to dinner here once, and I'm afraid he must have come intoxicated. He took me in; his little eyes quite burned me up. He drove his dog cart into a ditch on the way home. That sort of thing gets about so. It's such a pity. He's quite ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... in the inlet, it was pleasant to listen to the roar of the breakers on the bar, but not so cheerful was the thought of facing the high waves seaward. Therefore the plan suggested itself of sufficiently deepening a ditch that led through the marshes from New River to Bogue Sound, to let us through; thence we could sail inland the rest of the voyage without obstruction or hindrance of any kind. To this end we set about contrivances to heave the canoe over the ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum

... and the latter being held back for a time. Major Gilbraith and Colonel Burke's troops, being unable to cross the creek, passed over the bridge that spans it by the left flank, the former's companies having previously occupied a sheltered place in a ditch parallel to and to the right of the main road. About this time the advance-guard, one of the companies of which (Penrose's) had previously held for a short time a knoll on the left of the road, moved forward and crossed ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman

... Capt. Lossier and bade him take fifty men and advance to the right and post himself in an advantageous ditch and to maintain his ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan

... that it might be his chance to come short of being paid by you, he will always speak good of you in every company, ever and anon purchase new creditors unto you; to the end, that through their means you may make a shift by borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and with other folk's earth fill up his ditch. When of old, in the region of the Gauls, by the institution of the Druids, the servants, slaves, and bondmen were burnt quick at the funerals and obsequies of their lords and masters, had not they fear enough, think you, that their lords and masters should die? For, perforce, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... down in the Globe, which knows best what the military one is worth. There is nothing remarkable in his speech, except the fuss which he makes about national honour. He may find it lying in the ditch, much ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... were his own. Instead of being hundreds of miles ahead in the lead of the year's drive, as he expected, he now found himself in charge of a camp of cripples. What few trains belonging to his herd had escaped the ditch were used in filling up other unfortunate ones, the injured cattle from the other ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams

... whining about?' said Ugo, contemptuously, 'who fears numbers! Let them come, though they were as many, as the Signor's castle could hold; I would shew the knaves what fighting is. For you—I would lay you quietly in a dry ditch, where you might peep out, and see me put the rogues to flight.—Who ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... celerity that scarcely allowed him an exclamation; and before he had recovered his self-possession, the horses taking fright (and their fright being skilfully taken advantage of by the highwaymen), the carriage was fairly whirled into a ditch on the right side of the road, and upset. Meanwhile Smoothson had leaped from his station in the front; and having fired, though without effect, at the third robber, who approached menacingly towards him, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... A Quaker, fixing his eyes on Mr. Patten, and seeing his black dress, remarked, "Friend, thou hast been the trumpeter of rebellion to those men,—thou must answer for them." The moralizer was touched by a grenadier with the butt end of his musket, so that the "spirit fell into the ditch." But the Quaker was not rebuffed. "Friend," he said to the soldier, "thou art, I fear, no true friend ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson

... and women, his horse began to act up, and some one yelled, "Tally-ho," and that is something about fox hunting, not a coach, and the horse jumped a fence and dad rolled off over the bowsprit and went into a ditch of dirty water. ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck

... citie oughte to cause to be ordained all the saide things: and moreover aboute the walle, there woulde not bee suffered any grounde to be tilled, within a myle thereof, nor any wall made, but shoulde be all champaine, where should be neither ditch nor banck, neither tree nor house, which might let the fighte, and make defence ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli

... proposed canal. By leading the Canal directly through this pond, at least a quarter of a mile of excavation will be avoided. M. DE LESSEPS is known to have decided upon making a similar use of the Bitter Lakes in the construction of his Suez ditch, after having seen ELKANAH HOPKINS' plans for our great Cape Cod Canal. Vessels will hereafter pass through this Canal instead of taking the long voyage around the Cape; and it is believed that the saving which ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various

... of an outlying fort, three breaches were made in the walls, and on the night of April 6, under the cover of thick darkness, two divisions of British troops descended into the ditch, many carrying ladders or sacks of hay, and advanced to the foot of the glacis. Here they were almost overwhelmed with a hurricane of fiery missiles, and in mounting the breaches they had to face not only hand-grenades, trains of powder, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... of Saratoga by a sulky and careless driver, for a station on the top of the canal-packet. The weather was the finest imaginable; the air that blew over the fields was sweet with the odor of clover blossoms, and of shrubs in flower. A canal, they say, is but a ditch; but this was as unlike a ditch as possible; it was rather a gentle stream, winding in the most apparently natural meanders. Goldsmith could find no more picturesque epithet for the ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant

... was dammed up by a freak of nature, and the crews of thirty vessels had been occupied five weeks in cutting a ditch through the obstruction, wide enough to ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... Get high enough up upon the hill, and the hedges between the fields are barely perceptible. Live on the elevation to which the Gospel of Jesus Christ lifts men, and you look down upon a great prairie, without a fence or a ditch or a division. So my text comes with profound significance, 'Let us do good to all,' because all are included in the sweep of that great purpose of love, and in the redeeming possibilities of that great death on ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... considerable space separated them, continued it as they passed, and added polite questions as they drifted steadily apart. Williams's mind seemed to be a balloon. He had been so inflated that he had not noticed that Paterson had definitely shied into the dry ditch as they came to the point ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane

... of the rooms under some mattresses, five men were found, and under a bridge crossing an irrigating ditch another was discovered. All these were immediately shot by the orders of Santa Ana, and so hastily and excitedly was it all done that a Mexican was killed with them by accident. The wife of Lieutenant Dickinson, a negro servant of Travis, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... up, it had only to be set going. It was bound not to fail, and nothing did fail. What would have been an abyss if the majority had done its duty, and had understood its joint responsibility with the Left, was not even a ditch. The inviolability had been demolished by those who were inviolable. The hand of gendarmes had become as accustomed to the collar of the Representatives as to the collar of thieves: the white tie of the statesman was not even rumpled in the grasp of the galley sergeants, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo

... infatuated with wine, had to be held from jumping overboard. The ramping and stamping, and roaring and scrambling for room to sit or lie, was horrific. At last the day dawned, when matters were not quite so bad; but we moved over our fifty miles of ditch-water to Atfeh in a manner the most uncomfortable any poor ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various

... rushed Big Ferre, still full of the rage of battle. Reaching the point where the English had planted their flag, he killed the bearer, seized the standard, and bade one of his followers to go and fling it into the ditch, at a point where the wall was ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris

... When we awakened in the morning rain was pouring down. This in itself might not have prevented us from travelling, but the state of the trail did. It had been raining the greater part of the night and the trail was little more than a ditch of slimy, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... she made her way into the Park, and the rapid Foker made his dash forward. What to do? Just to get a nod of recognition from Miss Amory and her mother; to cross them a half-dozen times in the drive; to watch and ogle them from the other side of the ditch, where the horsemen assemble when the band plays in Kensington Gardens. What is the use of looking at a woman in a pink bonnet across a ditch? What is the earthly good to be got out of a nod of the head? Strange that men will be contented ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... ordinary woman, I'm afraid, but so far, respectable. How d'you do, Mrs. Middle-ditch? Your husband? I think he's riding down to Annandale with Colonel Statters. Yes, isn't it divine after the rain? Guy, how long am I to be allowed to bow to Mrs. ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling

... motoring to Lille to purchase whisky and other medical comforts, when the steering-gear of his 60-H.P. Rolls-Ford came away in his hands, with the result that he nose-dived into the rear of my ambulance at forty miles per hour. When I came to my senses my head was in the ditch and the rest of me in mid-air. Captain Scorcher, crawling out of the wreckage, said, 'Do you reverse?' and then asked me to be his wife. I said 'Yes,' meaning I reversed, and the marriage takes place as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various

... of "Colonel Dyer! Colonel Dyer!" answered by a guttural defiance of "Elderkin, too! Elderkin, too!" Next day the reason of it all came out: A pond having been emptied by drought, the frogs that had lived there emigrated by common consent to a ditch nearer the town, and on arriving there had apparently fought for its possession, for many lay dead on the bank. The night was still and the voices of the contestants sounded clearly into the village, the piping ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... he replied. "I have no idea. I was lying in a ditch inanimate. This is a degrading confession, sir; I can only say in self-defence that perhaps (in your good-nature) you have made yourself partly responsible for my shame. I am not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... that I could only ride a short distance, but thought it advisable to save myself all unnecessary fatigue. I was of course accompanied by a servant to bring back the horses when they were of no further use. By leaving the lane and making our way across the fields over hedge and ditch, we contrived to ride about half a mile. The horses then became useless, as the drifts were so deep against the hedges and gates, that the poor animals became imbedded in them, and were unable to find any firm footing to leap from. The servant therefore had to return ...
— A Night in the Snow - or, A Struggle for Life • Rev. E. Donald Carr

... is used with reference to the progress of work on a wall or ditch from one end of it to ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.

... take off the saddles, bridles, and accouterments, throw them into a ditch together with the men's arms and pile a few bushes over them, then drive the horses across the fields till they reach some grazing ground near the river; the farmers there will doubtless appropriate them ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty

... Beeston Castle, standing on a sandstone rock rising some three hundred and sixty feet from the flat country. It was built nearly seven hundred years ago by an Earl of Cheshire, then just returned from the Crusades. Standing in an irregular court covering about five acres, its thick walls and deep ditch made it a place of much strength. It was ruined prior to the time of Henry VIII., having been long contended for and finally dismantled in the Wars of the Roses. Being then rebuilt, it became a famous fortress in the Civil Wars, having ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... cheerfully. "So'll YOUR popper some day. I'm goin' to get mine to let YOUR popper into something—Ditch stocks and such. Yes! True, O King! Popper'll do anything for me," she added ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte

... among the upper classes of society, and their use has spread downward. They have broken down many barriers, and in many places, and under many and divers conditions, the pipe has followed triumphantly in their wake; but the last ditch of the old prejudice has been found in the convention, which, in certain places and at certain times, admits the cigar and cigarette of fashionable origin, but bars the entry of the plebeian pipe—the pipe which for two centuries was practically the only mode ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson

... was less inclined to resist it, and one glorious day of late April in its twelfth return he had wandered northward along to a little wood a couple of miles from the town. It was full of unnamed flowers and voices and mysteries. Every tree and thicket had a voice—a long ditch full of water had many that called to him. "Peep-peep-peep," they seemed to say in invitation for him to come and see. He crawled again and again to the ditch and watched and waited. The loud whistle would ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton

... his twin sister had been born in 1840, the little-prized children of an unmarried mother, who had vanished one day and left no trace. Probably she had died in a ditch. The children were taken into an orphanage, on leaving which the girl had gone to service, while the boy had become a soldier and climbed the ladder of promotion to the rank of sergeant, receiving the silver ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein

... contracting himself out of the obligations to be imposed on all other ecclesiastical dignitaries, he practically renounced any claim to set the policy of the Church. Henry may have aimed at digging an impassable ditch between the Pope and the German bishops. It was an impossible agreement; for neither bishops nor lay nobles would wish to see so large an addition to the King's resources, while Henry himself could not afford to surrender the right of investiture, since ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley

... all our War correspondents Mr. PHILIP GIBBS contrives to give in his despatches the liveliest sense of the movement, the pageantry and the abominable horror of war. Pageantry there is, for all the evil boredom and weariness of this pit-and-ditch business, and Mr. GIBBS sees finely and has an honest pen that avoids the easy cliche. You might truthfully describe his book, The Battles of the Somme (HEINEMANN), as an epic of the New Armies. He never seems to lose his wonder at their courage and their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various

... the way of settlement at Allen's Camp, where the first plowing was on March 25, 1876, by John Bushman and Nathan Cheney. Jacob Morris immediately commenced the construction of a house. Two days later an irrigation ditch was surveyed and on the following day John Bushman got out the first logs for a diversion dam. April 3, Bushman sowed the first wheat. A temporary structure was built for protection and for storage. May 26 the name of Allen City was given the settlement, ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock

... nations are easily overcome by their enemies. 2. Germany is much larger than Gaul. 3. Were not the Romans the most powerful among the tribes of Italy? 4. On account of (his) wounds the soldier dragged his body from the ditch with the greatest difficulty. 5. He was able neither to run nor to fight. 6. Who saved him? A certain horseman boldly undertook the matter. 7. The rumors concerning the soldier's death ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge

... last ditch," writes Sir HENRY NEWBOLT in his New Study of English Poetry; "Latin is trembling at sight of the thin edge of the wedge." Still a hope of saving Latin—within limits—yet remains, if the appeal of "Kismet" in The Spectator ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various

... who could go down lowest in the ground. How the goose did flap about with its broad breast when it was once more on the land! How quickly the cock scratched a hole! The duck came off the worst of all, for she leapt into a ditch, but sprained her legs, and waddled away to a neighboring pond, crying, "Cheating, cheating!" The little bird without a name, however, sought out a mouse-hole, slipped down into it, and cried out of it with his small voice, "I am ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers

... sleeping till the rainy season returns. On the Upper Amazons, where the dry season is never excessive, it has not this habit, but is lively all the year round. It is scarcely exaggerating to say that the waters of the Solimoens are as well stocked with large alligators in the dry season, as a ditch in England is in summer with tadpoles. During a journey of five days which I once made in the Upper Amazons steamer, in November, alligators were seen along the coast almost every step of the way, and the passengers ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... and nearly the whole division considered savage and unjustifiable, which was also the official view. It was the act of a very young subaltern, mistakenly interpreting an order. In the other case an Arab was caught red-handed, lurking in a ditch on our line of march, with one of their loaded knobkerries for any straggler. I do not know what happened, but have no ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... talking about?" sneered Black. "Do you think I'm fool enough to ditch the train? No, sir! Don't believe it. I'm not running my neck into a noose of that kind. A cluster of red lights has been spread along the track before the blow-out. The engineer will see the signals and pull his train up—-he has to, by law! No one on the train will be ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock

... The sprightly affair should end by his inviting Edward to dinner. That should lead to their uninviting him in turn, and then he should have a word with Julia, and find out what houses she visited, and get introduced to their proprietors. Arrived at this point, his mind went over hedge and ditch faster than my poor pen can follow; as the crow flies, so flew he, and had reached the church-porch under a rain of nosegays with Julia—in imagination—by then he arrived at Albion Villa in the body. Yet he knocked timidly; his heart beat almost as ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... region represents the ancient Babylon and that the vast walls of Herodotus enclosed it all.[12] This view, however, cannot be accepted. Quite apart from the considerations urged above, the region in question is not square but rather triangular, and traces of wall and ditch surrounding it are altogether wanting, though city-walls have survived elsewhere in this neighbourhood and though nothing can wholly delete an ancient ditch. We have, in short, no good reason to believe that Babylon, in any form ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield

... levelled up a bit. If I git down on me knees an' scrub the floor, it's nuthin' thought of. But if a missionary does it, a great fuss is made. When Parson John is dug out of snow-banks every week, when his sleigh gits upsot an' throws 'im into the ditch, no one outside the parish ever hears of it. But let sich things happen to a furren missionary, ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody

... the dark turf around with a lively luminousness, which softened off into obscurity where the barrow rounded downwards out of sight. It showed the barrow to be the segment of a globe, as perfect as on the day when it was thrown up, even the little ditch remaining from which the earth was dug. Not a plough had ever disturbed a grain of that stubborn soil. In the heath's barrenness to the farmer lay its fertility to the historian. There had been no obliteration, because there had ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... wanting therefore the rich graminivorous variety which Nature gives its carpet, and having instead a braird of six days' growth—lean and hungry growth too—of ryegrass and clover. As for the rill, it stagnates in a deep square ditch, which silences its prattle, and restrains its meanders with a witness. The original scene was, of course, imprinted still deeper on Russell's mind than mine, and I was glad to see he was ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... Southerner has appealed to force, and force he should have, until, by the laws of force, he is not only beaten, but compelled to admit the humiliating fact. That he is not disposed "to die in the last ditch," that he has none of the practical heroism of desperation, is proved by the actual results of battles. When defeated, and his means of escape are such as only desperation can surmount, he quickly surrenders, and is even disposed to take the oath ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... jump," my father had shouted to me once, years ago, while I sat up in a Norfolk ditch and watched my horse disappear through a gap in the ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman

... 18 Now behold, the Lamanites could not get into their forts of security by any other way save by the entrance, because of the highness of the bank which had been thrown up, and the depth of the ditch which had been dug round about, save it ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous

... year the scouring of that horse, as it is called, takes place, when men go and clear out the brown earth that has crumbled through frost and rain into the ditch-like lines which mark the horse's shape on the green hill-side, and make it stand out white and ...
— The King's Sons • George Manville Fenn

... form. Oh, what a number of wild beasts did I see in the way! Oh, what a number of powers were there that inflicted punishment upon me! And it came to pass that when I had been cast into the outer darkness, I saw a great ditch which was more than two hundred cubits deep, and it was filled with reptiles; each reptile had seven heads, and the body of each was like unto that of a scorpion. In this place also lived the Great Worm, the mere sight of which terrified him that looked thereat. In ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge

... and north of it. Indeed, a considerable number of trees have been felled within the southern part of the enclosure. In the mounds themselves trees are abundant, and there are many in the moat or ditch between. The stumps of those which have been cut down are so many chronological facts, from which the age of the fort may be conjectured with some approach to accuracy. A maple within the enclosure exhibits 242 rings of annual growth. It was probably the ...
— The Country of the Neutrals - (As Far As Comprised in the County of Elgin), From Champlain to Talbot • James H. Coyne

... stockade, after the traditional Indian style, it could have been taken with ease. But the Marylanders themselves had taught the Susquehannocks the art of fortification. So they had laid out a large square, raised embankments on all four sides, with an outer defence of palisades, and a ditch between. At each corner was a bastion, from which an attacking force could be enfiladed. Lacking artillery to batter down these works the three commanders decided to invest the fort and ...
— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker

... phenomena: but it was too late. For the Twenty Squadrons are again dashing forward; sweeping down whatever is before them: in spite of cannon-volleys, they plunge deeper and deeper into the mist; come upon "a ditch twelve feet broad" (big swampy drain, such as are still found there, grass-green in summer-time); clear said ditch; forward still deeper into the mist: and after three hundred yards, come upon a second far worse "ditch;" plainly impassable ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle

... we may affirm in general, our clergy is excellent, although this or that man be faulty. As if an army be constantly victorious, regular, &c. we may say, it is an excellent victorious army: But Tindal; to disparage it, would say, such a serjeant ran away; such an ensign hid himself in a ditch; nay, one colonel turned his back, therefore, it is a corrupt, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... hastily throwing back his head, with its thick, waving raven locks. "If, in leaping over the ditch, I should fall into the marsh, I must endure it, if thereby I can only reach the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... along, loaded down with men. Horsemen galloped down the slopes in squadrons—and such horsemen!—cowboys from "Lost Park" and "the Animas." Prospectors like Casey and Kelly who were quite as much at home on a horse as with a pick in a ditch, and men like Marshal Haney and Grassi, who were all-round plainsmen, and by that same token born horsemen. Haney and Kelly rode with Reynolds and Mose, while Cora and Mrs. Reynolds followed in a rusty buggy drawn by a fleabitten gray cow pony, ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland

... a soldier of Fortune. At first I was doubtful as to what path to glory and bread-and-butter I could carve out for myself. Hitherto I had been Fortune's darling instead of her mercenary, and she had most politely carved out my paths for me, until she had played her jade's trick and left me in the ditch. Now things were different. I stood alone, ironical, ambitionless, still questioning the utility of human effort, yet determined to play the game of life to its bitter end. What ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... 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 ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott

... saw enough when we beheld the post the poor kids and goats are tied to, all messy and horrid from the last sacrifice. The priest who forbade us to enter, just to show there was no ill-feeling, hung wreaths of marigolds round our necks. Boggley, once we were out of sight, hid his in the ditch, but I, afraid they might find out and be offended, went about for the rest of the day decked like any ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas

... he had been! Blind fool! To have run away instead of fighting to the last ditch for his happiness! The Desimone woman was right: it had taken him a long time to come to the conclusion that she had done him an ill turn. And during all these weary months he had drawn a melancholy picture of himself ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath

... Tidore were built upon the same principle as almost all the Portuguese defences in those seas. An outer fortification, consisting of a ditch, with strong palisades embedded in masonry, surrounded the factory and all the houses of the establishment. The gates of the outer wall were open all day for ingress and egress, and closed only at night. On the seaward side of this enclosure was what ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat

... on the gate intrusted to the care of the Spaniards and Auvergnese. But this success was merely temporary in that quarter; for the Ottomans were beaten back with such immense slaughter, that fifteen thousand of their choicest troops were cut to pieces in the breach and the ditch. But still the assault was prosecuted in every quarter and every point, and the Christian warriors acquitted themselves nobly in the defense of the city. The women of Rhodes manifested a courage and zeal which history has loved to record as most honorable to their sex. Some of ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... among these be the Goorkhas who watched on the hillside, that that battle was won by Jakin and Lew, whose little bodies were borne up just in time to fit two gaps at the head of the big ditch-grave for the dead under ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling

... tramp!" returned Winston, disdainfully. "As villanous a dog in physiognomy and dress as I ever saw! Such an one as generally draws his last breath where he drew the first—in a ditch or jail; and too seldom, for the peace and safety of society, finds his noblest earthly elevation upon a gallows. It is a nuisance, though, having him pay this trifling debt of Nature—nobody but Nature would trust him—in my house. There must be an inquest ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... brought to save them to Dur-Iakin, fortifying its walls. He summoned the tribes of Gambul, Pukud, Tamun, Ruhua, and Khindar, put them in this place, and prepared for battle. He calculated the extent of a plethrum[30] in front of the great wall. He constructed a ditch 200 spans[31] wide, and deep one fathom and a half.[32] The conduits of water, coming from the Euphrates, flowed out into this ditch; he had cut off the course of the river, and divided it into canals, he had surrounded the town, the place of his revolt, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... you!" he exclaimed; "don't worry over me or my aunt. I don't. I don't mind anything, with Holloway staked in the ditch. I can get along ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner

... following interesting account of how duck-snaring used to be managed in the Lincolnshire fens, was published some years ago, in a work entitled the "Feathered Tribes."—"In the lakes to which they resorted, their favourite haunts were observed, and in the most sequestered part of a haunt, a pipe or ditch was cut across the entrance, decreasing gradually in width from the entrance to the further end, which was not more than two feet wide. The ditch was of a circular form, but did not bend much for the first ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... is capable 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 ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... blocking out marble statues only to throw them away half finished, but as if he should take the living human frame for his subject, and should cut and gash and torture it for years, only to fling it into the ditch. ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... voice, "I wouldn't just stay there. They generally send over four of 'em. That's only the third. I find this ditch very ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor

... Canals were built, the Lachine in 1821-25, the Welland around Niagara Falls in 1824-29, and the Rideau, as a military undertaking, in 1826-32, all in response to the stimulus given by De Witt Clinton, who had begun the "Erie Ditch" in 1817. On land, road making made slower progress. The blazed trail gave way to the corduroy road, and the pack horse to the oxcart or the stage. Upper Canada had the honor of inventing, in 1835, the plank road, which for some years thereafter became the fashion through the forested States to ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton

... which were perforated for the discharge of musketry. They were formed of the hardest and most knotted pines that could be procured; the sharp points of which were seasoned by fire until they acquired nearly the durability and consistency of iron. Beyond these firmly imbedded pickets was a ditch, encircling the fort, of about twenty feet in width, and of proportionate depth, the only communication over which to and from the garrison was by means of a drawbridge, protected by a strong chevaux-de-frise. The ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... the Romans into despair and filled the minds of the Britons with joy. No effort was made by the soldiers for defence, no ditch was dug, no palisade erected, and the assault of the Britons found the colonists utterly unprepared. Taken by surprise, the Romans were overpowered, and the colony was laid waste with fire and sword. The fortified temple alone held out, but after ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... of my own nag, and with these fastened them each to a separate tree in the best manner I could. This done, I returned to the chaise and the postillion. In a minute or two Belle arrived with two poles, which, it seems, had long been lying, overgrown with brushwood, in a ditch or hollow behind the plantation. With these both she and I set to work in endeavouring to raise the fallen ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow

... to Chopigni,[93] a pretty village a league from Richelieu, and about 5 a cloack we entred Richelieu, a toune that give yeell consider its bigness it hath not its match in France. For being about a mile in circuit, besides a wery strong wall, it hath a considerable ditch environing it having something of the nature of a pond; for it abounds wt all sorts of fisches. The French calls it une canale. Being entred the toune ye have one of the prettiest prospects thats imaginable. It hath only one street, but that consisting of such magnifick stately ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder

... is nothing, wait until you get stuck in a mud-hole out west." Then 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 potato garden ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall

... all the expense of the law, the bad name that your sister will be having over the head of being in a breach of promise, and all the expenses of solicitors and lawyers. Then, after that, trying to get the money out of us, and, mind you, we will fight you to the last ditch. Won't ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne

... and without the life's experience of humans which made the Professor's part so incredibly base, so gratuitously cruel and treacherous to Finn, would have given in long before. Finn fought with the courage of a brave man who has reached the last ditch, and with the ferocity that came to him out of the ancient days in which his warrior ancestors were never known either to give or ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... stick over Tom's head; but in a moment it was spinning harmlessly in the air, and Jonas himself lay sprawling in the ditch. In the momentary struggle for the stick, Tom had brought it into violent contact with his opponent's forehead; and the blood welled out profusely from a deep cut on the temple. Tom was first apprised of this by seeing that he pressed his handkerchief to the wounded part, and staggered ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... the weather had cleared, and I went on towards Cagnicourt. On the journey I was delayed by a lorry which had gone into the ditch and completely blocked the road. Here in a field the 1st Field Ambulance had established themselves. Later on I managed to get to Cagnicourt and found my son's battery in the cellars of the Chateau. They were getting their ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott

... 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 ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... same time the officers' quarters were being prepared, and the barracks as well; while plans were made to strengthen the fort, dig ditch, form glacis, and generally make the place tenable against ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn

... Conditions were favorable for an approach to the pump-house itself, for two ridges of earth, perhaps eight feet high, thrown up like parallel furrows from a giant plow, marked the beginning of the irrigation ditch, and in the shadow of these the women worked their way forward, unobserved. They had nearly reached their goal when out into the clearing behind them, with metallic rattle and clang, burst another automobile, and Paloma ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... out of which three Galloway men had just drawn their horses. They cried to the captain, What would they do now! He answered them, What was the fray—he saw but three men coming upon them; and then caused his horse jump the ditch, and faced about with his sword drawn in his hand, stood still till the first, coming up, endeavoured to make his horse jump over also.—Upon which he, with his sword[208], clove his head in two, and his horse being marred, fell into the bog, with the other two men ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... ahead of his men and leaped to the abatis. For a half moment he stood alone on the parapet, then Fish reached him, and together they encouraged the rest to come on. Hamilton turned and sprang into the ditch, Fish following. The infantry was close behind, and surmounting the abatis, ditch, and palisades, leaped into the work. Hamilton had disappeared, and they feared he had fallen, but he was investigating; he suddenly reappeared, and formed the troops in the redoubt. It surrendered almost immediately. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... from the car into a ditch next the hillside in which the water was already a foot and a half deep and with the others climbed up the mountainside for our very lives. We had to do so as the water glided up after us like a huge serpent. ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... favourite. "Keep your spirits up as well as you can; I am not going to be like your wonderful nephews and nieces at Ashfield. I never saw such ignorant children; they did not know how to make dirt pies, nor could they jump across the ditch, or get up by the trees to the top of the garden wall. Harriett and I had such a beautiful race round that garden, and they looked ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... are very likely to find ourselves reposing in a ditch before the day is over,' retorted Bessie. 'I hope you—or the pony—will choose a ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... Chartres miracles expresses the same motive in language almost plainer still. A good-for-nothing clerk, vicious, proud, vain, rude, and altogether worthless, but devoted to the Virgin, died, and with general approval his body was thrown into a ditch (Bartsch, 1887, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... own men, English, Irish, and Scottish troops, went behind the Tanks, "laughing and cheering when they saw them get at the German wire and eat it up, and then head for the Hindenburg line, and cross it as though it were but a narrow ditch." ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... days, perhaps, many of those light-hearted boys would be lying in the trenches, or in some ditch, stark and dead, or in some hospital maimed and crippled ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking

... I went to the parson to get this thing fixed up. As I came on the marsh to the selfsame place where I saw that Poor-customer the first time, there was somebody lying at one edge of the bog, on his back in the heather and with his legs in the ditch. I knew him well enough. 'Why are you lying here alone?' said I: 'is anything the matter with you?' 'I think I am dying,' said he, but he gasped so I could hardly understand him. 'Where are those women,' said I, 'that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... compelled to resign his profession. He died shortly after, but the authorities would not even allow his corpse to be buried in the family vault. They demolished his place of interment, and threw his body into a ditch by the side ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles

... indeed, had heard that the company assembled in the meadow to tell the pleasantest tales imaginable, and being fonder of pleasure than of their prayers, they had gone and hidden themselves in a ditch, where they lay flat on their bellies behind a very thick hedge; and they had there listened so eagerly to the stories that they had not heard the ringing of the monastery bell, as was soon clearly shown, for they returned in such great haste that they almost lacked breath to begin ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre

... deliberately imposing upon the credulity of the public. Some—perhaps all of them, are men of sincerity and probity; but, deluded themselves, they help to delude others. Their vision is imperfect; and 'if the blind lead the blind,' we may expect to find them in the same ditch together. ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

... Molino del Rey was occupied by a brigade of the National Guards, under General Leon. These were re-enforced on the morning of the 7th by a brigade under General Rangel. The Casta Mata, a large storehouse surrounded by a wide ditch and inclosed by a bastioned fort, was occupied by the brigade of General Perez, and between these two positions was posted General Ramirez's brigade with six pieces of artillery. In the rear occupying some woods ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright

... 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 of plains covered with coarse grass, ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... pen, and leads it astray. Characters expand; incidents multiply; the story lingers while the materials increase; Bailie Jarvie or Dugald Dalgetty leads him astray, and he goes many a weary mile from the regular road and has to leap hedge and ditch to get back. If he resists the temptation, his imagination flags and he becomes prosy and dull. No one can read his best novels without seeing the truth of this description. 'Waverley' made an immense success as a description of new scenes and social conditions: the story of Waverley himself ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... another direction, to have his master's chariot ready for him, at some distance on the north road. Who then was there to drive home the glass-coach? Nobody. So they turned the horses' heads towards the city, and set them off by themselves; and the coach was found next day in a ditch. Still there was another meeting to take place. At the hamlet of Bondy they were to meet the two waiting-women, with their luggage in the new chaise, and postilions with fresh horses. There they were at Bondy, while every one else was asleep. They had been waiting ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau

... lined with houses as it is today, only at that time they were crude adobe structures. Surrounding these was a wall fourteen feet high, made of huge upright and horizontal saplings plastered with mud, and as a further means of protection, a wide ditch was dug on the outside. Here Luis Argueello was Comandante for ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray

... Peel-fell, is upwards of forty five miles. The most entire parts of it show that it was originally a broad and deep fosse; having on each side a rampart, which was formed of the natural soil, that was thrown from the ditch, intermixed with some stones. Its dimensions vary in different places, which may be owing to its remains being more or less perfect. In those parts where it is pretty entire, the fosse is twenty seven, twenty ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin

... paddles, and Dick pushed with an oar, while Ned used a pole which he had brought along for use with a harpoon. As the trail grew dryer, it became impossible to pole the canoe, and Ned took the painter and, stepping into the nearly dry ditch in front of the canoe, dragged the craft, while Billy got overboard and pushed from behind. Sometimes Ned stopped to kick something out of his path, and at last Dick ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock

... mind up to shoot no more that time, we were returning briskly toward Rome. Calling to my dog by his name, Barucco, and not seeing him in front of me, I turned round and noticed that the well-trained animal was pointing at some geese which had settled in a ditch. I therefore dismounted at once, got my fowling-piece ready, and at a very long range brought two of them down with a single ball. I never used to shoot with more than one ball, and was usually ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini

... dignity to his figure, and I am not sure but that his very physical condition impressed them as a kind of regal unbending and large condescension. Howbeit, when this unexpected Hector arose from the ditch, York's myrmidons trembled. ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... upon the flesh and blood of boyhood in the fighting-lines. These old men, these fat men, were breathing out fire and fury against the Hun, and vowing by all their gods that they would see their last son die in the last ditch rather than agree to any peace except that of destruction. There were "fug committees" (it was Lord Kitchener's word) at the War Office, the Board of Trade, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Ministry of Munitions, the Ministry ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... advance towards the sound. Something white comes lumbering through the darkness. An asthmatic sheep! Dead, as I judge, by this time. Leaving Frank to guard him, I took Andrew with me, and went all round the monument, and down into the ditch, and examined the field well, thinking it likely that somebody might be taking advantage of the sheep to frighten the village. Drama ends with discovery of no one, and triumphant return ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens

... and porpoises have a more masculine assurance that God is on their side than ever visits the breast of antelope or jelly-fish. This assurance, when put to the test in adventurous living, becomes in a strong and high-bred creature a refusal to be defeated, a gallant determination to hold the last ditch and hope for the best in spite of appearances. It is a part of Protestantism to be austere, energetic, unwearied in some laborious task. The end and profit are not so much regarded as the mere habit of self-control and practical devotion and steadiness. The point is to accomplish ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... Thought Waves. Begin with your WORLD, what is it? The kitchen or the school-room? The ditch or the mayor's chair? The field or as superintendent of a railroad? A brickyard or a bank? A bench or a pulpit? A loom or grand opera? A pick or a pen? Take a look at your world, what is it? Now plan it, then breathe ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft

... number of Saracen knights, all of whom Sir Isumbras successively overthrew. So dreadful was the stroke of his spear, that many were killed at the first encounter; some escaped with a few broken bones; others were thrown headlong into the castle ditch, but the greater number consulted their safety by a timely flight; while the queen contemplated with pleasure and astonishment the unparalleled exploits of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... 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 of an ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... they labored far into the night until the camp on the knoll was a hard nut to crack, with its surrounding ditch and palisade of logs behind which a man could lie and shoot. Now and then it might have been noted that Jack Cockrell and Joe Hawkridge conferred with their heads together as though something private were in the wind. As soon as they were relieved from duty, ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... (amends, vengeance) upon him!" So saying, he took the offensive vehicle, awkward burden as it was, in his two arms, and carrying it to the back of the cornyard, shoved it over the low wall into the dry ditch at its foot, where he heaped dirty straw ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald

... running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal, it shall be measured to you again. And he spake a parable unto them, Can the blind lead the blind? shall they not both fall into the ditch? The disciple is not above his master; but every one that is perfect shall be as his master. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Either how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England

... breastworks varied in altitude from three to eight feet. They sometimes had one, and sometimes two entrances, as was to be inferred from there being no ditches at those places. When the works were protected by a deep ravine, or large stream of water, no ditch was to be seen. The areas of these forts varied from two to six acres; and the form was in general an irregular ellipsis; in some of them, fragments of earthenware and pulverized substances, supposed to have been originally human bones, were to ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall

... hindrance. He had torn off jacket, skirt, hat and wig. The frightened cabman saw his fare—changed now into an athletic young man, attired in shirt and trousers, the latter rolled up to his knees—spring from the vehicle and vault over a ditch by the roadside. ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy

... to be enthusiastic on a wild-goose chase like this?" commented Brenchfield. "I've been on the run these last three weeks, dancing all this evening, and now the delightful prospect of lying in a ditch till morning, and nothing at all at the end of it but the possibility of a rheumatic fever. You juvenile bath-tub pirates and Sherlock Holmeses give ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson

... the 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 ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton

... fourteen to throw earth out of a ditch so deep, that it requires the full strength of a grown man, and loses flesh and health under the exertion; he is twice blown up with his own blast in quarrying, and left for dead, recovers slowly, maimed and scarred, with the loss of an eye. John, when not thirteen, is set to stone-breaking on ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... that your shadow may be thrown on the right—a little slanting—just as you are at this moment. Moreover, when you have started, never draw bridle till you have reached the house of Don Mariano de Silva. If you meet a ditch, or brake, or ravine, cross them in a direct line, and don't attempt to go ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid

... evening of the Lord-mayor's day. The first book passed in that night; the next morning the games begin in the Strand; thence along Fleet Street (places inhabited by booksellers); then they proceed by Bridewell towards Fleet-ditch; and, lastly, through Ludgate to the City and the temple ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... out in the end. It's a cinch, with everything on her side. Anyway, the next thing I knows about their plans is when I finds their names in the sailin' list, bound for the Big Ditch, with most everyone else that could get away. And I makes my discovery about three hours ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford

... on one side. The Rats, which, as every one knows, never turn out of their road, but always go straight forward, through field and wood, over hedge and ditch, gnawing their way through stick and stone, fell without ado upon the chests and boxes. The fresh young pine-wood boards were a welcome prize to their sharp teeth, and so too the strong hempen ropes. Speedily off fell the box-lids, one here, one ...
— The King of Root Valley - and his curious daughter • R. Reinick

... work held well. At times, when three or four broadsides struck together, the merlons shook so that Moultrie feared they would come bodily in; but they withstood, and the small loss inflicted was chiefly through the embrasures. The flagstaff being shot away, falling outside into the ditch, a young sergeant, named Jasper, distinguished himself by jumping after it, fetching back and rehoisting the colours under a ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan

... from Christ Church to Main's is metalled for about four and a half miles; there are fences and fields on both sides, either laid down in English grass or sown with grain; the fences are chiefly low ditch and bank planted with gorse, rarely with quick, the scarcity of which detracts from the resemblance to English scenery which would otherwise prevail. The copy, however, is slatternly compared with the original; the scarcity of timber, the high price of ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler

... not destined to be a long one. The mule ran along the highway, leaped a roadside ditch, and then stopped short in front of a grassy bank. So sudden was the halt that Mr. Bunn shot over the animal's head, his hold around the neck being broken, and he was thus neatly upset, coming down amid the ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope

... to the Athenians, to demand earth and water, which denoted submission. The Athenians threw them into a ditch and told them, there was earth ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... 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 Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... get stuck in a mud-hole out west." Then 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 potato ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall

... out to see it, had been too good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had ever seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a marked accent and accosting some passer-by with the question, "Say! But is this little wet ditch here the ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... 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 ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... chief, Msalala, came selling from Sakuma on the north—a jocular man, always a favourite with the ladies. He offered a hoe as a token of friendship, but I bought it, as we are, I hope, soon going off, and it clears the tent floor and ditch round it ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... steps to their level. He would lift from below. He would get by the side of the man lowest down. It was clear evidence at the start that He was the true Messiah, the King. He was their Brother. He would get down alongside, and pull up with them side by side out of the ditch of sticky mud up to ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon

... the settlement there are faint traces of what may have been an irrigating ditch, but the topography is such that water could not be brought on top of the mesa from the river itself. At the southern end of the settlement, northeast of the point shown in the illustration, there are traces of a structure that may have been a storage reservoir. The surface of the mesa dips ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff

... petals of the flowers curve in to cover and protect the sheathes of the minute corollas that I can no longer see. Tenderly I try to raise these petals, but they resist me and I only succeed in murdering the plant. Fool! Why could I not let these flowers live on the edge of their ditch? There they would have felt the fresh shrivelling of drinking in the sun, a bird would have touched them lightly, the proboscis of the mosquitoes would have sucked up their pollen, and they would have died gently by the side ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes

... but all, one and other, having this scope to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying his own divine essence. But when, by the balance of experience, it was found that the astronomer, looking to the stars, might fall in a ditch; that the enquiring philosopher might be blind in himself; and the mathematician might draw forth a straight line with a crooked heart; then lo! did proof, the over-ruler of opinions, make manifest that all these are but serving sciences, which, as they have a private end in themselves, ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney

... found of value when I came to be pursued by mounted military police, who suspected me of being a spy at some manoeuvres abroad. After a rare chase I scrambled over a wall and dropped into an orchard of low fruit trees. Here squatting in a ditch, I watched the legs of the gendarmes' horses while they quartered the plantation, and when they drew away from me I crept to the bank of a deep water channel which formed one of the boundaries of the enclosure. Here I found a small plank bridge ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell

... way to a village which closes the horizon with several masts and hulls of ships in profile against a sky where the sun is veiled; to the right, a nursery-garden of shrubs and rose-trees separated from the road by a wide ditch full of water; then, in the middle distance, the buildings of a farm; to the left, a clump of trees and another ditch, and further back the spire of a church; a huntsman, with a gun on his shoulder and preceded by his dog, is walking on the road, and two peasants—a man and a woman—have stopped ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... head in assent. "Nurse, I once saw a robin's nest when I was in England; it was in the side of a mossy ditch, with primroses growing close beside it; it was made of green moss, and lined with white wool and hair; it was a pretty nest, with nice eggs in it, much better than your ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill

... bake and cake in the pots; rich, that the little plants may readily find ample nourishment; porous, that water may be soaked up readily, and any surplus drained off freely. A soil answering all these requirements is made as follows: cut from an old ditch or fence-side, thick sods, and stack them with the grass sides together to rot. This heap should be forked over several times, when it has begun to decompose. In dry weather, if within reach of the hose, a good soaking ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell

... and found herself hanging, bruised and breathless, across the back of the driving-seat. The automobile was bucking and bumping, as if the pavement had been turned into a corduroy road; then it came to a pause, half in the ditch. Merkle was jammed into an awkward coil on the floor of the tonneau, but raised himself, swearing softly. The other car held to its course, and whizzed onward, leaving in its wake a drunken shout ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... at the mountains on my left—the lower ridge of the Kapanja Sirt—and saw how the water-course went up and up and in and out, and I thought if I kept low and crawled round in this ditch I should come out at last close behind the firing-line, and then I could get in touch with the trenches. I could hear the machine-gun of the M—'s ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave

... had returned weary, muddy, with his jacket torn, and the livid mark of a stone on his forehead. He had engaged in a stone fight with his comrades; they had come to blows, as usual; and in addition he had gambled, and lost all his soldi, and left his cap in a ditch. ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis

... present we two must be content with smaller things," Ferdinand went on. "And I don't mind admitting that laying out a bit of road, or a bit of railway, or bridging a ditch or so, isn't work that appeals to me tremendously. But if a man can get out into the wide world, there are things enough to be done that give him plenty of chance to develop what's in him—if there happens to be anything. I used to envy the great soldiers, ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer

... "Waters," old man!!! S'elp me never! yer don't kow wot nastyness is Till you've tried "Sulphur 'ot and strong," fasting. The Kissing Gin, taken a-fizz, Isn't wus than ditch-water and sherbet; but Sulphur!!! It's eased my game leg; But I go with my heart in my mouth, and I feel ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various

... struggle was really a test of strength between industrial autocracy and militant unionism. The former was determined to restore the palmy days of peonage for all time to come, the latter to fight to the last ditch in spite of hell and high water. The lumber trust sought to break the strike of the loggers and destroy their organization. In the ensuing fracas the lumber barons came out only second best—and they were bad losers. After the war-fever had died down—one year after the signing of the Armistice—they ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin

... the plain into this hollow way. There, as there will be no room for retiring, we shall come to close quarters." Almost quicker than the word, Claudius leaped into the hollow way. Taurea, bold in words more than in reality, said, "Never be the ass in the ditch;" an expression which from this circumstance became a common proverb among rustics. Claudius having rode up and down the way to a considerable distance, and again come up into the plain without meeting his antagonist, after reflecting in reproachful terms on the cowardice of the enemy, returned ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius

... the aged and sick, who aloft on the wagon, Heavy and thus overpacked, upon beds were sitting and swaying. Pressed at last from the rut and out to the edge of the highway, Slipped the creaking wheel; the cart lost its balance, and over Fell in the ditch. In the swing the people were flung to a distance, Far off into the field, with horrible screams; by good fortune Later the boxes were thrown and fell more near to the wagon. Verily all who had witnessed the fall, expected to see them Crushed into pieces beneath the ...
— Hermann and Dorothea • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... admit her promptly," said I, "it will take a little time to lower the bridge over the ditch. We may then ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens

... many brave actions must be expected to be performed without witness, for one that comes to some notice. A man is not always at the top of a breach, or at the head of an army in the sight of his general, as upon a platform. He is often surprised between the hedge and the ditch; he must run the hazard of his life against a hen-roost; he must dislodge four rascally musketeers out of a barn; he must pick out single from his party, as necessity arises, and meet ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... "Now we must be very careful, for it is pitch dark and banisters are unknown in Uargla. Ah, now I know where the pathway comes from. It is a ditch which gets the ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere

... master was well aware that he did read, and that it was possible to read and yet herd well. It was easy enough in this same meadow: on one side ran the Lorrie; on another was a stone wall; and on the third a ditch; only the cornfield lay virtually unprotected, and there he had to be himself the boundary. And now he sat leaning against the dyke, as if he held so a position of special defence; but he knew well enough that the dullest ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... 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 courtesy if ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... meant for a sportsman. On a very warm August morning, as he and I squatted "a l'affut" at the end of a long straight ditch outside a thicket which the bassets were hunting, we saw a hare running full tilt at us along the ditch, and we both fired together. The hare shrieked, and turned a big somersault and fell on its back and kicked convulsively—its legs still galloping—and its face ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... When irrigated, too much water will kill them. And this is true also of walnut and butternut seedlings. I have no acreage of nut trees. I grow seedlings and plant them wherever I find a place protected from the stock and within reach of moisture from the irrigation ditch, as this is ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various

... the first that ever ventured to pronounce him not a knave and liar, but a genuinely honest man! Peace to him. Did he not, in spite of all, accomplish much for us? We walk smoothly over his great rough heroic life; step-over his body sunk in the ditch there. We need not spurn it, as we step on it!—Let the Hero rest. It was not to men's judgment that he appealed: nor have men judged ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... gruff Silas, with genuine Yankee intolerance of any intermission of toil, except on Sunday, the Fourth of July, the autumnal cattle-show, Thanksgiving, or the annual Fast,—"die in a ditch! I believe, in my conscience, you would, if there were no steadier means than your own labor to keep you ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... used—are small embankments, made by throwing up dirt from an excavation inside. They can be erected quickly, for it will be seen that those behind them have the advantage, not only of the height of the embankment, but also of the depth of the ditch. Thus an excavation of two feet would give a protection of four feet. This is the ordinary rifle pit, but when time permits it ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... out once more on his wanderings. All day he walked, and in the evening he came to a peasant's house. While he was wondering whether he should knock and demand shelter for the night, he heard a great croaking of frogs in a ditch behind the house. Stepping to the back he saw a very strange sight. Four frogs were throwing a small bottle about from one to the other, making a great croaking as they did so. Bobino listened for a few minutes, and then knocked at the door of the house. It was opened by ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various

... work. There was a great clamour, the acrid smell of powder, the indescribable taste of battle. The flag was down; the red battle-flag with the blue cross in its place. There was a surge of the western regiment toward it, a battle around it that strewed the bank and the shallow ditch beneath with many a blue figure, many a grey. Step by step the grey pushed the blue back, away from the bank, back toward the wood arising, shadowy, from ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... a plain, well-meaning carrot chanced to lift its leaves among the poppies, why, they were all the children of the same mother, and Miss Vilda was not the woman to root out the invader and fling it into the ditch. There was a bed of yellow tomatoes, where, in the season, a hundred tiny golden balls hung among the green leaves; and just beside them, in friendly equality, a tangle of pink sweet-williams, fragrant phlox, delicate bride's-tears, canterbury bells blue as the June sky, none-so-pretties, gay cockscombs, ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... and to establish here a completely appointed woolen mill. Water was brought from a series of reservoirs built in a small valley several miles away, and was conducted to a point on the Moen-kopi knoll, near the end of the south row of houses, where the ditch terminated in a solidly constructed box of masonry. From this in turn the water was delivered through a large pipe to a turbine wheel, which furnished the motive power for the works. The ditch and masonry are shown on the ground plan ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff

... capable 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 ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... hundred yards in front of it felled trees were laid across the road, with their branches turned towards the town, forming what soldiers, in the language of their profession, term an abattis. Forty or fifty yards in rear of this a ditch was dug, and a breastwork thrown up, from behind which a party might do great execution upon any body of men struggling to force their way over that impediment. On each side of the highway again, where the ground rises into little eminences, redoubts and batteries ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... then the abode of Ishtar. As they rise to height after height the eagle describes the appearance of the world lying stretched out beneath: at first it rises like a huge mountain out of the sea; then the ocean appears as a girdle encircling the land, and finally but as a ditch a gardener digs to irrigate his land. When they have risen so high that the earth is scarcely visible, Etana cries to the eagle to stop; so he does, but his strength is exhausted, and bird and man fall ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... declared 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 Bevis! ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil

... and that the vast walls of Herodotus enclosed it all.[12] This view, however, cannot be accepted. Quite apart from the considerations urged above, the region in question is not square but rather triangular, and traces of wall and ditch surrounding it are altogether wanting, though city-walls have survived elsewhere in this neighbourhood and though nothing can wholly delete an ancient ditch. We have, in short, no good reason to believe that Babylon, in any form or sense whatever, covered ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield

... hearts were faithful to it, were content to live by its grace—to die by its will. That was the sea before the time when the French mind set the Egyptian muscle in motion and produced a dismal but profitable ditch. Then a great pall of smoke sent out by countless steam-boats was spread over the restless mirror of the Infinite. The hand of the engineer tore down the veil of the terrible beauty in order that greedy and faithless landlubbers might pocket dividends. ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad

... our college of Visitors could justifiably withdraw from this sacred duty, it would be myself, who quadragenis stipendiis jamdudum peractis, have neither vigor of body nor mind left to keep the field: but I will die in the last ditch, and so I hope you will, my friend, as well as our firm-breasted brothers and colleagues, Mr. Johnson and General Breckenridge. Nature will not give you a second life wherein to atone for the omissions of this. Pray then, dear and very dear Sir, do not think ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... graves you are sending them to. Think of the mother and the babe at her breast, think of the father and son, Think of the lover and the loved one too, think of them doomed every one To fall (as it were by your very hand) into yon fathomless ditch, Murdered by one who should guard them from harm, who now lies ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various

... surrounded by cavalry and brought in tied to the horses' tails. Many a knight, better accoutred than his fellows, was despatched in a more summary manner and stripped of his armor, after which his body was carelessly thrown into a ditch by the roadside.[829] La Renaudie was so fortunate as to escape this fate and the yet more cruel doom that awaited him at Amboise, by meeting a soldier's death, while courageously fighting against a party of Guisards who fell in with him. He had just slain his antagonist—one Pardaillan, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... and what was even more unusual in a prospective clergyman, had never heard of the Thirty-nine Articles. He was struck with the architecture of the colleges, and much surprised at the meanness of the houses that surrounded them. He heretically calls the Isis 'a mere moat,' the Cherwell 'a ditch.' The brilliant dare-devil from Italy despised alike the raw, limitary, reputable, priggish undergraduates and the dull, snuffling, smug-looking, fussy dons. The torpor of academic dulness, indeed, was as irksome to Burton at Oxford as ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... shoes an' the stuff fer a dress, an' sometimes my cal'lations went as fur 's a gold breastpin; but I never wanted to see none o' the rest on 'em, an' fer that matter, I never did. Yes, sir, the old ditch was better to me than the place I was borned in, an', as you say, I wa'n't nobody's slave, an' I wa'n't scairt to death the hull time. Some o' the men was rough, but they wa'n't cruel, as a rule, an' as I growed up a little I was putty well able to look out fer myself—wa'al, ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott

... instruction. There is not one of them that has understanding enough to direct the feet of his neighbour in the path he should go—it would be the blind leading the blind, and together would they fall into the ditch. What more would the bear do, if he were made ruler, than train his subjects to perform great feats of strength, or to climb a tree, or to suck their paws through the long nights of winter?—The panther would teach them savage cruelty and a speedy step, and the deer would counsel ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... a long and troublesome one, the Indians having a strong constitutional objection to anything in the nature of hard work; but Earle succeeded at length, and actually got them started on the work of cutting the drainage ditch, that scheme having been chosen as the one promising the quickest results and involving the least labour. By the time that this was done the invalids were all recovered from their sickness; and ten days after their arrival ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood

... brought upon the corps by his falling into old ways; old habits of drunkenness or uncleanness, fighting or thieving, or any other vulgar form of sin. The F.O. should consider the shame of the man himself, if he is permanently left to rot in the ditch of corruption, and the sorrows that burden the heart of His Master, for one for whom He has given ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter

... go forward whenever a gate is to be opened or an obstruction to be removed, and clear the way for the lady; he must leap first when there is a fence or ditch to be crossed; he must pay all tolls; must first test any dangerous-looking place, and must try to select the most ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost

... acknowledges a thousand imperfections in this discursive story. In all truth, it is a most garrulous and incoherent narrative. Like the automobile, part of the time the narrative moves, part of the time it does not; now it is in the road pursuing a straight course; then again it is in the ditch, or far afield, quite beyond control and out of reason. It is impossible to write coolly, calmly, logically, and coherently about the automobile; it is not a cool, calm, logical, or coherent beast, the ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... white with green shutters, and sometimes little Dutch gardens. Many windmills, several pigeons always fluttering round each. A lorry in a ditch. A roadside canteen, with perhaps an A.S.C. camp near by. Fields and fields of corn and every other crop under the sun. I long to sketch, but feel slightly nervous of so doing so far from camp. I don't want to be arrested as a spy. We are practically ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson

... 23d of August, 1382, the Tartars appeared before the gates of the city. Some of the chiefs rode slowly around the ramparts, examining the ditch, the walls, the height of the towers, and selected the most favorable spot for commencing the assault. The Tartars did not appear in such overwhelming numbers as report had taught the Russians to expect, and they felt quite sanguine that they should be able to defend the ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott

... when from out the town they had got clear, The Sumner said, "Here dwelleth an old witch, That had as lief be tumbled in a ditch And break her neck, as part with an old penny. Nathless her twelve pence is as good as any, And I will have it, though she lose her wits; Or else I'll cite her with a score of writs: And yet, God wot, I know of her no vice. So learn of me, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley

... Horn came over from Van Horn's early, Bradley told his hearers brokenly. They asked for Barb and he was down at the creek. Barb had sent Bradley about a mile below the house to repair a small break in the irrigation ditch and had ridden down to show him what he wanted done. After giving instructions, he had started back for the house. Before he got far, Stone and Van Horn met him. Bradley heard voices up the creek but paid no special attention to them, and busied himself with his job. ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman

... his sledge-hammer in his hand, stops the horse at the last; but my Lady Rackrent was all kilt[21] and smashed, and they lifted her into a cabin hard by, and the maid was found after, where she had been thrown, in the gripe of the ditch, her cap and bonnet all full of bog water, and they say my lady can't live any way.' Thady, pray now is it true what I'm told for sartain, that Sir Condy has made over all to your son Jason?" "All," says ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... "Countess or bastard, you are a little beauty. And there is countess in your blood somewhere, I'll take an oath. Hands and feet, neck and head, tell the story. There was love and a young countess and a hot-brained troubadour went to the making of you, my little lady. A ditch-full of witches could not bring such tokens to a villein. Galors, my dear friend, if I owed nothing to Master le Gai, I doubt if I should help you to this. 'Tis too much, my friend, with an earldom. She needs ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett

... a sudden end; for as, rapt in his thoughts, the boy had continued to walk backwards, he had come to the verge where the lawn slided off into the ditch of the ha-ha; and just as he was fortifying himself by the precept and practice of my Lord Bacon, the ground went from under him, and—slap into the ditch went ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of his rifle, deadened among the rocks, and finally saw him reappear, with a surly look that plainly betrayed his ill success. Again we moved forward down the long valley, when soon after we came full upon what seemed a wide and very shallow ditch, incrusted at the bottom with white clay, dried and cracked in the sun. Under this fair outside, Reynal's eye detected the signs of lurking mischief. He called me to stop, and then alighting, picked up a stone and threw it ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... river flows through the valley, and is crossed by a single bridge in the lower part of the village. This is the Trym,—an untidy Trym enough, nowadays,—opaque, muddy, and little better than a ditch. Yet it was a navigable river some centuries ago, and, according to tradition, was not unknown to trout. On leaving the village, it takes a southwesterly course through a pleasant bottom of meadow lands, and thence between wooded slopes and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... in a ditch, denotes degradation and personal loss; but if you jump over it, you will live ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... course. But do you suppose they're going to lie down just because an unknown and penniless inventor sues them? Bless you, no! They'll fight to the last ditch, they'll engage the best legal talent in the country. You'll have to carry the case to the Supreme Court of the United States if you want a winning decision. And that's going to cost you thousands—hundreds ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance

... you, sir; he has been the only 'Bid-stand' that ever kept New-market, Salisbury-plain, Hockley i' the Hole, Gadshill, and all the high places of any request: he has had his mares and his geldings, he, have been worth forty, threescore, a hundred pound a horse, would ha' sprung you over the hedge and ditch like your greyhound: he has done five hundred robberies in his time, more or less, I ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson

... columns, millions and millions of them. And when they come to a ditch, the front ones fall in, and more and more of them on top, till they fill up the ditch, and the rest cross over. ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair

... for the unfinished work to be dropped would be, not as if a sculptor should go on blocking out marble statues only to throw them away half finished, but as if he should take the living human frame for his subject, and should cut and gash and torture it for years, only to fling it into the ditch. ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... and he himself, while he lived in the flesh, preached oftener in the desart, and upon the sea-side, than in the temple of Jerusalem." Upon this the people were appeased, and went with him to the edge of a muir on the south-west side of Mauchlin, where having placed himself upon a ditch-dyke, he preached to a great multitude who resorted to him; he continued speaking for more than three hours, God working wondrously by him, insomuch that Laurence Rankin the laird of Sheld, a very profane person, was converted by his means; the tears ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... on the scent! At fault none losing heart!—but all at work! None leaving his task to another!—answering The watchful huntsman's cautions, check, or cheer. As steed his rider's rein! Away they go How close they keep together! What a pack! Nor turn, nor ditch, nor stream divides them—as They moved with one intelligence, act, will! And then the concert they keep up!—enough To make one tenant of the merry wood, ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles

... the darkness, seeking the way, lest ye fall into the ditch; but gather together, sustain one another, put your faith in your God and wait for the first ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch

... imprisonment of his friend Coleman had weighed heavily on his spirits. A terrible fear now taking possession of his relatives and friends, thorough search was made for him, which proved vain until the Thursday following his disappearance, when he was accidentally discovered lying in a ditch, a cloth knotted round his neck, and a sword passed through his body, "at or near a place called Primrose Hill, in the ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy

... nothing but misery and unhappiness. We should dress for comfort, and we should have the courage to live in a youthful world where all may be happy. "If the blind lead the blind," so the Bible tells us, "both shall fall into the ditch." We need so to live and act that we shall not fail to be happy. Happiness really is what everybody is chasing, but how very far away from it most people are getting! Go back to the memories of your childhood. Be with children and play with them all you possibly can. If you are a mother, ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle

... word is spelt now with a final k and now with a final ch; out of this variation two different words have been formed; with, it may be, other slight differences superadded; thus is it with 'poke' and 'poach'; 'dyke' and 'ditch'; 'stink' and 'stench'; 'prick' and 'pritch' (now obsolete); 'break' and 'breach'; to which may be added 'broach'; 'lace' and 'latch'; 'stick' and 'stitch'; 'lurk' and 'lurch'; 'bank' and 'bench'; 'stark' and 'starch'; 'wake' ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... garrison, commanded by Memnon, and the strength of the defenses, aided by the Persian fleet. But his soldiers, "protected from missiles by movable pent-houses, called tortoises, gradually filled up the deep and wide ditch round the town, so as to open a level road for his engines (rolling towers of wood) to come up close to the walls." Then the battering-rams overthrew the towers of the city wall, and made a breach in ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... following day, as Miss Combs opened her ditch-gate for the tide of mine water which came in a flume across the arroyo, she saw the doctor and Mr. Keene approaching. They had an absorbed air, and as she opened the door for them the doctor said, "Miss Combs, we want you to agree to a plan of ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead

... the work completed, from his camp on the old Asometon promontory he reconnoitred the country up to the ditch of Constantinople, and on the first of September betook himself ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... ouer, hauing the maine sea on the side of it, and the harbour water or inner sea (as you may tearme it) on the other side, vvhich in this plot is plainely shewed. This straight was fortified cleane ouer with a stone vvall and a ditch without it, the saide wall being as orderly built vvith flanking in euery part, as can be set dovvne. There vvas onely so much of this straight vnvvalled, as might serue for the issuing of the horsemen, or the passing of carriage in time of neede: but this vnvvalled part ...
— A Svmmarie and Trve Discovrse of Sir Frances Drakes VVest Indian Voyage • Richard Field

... the fence. They craned their necks. The dusty road was flowing very swiftly, and like a river it had risen. Never before had it been so easily visible. They saw the ruts the carts had made, the hedge upon the opposite bank, the grassy ditch where the hemlock grew in feathery quantities. They even saw loose flints upon the edge. But the actual road was higher than before. It ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood

... spy! Get down—" George did not give him time to finish the phrase, but with a well-measured blow, sent him sprawling in the brambled ditch and we beat a hasty retreat ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard

... The shower just past, though brief, had been heavy enough to turn a thick layer of white dust into a greasy, grey paste of mud. On our left was a sudden drop into the rushing river, on the right a deep ditch, and the road between was as round-shouldered as a hunchback. Seeing this natural phenomenon, and feeling the slightly uncertain step of our fat tyres as they waddled through the pasty mud, the pleasant smile of the proud motor-proprietor ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... Santiago—that was what Phyllis had read. The Spaniard had a good muster-roll of regulars and aid from Cervera's fleet; was well armed, and had plenty of time to intrench and otherwise prepare himself for a bloody fight in the last ditch. ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.

... and who will play a practical trick on the friend he most respects is always a delight. It is he that keeps the crowd in good humor, who is generally deepest and most abiding in his affection, and who at the drop of the hat would fight to the last ditch for his friend. To handle him rightly does not require a six-foot rod, or a half-inch rule. But the Teacher must keep him so busy doing the things that he likes that he will have no dull moments in which to vent his inborn sense ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander

... 1, Camera Square, Chelsea. Blanchard had dined with a friend at Hammersmith, and left him to return home about six in the evening of Tuesday. On the following morning, at three o'clock, poor Blanchard was found lying in a ditch by the roadside, having been, as is supposed, seized by a fit; in the course of the evening he was visited by another attack, which was succeeded by one more violent on the Thursday, and on the following day ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker

... last!" groaned the fear-stricken man. "Heaven be merciful to me, the greatest of sinners! And must I die in a ditch, after ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various

... father the sexton. Now, how he and Tom manage their matters, I don't know; but Tom gave him a lick on the head with a stick, which killed him on the spot. As the devil would have it, all this was seen by two people, a laborer working in a ditch hard by, and Scantling's son, a boy of ten years old. The end of it is, Tom was instantly pursued, and apprehended; your good uncle, Sir John, was called to take the depositions, and without any remand whatever, committed our good ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... were just one hundred feet of ditch to fill with dirt, the task was completed, and that quite thoroughly, long ere the close of the day. The pounding down of the earth consumed more time, and was much more laborious than the mere tumbling of the earth back ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... themselves off wooden platforms,—splashes, sparks, coruscations, showers of soldiers. At every corner of the town-wall, every guard-house, every gateway, every sentry-box, every drawbridge, every reedy ditch, and rushy dike, soldiers, soldiers, soldiers. And the town being pretty well all wall, guard-house, gateway, sentry-box, drawbridge, reedy ditch, and rushy dike, the town was ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens

... stony silence. Well, Mahaffy could sneer—he would show him! This was the last ditch and he proposed to descend into it, it was something to be able to demand the final word of fate—but he instantly recalled that he had been playing at hide-and-seek with inevitable consequences for something like ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... the flank of the men serving the gun on the road, and with no obstruction between us and them. When we reached the south-west corner of the enclosure before described, I saw some United States troops pushing north through a shallow ditch near by, who had come up since my reconnaissance. This was the company of Captain Horace Brooks, of the artillery, acting as infantry. I explained to Brooks briefly what I had discovered and what I was about to do. He said, as I knew the ground and he did not, I might go ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... are: maister, well overtane, I thought we two should never meete againe: You went so fast that I to follow thee Slipt over hedge and ditch ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various

... anything, you mount a guard quite close to it, and place a sentry, if possible, standing on top of it. The place picked out by me also had the river circling round three sides of it in a regular horseshoe bend, which formed a kind of ditch, or, as the book says, "a natural obstacle." I was indeed lucky to have such an ideal place close at hand; nothing could ...
— The Defence of Duffer's Drift • Ernest Dunlop Swinton

... look! Bob's in the seat—you'll win your money now. Well, Bob Gayner, afther that you'll never live till you're drowned! Come away to the double ditch; that's where they'll show what they're made of—the mare'll be cooled now, and she'll run as easy ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope

... the last yellow in the sky is fading—I have no words with which to praise the music of these people. Or listen to the chuckling of a string of soft young ducks, as they glide single- file beside a ditch under a hedgerow, so close together that they look like some long brown serpent, and say what sound can ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler

... 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 ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... As some attention had previously been bestowed on the fortifications of the crater, that place was justly deemed the citadel of the Reef. Some thought the ship would be the most easily defended, on account of the size of the crater, and because it had a natural ditch around it, but so much property was accumulated in and around the crater that it could not be abandoned without a loss to which the governor had no idea of submitting. The gate of the crater was nothing in the way of defence, it is true; but ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper

... said Ugo, contemptuously, 'who fears numbers! Let them come, though they were as many, as the Signor's castle could hold; I would shew the knaves what fighting is. For you—I would lay you quietly in a dry ditch, where you might peep out, and see me put the rogues to flight.—Who ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... turned to address a young artillery-officer in the road: "Is your gun near here?" "Yes, sir, I was just going back to it." He was asked to show us the way. As we followed I noticed the white puff of a shell, far ahead, over the flat, ditch-lined fields; a captive balloon was making observations about half a mile in front, and an aeroplane passed over our heads. "Ah, not a Boche," said Captain —— regretfully, "but we brought a Boche down here yesterday, just over ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... there faithfully, as a friend that waited his return. He is stronger now, but no less delicate; he loves not Nature less, but the world more. He has learned to love his fellow-men. Knut Pedersen, vagabond, wanders about the country with his tramp-companions, Grindhusen, the painter who can ditch and delve at a pinch, or Falkenberg, farm-labourer in harvest-time, and piano-tuner where pianos are. Here is brave comradeship, the sharing of adventures, the ready wit of jovial vagrants. The book is a harmless picaresque, a geste of innocent rogue-errantry; ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun

... troops, from the bridge quite to the end of Ligny. On the left in the distance the Prussians were shooting from the windows again, while we did not reply. The shout rose—"The Guard! the Guard!" I do not know how that mass of men passed the muddy ditch, probably by means of plank thrown across, but in a moment they were on ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann

... point at the lower end of the yard, on the opposite side from the garden, and left him. But he was inclined to give trouble when they both reappeared with a gun, and in a whisper announced that they must march first up the ditch which ran by the spring around ...
— Two Little Confederates • Thomas Nelson Page

... your way out here, and navigated that ewer safely! The boys find it surpassingly attractive,—as a coal mine, or a canal in Mars, or the Panama ditch. I've tried to induce Mr. Jorgesson, the contractor, to hang out a lantern or two at night. But he evidently thinks well of the caution and sobriety of the Johnston family and prefers to take his chances of a suit for damages. So far ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... and granaries. A big bell hung on cross poles at the entrance to one of the avenues leading to what was once the rolling prairie, now fields of grain—six hundred acres, without a fence, stump, or ditch to mar the effect. The clear line of the horizon was broken only by another farmhouse, owned by a brother-in-law, whose farm lay beyond. The man told us he had emigrated six years before to Manitoba, and had gone as ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon

... dunce-head!" exclaimed his sister; "that was last night when you played tag, and you tumbled over into the ditch and bellered like the big baby ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis

... in the distance; and the boy saw or heard no more. Bill Sikes had him on his back scudding like the wind. Oliver's head hung down, and he was deadly cold. The pursuers were close upon Sikes' heels. He dropped the boy in a ditch and fled. ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... he dwell? I cannot tell; Nor do I know his name. Or poor, or rich? I don't mind which; Or learning Latin, or digging ditch; I ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various

... Moll Brown, look, see, just past! I wish the ugly sly old witch Would tumble over in the ditch; I wouldn't pick her out not very fast. I don't think she's belied, 'tis clear's the sun That she's a witch if ever there was one. Yes, I do know just hereabout of two Or three folk that have learnt what Moll can do. ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various

... noticed that when young fellows of your sort prefer their own haste to the Lord's leisure there's a Lord's haste that hurries on before 'em, so as to be all ready to meet 'em when they come a cropper in the ditch." ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... and repeat after me," and then he said: "I promise and swear that I will never reveal the secrets of this degree," and then the conductor pulled pa's leg and said: "Crawl out of the window, old man, 'cause the train is in the ditch, the car is afire, and if you don't get out in about a minute with the other freaks, you will be ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck

... groaning," said the vizier's son. "I will climb to the window, and see whether there are any means of escape. Yes! yes!" he whispered, when he had reached the window-hole. "Below there is a ditch surrounded by a high wall. I will jump down and reconnoitre. You stay here, and wait ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs

... skidded. It skidded all over the place, as if it were drunk, and, aided by Marigold, described a series of ghastly half-circles. At last he performed various convulsive feats of jugglery, with the result that the car, which was nosing steadily for the ditch, came to a stand-still. Then Marigold informed me in unemotional tones that ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... think credit, respect, power, and authority the concomitants of their birth and fortune, yet they will find all these still carried away from them by men of lower condition, who surpass them in knowledge. They who are blind will always be led by those that see, or else fall into the ditch: and he is certainly the most subjected, the most enslaved, who is so in his understanding. In the foregoing instances some of the causes have been shown of wrong assent, and how it comes to pass, that probable ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke

... reasons were sound enough, as will be seen later. But as a piece of scientific tactics it was as though an engineer besieging a fortress, instead of drawing his lines of approach diagonally, were to make them at right angles to the ditch. When the greatest of the admirals apparently (but only apparently) confused the two antagonistic conceptions of breaking the line, there is much excuse for civilian ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett

... enough, for then everything is frozen; but, in the beginning of spring, when frozen nature undergoes the process of thawing, then it is that one wishes to be deprived of his nose. At the entrance of each house a stone slab is thrown across to the doorway so as to cover the ditch. Only the foundations of the town houses are made of solid stone, well cemented, but in the case of country dwellings these are extended upwards so as to make up one-half of the whole height, the upper part being of mud, stuck on to a rough matting ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... enjoyable in this awful weather was to have some nice hot coffee in the middle of the day. The workwomen had no cause for complaint. The mistress made it very strong and without a grain of chicory. It was quite different to Madame Fauconnier's coffee, which was like ditch-water. Only whenever mother Coupeau undertook to make it, it was always an interminable time before it was ready, because she would fall asleep over the kettle. On these occasions, when the workwomen had finished their lunch, they would do a little ironing ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... their lives and unhurriedly pushing forward through the thickest of the fire to the spots where men had been seen to fall. At times they would creep on hands and knees: would always take advantage of a hedge or ditch, or any shelter that was afforded by the conformation of the ground, never exposing themselves unnecessarily out of bravado. When at last they reached the fallen men their painful task commenced, which was made more difficult and protracted by the fact ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... my blundering behavior, When fortune seems to follow at my heels; Now and then I play supremely in her favor, And she lets me pull the rankest sort of steals; She'll give to me the friendliest assistance, I'll jump a ditch at times when I should not, I'll top the ball and get a lot of distance— But I don't claim that's ...
— When Day is Done • Edgar A. Guest

... him. There was a great snarling and growling, a clashing of teeth and a flurry of bodies. The dust of the road arose in a cloud and screened the battle. But at the end of several minutes two dogs were struggling in the dirt and the third was in full flight. He leaped a ditch, went through a rail fence, and fled across a field. White Fang followed, sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with wolf speed, swiftly and without noise, and in the centre of the field he dragged down ...
— White Fang • Jack London

... drive me distracted! I wonder if there is such a thing as a ditch or a horsepond ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various

... or adze, box, brush, cage, chaise, cross, ditch, face, gas, glass, hedge, horse, lash, lens, niche, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg

... are we?" said the stout huntsman, mopping his forehead and leaning against the trunk of a tree nearly opposite to his companion, for he felt unequal to the effort of leaping the ditch between them. ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac

... their ditches on the wrong side of their breastworks, and afforded the enemy an easy entrance into their fortress. But, "Let them alone; they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch."[84] ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... Inner Ward is defended by a wall, flanked by thirteen towers, the entrance to it being on the south side under the Bloody Tower. The Outer Ward is defended by a second wall, flanked by six towers on the river face (see Pl. IX, X and XI), and by three semicircular bastions on the north face. A Ditch or "Moat," now dry, encircles the whole, crossed at the south-western angle by a stone bridge, leading to the "Byward Tower" from the "Middle Tower," a gateway which had formerly an outwork, called the ...
— Authorised Guide to the Tower of London • W. J. Loftie

... car in the ditch, just outside the Park," Ronnie explained. "Don't know in the least how it happened. Suppose I was thinking of something else. Anyway, I've fairly piled her up, I'm afraid. I was coming back from the vicarage, you know. And then, of course, I walked up here, ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford

... came along a side street where a number of men were at work digging a long and deep ditch in which to ...
— The Woggle-Bug Book • L. Frank Baum

... the intimate secrets of matter; your Marconi employs the mysterious properties of the "jellied ether," but let a man seek to experiment with the laws of that singular electricity which connects you and me (though you be a millionaire and I a ditch-digger), and we think him a wild visionary, an academic person. I think sometimes that the science of humanity to-day is in about the state of darkness that the natural sciences were when Linneus ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker

... Plot" in 1678, one of the most prominent incidents being the murder of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, who is here shown (Fig. 11), carried on a horse, the day after his murder, to Primrose Hill, where the body was put into a ditch, the carrying on the horse and the discovery in the ditch being shown as coincident. They were produced, probably, as one of the means of inflaming the public mind against the Roman Catholics, which led to the execution, among others, of the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... at West End is going to be attended to. There's been enough rubbers lost in that mudhole to about fill it, so it won't take much to fill it up. We're going to have a little bridge built over that ditch on Lane Avenue so's we women don't dislocate our joints jumping over it. But first the ditch is going to be deepened and cleaned so's it won't smell so unhealthy. When that's done the ladies aim to plant wild flowers along ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds

... the straits of Royd Lane they accordingly defiled. It was very narrow—so narrow that only two could walk abreast without falling into the ditch which ran along each side. They had gained the middle of it, when excitement became obvious in the clerical commanders. Boultby's spectacles and Helstone's Rehoboam were agitated; the curates nudged each other; Mr. Hall turned to the ladies ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... could, taking care to waste none of it by random or careless shooting. The fort consisted, as all the border fortifications did, of a simple stockade, inside of which was a block-house for the protection of the women and children, and designed also as a sort of "last ditch," in which a desperate resistance could be made, even after the fort had been carried. The stockade was made of the trunks of pine-trees set on end in the ground, close together, but pierced at intervals with port-holes, through which the men of the garrison ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston

... a similar manner. I saw a woman, for example, tear whole handfuls of hair from her head, a murdering thief, guilty of more or fewer crimes, smash his head on the corner of a window, and a seventeen year old murderer throw himself into a ditch in the street, beat his head fiercely on the earth, and yell, "Hang me! Pull my ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... rather than lost her squareness, who showed her strength and hid her tenderness. He had rejoiced in several brushes with Kate Wilkes. There was a tang to them. A little sac of fiery acid had formed in her brain. It came from fighting the world to the last ditch, year after year. Her children played in the quick-passing columns of the periodicals—ambidextrous, untamable, shockingly rough in their games, these children, but shams slunk away from their shrill laughter. In tearing down, she prepared for ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort

... [1682]Jovius in elogiis. A grave and learned minister, and an ordinary preacher at Alcmar in Holland, was (one day as he walked in the fields for his recreation) suddenly taken with a lax or looseness, and thereupon compelled to retire to the next ditch; but being [1683]surprised at unawares, by some gentlewomen of his parish wandering that way, was so abashed, that he did never after show his head in public, or come into the pulpit, but pined away with melancholy: (Pet. Forestus med. observat. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... it, and Bill Hay had a bay half thoroughbred that could discount the major's mare 'cross country. All Frayne was out to see her start for her first ride with Beverly Field, and all Frayne reluctantly agreed that sweet Essie Dade could never sit a horse over ditch or hurdle with the superb grace and unconcern displayed by the daring, dashing girl who had so suddenly become the centre of garrison interest. For the first time in her life Mrs. Bill Hay knew what it ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King

... muttering to herself, "Nobody else"—that was the sin and guilt of it—by-and-by Mrs. Iden would circle round to where he had left his boots, and, suddenly seizing them, would fling them in the ditch. ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies

... kind is connected with earthworks. So far as we can tell from recorded history the ditch round the Tower was not dug till the end of the twelfth century. Finally, there is this strong argument against the theory of a Roman origin to the Tower that had such a Roman fortress existed an extension of the town would almost ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... hundred soldiers with pickaxes and shovels rushed to the work. Some knocked out stones from the cliff; others threw them into the ditch and covered ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... that the bandbox had tumbled out of the window by some extraordinary chance, was going to pick it up, when Lord Ellenborough furiously called out, 'Drive on!' The bandbox, accordingly, was left by the ditch-side. Having reached the county town where he was to officiate as judge, Lord Ellenborough proceeded to array himself for his appearance in the court-house. 'Now,' said he, 'where's my wig?—where is my wig?' 'My lord,' replied his ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... where another grassy lane crossed at right angles the one down which he had been riding. It was a lonely spot, but yet was a thoroughfare from which the roads diverged to one or two large villages, and led in one direction ultimately to the market-town. Close to the ditch opposite the road down which Amos had come was a white finger- post, informing those who were capable of deciphering its bleared inscriptions whither they were going or might go. Amos hesitated; he had never been on this exact spot before, and he therefore rode close up ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... the Pahang River for a hundred and eighty miles, you come to a spot where the stream divides into two main branches, and where the name Pahang dies an ignominious death in a small ditch, which debouches at their point of junction. The right stream,—using the term in its topographical sense,—is the Jelai, and the left is the Tembeling. If you go up the latter, you come to rapids innumerable, a few gambir plantations, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... rising straight among the white blossoms reminded him again of his hunger, so, wiping the perspiration from his snow-burned face, he started on again, but when he came to the ditch which carried water from the stream through a hundred and fifty feet of sluice-boxes he stopped and examined with eager interest the methods used for saving fine gold, for, keen as was his hunger, the miner's instinct within him ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... clergy is excellent, although this or that man be faulty. As if an army be constantly victorious, regular, &c. we may say, it is an excellent victorious army: But Tindal; to disparage it, would say, such a serjeant ran away; such an ensign hid himself in a ditch; nay, one colonel turned his back, therefore, it is a corrupt, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... figure of yourself! Sit down!" said her aunt, shortly, as she thrust a chair down on the hearth before the fire "I should have thought you'd have had wit enough at your age, to keep out of the ditch." ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell

... the largest objects that has been found is an earthenware baking oven, which was unearthed in an old ditch near the site of the May-Hartwell House. Restored from over 200 fragments, the oven was probably used between 1650 and 1690. It may have been made at Jamestown, molded of native clay and fired in a pottery kiln. ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter

... admit a 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

... did, jogging along, till he came to two labourers who had fallen into a ditch. The lad kept ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various

... eastward until it reached the point where a rocky region separates the basin of the Bagradas (Medjerda) from the plains of the Sahel; thence it ran to the neighbourhood of Aquae Regiae and thence, probably following the line of a ditch drawn between the two great depressions of Kairouan and El-Gharra, to its ultimate bourne at Thenae.[853] It is clear that the Romans did not look on their province as an end desirable in itself. They had left in the hands of their Numidian friends ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... 1885, Commisioner Sparks, of the United States General Land Office told (House Executive Documents, 1885-86, Vol. II) how, by 1885, the Portage Lake "canal" was only a worthless ditch and a complete fraud. What had the company done with its large land grant? Instead of accepting the grant as intended by Congress, it had, by means of fraudulent surveys, and doubtless by official corruption, ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... what's coming. For a good many years I never did know, from one minute to another, and now I like to think that everything's cut-and-dried, and nothing unexpected can jump out at me like a tramp from a ditch." ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... 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

... finger: and, in the next, Brian and Basil, in scrambling among the hedges in quest of straight twigs for arrows, met with their mishaps; for Brian got a thorn in his thumb, while Basil had a roll down the bank into a dry ditch. ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge

... "Down in the ditch; we passed them before I spoke. I see them on a blackberry-bush; they've got little brass buttons on ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... lifetime, the moral pressure of my wife and children, the example of society, and the force of superficial public opinion and expectation were spinning it round and round in the direction of least resistance. As well attempt to alter my course as to steer a locomotive off the track! I could not ditch the locomotive, for I had a trainload of ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train

... warningly. "Do you want to steer us into a ditch? Drop it, I say!" And he pushed ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield

... large sections the appearance of a forest. Near the centre of the plain, four hundred feet above the lake, stands the city of Oroomiah. It dates from a remote antiquity, and claims to be the birthplace of Zoroaster. It is built chiefly of unburnt brick, is surrounded by a high mud wall and a ditch, and has a population of twenty-five thousand, of whom the larger part are Mohammedans. The Nestorians of the plain were estimated ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson

... unusual and outrageous noise, while the smoke was so thick as to darken the very air. As the fugitives passed the crest of the hill, they saw the seaman, whom we formerly mentioned as a spectator, snugly reclining under cover of a dry ditch, where he managed so as to secure himself as far as possible from any accident. He could not, however, omit breaking his ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... the experiment twice here in England, but without success. The first was in a slow running water with a muddy bottom. The second in a stagnant water at the bottom of a deep ditch. Being some time employed in stirring this water, I ascribed an intermitting fever, which seized me a few days after, to my breathing too much of that foul air which I stirred up from the bottom, and which I could ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley

... aneurism of the heart, was cautioned by his medical attendant never to use violent exercise; but, disregarding this, when he had nearly recovered, he went one day to visit a friend at the gaol in which he ought to have been confined, and in springing over a ditch near it, fell dead on the other side, and wholly unprepared to appear before that tribunal, to which he will one day or other be summoned, to answer for this ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt

... ground through which the mountaineers must have descended, although not of great extent, was impracticable in its character, being not only marshy but intersected with walls of dry stone, and traversed in its whole length by a very broad and deep ditch, circumstances which must have given the musketry of the regulars dreadful advantages before the mountaineers could have used their swords, on which they were taught to rely. The authority of the commanders was therefore interposed to curb the impetuosity of ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... our land, and I've got a pigeon rig up there. But Bull Meadow Hill is higher and a good deal better. It belongs to Amos's folks. He has a pigeon rig and pole on it, and it will be all ready. Amos says Bull Meadow got its name because a bull was drowned in a ditch there nigh on to ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan

... besides! but who has ever heard of, or saw, the "Diary of a Lord Mayor,—that day-book, or blotter, as it may be commercially termed, of a gigantic mind? Who has ever perused the autobiography of the Lama of Guildhall, Cham of Cripplegate, Admiral of Fleet Ditch, Great Turtle-hunter and Herod of Michaelmas geese? We will take upon ourselves to answer—not one! It was reserved for PUNCH to give to his dear friends, the public, the first and only extract which has ever been made from the genuine diary of a late Lord Mayor of London, or, as that august ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... outsider might not understand, is ever present to the mind of the occupant. He feels convinced every minute that the whole concern is going over, a conviction which becomes especially lively whenever a ditch or a stretch of newly macadamized road comes in sight. Every vehicle that passes he expects is going to run into him; and he never finds himself ascending or descending a hill without immediately beginning to speculate upon his chances, supposing—as seems extremely probable—that the weak-kneed ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... in Africa situated by the seaside containeth seuen miles in circuite, and is enuironed with two walles one neere to the other with high towers, but the walles within be farre higher than those without, with a great ditch round about the same: yet is not this Citie very strong by reason of the great antiquitie, being almost halfe destroyed and ruinated. The greatnesse of this Citie is such, that if it were of double habitation, as it is compassed with ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt

... day, the sheep broke from their pasture, when the thoughtless boy drove them back in great haste over a narrow and deep ditch. The leading sheep fell in, and the remainder, passing over them, smothered twenty-five sheep and forty lambs, the whole being ...
— Minnie's Pet Lamb • Madeline Leslie

... a long breath. "If that had happened on a culvert, we'd be in the ditch with the car on top of us. I simply can't control the thing. The whole top soil is loose, and there's nothing to hold to. That's Tommy Rice's place over there. We'd better get him to take us in for ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather

... the most useless pauper that burdens the Alms-House—the most uncombed foreigner that delves in a ditch—the most abject creature that begs a morsel from door to door, is yet a man; and there is, not in theory only, but in the public sentiment, a sacredness of rights, which no man, except by stealth, can violate with impunity. There is no other law for the Governor of New-York or ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher

... Here in the ditch my bones I'll lay; Weak, wearied, old, the world I leave. "He's drunk," the passing crowd will say 'T is well, for none will need to grieve. Some turn their scornful heads away, Some fling an alms in hurrying by;— Haste,—'t is the village holyday! The aged beggar needs ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... irrigation water available in the foothills you can get a very satisfactory growth of red clover. We have seen it doing very well on sloping land in your county where water was allowed to spill over from a ditch on the ridge to moisten the slope below. Winter rye and other hardy stock feeds could also be grown in the winter time on the protected slopes with the rainfall. Some such plants are not good summer growers, owing to the drought. Rape is a good winter grower by rainfall, but not so satisfactory ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson

... whispers he, "this may be fun for you, but it's death to me. He'll hit all the fight out of you in another five minutes, and then I shall go and drown myself in the island ditch. Feint him—use your legs! draw him about! he'll lose his wind then in no time, and you can go into him. Hit at his body too, we'll take care of his frontispiece by ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... and only a week ago, Larry Ronan, coming back at night from Ennistimon Fair, saw a black shadowy figure under the black trees, and heard a heart-broken voice cry "Remember the Dark Man!" Larry's natural surprise at this accounted for his being found next morning asleep in the ditch. But it is agreed in Moher that Andy left life on November Eve, whether he became the playfellow of the Fairies or the plaything of ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various

... cruisers were soon busily engaged, for there is always plenty for all hands to do when pitching camp, what with the raising of the tent, the making of a fireplace upon which coffee pot and frying pan will rest cozily, the digging of a ditch on the higher ground back of the shelter, if there seems the slightest possible chance of rain before morning—well, every one who has been there knows how the opportunities for doing something open up to a willing campmate, so there is hardly any ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne

... certainly going. It had careened from the road, tilted itself down into a ditch and gone on across the fields, lights shooting from it ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton

... formed by rows of the maguey or century plant, growing at the side of a ditch. Here it reaches its greatest perfection, and adds materially to the fine appearance of the fields, and is seen every where upon the table-land. It grows wild upon the mountains, and springs up in uncultivated ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... those of to-morrow. Not one of them has the head required for war. In this cursed Vendee a general is needed who would be a lawyer as well as a leader. He must harass the enemy, dispute every bush, ditch, and stone; he must force unlucky quarrels upon him, and take advantage of everything; vigilant and pitiless, he must watch incessantly, slaughter freely, and make examples. Now, in this army of peasants there are heroes, but no captains. D'Elbee is ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... 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 ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker

... pieces in the streets; others climbed the walls, and threw themselves head foremost into the moat. Many were drowned, and but a very few effected their escape. Justinus de Nassau. sprang over the parapet, and succeeded in swimming the ditch. Kleerhagen, driven into the Holy Cross tower, ascended to its .roof, leaped, all accoutred as he was, into the river, and with the assistance of a Scotch soldier, came safe to land. Ferdinand Truchsess, brother of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... selfishness, so there were disagreements and bitter quarrels over the water. Lawsuits followed and sometimes even fighting and murders. The remedy for this state of things was found to be in a company ditch, flume, or reservoir, with the use of ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini

... ground, a mounted cavalryman was riding rapidly toward me, the wind blowing back his cape so as to make conspicuous its bright yellow lining. For the moment his lowered head prevented recognition, but as he cleared the ditch and came up smiling, I ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish

... tangled mass of bramble arched over the dry ditch; it was possible to see some distance down the bank, for nothing grew on the top itself, the bushes all rising from either side—a peculiarity of clay mounds. This narrow space was a favourite promenade of the rabbits; they usually ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies

... came a new clue. A pair of ladies' shoes, mud-stained and worn, had been discovered in a ditch on the Hertford road, four miles from the house where the latest murder had been committed. This news came by telephone from the Chief of the Hertford Constabulary, with the further information that the shoes had been despatched to Scotland Yard by ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace

... yellowish leaves, and contained one solid kernel of about the size of an almond, enclosed entirely in a sort of spongy material, very palatable to the taste, and resembling more the inside of roasted maize than any other familiar vegetable. As I emerged entirely from the grove, I came upon a ditch about twice as broad as deep. On Earth I certainly could not have leaped it; but since landing on Mars, I had forgotten the weightless life of the Astronaut, and felt as if on Earth, but enjoying great increase ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... rooms under some mattresses, five men were found, and under a bridge crossing an irrigating ditch another was discovered. All these were immediately shot by the orders of Santa Ana, and so hastily and excitedly was it all done that a Mexican was killed with them by accident. The wife of Lieutenant Dickinson, a negro servant of Travis, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... 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

... Dilsey, an' all of yer—I've got er letter from Lord Burgoyne, an' he'll be here to-morrow, an' I want you all to go right into the kitchen an' make pies an' cakes." And so the whole party adjourned to a little ditch where mud and water were plentiful (and which on that account had been selected as the kitchen), and began at once to prepare an ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle

... negotiate with Tippo in order to avoid a conflict at the time when the State was not sufficiently armed to undertake such a task but since then, Arab rule has been entirely driven from Central Africa. Almost opposite the Falls, a fort is being constructed with a ditch all round. When finished, it will be capable of holding the whole garrison and supplies for eighteen months. It is of course, only constructed as a defence against native attacks and is not built strong enough to resist ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman

... The carriage set itself again in motion, but at the very moment when the horses passed the heap, they shyed so violently that the carriage was backed into a ditch and overturned. ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer

... men, by the ditches, maguey plant, etc. I ordered my men to separate, to shelter themselves as much as possible, [and] to keep within supporting distance of me. I proceeded about two hundred yards. I ordered every man to shelter himself in a small ditch which was fortunately near us; immediately after I heard the fire of Taylor's battery passing directly over my head. [When that fire commenced we were] in the corn-field, about half-way between Taylor's battery and the enemy. Requiring my command to lie close, with Lieutenant Foster, I made my way ...
— Company 'A', corps of engineers, U.S.A., 1846-'48, in the Mexican war • Gustavus Woodson Smith

... to the horses, while several passengers, who had alighted to gather blackberries from the ditch, scrambled hurriedly into their places. With a single clanking wrench the stage toiled on, plodding clumsily over ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... when his ashes have been placed in the casket, is laid in a [Greek: kapetos], a ditch or trench (Iliad, XV. 356; XVIII. 564); but here (XXIV. 797) [Greek: kapetos] is a chamber covered with great stones, within the howe, the casket being swathed with purple robes, and this was the end. The ghost of Hector would not revisit the sun, as ghosts do freely in the Cyclic poems, a proof ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... started up, entreating leave to tell his last night's dream. Some laughing at him, he observed, that "kingdoms had been saved by dreams!" Allowed to proceed, he said, "he saw two good pastures; a flock of sheep was in the one, and a bell-wether alone in the other; a great ditch was between them, and a narrow ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... the Gipsies, another is tracing their language, another treats upon our English Gipsies in a kind of "milk-and-watery" fashion that will neither do them good nor harm—he pleases his readers, but leaves the Gipsies where he found them, viz., in the ditch. Another went to work on the principle of praying and believing for them; but, I am sorry to say, in his circumscribed sphere his faith and works fell flat, on account, no doubt, of this dear, good man ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... 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, and around it various buildings for lodging and storage. A large house with covered galleries ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... by dark hair lightly sprinkled with gray. The second that he looked into that woman's eyes taught him her character, absolutely, as finally as if he had grown up with her. One could trust her to the last ditch, he thought. ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam

... at Patrasche, paused, wondered, turned aside, then kneeled down in the rank grass and weeds of the ditch and surveyed the dog ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester

... is the home of the unmarried women. This, and the rooms for their work, open on a separate square where there is shade from orange and fig trees and a bathing pond supplied by the zanja, or water ditch. Here square-figured, heavy-featured Indian girls are busy spinning and weaving thread into cloth. Others are cutting out and sewing garments. Some, squatted on the ground, are grinding corn into a coarse meal for the atole, ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini

... jaws shut on the word like a steel trap. "The scarp's thirty feet high, and the ditch accordin'. The last on the west side it will be—over by the river. I know it like your face, and ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... into stony silence. Well, Mahaffy could sneer—he would show him! This was the last ditch and he proposed to descend into it, it was something to be able to demand the final word of fate—but he instantly recalled that he had been playing at hide-and-seek with inevitable consequences for something like a quarter of a century; it had ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... are next to the Remi, and having accomplished a long march, hastens to the town named Noviodunum. Having attempted to take it by storm on his march, because he heard that it was destitute of [sufficient] defenders, he was not able to carry it by assault, on account of the breadth of the ditch and the height of the wall, though few were defending it. Therefore, having fortified the camp, he began to bring up the vineae, and to provide whatever things were necessary for the storm. In the meantime, the whole body of the ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar

... soon be better. If I had fifty thousand for a month, though, the strain would be over. She'd be nagging me to take a lot of her money, and I'd see Wall Street sunk first. Well, well, Wildmere and I may land together in the same ditch." ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe

... out. To her astonishment, it ran on before her, turning continually, and apparently delighted that it had gained its object, until they had gone some distance. Here the cat left her, and darted forward, when, to her surprise, she saw her youngest child stuck fast in the mud of a ditch, unable to move. ...
— Minnie's Pet Cat • Madeline Leslie

... rail, railing, quickset hedge, park paling, circumvallation[obs3], enceinte, ring fence. barrier, barricade; gate, gateway; bent, dingle [U.S.]; door, hatch, cordon; prison &c. 752. dike, dyke, ditch, fosse[obs3], moat. V. inclose, circumscribe ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... Miss Combs opened her ditch-gate for the tide of mine water which came in a flume across the arroyo, she saw the doctor and Mr. Keene approaching. They had an absorbed air, and as she opened the door for them the doctor said, ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead

... was wheeling His wife by a ditch, Then the barrow turned over, And in she did pitch. Says Jack, "She'll be drown'd!" But Joan did reply, "I don't think I shall, For the ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... fare,—you, the rank and file, the thousand unnoticed ones, who have left warm fires, dear wives, loving little children, without even the hope of glory or fame,—without even the hope of doing anything remarkable or perceptible for the cause you love,—resigned only to fill the ditch or bridge the chasm over which your country shall walk to peace and joy! Good men and true, brave unknown hearts, we salute you, and feel that we, in our soft peace and security, are not worthy of you! When we think ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... of that domain where once the cowboy reigned supreme have been turned into farms by the irrigator's ditch or by the dry-farmer's plan. The farmer in overalls is in many instances his own stockman today. On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and Texas and parts of Nevada we may find the cowboy, it is true, even today: but he is no longer the Homeric ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough

... 136, consisted of four ribs spaced 3 ft. on centers. Each rib consists of two side posts and an arch piece. The side posts on each side are connected at the bottoms by a sill and at the top by a cap. Jacks between the sill and a mud sill laid on the concrete invert or in the ditch held the center in place during arch construction. Lowering these jacks dropped the center onto trucks traveling on the mud sills. Thus the center was moved along as the work progressed. As will be noted from Figs. 134 and 135, the side ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette

... suggested motoring, and after a meal I started on what seemed a first rate car. But we had a breakdown lasting an hour, a dozen miles out of Glasgow, and then, running down Garelochside in the face of the storm, we smashed into the ditch. After making sure that the car was hopeless, I left the man at a wayside cottage and tramped the rest of the way. Hence my late arrival, and you know ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell

... John Larkin, a broad smile on his face, looking at the disconsolate Turner and saying: "He digged a pit, and is fallen into the ditch which he made." ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick

... to be much hurt: she had been thrown from the top of the coach into a ditch, which had stones at the bottom of it. She had not been able to make herself heard by any body, whilst the ladies' loud complaints continued; nor had she been able long to call for any assistance, for she had been stunned by her ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... 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

... very great citie and populous, built with stone, hauing faire and large streetes, with a faire riuer running by it, which falleth into the gulfe of Bengala. It hath a faire castle and a strong with a very faire ditch. [Sidenote: The great Mogor.] Here bee many Moores and Gentiles, the king is called Zelabdim Echebar: the people for the most part call him The great Mogor. From thence we went for Fatepore, which is the place where the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt

... snapped at the hub. Thereupon some two hundred dozen ears of early green-corn were strewn along the flinty face of the highway, while Uncle Enoch was hurled, seat and all, accompanied by four dozen eggs and ten pounds of Aunt Henrietta's best butter, into the ditch. ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford

... dissxuti. Distribute (to share) disdoni. District kvartalo. Distrust malfidi. Distrust malfido. Distrustful malfidema. Disturb interrompi. Disturbance tumulto. Disunite disigi. Disunion disigxo. Ditch defluilo. Ditto sama, idemo. Ditty kanteto. Dive subakvigxi. Diver (bird) kolimbo. Diverge malkonvergi. Divers (various) diversa. Diverse diversa. Diversity diverseco. Divert amuzi. Divest senvestigi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... a hundred and eight feet [90] in length, with two wings of sixty feet each, having small towers at the four corners. In front and on the borders of the river a platform was erected, on which were placed cannon, while the whole was surrounded by a ditch spanned ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain

... a tree. hist, hush! bowl, a vessel. hissed, did hiss. boll, a pod. paws, the feet of beasts. nose, part of the face. pause, a stop. knows, does know. faun, a sylvan god. mote, a particle. fawn, a young deer. moat, a ditch. pride, vanity. toled, allured. pried, did pry. told, did tell. wain, a wagon. tolled, did toll. wane, to decrease. rein, part of a bridle. see, to behold. rain, falling water. sea, a body of water. reign, to rule. si, a term ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey

... of Ambohipotsy to witness the execution. Pushing to the front with breathless anxiety, they were just in time to see Rasalama led forward by two men armed with spears. In front of them was a shallow ditch, and a little further on the brow of the precipice, from which was seen a magnificent prospect of the surrounding country. But no prospect, however sublime, could have attracted the eyes of the three friends just then, for in front of them stood two crosses supporting ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne

... of the 23d of August, 1382, the Tartars appeared before the gates of the city. Some of the chiefs rode slowly around the ramparts, examining the ditch, the walls, the height of the towers, and selected the most favorable spot for commencing the assault. The Tartars did not appear in such overwhelming numbers as report had taught the Russians to expect, and they felt quite sanguine ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott

... "Are ye sure?" he said to Gueldmar. "Are ye sure that wee chap kens whaur he's gaun? He'll no lead us into a ditch an' leave us there, mistakin' it for ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... Harefoot was crowned and resided here; and one of Alfred's sons struck money here. Hearne has likewise identified this fact by the very ancient and original arms of Oxford, which have a castle represented, with a large ditch and bridge. Upon the same authority we learn that Offa "built walls at Oxford," and by him, therefore, a Saxon castle was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various

... active in devising new schemes for the welfare of humanity. The most trivial events would often suggest to him measures conducive to the most beneficial results. It is said that Franklin saw one day in a ditch the fragments of a basket of yellow willow, in which some foreign commodity had been imported to this country. One of the twigs had sprouted. He planted it; and it became the parent of all the yellow willows in ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott

... and stared into the moon-broken gloom on his left. Something was there, fifty feet away, that drew him down through the muck which lay knee deep in the right-of-way ditch. It was what was left of the cutter's cabin, a clutter of burned logs, a wind scattered heap of ash. Even there, within arm's reach of the railroad, there had been ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... 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

... in weighted with an extra bundle. Tenderly unwrapping the covering she disclosed a half-starved baby. That day she had gone to a distant part of the city to assist in organizing a soup kitchen, and a Bible class. On her way home she heard a feeble cry coming from a ditch. She located a bundle of rags, and found a bit of ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay

... That is the actual state of the case, there is the truth. Did you hear much about this at school? Did you ever learn there that George III had a fake Parliament, largely elected by fake votes, which did not represent the English people; that this fake Parliament was autocracy's last ditch in England; that it choked for a time the English democracy which, after the setback given it by the excesses of the French Revolution, went forward again until to-day the King of England has less power than the President of the United States? I suppose everybody in the world who knows ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister

... he decided to take one more ride and then start for the station. But on that ride an accident occurred. The bobs on which the boys were seated collapsed midway of the descent, and threw the coasters into a heap in the ditch. None of them was seriously hurt, though the loose stones among which they were thrown were not sufficiently cushioned by the snow to prevent some bruises, and abrasions of the skin. Of course there was much confusion and excitement. ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene

... the cart-wheel flew off, and down went the cart, and Belinda and the boy were tumbled into a ditch, whence they scrambled out and rolled down a grassy slope, on and on and on, such a distance ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... occurred there. It was one of the very strangest places in the whole world, for there, in the middle of that great desolate waste, were herded together seven or eight thousand men—warriors, you understand, men of experience and courage. Around there were a double wall and a ditch, and warders and soldiers; but, my faith! you could not coop men like that up like rabbits in a hutch! They would escape by twos and tens and twenties, and then the cannon would boom, and the search parties run, and we, ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle

... clean, that we defy you to make them bona fide dirty. You may as well drive down a duck into a dirty puddle, and expect lasting stains on its pretty plumage. Pope says the same thing of swans—that is, Poets—when speaking of Aaron Hill diving into the ditch,— ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... vilyans want shtandin' up to, an' they'll rispict ye. I had no further trouble. That was the last o' thim. 'Tis the wake an' difinceless people they bate an' murther. I heerd there was talk o' shootin' me from the back iv a ditch; an' that one said, 'But av ye missed?' says he. 'What thin?' ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... a rice field and between field and waste land stood a fence; there was doubtless a ditch on the other side ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... but would not hand him the chicken, holding out for her original price. He jumped ashore, intending to take the chicken. She had a few yards' start and made the most of it. In and out they chased, over hedge and ditch, down the bank and up again. Several times he almost had her. She never for a moment ceased screeching—an operation which seemed to affect her wind not a particle. At the end of fifteen minutes the Indian gave up amid the ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt

... 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 the foreman ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... building of elaborate defenses, and there was practically nothing worthy the name of a castle. Watch-towers had been built and roofs and walls were sometimes protected by putting nails in the building points outward,—a sort of chevaux de frise. But a system of outlying defenses, ditch, earthen wall and wooden palisade, was all that was used so long as fighting was either hand-to-hand or with missiles no more penetrating than arrows. But when fire-arms were introduced in 1542, massively constructed castles began to be built. These were ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... 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 and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... horribly in his Hindustan jargon. Behind him came troops of matchlock-men, who picked off every one of our men who showed their noses above the ramparts: and a great host of blackamoors with scaling-ladders, bundles to fill the ditch, fascines, gabions, culverins, demilunes, counterscarps, and all the other ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray

... white hand in the scorching sunrays and commented jovially: "Talk about Eastern heat—this is a hundred and five Fahrenheit at the very least! A-a-ah!" He drew in a deep breath of the dry pure air. "This is something like! When you get your land under ditch, you'll have ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet

... are already,' says Micky, 'so come up behind me, for God's sake,' says he, 'an' don't waste time;' an' with that he brought the horse up beside the ditch, an' Jim Soolivan mounted up behind Micky, an' they rode off; an' tin good miles it was iv a road, an' at the other side iv Keeper intirely; an' it was snowin' so fast that the ould baste could hardly go an at all at all, ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... objects that has been found is an earthenware baking oven, which was unearthed in an old ditch near the site of the May-Hartwell House. Restored from over 200 fragments, the oven was probably used between 1650 and 1690. It may have been made at Jamestown, molded of native clay and fired in a pottery kiln. In use, heated stones were placed inside the oven and left until ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter

... above high-water mark, but an old Mahometan gentleman having told me that, when he was a little boy, he recollected the water once rising higher than the hill, I took the precaution of keeping a canoe in a small ditch close at hand. ...
— True Stories of Wonderful Deeds - Pictures and Stories for Little Folk • Anonymous

... been aground in a narrow ditch of a canal ever since last evening, and it is now past nine in the morning. I spent the night in a corner of the crowded deck, more dead than alive. I had asked the steward to fry some luchis for my dinner, and he brought me some nondescript slabs of fried ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore

... The forest which covers it, consisting chiefly of white-cedar, black-ash, and other trees that live in excessive moisture, is now decayed and death-struck by the partial draining of the swamp into the great ditch of the canal. Sometimes, indeed, our lights were reflected from pools of stagnant water which stretched far in among the trunks of the trees, beneath dense masses of dark foliage. But generally the tall stems and intermingled branches were naked, and brought into ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... cried peremptorily, stopping him. And then in a quieter tone, "And what about Carlier? Is he also in the ditch?" ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... was originally a ditch 4 feet deep, 40 feet wide, and 363 miles long. The chief promoter was De Witt Clinton. The opponents of the canal therefore called it in derision "Clinton's big ditch," and declared that it could never be ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... there is a flat, square kind of gingerbread which we boys used to know as "parliament." I cannot ever see that without thinking of going to school on sunny mornings, and stopping by one particular ditch to bang the wasps with my school-bag, swung round by its string. It was only the seniors who sported a strap for their books; and in those days my legs, from the bottom of my drawers to the top of my white socks, were bare, and my unprotected knees ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn

... to steal away at night to have church on de ditch bank, and crawl home on de belly. Once overseers heered us prayin', give us one day each ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration

... orbilium, ut uxorem duceret, Epistola hortativa." Subscribed "Kent, Lady-day, 1835"—are Alsop's. He took the degree of M.A. in 1696, and of B.D. in 1706, and, by favour of the Bishop of Winchester, got a prebend in his cathedral, and the rectory of Brightwell, Berks. He was accidentally drowned in a ditch leading to his garden gate, in 1726. There is good reason to believe that a MS. life of him is to be found among the Rawlinson MSS., which it may ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various

... expect a girl, brought up as I have been, to believe that society is upside down, and would be better if it were tipped over the other way and run by a lot of hod-carriers and ditch-diggers and cooks. Can ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... the morning of the next day, November 7, 1914. Encouraged by the unexpected successes of the night, the Japanese commander gave the order for a final grand assault. Nobody was more surprised than the Japanese themselves. They had expected a last-ditch resistance and feared they would have to sacrifice a thousand men before gaining these positions commanding the city. But the Germans, their ammunition almost gone, stunned by the continuous ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... whole fish, they got but a portion from some neighbor. For this reason the woman was angry, and told Aiai to go to the brook and get some oopus fit to eat, as well as opae. Aiai listened to the voice of his wife. He dug a ditch and constructed a dam so as to lead the water of the brook into some pits, and thus be able to catch the oopu and opae. He labored some days at this work, and the fish and shrimps ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various

... worshipped as Deities. The Atheists are the vanguard of the army of Freethought, on whom falls the brunt of the battle, and are shivered the hardest of the blows; their feet trample down the thorns that others may tread unwounded; their bodies fill up the ditch that, by the bridge thus made, others may pass to victory. Honour to the pioneers of progress, honour to the vanguard of Liberty's army, honour to those who to improve earth have forgotten heaven, and who in their zeal ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... been described in Belgium. We are told, "They are generally established on points overhanging valleys, on a mass of rocks forming a kind of headland, which is united to the rest of the country by a narrow neck of land. A wide ditch was dug across this narrow tongue of land, and the whole camp was surrounded by a thick wall of stone, simply piled one upon another, without either mortar or cement." "One of these walls, when described, was ten feet thick, and ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... beauty of these people; one feels they have been eating and drinking, and befouling the earth and the streets with the excrements of themselves and their lives, love-making and begetting, and suffering stolidly all through the centuries, and one wonders why? as one wonders before a ditch full of tadpoles. Low mass was going on at a side altar, and the canon's mass in the beautiful marble choir, behind the ambones, behind those delicate marble railings and seats, which, with their inclusion, ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee

... Souse went the sheep into a murky, muddy pool and disappeared. But suddenly its head came up and then its shoulders. And it began half to walk and half swim down what appeared to be a narrow boxlike ditch that contained other floundering sheep. Then Carley saw men on each side of this ditch bending over with poles that had crooks at the end, and their work was to press and pull the sheep along to the end of the ditch, and drive them up a boarded incline into another corral where ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... shallow and narrow; and the breastworks varied in altitude from three to eight feet. They sometimes had one, and sometimes two entrances, as was to be inferred from there being no ditches at those places. When the works were protected by a deep ravine, or large stream of water, no ditch was to be seen. The areas of these forts varied from two to six acres; and the form was in general an irregular ellipsis; in some of them, fragments of earthenware and pulverized substances, supposed to have been originally human bones, were to ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall

... scientifically. Scientifically it's a delightful subject. You think death's natural. Well, it isnt. You read Weismann. There wasnt any death to start with. You go look in any ditch outside and youll find swimming about there as fresh as paint some of the identical little live cells that Adam christened in the Garden of Eden. But if big things like us didnt die, we'd crowd one ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw

... fast, that the sentries did not perceive us; indeed, it was no fault of theirs, for it was impossible to have made us out. It was some time before O'Brien could find out the point exactly above the drawbridge of the first ditch; at last he did—he fixed his crow-bar in, and lowered down the rope. "Now, Peter, I had better go first again; when I shake the rope from below, all's right." O'Brien descended, and in a few minutes the rope again shook; I followed him, and found myself received ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat

... American history, we have been engaged in change—in a perpetual peaceful revolution—a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions—without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... by grafting and budding upon their own pear-stocks raised from the kernels in the same manner as for apples. Standard quinces, designed as fruit trees, may be stationed in the garden or orchard, and some by the sides of any water, pond, watery ditch, &c. as they ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton

... The roaring of the great water-organ grew louder and louder. He knew every step of the way to the shore—across the fields and over fences and stiles. He turned this way and that, to avoid here a ditch, there a deep sandy patch. And still the music grew louder and louder—and at length came in his face the driving spray: it was the flying touch of the wings on which the tones went hurrying past into the depths of awful distance! His feet were now wading through the bent-tufted sand, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... no possible introduction could have stood you more in stead than your own extensive knowledge of transatlantic ornithology. Swammerdam passed his life, it is said, in a ditch. That was a base, earthy solitude,—and a prison. But you and Audubon have passed your lives in the heavenly solitudes of forests and savannahs; and such solitude as this is no prison, but infinite liberty. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... daughter of the sun, instead of crystallising slowly here into ice, amid countenances rigid with respectability, sharpened by the lust of gain; without taste, without emotion, without even sorrow! Let who will be the stagnant mill-head, crawling in its ugly spade-cut ditch to turn the mill. Let me be the wild mountain brook, which foams and flashes over the rocks—what if they tear it?—it leaps them nevertheless, and goes laughing on its way. Let me go thus, for weal or woe! And if I sleep awhile, let it be like the brook, beneath ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... she looked about, while she thought, from the well-known mountains that bounded her world to the familiar arches of the distant aqueduct, from the dry ditch opposite to the burning sky above and the greyish green hillocks below Tivoli. But by and by she looked straight before her, with a steady, concentrated stare, as if she saw something happening and was watching to see how it ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford

... made a sudden swerve. Of course the car skidded. It skidded all over the place, as if it were drunk, and, aided by Marigold, described a series of ghastly half-circles. At last he performed various convulsive feats of jugglery, with the result that the car, which was nosing steadily for the ditch, came to a stand-still. Then Marigold informed me in unemotional tones that the ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... Memorialls, rode his horse into a river at night, and did not arrive at the opposite bank. Every effort was made to find his body in the stream, which was searched as far as the sea. The corpse was at last discovered in a ditch, two miles away, shamefully mutilated. The money of the laird, and other objects of value, were still in his pockets. This was regarded as the work of fiends, but there is a more plausible explanation. Nobody ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... the establishments output may be regularized by taking orders in advance; by producing various products successively in the same factory; by overcoming weather conditions as has been done successfully in brick and tile making, ditch digging, and building operations; by transferring workers from one department of an establishment to another; by improving the employment departments so as to build up a more stable force, thus reducing the great expense of "hiring and firing" and the loss through training ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... Ditch with disemboguing streams Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames, The king of dykes than whom no sluice of mud With deeper sable blots the silver flood.— Here strip, my children, here at once leap in; Here prove who best can dash through thick and thin, And who the most ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... one roll of it, but the bacon's the butter for us. Now for the butcher-knives. We must ditch our tent." ...
— Harper's Young People, May 18, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... was sealed and inscribed. The mellow splendor of the August moon, pouring over the crest of Olivet, since termed the Mount of Offence, brought the lettering boldly out; and he read, and was filled with rage. All he could do was to wrench the board from its nailing, and hurl it into the ditch. Then he sat upon the step, and prayed for the New King, and that his coming might be hastened. As his blood cooled, insensibly he yielded to the fatigue of long travel in the summer heat, and sank down lower, and, at ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... his wits, which, though he has lost so often, you know he always recovers, and as fresh as ever. Lord Egmont despairs of the commonwealth; and I am going to fortify my castle of Strawberry, according to an old charter I should have had for embattling and making a deep ditch. But here am I laughing when I really ought to cry, both with my public eye and my private one. I have told you what I think ought to sluice my public eye; and your private eye too will moisten, when I tell you that poor Miss Harriet Montagu is dead. She died about a fortnight ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... was one of the forty men, who, headed by our gallant leader, jumped into the turbid waters of the ditch, swam across, and, scaling the walls, opened ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall

... 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 the other side of the river. A mile ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair

... human body. We speak of the head, shoulder, back, or foot of a mountain, of an arm of the sea, a tongue of land, the mouth of a sea-port, of a cave, or crater. So again we ascribe teeth to mountains, a front (fronte, forehead) to a house; there is the eye-brow (ciglio) of a ditch, the eye of heaven, a vein of metal, the entrails of a mountain. The Alps are bald or bare, the soil is wrinkled, objects are sinister or the reverse (sinistra, destra),[24] and a mountain ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... and very damp. I knew my way to the Battery, for I had been down there on a Sunday with Joe, and had just scrambled up the mound beyond the ditch when I saw the man sitting before me—with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... their enthusiasm was seasoned. It grew under fire, or practically so, in the presence of the danger. There is always an abundance of the green article of enthusiasm, but it's not worth much for steady ditch-work. There is a sort of wood enthusiasm, apple-wood. You know how apple-wood burns in a fire. It catches quickly, throws out a good many sparks, makes a loud crackling noise, but ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon

... march upon the city, and beholds Fast barred the gate-ways, while in arms the youths Stand on the battlements. Hard by the walls A hillock rose, upon the further side Expanding in a plain of gentle slope, Fit (as he deemed it) for a camp with ditch And mound encircling. To a lofty height The nearest portion of the city rose, While intervening valleys lay between. These summits with a mighty trench to bind The chief resolves, gigantic though ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... 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

... his service his leg was affected, fails to show a continuous disability from that cause. It is stated that about five years ago, while the claimant was gathering dandelions, in stepping across a ditch his leg broke. The doctor who attended him states that the leg was about four weeks longer in uniting than is usual, but he is not represented as giving an opinion that the fracture had anything to do with his ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland

... Babylon was less a city than a fortified camp. The walls equipped with towers and pierced by a hundred gates of brass were so thick that a chariot might be driven on them. All around the wall was a large, deep ditch full of water, with its sides lined with brick. The houses of the city were constructed of three or four stories. The streets intersected at right angles. The bridge and docks of the Euphrates excited admiration; the fortified palace also, and the hanging gardens, one of the seven wonders of ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... There is not one of them that has understanding enough to direct the feet of his neighbour in the path he should go—it would be the blind leading the blind, and together would they fall into the ditch. What more would the bear do, if he were made ruler, than train his subjects to perform great feats of strength, or to climb a tree, or to suck their paws through the long nights of winter?—The panther would teach them savage cruelty and a speedy step, and the deer would counsel them ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... intended by the natives as groundless. We had, however, another source of security; our little fortification was now complete. The north and south sides consisted of a bank of earth four feet and a half high on the inside, and a ditch without ten feet broad and six deep; on the west side, facing the bay, there was a bank of earth four feet high, and pallisadoes upon that, but no ditch, the works here being at high-water mark; on the east ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... Withyham, perceived a briar pipe lying near the footpath which skirts the hedge in Lower Haycock. A few paces farther on he picked up a pair of broken binocular glasses. Finally, among some nettles in the ditch, he caught sight of a flat, canvas-backed book, which proved to be a note-book with detachable leaves, some of which had come loose and were fluttering along the base of the hedge. These he collected, but some, including the first, were never recovered, and ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the Ditch chafed up from under us against its banks with a smell that enabled me to hide the emotions Mrs. Morgan evoked behind my handkerchief. The pale desert was pictorial with the drifting, deepening purple shadows of clouds, and in the midst a blue glimmer of the Bitter Lakes, with a white ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... 'arf of your bullets fly wide in the ditch, Don't call your Martini a cross-eyed old bitch; She's human as you are — you treat her as sich, An' she'll fight for the young British soldier. Fight, fight, fight for the soldier ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling

... upon the roadside bushes, the half-breed announced that there had been that morning a scuffle in a gang of negroes; that a small man had been thrown heavily to the earth, and a large man had made off across a low ditch into the woods; that the overseer had parted the combatants, and that some one's back had bled. No sooner was this piece of clairvoyance aired than he was vexed that he had shown a hall-mark of the savage, and hastily explained ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... position; the damage to the Carlist must have been less. Two of the Miqueletes ventured stealthily down a road leading towards the point from which the nearest jets of smoke curled, following the ditch by the side, stooping and peering through the bushes. There was a volley from afar. They hesitated and stood, as if ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... the Trojans, verily then I too would desire that even instantly this might be, that the Achaians should perish here nameless far from Argos: but and if they turn again, and we flee back from among the ships, and rush into the delved ditch, then methinks that not even one from among us to bear the tidings will win back to the city before the force of the Achaians when they rally. But come as I declare, let us all obey. Let our squires hold the horses by the dyke, while ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)

... was in China. (No, not Neuville-St.-Vaast; China, China, place where they eat birds'-nests and puppy-dogs' tails.) There were coolies from some salvage company all over the place, perched on heaps of broken masonry, squatting along the ditch side, banked ten-deep in the road—tall villainous-looking devils, very intently watching something. I pulled up, partly to avoid killing them and partly to see what it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various

... "I will turn out of the road, for there is a treacherous pitch on the other side, and for me to let them topple into the ditch might be profitable, ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright

... when corporal of the guard, I had a little misunderstanding one night with the sentinel on post along Fort Clinton ditch, which was then nearly filled by a growth of bushes. The sentinel tore the breast of my shell-jacket with the point of his bayonet, and I tumbled him over backward into the ditch and ruined his musket. But I quickly helped him out, and gave him my musket in place of his, with ample ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... meeting a strange cat, took her by the top of the back, and shook her for a considerable period with some earnestness. Then depositing her in a ditch, he remarked ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... Leaping the ditch that skirted the road, the youth soon crossed the belt of furze and heather that lay between him and the river, about which he and his host had been conversing. Being unaccustomed to the nature of the Western Isles, he was a little ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne

... says: If Thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquity, O Lord, who shall stand! And thus says Job, 9, 28: I was afraid of all my works (Engl. vers., sorrows). Likewise chap. 9, 30: If I wash myself with snow-water, and make my hands never so clean, yet shalt Thou plunge me in the ditch. And Prov. 20, 9: Who can say, I have made my heart clean? And 1 John 1, 8: If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. And in the Lord's Prayer the saints ask for the forgiveness of sins. Therefore even the saints have guilt and sins. Again ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon

... the town in the narrow forest-valley was well secured, a wall and ditch enclosed it; only the houses on the edge of the ravine were unprotected. True, the mouth of the pass was covered by the field pieces on the city wall, and the strong tower beside the gate, but it was not incumbent on the citizens to provide for the safety of the row of houses up ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... deal uprightly in this matter, as thou dost regard thine own life; for here are as many English left alive, notwithstanding the slaughter of to-day, as may well suffice to fling the Flemish bull-frogs into the castle-ditch, should they have cause to think thou meanest falsely, in the keeping of this castle, and the ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... next visited what is called Demosthenes's Lantern, situated close to a ruined house, formerly the Franciscan convent. Mr. Finlay and some others have cleared away the rubbish and masses of fallen masonry from about the Lantern: they have also dug a ditch around it, to prevent the devastation committed by visitors who attempt to break and carry away the ornaments: they ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo

... men just as good for the price—but I want him to understand so he won't forget it that he's taking his orders from me. Now I happen to know that our dear friend Stoddard is out to get control of this mine and the very man that is liable to ditch us is this same efficient Mr. Jepson. Don't ever make the mistake of giving these financiers the credit of being on the level. You can't grab that much money in the short time they've been gathering without gouging every man ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge

... Neewa were in a swamp country when the fifth of August came. In the lowland it was sweltering. Neewa's tongue hung from his mouth, and Miki was panting as they made their way along a black and sluggish stream that was like a great ditch and as dead as the day itself. There was no visible sun, but a red and lurid glow filled the sky—the sun struggling to fight its way through the smothering film that had grown thicker over the earth. ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood

... ATTEMPT AT BURGLARY—HEROIC VICTORY OVER THE VILLAINS," &c. &c. Rascals as yet unknown! perhaps you, too, may read these words, and may be induced to pause in your fatal intention. Take the advice of a sincere friend, and keep off. To find a man writhing in my man-trap, another mayhap impaled in my ditch, to pick off another from my tree (scoundrel! as though he were a pear) will give me no pleasure; but such things may happen. Be warned in time, villains! Or, if you MUST pursue your calling as cracksmen, have the goodness to ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... beginning to curl back. Then she went round by the edge of the brook which keeps damp one side of the orchard, where she found some single stems of forget-me-nots, shining in the dusk like beaded turquoise. She pulled some from the bottom of the half-dry ditch, and setting the pale moss-rosebud in the middle, she bound the whole together with a striped yellow and green withe. Then snipping the stacks with her pocket scissors, she brought the posy to Saunders, with instructions to wrap it in a dock-leaf and never to let his hands ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... abode of Ishtar. As they rise to height after height the eagle describes the appearance of the world lying stretched out beneath: at first it rises like a huge mountain out of the sea; then the ocean appears as a girdle encircling the land, and finally but as a ditch a gardener digs to irrigate his land. When they have risen so high that the earth is scarcely visible, Etana cries to the eagle to stop; so he does, but his strength is exhausted, and bird and man ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Gheluvelt. It was pouring with rain as we ate our meal of cold rations; we could not even enjoy a comforting smoke, as the lighting of a match would have been certain to draw the fire of our vigilant foe. Mr. Jaffray and I both agreed that a night's lodging in a damp ditch was hardly consonant with our wishes, and therefore we set out for the hamlet of Halte, where the railway crosses the road, in hopes that we might find cover of ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester

... mountain roe More fleet, the verdant carpet skim; thick clouds Snorting they breathe; their shining hoofs scarce print The grass unbruised; when emulation fired, They strain, to lead the field, top the barred gate, O'er the deep ditch exulting bound, and brush The thorny-twining hedge; the riders bend O'er their arched necks; with steady hands, by turns Indulge their speed, or moderate their rage. Where are their sorrows, disappointments, wrongs, Vexations, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum









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