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More "Pit" Quotes from Famous Books



... any one had seen me flitting noiselessly along the silent and deserted street, I should assuredly have been taken for a washed-out ghost, for I had left my boots behind, and my feet gave only a faint, scarcely audible, pit-pat on the flooded causeway. ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood

... to all—from Dardale Moss, as black as pitch and as rotten as the grave, up that zigzag wall you call a road, that looks like chalk in the moonlight, through Dunner Cleugh, as dark as a coal-pit, and down here to the George and the Dragon, where you have a roaring fire, wise men, good punch—here it is—and a corpse in your coach-house. Where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together. Come, landlord, ladle out the nectar. Drink, gentlemen—drink, ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... short trip. Jason barely had time to catch up on his sleep before they grounded on Darkhan. Being without luggage they were the first ones through customs. They left the shed just in time to see another ship landing in a distant pit. Kerk stopped to watch it and Jason followed his gaze. It was a gray, scarred ship. With the stubby lines of a freighter—but sporting as many ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison

... at length it grows calm and gets rest for what still lies before it. All the features of the view correspond with the waters in grandeur and wildness. The glacier sculptured walls of the canyon on either hand, with the sublime mass of the Glacier Point Ridge in front, form a huge triangular pit-like basin, which, filled with the roaring of the falling river seems as if it might be the hopper of one of the mills of the gods in which ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir

... Bruce, hearing of the circumstance, proposed to Mr. H. that they should repair to the spot, with suitable instruments, and endeavor to find some relics. The soil was a light loam, which would be dry and preserve bones for centuries without decay. A search enabled them to come to a pit but a slight distance from the surface. The top of the pit was covered with small slabs of the Medina sandstone, and was twenty-four feet square, four and a half feet deep, planes agreeing with the four cardinal points. ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson

... basement-doors opening into its bottomless pit; with its continual outgoing and ingoing of sooty and cruel-visaged denizens; with its rickety old steps leading to the second story; with its battered windows, begrimed walls, demolished shutters, clapboards hanging at sixes and sevens-with its suspicious aspect;—there it stands, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... water in a billy; and how he manages without a bag is known only to himself. He has read every scrap of print within reach, and now lies on his side, with his face to the wall and one arm thrown up over his head; the jumper is twisted back, and leaves his skin bare from hip to arm-pit. His lower face is brutal, his eyes small and shifty, and ugly straight lines run across his low forehead. He says very little, but scowls most of the time—poor devil. He might be, or at least seem, a totally different man under more favourable conditions. He ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... expect you've got to die, there's only one thing that'll save you—get up and follow me to the cock-pit." ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various

... it disturbed the limpid streams of liberty, it has polluted the minds of your youth, sown the seeds of despotism, and without a speedy check to her ravages, will sink you into a pit of infamy, where you shall be robbed of all the honours you have ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole

... dense and firm, so that one may safely walk across the streams, or even lead a horse across them without danger of falling through. In June the thinnest parts of the winter ceiling, and those most exposed to sunshine, begin to give way, forming dark, rugged-edged, pit-like sinks, at the bottom of which the rushing water may be seen. At the end of June only here and there may the mountaineer find a secure snow-bridge. The most lasting of the winter bridges, thawing from below ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... Gallows-knows of Irvine? The cook, howsomever, has shown me a way to make rice-puddings without eggs, by putting in a bit of shoohet, which is as good—and this you will tell Miss Nanny Eydent; likewise, that the most fashionable way of boiling green pis, is to pit a blade of spearmint in the pot, which gives a fine flavour. But this is a long letter, and my pepper is done; so no more, but ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt

... transgressors had not gone far on their own way when night came on and with the night a very great darkness. But what soon added to the horror of their condition was that they heard a man fall into a deep pit right before them, and it sounded to them as if he was dashed to pieces by his fall. So they called to know the matter, but there was none to answer, only they heard a groaning. Then said Hopeful: Where are we ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte

... ordinary scale of human features almost ridiculous by disproportion. Seat yourself at this day in the amphitheatre at Verona, and judge for yourself. In an amphitheatre, the stage, or properly the arena, occupying, in fact, the place of our modern pit, was much nearer than in a scenic theatre to the surrounding spectators. Allow for this, and placing some adult in a station expressing the distance of the Athenian stage, then judge by his appearance ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... everywhere, and lighted torches, in the midst of the black night, shining upon tombs. Bowanee smiled in her ebon sky. As I thought of that divinity of destruction, I beheld with joy the dead-cart emptied of its coffins. The immense pit yawned like the mouth of hell; corpses were heaped upon corpses, and still it yawned the same. Suddenly, by the light of a torch, I saw an old man beside me. He wept. I had seen him before. He is a Jew—the keeper of the house in the Rue Saint-Francois—you ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... a snare. Fratres charissimi, the time is short;' but who love earth and life and riches and pleasure better than they? You are all of you as fond of the world, as set upon gain, as chary of reputation, as ambitious of power, as the jolly old heathen, who, you say, is going the way of the pit." ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... thee from of old. Ever ambitious, ever plotting to be great, I fear me that thou hast overreached thyself at last. Years ago, when thou wouldst have plotted against Cetywayo, son of Panda, I warned thee, and thou didst listen. But now, when I was not by thee to stay thy hand, thou hast dug a pit for thine own feet to fall in. Is it not so? But what is done is done. Who can make the dead tree green, or gaze again upon last year's light? Who can recall the spoken word, or bring back the spirit of the fallen? That ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard

... a mark of singular approval with which one of my pit audience favored me. My son had named to him several objects he offered in succession; but not feeling satisfied, my incredulous friend, rising, as if to give more importance to the difficulty he was about to present, handed me an instrument peculiar to cloth merchants, and ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne

... confidence in you is abused, and you pass too near the nest, that might easily be mistaken for a robin's, just above your head in a sapling, that the wood thrush so far forgets itself as to become excited. Pit, pit, pit, sharply reiterated, is called out at you with a strident quality in the tone that is painful evidence of the fearful anxiety your presence gives ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... truth. It is not so with the agricultural interest, or what passes by that name. It never thinks of the suffering world, or sees it, or cares to extend its knowledge of it; or, so long as it remains a world, cares anything about it. All those whom Dante placed in the first pit or circle of the doleful regions, might have represented the agricultural interest in the present Parliament, or at quarter sessions, or at meetings of the farmers' ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens

... without replying, leaped out of the pit, and shouted in a voice that trembled with anger, "Does you know, Mr. Edie Ochiltree, who it is you are putting off your gibes and your jests upon? You base old person, I will cleave your ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... one of the dreadful symptoms of his dreadful disease. All at once, with the solid black and white marble beneath his feet, he felt himself upon the edge of a precipice, felt himself falling, falling, falling, into a bottomless pit. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... corpse away before I could return and search for the diamond I had failed to find upon his body! But as I tossed the earth and lime aside, and discovered my handiwork, the moon's rays were suddenly caught and reflected from within the pit, and I fell forward with a ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Miss R——'s face was assuming a fine, corpse-like green tint, I began to have a hesitating and unhappy sensation in the pit of the stomach, a suggestion of doubt as to the wisdom of leaving the solid, reliable land, and trusting myself to the fickle and deceitful sea. In a few moments these disquieting hints had grown to a positive ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee

... steep than either. Three narrow streets lead to its top. They are of flat stones, with cement gutters. The stones radiate the heat of stove lids. They are worn to a mirror-like smoothness, and from their surface the sun strikes between your eyes, at the pit of your stomach, and the soles of your mosquito boots. The three streets lead to a parade ground no larger than and as bare as a brickyard. It is surrounded by the buildings of Bula Matadi, the post-office, the custom-house, the barracks, and the Cafe Franco-Belge. It has a tableland ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis

... 'Take me as one tastes the perfume of a flower when one passes it in a king's garden.' Then, after having used the cunning eloquence of woman and soared on the wings of pleasure, after having quenched my thirst, I could have you cast into a pit, where none could find you, which has been made to gratify vengeance without having to fear that of the law, a pit full of lime which would kindle and consume you, until no particle of you were left. You would stay in my ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... conveyed to the Magdalene burying-ground, and thrown into a pit twelve feet deep, into which a considerable quantity of quicklime ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz

... no means of ingress. Every window and door was fastened and locked, and I returned baffled to the porch. As I did so, I heard the rapid pit-pat of a swiftly driven horse's feet. They stopped at the gate, and a few seconds later I met Van Helsing running up the avenue. When he saw me, he gasped out, "Then it was you, and just arrived. How is she? Are we too late? Did ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker

... said Freydisa, "that we wait here until the moon rises, which it should do soon. When the wind has driven away the clouds it will show us our path, but if we go on in this darkness we shall fall into some pit. It is not cold to-night, and you ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard

... the beseeching cry of the dew-washed meadow begging for a wee rainbow at every grass-tip, of the forest begging a burst of fire at the end of each gloomy avenue; that cry which mounts to the sky through me is so greatly the cry of all that feels itself in disgrace, plunged in a sunless pit, deprived of light without knowing for what offence; is the cry of cold, the cry of fear, the cry of weariness, of all that night disables or disarms; the rose shivering alone in the dark, the hay wanting to be dried and go to the mow, the sickle ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand

... went after his brethren, and found them in Dothan. And when they saw him afar off, even before he came near unto them, they conspired against him to slay him. And they said one to another: "Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, 'Some evil beast hath devoured him:' and we shall see what will become of his dreams." And Reuben heard it, and he delivered him out of their hands, and said: "Let us not kill him." And Reuben said unto ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... spots where Tiberius and Caius Gracchus were murdered, and services were there performed in honor of their manes. Festus, an old Roman lexicographer who lived in the second or third century, tells us there was in the Comitium a stone covered pit which ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... ye've done or where ye've been or who ye've been with, a mither's heart welcomes ye back jist the same as when yes were a babby an' slept on me breast. A mither's heart ud quench the fires o' hell. I'd go inter the burnin' flames o' the pit an' bear ye out in me arms. So niver fear. Now that I've found ye, ye're safe. Ye'll not run away from me ag'in. I'll hould ye—I'll hould ye back," and the poor creature clasped Alida with such conclusive energy that she ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe

... box-offices of Burton's Chambers Street house, of Brougham's Lyceum, corner of Broome Street and Broadway, of Niblo's, and of Castle Garden. There were no afternoon performances in those days, except now and then when the Ravels were at Castle Garden; and the admission to pit and galleries was usually two shillings—otherwise, twenty-five cents. His first play, so far as he remembers, was "The Stranger," a play dismal enough to destroy any taste for the drama, one would suppose, in any juvenile mind. He never cared very much to ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton

... o'clock I awoke to the conviction that I was hopelessly lost, and must spend the night in the wilderness. The rain still fell unceasingly through the pit-mirk, and I was as sodden and bleached as the bent I trod on. A night on the hills had no terrors for me; but I was mortally cold and furiously hungry, and my temper grew bitter against the world. I had forgotten the girl and her ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan

... Play-Book, swears it too, Your pox uppo'nt damn it, what's here to do? Your nods, your winks, nay, your least signs of Wit, Are truer Reason than e're Poet writ, And he observes do much more sway the Pit. For sitting there h' has seen the lesser gang Of Callow Criticks down their heads to bang; Lending long Ears to all that you should say, So understand, yet never hear the Play: Then in the Tavern swear their time they've lost, And Curse the Poet put e'm to that cost. And if one would ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne

... dependent. She had a heart "at leisure from itself, to soothe and sympathize." From the depths of her soul she pitied Gregory and wished to help him out of a state which the psalmist with quaint force describes as "a horrible pit and the ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... lands at a dock; on the dock a special train is waiting; in an hour and three-quarters he is in, London. Nothing could be handier. If your journey were from a sand-pit on our side to a lighthouse on the other, you could make it quicker by other lines, but that is not the case. The journey is from the city of New York to the city of London, and no line can do that journey quicker than this one, nor anywhere ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... there. His mother was unwilling to have him engage in these schemes. She was afraid he would, sooner or later, involve himself in dangers from which he could not extricate himself, and that he would end by being plunged into the same pit of destruction that had engulfed ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott

... he bounded away like a foot-ball at play, Till into the bottomless pit he fell slap, Knocking Mammon the meagre o'er pursy Belphegor, And ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Puritan's own appeal to individual judgment, stated in different form; but the Puritan could not so regard it. To such a fanatic as Norton this inward light was but a reflection from the glare of the bottomless pit, this private inspiration was the beguiling voice of the Devil. As it led the Quakers to strange and novel conclusions, this inward light seemed to array itself in hostility to that final court of appeal for all good Protestants, the sacred text of the Bible. The Quakers were accordingly regarded ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske

... intending to try it after the European method of dressing flax. The sawpit being finished on the 18th, a small pine was cut down near it, which measured 115 feet in length, and two feet six inches diameter at the base: a twelve foot length was got on the pit, and the sawyers began sawing it into framings and scantlings for the store-house. By the 19th, the greatest part of the seeds we had procured at the Cape of Good Hope, and sown in the garden, were out of the ground, and seemed likely ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter

... back, and Peter declared that he could no longer hear their footsteps. They waited and waited, but the explorers did not appear. Old John suggested that there might be some pit or hole into which they had tumbled, and perhaps nothing would ever again be heard of them; but the idea was too terrible to entertain, for Peter had a sincere regard for Tom, and Charley's blithe voice and kind manners had won his ...
— Washed Ashore - The Tower of Stormount Bay • W.H.G. Kingston

... the ring, apparently fifteen or twenty feet away. I started to walk towards it, but although it grew rapidly larger, the distance separating me from it seemed to increase rather than lessen. Then I ran, and by the time I arrived it stood higher than my waist—a beautiful, shaggy, golden pit. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... face each other under similar conditions, with similar weapons, and with the same sun and the same wind. It was unfair, because the stakes were of such totally unequal value. A man in his prime, who had done good work in his profession and promised to do still more, must pit himself against an irresponsible young fellow, who up to the present had shirked everything serious. And then Guentz's position as husband and father must be compared with his opponent's irregular life. An absolute cypher was opposed to a number that counted; ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein

... anither are that wis there came doon hame and gaed in ben, an' wis speirin' for ye, an' says she'll gie me till the polis for singin' an' askin' money in t' streets, an' wants you to gie me till her to pit in schuil." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... the face of a mass of rocks, where the path was so narrow that she felt the swish of her skirts against the mountain wall, and on her right it sloped downward perpendicularly, until what seemed a bottomless pit was hidden in a pool of gloom. A misstep by any member of the party would have sent him or her to instant destruction. But the animals and men moved confidently, though the pace was slow. Evidently, with the exception of the women, all were familiar, not only ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... Poltimore's estate in South Moulton, are in working, it seems sensibly nearer. It is a literal fact that we have yet to ascertain whether this vaunted gold will even pay for the costs of working it. Coals lying at the very mouth of a pit will be thankfully carried off by the poor man, but dig a little deeper, and it requires the capital of a rich man to raise them; and after that it requires a good deal of experience, and the trial of much mechanic artifice, to ascertain ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... angry voice struck in: 'Stop that fooling, Seton and Elliott,' he said. Then he went on: 'Wolf Patrol, you will at once return to the sand-pit ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore

... At the bottom of the shaft was a pit into which sank the great chains of the car. The pit was full of crude castor-oil, cheapest and best ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain

... speaks through these hymns, a soul that has faced the abyss and clung heroically, but not always successfully, to the pinnacle of faith. One feels that the man who penned the following lines has not merely imagined the nearness of the pit but felt himself standing on the ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg

... Hosea, And the Knowledge of God more than burnt Offerings. No Man can be said to keep the Law of God, but he that keeps it according to the Mind of God. The Jews could lift up an Ass upon the Sabbath that was fallen into a Pit, and yet calumniated our Saviour for preserving a Man upon that Day. This was a preposterous Judgment, and not according to the Knowledge of God; for they did not consider that these Things were made for Man, and not Man for them. But ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus

... flew from between their lips, Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw, Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue; Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide Found in the pit when the tanner died. That was the way he "put her through."— "There!" said the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... too how the Palace was in four quarters, of which two were divided from two by Whitehall itself and the street between the gatehouses. That half of it that was nearer to the Park held the tennis-court and the cock-pit and the lodgings of the Duke of Monmouth and others nearer Westminster, and the other half the Horse Guards and the barracks: and that nearer the river held, to the south the Stone Gallery, the Privy Garden, the Bowling Green and a great number of lodgings amongst which ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson

... sinkin' feeling here," she laid her hand at the pit of her stomach, "and my back feels weak—all gone. My knees take spells of wobblin' when I walk. I'm afraid in the dark. I'm afraid in the light. Not so much of any one thing as of some big, intangible thing that ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... negative; but as for anything positive, you might as well look into a coal-pit and find what philosophers do in the wells of truth. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various

... whether she should carry the child home, or the basket of clay, but in the end decided to take the clay which was urgently wanted, while she would doubtless have plenty more children in the course of time. So she went away, leaving the baby in the pit. At evening a tiger came by and heard the child crying and he took pity on it and carried it away and he ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas

... in vain, But a river of blood was between and an ineffaceable stain), Great with an earth-born greatness; a Titan of awe, not of love; 'Twas strength and subtlety balanced; the wisdom not from above. For he leant o'er his own deep soul, oracular; over the pit As the Pythia throned her of old, where the rock in Delphi was split; And the vapour and echo within he mis-held for divine; and the land Heard and obey'd, unwillingly willing, the voice of command. —Soaring enormous soul, that to height ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... with shouting. The musicians fiddled as though the end of all things was at hand and must not surprise them at a broken bar. In Russia the scene was familiar enough, but to the stranger incomprehensible and revolting. Alban felt as one released from a pit of gluttony when at three in the morning Sergius staggered to his feet and bade a servant call him in ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton

... tangled mass of vines. In the second before the vines gave way under his weight, Charley succeeded in grasping a limb and swinging himself in to the trunk of the tree where he found a safe resting-place between two branches. Below him yawned a gigantic pit, its edge hidden from view ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... poisoned the springs, (Priscus, p. 42.) Dubos (Hist. Critique, tom. i. p. 475) observes, that the magazines which the Moors buried in the earth might escape his destructive search. Two or three hundred pits are sometimes dug in the same place; and each pit contains at least four hundred bushels of corn Shaw's ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... to himself his own substantial mamma swooping erratically through the air, with skirts flying out behind and himself clinging precariously to her neck. And at the thought he felt a sinking sensation at the pit ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts

... Sunday suit, that young scamp intending to personate some raw New England Yankee; and that was how Mrs. Markham, senior, first came to hear of the proceedings which, to one of her rigid views, savored strongly of the pit, especially after she heard one of the parties described by an eye-witness, who mentioned among other characters his Satanic Majesty, as enacted by Harry Clifford, who would fain have appeared next in Andy's clothes! No ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes

... succeeding the victory of Falkirk was passed by the insurgents in burying the slain, and in collecting the spoils. A deep pit was dug by the country people, into which the English soldiers and the Highland clansmen were precipitated into one common grave. The former were easily distinguished by the frightful gashes of the broad-swords on their breasts and limbs. The tomb contained a heap of human bodies; ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson

... N.N.W. course, and, there being no canoes, got frequently wet in the course of the day. The oxen in some places had their heads only above water, and the stream, flowing over their backs, wetted our blankets, which we used as saddles. The arm-pit was the only safe spot for carrying the watch, for there it was preserved from rains above and waters below. The men on foot crossed these gullies holding up their burdens ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... particular friends. One of them, the son of our kind and valued friends the G——s, an excellent, good-hearted, but not very wise young fellow, invariably occupied a certain favorite and favorable position in the midst of the third row of the pit every night that I acted. There were no stalls or reserved seats then, though not long after I came out the majority of the seats in the orchestra were let to spectators, and generally occupied by a set of young gentlemen whom Sir Thomas Lawrence always designated as my "body guard." This, however, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... so-called craters merge by imperceptible gradations into very minute objects, as small as half a mile in diameter, and most probably, if we could more accurately estimate their size, still less. The crater-pit, however, has well-marked peculiarities which distinguish it from all other types, such as the absence of a distinguishable rim and extreme shallowness. They appear to be most numerous on the high-level plains and plateaus in the south-western ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger

... strange happened. Nero suddenly felt himself falling down. Down and down he went, into a big hole, and the meat and the pile of leaves went with him. Down into a black pit fell Nero, and, as he toppled in, a ...
— Nero, the Circus Lion - His Many Adventures • Richard Barnum

... all is false: through every phasis still 'T is shadowy and deceitful. It assumes The semblances of things and specious shapes; But the lost traveller might as soon rely On the evasive spirit of the marsh, Whose lantern beams, and vanishes, and flits, O'er bog, and rock, and pit, and hollow way, As ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White

... fully known till he is dead; change of fortune is the lot of life. He who rides in the carriage may yet have to clean it. Sawyers change-places, and he who is up aloft may have to take his turn in the pit. In less than a thousand years we shall all be bald and poor too, and who knows what he may come to before that? The thought that we may ourselves be one day under the window, should make us careful when we are throwing out our dirty water. With ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... y l e'ne.] answered Bias, "there is a very great man named Pittacus. [Footnote: Pit'ta ous.] He might now be the king of his country, but he prefers to give all of his time to the study of wisdom. He is the man whom ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin

... had become blue whilst hanging; he had an awful appearance, because his eyes were open and terror-stricken, his mouth was also open as though in the act of trying to catch his last breath. They quickly dug a pit near by and pushed therein the corpse of Zygfried with the handles of their pitchforks; they laid him with his face downward and covered it first with dust, then they gathered stones and placed them upon it, because it was an immemorial custom to cover the graves of suicides with stones; otherwise ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... being on a horse which distinguishes ladies who have ridden all their lives from the gawky snobbesses in Hyde Park, who ride, if riding it can be called, with their elbows uncouthly fastened to their sides as if by a rope, their hands at the pit of their stomachs, and both those hands, as heavy as a housemaid's, sawing the poor horse with curb and snaffle at once, while the whole body breathes pretension and affectation, and seems to say, "Look at me; I am on horseback! ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade

... it? Never mind, Dad, I'll try not to shock you again. Haven't had much hankering for closets since I got shut up in that hole over in Sydney. They called it a prison, but it was more like a potato-pit than ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper

... lose no opportunity of instilling into the minds of their neighbours, whether they be corporators or peasants, that it is a brutal, mean, and sacrilegious thing to turn a castle, a church, a tomb, or a mound into a quarry or a gravel pit, or to break the least morsel of sculpture, or to take any old coin or ornament they may find to a jeweller, so long as there is an Irish Academy in Dublin to pay ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... as a pit,' Cecco said, almost gibbering, 'but there is something terrible in there: the thing you ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie

... difficulties and administrative changes, now processes 40 tons or more of shells per day and produces a wide variety of ground products including exceedingly fine flours for use in plastics and plywood adhesives. It has been said that this plant processes all of the English walnut and apricot pit shells and 80 percent of the peach pit shells available ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various

... he belongs. First, there is the deliberate lie. This species needs no particular definition. All are acquainted with it, all have met it, some have uttered it. You all know it when you see it; it is barefaced and shameless; it reeks with the mire of falsity and is foul with the slime of the pit infernal. This lie contains not an atom of truth, is tinctured not with a grain of fact, but is a full-blooded, thoroughbred, out and out lie. Then we have the campaign lie. A large, open-faced fellow, loud-voiced and blatant; bold, daring and ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins

... already recognised and which makes me wonder to-day at the legend of the native neglect of him. Was he not even at that time on all lips, had not my brother, promptly master of the subject, beckoned on my lagging mind with a recital of The Gold-Bug and The Pit and the Pendulum?—both of which, however, I was soon enough to read for myself, adding to them The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Were we not also forever mounting on little platforms at our infant schools ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... through the pitmen's village, all shut up and silent now, and through the turnpike; and then they were out in the real country, and plodding along the black dusty road, between black slag walls, with no sound but the groaning and thumping of the pit-engine in the next field. But soon the road grew white, and the walls likewise; and at the wall's foot grew long grass and gay flowers, all drenched with dew; and instead of the groaning of the pit-engine, they heard the skylark saying his matins high up in the air, and ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley

... that has eyes to see it rightly, is the newspaper. To me, for example, sitting on the critical front bench of the pit, in my study here in Jaalam, the advent of my weekly journal is as that of a strolling theater, or rather of a puppet-show, on whose stage, narrow as it is, the tragedy, comedy, and farce of life are played in little. Behold ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody

... Farms' belongs to the outlying husbandry and homesteads. And 'Clay Pits!' It is out of the pit and the miry clay that we want to bring them. The suggestion of that is too much like Mary Moxall's 'heap that ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... gained some knowledge of the structural rules of English. He had already become acquainted with Paradise Lost, and was another proof of Matthew Prior's axiom, 'Who often reads will sometimes want to write,' for he had begun to write verse when only 'a bonnie pit lad.' For more than forty years of his life he laboured in 'the coal-dark underground,' and is now the caretaker of a Board-school in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. As for the qualities of his poetry, they are its directness and its natural grace. He has an intellectual as well ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... dustier nor dirtier than everything else in the place. On this straw, therefore, Gervaise now lay with her eyes wide open. How long, she wondered, could people live without eating? She was not hungry, but there was a strange weight at the pit of her stomach. Her haggard eyes wandered about the room in search of anything she could sell. She vaguely wished someone would buy the spider webs which hung in all the corners. She knew them to be very good for ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... short bacillus. The third gelatine plate prepared from this mixture, on inspection after four day's incubation, showed twenty-five colonies—seven moist yellow colonies, each sinking into a shallow pit of liquefied gelatine, fourteen flat irridescent filmy colonies, and four raised white slimy colonies. A film preparation (stained Gram) from each variety examined microscopically showed that the yellow liquefying colony was composed ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre

... my patience, lass, idlin' awa' yer time that get. It's an awfu' wastery o' time, what wi' beuks, an' what wi' stravaguin', an' what wi' naething ava. Jist pit yer han' to this kirn ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... Fort Leavenworth—men who went away cursing the government, loathing the flag, hating all men, and who have nothing to take them out of it. I wish I could take them up with me to the hill-top and say—'There! Don't look at the little pit down below! ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell

... I stood on the deck of the little vessel, which was no above a foot out of the water; and Obediah, as he spoke, pointed to the small dark pit of a companion, for there was no light below, nor indeed anywhere on board, except in the binnacle, and that carefully masked, indicating by his threatening manner, that I was to get below as ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... more. I was alone on the roof. The water had risen. A chimney was standing, and I must have clung to it with all my strength, like an animal that dreads death. Then, nothing, nothing, a black pit, oblivion. ...
— The Flood • Emile Zola

... men that they hurled rocks down into the pit that had been dug for the foundations of the wall, and began to fill up the hole that had taken so much time and money to make. Then the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 53, November 11, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... because Men, warring in the woodlands, on their foes Had hurled fire to frighten and dismay, Or yet because, by goodness of the soil Invited, men desired to clear rich fields And turn the countryside to pasture-lands, Or slay the wild and thrive upon the spoils. (For hunting by pit-fall and by fire arose Before the art of hedging the covert round With net or stirring it with dogs of chase.) Howso the fact, and from what cause soever The flamy heat with awful crack and roar Had there devoured to their deepest roots The forest trees and baked the earth ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... have fled from myself; I have fled from the magnificence of my retinue, to find variety. And yet how dearly am I to pay for a few gratifications which were in fact no better than specious allurements to destruction, and flowers that slightly covered the pit of ruin! In the bloom of manhood, in the full career of youth to be cast forth an UNPITIED, NECESSITOUS, MISERABLE VAGABOND! All but this I could have borne without a sigh. Were I threatened with death, in this opening scene ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin

... in playing the part of Successful Author. It was all very comical—for my study was the ratty little parlor of a furnished flat for which we paid thirty dollars per month. Still to the man at the bottom of a pit the fellow on top, in the sunlight, is a king, and to Crane my brother and I were at ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... immeasurable whiteness of bared breast and ivoried shoulder. It was a white whirl of women, a ferocious vortex of terrified women. Lenyard saw the petrified fear upon the faces of them that went into the Pit; and he descried the cruel and looming figure of Illowski piping to them as they went into the Pit. The maelstrom of faces turned to their dream-master; faces blanched by regret, sunned by crime, beaming with sin; faces rusted by vain virtue; wan, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar. It expressed Frescobaldi's conception of a derrick, and a touch of nature had been added in the flame of brandy, which burned luridly up from a small pit in the centre of the base, and represented the gas in combustion as it issued from the ground. Fulkerson burst into a roar of laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi's personal tribute to Dryfoos. Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, while he explained ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... my stall at eve I sit (And these remarks would still apply, Perhaps with greater force, were I Accommodated in the Pit)— Worn with the long day's dusty strife, I ask a brief surcease of gloom; I want a mirror held to life, But not the life ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various

... lined the building and ran all around the yard. In the theaters, therefore, at first generally square-built or octagonal, the stage projected from the rear wall well toward the center of an unroofed pit (the present-day 'orchestra'), where, still on three sides of the stage, the common people, admitted for sixpence or less, stood and jostled each other, either going home when it rained or staying and getting wet as the degree of their interest in the play might determine. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... feel an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach, sir? and a nasty thumping at the top of your head? Ah! not yet? It will lay hold of you at Cobb's Hole, Mr. Franklin. I call it the detective-fever; and I first caught it in the ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... some belated pedestrian might run against her at any moment, for the dense darkness shrouded even the nearest objects. But she knew the way, and had determined to follow the Danube and go along the woodlands to the tanner's pit, whence the Hiltner house was easily reached. In this way she could pass around the gate, which otherwise she would have been obliged to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... sanctique Petri, et cuncta aedificia igne iniecto adurunt, in solitudinem omnia redigentes. Hac itaque patrata eversione, locus, qui tauto honoris splendore diu viguerat, exturbatis omnibus ac subuersis domibus, cA"pit esse cubile ferarum et volucrum: maceriis in sua soliditate in sublime porrectis, arbustisque densissimis; et arborum virgultis per triginta ferme annorum curricula ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner

... Whose softness shock'd. Worms of all monstrous size Crawl'd round; and one, upcoil'd, which never dies. A doleful bell, inculcating despair, Was always ringing in the heavy air. And all about the detestable pit Strange headless ghosts, and quarter'd forms, did flit; Rivers of blood, from living traitors spilt, By treachery stung from poverty to guilt. I ask'd the fiend, for whom these rites were meant? "These graves," quoth he, "when life's brief oil is spent, When the dark night ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... The date of the death of Painotmu II. is fixed at the XVIth year of his reign, according to the inscriptions in the pit at Deir el-Bahari. This would be the date of the accession of Auputi', if Auputi succeeded him directly, as I am inclined to believe; but if Psiukhannit was his immediate successor, and if Nsbindidi succeeded Manakhpirri, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... in front of the kitchen, and divided it into three parts, where he could manufacture composts which would grow a heap of things, whose detritus would again bring other crops, providing in this way other manures to a limitless extent; and he fell into reveries on the edge of the pit, seeing in the future mountains of fruits, floods of flowers, and avalanches of vegetables. But the horse-dung, so necessary for the beds, was not to be had, inasmuch as the farmers did not sell it, and the innkeepers refused to supply it. At last, after many searches, in ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... narrates, "Lincoln was one day riding by a deep slough or pit in which, to his exceeding pain, he saw a pig struggling, and with such faint efforts that it was evident that he could not extricate himself. Lincoln looked at the pig and the mud that enveloped him, and then looked ruefully at some new clothes in which ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... end and the awakened despot did allow the door of the Blackhole to be opened, only twenty-three out of the hundred and forty-six victims were alive. The hundred and twenty-three dead bodies were hurriedly buried in a common pit. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... that visit I had in mind when punting along the Cam. A man is a fool to pit his little mind against so vast and wonderful an edifice as a great university like Cambridge, but one thought which occurred more than once to me was whether or not a man can be considered educated if he be ignorant of human misery existing beyond the ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... trouble is we got behind Christmas. It's that Dyer. He's about as mean as they make 'em. The only reason he didn't die long ago is becuz th' Devil's thought him too mean to pay any 'tention to. If ever he should die an' go to Heaven he'd pry up th' golden streets an' use the infernal pit for ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... even of the course of events, as far as that could be done, which occurred during the progress of the enterprize. Now that it has failed, we must expect these deep politicians to return to the charge, and to beg us to help them out of the pit into which they wanted to help us. But they have as yet been in no hurry to begin this pleasant communication, and most assuredly we are in no disposition to urge them on faster. You have here, therefore, the explanation ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham

... of which advantage was taken by Mr. Stentor, a well-known Hyde Park orator, who bellowed from a friend's shoulders in the pit, "Mr. Chairman, hear ME!" an appeal that was followed by ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins

... a year ago, before anything was known of Lydgate's skill, the judgments on it had naturally been divided, depending on a sense of likelihood, situated perhaps in the pit of the stomach or in the pineal gland, and differing in its verdicts, but not the less valuable as a guide in the total deficit of evidence. Patients who had chronic diseases or whose lives had long been worn threadbare, like old ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... was just coming up from the pit to go to my tea, when they came bursting over the tips, shouting and waving their sticks, and wearing in their hats little bits of burnt paper from the bonfire opposite Coffin's house. They were most of them drunk, but they were very friendly with ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy

... much as if he had suddenly been dropped down a bear-pit, and, avoiding welcome and observation as well as he could, got away into a corner, from which he observed his ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... by their right names. He gave forth no uncertain sound. His theology was that of the Fathers. We hear little in these modern days of "The fire that quencheth not" and of "total depravity" and of "the bottomless pit." Such expressions are unfitted for ears polite. Higher criticism, new thought, and all kindred ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... of the snakes was out on the ballyhoo, walking around with the gander following him to advertise the show; and when he came in he looked them over and found that each one had as pretty a pair of fangs as you would wish to see. He told me about it and I confess that it gave me a gone feeling in the pit of my stomach, for I remembered how I had felt around for them in the box with my ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe

... stopped short and, turning to the public, he pointed with his hand to some one far down in the pit and exclaimed ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi

... am fit for the work as much as that Serang. Because that's what it amounts to. Do you know, sir, that a dam' Malay like a monkey is in charge of your ship—and no one else. Just listen to his feet pit-patting above us on the bridge—real officer in charge. He's taking her up the river while the great man is wallowing in the chair—perhaps asleep; and if he is, that would not make it much worse either—take my word ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad

... entirely submerged; but the flowers, like a whale, as the old conundrum put it, come to the surface to blow. The latter are small, white, or only yellow at the base, where each petal bears a spot or little pit that serves as a pathfinder to the flies. When the water rises unusually high, the blossoms never open, but remain submerged, and fertilize themselves. Seen underwater, the delicate leaves, which are little more than forked hairs, spread abroad in dainty patterns; lifted cut of the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... suspicion that there was considerable truth in what Semyonov had said, that I was interfering in what only remotely concerned me. At any rate, that was certainly the view that Grogoff would take, and Nina, perhaps also. I felt, as I rang the bell of No. 3, that unpleasant pain in the pit of the stomach that tells you that you're going to make a fool ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... will not be an everlasting night or endless sleep. As sure as we awake in the morning when we have slept out the night, so sure shall we then awake. What if our carcasses become as vile as those of the beasts that perish, what if our bones are digged up and scattered about the pit brink, and worms consume our flesh, yet we know that our Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the last on earth, and we shall see Him with ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... barren of all interest; for nothing touches me but what has a reference to her. If the clock strikes, the sound jars me; a million of hours will not bring back peace to my breast. The light startles me; the darkness terrifies me. I seem falling into a pit, without a hand to help me. She has deceived me, and the earth fails from under my feet; no object in nature is substantial, real, but false and hollow, like her faith on which I built my trust. She came (I knew not how) and sat by my side and was folded in my arms, a ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt

... will be like to tingle wi' the news; for he has set himsel' in a' the high seats in Glasca' College; and folks talk o' naething less than a Glasca' pu'pit for him; and you ken, it tak's doctors in divinity to stand up afore a Glasca' congregation. Elder Mackelvine never wearies o' talking anent him. For mysel', I canna say I ever likit him o'er weel; and since puir Maggie gaed awa', I hae ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr

... no Brahm[a]ite to modify the impression. There existed no strong Brahm[a] sect as there were Vishnu and Civa sects. Brahm[a] is in his place merely because to the preceding age he was the highest god; for the epic regards Creator, Praj[a]pati, Pit[a]maha, Brahm[a] as synonymous.[22] The abstract brahma, which in the Upanishads is the same with the Supreme Spirit, was called personally Brahm[a], and this Brahm[a] is now the Brahmanic Father-god. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... 18, 1821, came the first performance of Weber's masterpiece, "Der Freischuetz." The theater was beseiged for hours by eager crowds, and when the doors were at last opened, there was a grand rush to enter. The whole house from pit to galleries was soon filled, and when the composer entered the orchestra, there was a roar of applause, which it seemed would never end. As the performance proceeded, the listeners became more charmed and carried away, and at the ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower

... scorn, This, this was that rich head Was crown'd with garlands, and with odours, this That was in Rome so reverenced! Now The furnace and the bellows shall to work, The great Sejanus crack, and piece by piece Drop in the founder's pit. ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson

... he is gracious unto him & saith Deliver him from going down to the Pit I have found ...
— Illustrations of The Book of Job • William Blake

... goods"—and in conclusion declares it to be "a custome loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black and stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse." ...
— An Essay on the Influence of Tobacco upon Life and Health • R. D. Mussey

... master, he was the author of my situation. The revelation haunted me, stung me, and made me gloomy and miserable. As I writhed under the sting and torment of this knowledge, I almost envied my fellow slaves their stupid contentment. This knowledge opened my eyes to the horrible pit, and revealed the teeth of the frightful dragon that was ready to pounce upon me, but it opened no way for my escape. I have often wished myself a beast, or a bird—anything, rather than a slave. I was wretched and gloomy, beyond my ability to describe. ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... fell, probably on me. I was rendered insensible, and when I regained consciousness I found myself in a hotel near by with several doctors attending me. My leg was swollen from the knee to the thigh, and the swelling, almost to the point of bursting, extended along the body up to the arm-pit. The pain was almost beyond endurance. I lay at the hotel something over a week without being able to turn myself in bed. I had a steamer stop at the nearest point possible, and was carried to it on a litter. I was then taken to Vicksburg, where I remained unable to move ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant

... micht, and drive thir ladies to Douglas's Hotel. An' I'm sayin', if ony o' thae English bit craturs, wi' their clippy tongues, lays hand on bit or bridle o' ony o' my horses, dinna spare the pitchin' fork—pit it through them as ye wad a lock strae; I'll hae nae rubbery in my stable-yaird—I'm braw ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various

... tranquil retirement soon enough, for the agitation and excitement of this new world. God grant that he may never repent of having exposed the unspotted obscurity of his name and his person to the shoals, the squalls and tempests of the pit, and above all (for what does a mere failure matter?) to the wretched bickerings of the wings; of having entered that shifting, foggy, stormy atmosphere, where ignorance dogmatises, where envy hisses, where cabals cringe and crawl, where the probity of talent has so often ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... the face of opportunity. Such was Jethro's torment that morning as he saw her drive away, the minister in the place where he should have been, at her side, and he, Jethro Bass, as helpless as though he had indeed been in the pit among the flames. Had the prudential committee at Brampton promised the appointment ten times over, he might still have obtained it for her by a word. And he must not speak even that word. Who shall say that a large ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... his Seat in the midst of you, that there were still found not a few that kept their Garments clean? But the greatest praise of the good hand of God upon you hath been in this, That amidst the many Mists of Errour and Heresie which have risen from the bottomlesse pit, to bespot the face and darken the glory of the Church, (while the Bride is a making ready for the Lamb) you have held the Trueth, and most piously endeavoured the setling of Christ upon his Throne. We need not remember how zealous you have been in the Cause of God, nor how you have laid out ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland

... clutch him. Such was the dismay that now followed in the track of the disease or ran before it throughout the town. Graves were hastily dug and the pestilential relics as hastily covered, because the dead were enemies of the living and strove to draw them headlong, as it were, into their own dismal pit. The public councils were suspended, as if mortal wisdom might relinquish its devices now that an unearthly usurper had found his way into the ruler's mansion. Had an enemy's fleet been hovering on ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... and freeing the door. As soon as there was space enough, the merman's claws recklessly slid under, and he added what strength he could to Dalgard's. The door arose and fell back onto the pavement with a clang, exposing a dark pit. ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton

... So it would rid me of her! and, that I did supererogatory penance in a belfry, at Westminster-hall, in the Cock-pit, at the fall of a stag; the Tower-wharf (what place is there else?)— London-bridge, Paris-garden, Billinsgate, when the noises are at their height, and loudest. Nay, I would sit out a play, that were nothing but fights at ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson

... me alone. I'm very tender-hearted, as a matter of fact, and I like you immensely and would enjoy having you as a friend, but—" Here he pressed a button on the arm of his throne chair and the section of the floor where Rinkitink stood suddenly opened and disclosed a black pit beneath, which was a part of ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum

... the wreck. Then he thought of all his little child had told him about how Jesus had died to save us. He thought he had never loved her so much. But he began to see that he had far more reason to love Jesus who had suffered much more to save him from the "bottomless pit." And then he thought of the promise he so carefully made to his daughter. What could he do but kneel down and cry to God to have mercy ...
— Children's Edition of Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer • S. B. Shaw

... great plague, which attacked the city of Dijon in 1558, a lady, named Nicole Lentillet, being reputed dead of the epidemic, was thrown into a great pit, wherein they buried the dead. The day after her interment, in the morning, she came to herself again, and made vain efforts to get out, but her weakness, and the weight of the other bodies with which she was covered, prevented her doing so. She remained in this ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... inaugurate, as it were, my entree into the musical world in a festive manner. The carriage drew up in front of the theatre. Ottilie went into my brother-in-law's box, which forced me to try and find a seat in the pit. I had forgotten to buy a ticket, and was refused admission by the man at the door. Suddenly the tuning up of the orchestra grew louder and louder, and I thought I should have to miss the beginning of my work. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... majesties my desire to shew my gratitude for the numerous favours, honours, and magnificent presents, they have heaped upon me." Lord Nelson now first heard of the attempt on our sovereign's life, by Hatfield, the lunatic, who fired a pistol at the king from the pit of Drury Lane Theatre, on the 15th of May 1800. "The Queen of Naples," says his lordship, writing to Lord Keith, on the 18th of June, "waits here, with impatience, news from the armies; for, if the French beat, I have only to return with my sacred charge: but, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison

... consists of two plays and an interlude—The Lay of Elena—and being, as he says in his preface, equal in length to about six such plays as are adapted to the stage, was not, of course, intended to solicit the most sweet voices of pit and gallery, although it has since been subjected to that ordeal at the instance of Mr Macready. Historic truth is said to be preserved in it, as far as the material events are concerned—with the usual exception of such occasional dilatations and ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various

... of interment was reached the corpse was lowered, just as it was, into a deep pit. Then the husband, bidding farewell to all his friends, stretched himself upon another bier, upon which were laid seven little loaves of bread and a pitcher of water, and he also was let down-down-down to the depths of the horrible cavern, and then a stone was laid over the opening, ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous

... the venomed crawlers that he knew were near him faded into nothing that really mattered, compared to the greater, stealthy horror that he knew was coming, born of the shuddersome, shut silence that ensued. There was neither air nor view—no sense of time or space—nothing but the coal-black pit of terror yawning—cold sweat in the heat, and a footfall—an undoubted footfall—followed by another one, too heavy ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... care of the family for 18 months. Potatoes were raised in large quantities and after they were dug they were banked for the winter. By banked, it is meant, large holes were dug in the cellar of the house or under the house or inside of an outhouse; pine straw was put into this pit and the potatoes piled in; more straw was laid on and more potatoes piled in until all were in the pit. Dirt was shoveled over the lot and it was left until for using them. Northern people used and still use a large amount of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... mentioned by Spence, in a letter to his mother:-"In spite of the excellence," he says, "of the actors, the greatest part of the entertainment to me was the countenances of the people in the pit and boxes. When the devils were like to carry off the Damned Soul, every body was in the utmost consternation and when St. John spoke so obligingly to her, they were ready to cry out for joy. When the Virgin appeared ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... looked, these three were not men of Earth. The certainty of this settled like a cold, dead weight in the pit of his stomach. ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones

... forbearance, recoiled, and stepped into the roadway in order to pass him. Indignant at this attempt to ignore him, he again placed himself in her path, and was repeating his question with increased sternness, when a jerk in the pit of his stomach caused him a severe internal qualm, besides disturbing his equilibrium so rudely that he narrowly escaped a fall against the curb-stone. When he recovered himself he saw before him a showily dressed young ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw

... fit of laughter drives away the devil, while the groans of flagellating saints seem as music to Beelzebub's ears. Thus, a wit-cracker is the demon's enemy, and the band of Pantagruel, an evangelical brotherhood, that with tankard and pot sends the arch-fiend back to the bottomless pit." ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... arrested, cangued, and fettered. Without loss of time he wrote an invitation to the second brother, Ts'ao Ching-chih, and on his arrival confronted him with the graduate's wife, who accused him to his face. Pao Lao-yeh had him put in a pit, and remained deaf to all entreaties of the Emperor and Empress on his behalf. A few days later the murderer was taken to the place of execution, and his head rolled in the dust. The problem now was how to get Ts'ao Ching-hsiu ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner

... needed the dark of that dungeon. He crawled in and, searching out the remotest, blackest corner, hidden from all human eyes, and especially his own, he lay there clammy and wet all over, with an icy, sickening rend, like a wound, in the pit of his stomach. He shut his eyes, but that did not shut out what he saw. "So help me God!" he whispered to himself.... Six endless months had gone to the preparation of a deed that had taken one second! That transformed him! His life on earth, his spirit in the beyond, could never be now what they ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey

... along the corridor, and, slipping back the door-bolts, went out on to the great, dark, echoing marble staircase. It seemed to yawn beneath him like a black pit as he descended. ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich

... pretty wife with powdered hair, a waist all trimmed with gay ribbons, a light and short skirt, and stockings with gilded clocks; in short, one of those fair young millers' wives whose heart goes pit-a-pat with hautboy accompaniment. But the graces who are ever sporting in your mind sometimes lead it astray; my fair miller is as much like the creature of your imagination as I am like a youthful Colin; her head is adorned with a towering cotton night-cap to which the thickest possible ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet

... Army lass, disputing his catch with him; upon the police detective going his rounds with coldly observant eye intent upon the outcome of the contest; upon the wreck that is past hope, and upon the youth pausing on the verge of the pit in which the other has long ceased to struggle. Sights and sounds of Christmas there are in plenty in the Bowery. Balsam and hemlock and fir stand in groves along the busy thoroughfare, and garlands of green embower mission and dive impartially. Once ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... the guard wheeled, and the tiny party moved off. We discovered afterwards that they were marched three miles along the sandy road in the blazing sun to a point where they were roughly bidden to dig a huge pit. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney

... uproar. The characters of this pseudo-comedy are swindlers or fools; and the spectators insisted that the portraits were either too exact a copy of the originals, or not at all like them. By means of much insolence, by means of the guard which was incautiously introduced into the pit, and which put to flight the majority of the audience, and, lastly, by means of several alterations, PICARD contrived to get his piece endured. But this triumph may probably be the signal of his ruin,[1] ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... unseen into the men's camp. When Morgan, the camp foreman, finally discovered his presence, the mischief had been done. Everybody was smoking cigars, everybody was happily conscious of a warm glow at the pit of the stomach, everybody was firmly convinced that Silver Jack was the best fellow on earth. Morgan could do nothing. An attempt to eject Silver Jack, an expostulation even, would, he knew, lose ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White

... essentially conservative. He looked naturally unto the rock whence he was hewn and to the hole of the pit whence he was digged. With a deep and abiding pride of race, linking him spiritually with the historic past of his people, he was inclined to look askance at the subverting spirit of Puritanism, which was now beginning ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson

... Po-papa-ia-owa, Po-ia-milu. Milu, according to those other legends, was a chief of superior wickedness on earth who was thrust down into Po, but who was really both inferior and posterior to Manua. This inferno, this Po, with many names, one of which remarkably enough was Ke-po-lua-ahi, the pit of fire, was not an entirely dark place. There was light of some kind and there was fire. The legends further tell us that when Kane, Ku, and Lono were creating the first man from the earth, Kanaloa was present, and in ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various

... fine," she replied, smiling. "Margaret pit him doon for three dances, and sat in a corner with him through 'em a'. I wonder the incomparable one's lugs"—I knew what she meant because she pinched one—"arena burnt off his head. You should hae seen Maclachlan ranting and raving ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough

... outshut the sunlight, In a foggy dun light, Where the footstep falls With a pit-pat wearisome In its cadency On the ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy

... could not be excelled. They took us to Fleurbaix, where their batteries were located on the outskirts of the town, in cellars in the back part of a building destroyed by German fire. There they had skillfully transformed the cellar into a gun pit, with a loophole four feet in diameter overlooking an orchard at the rear. Each time the gun spoke it would first be shoved into the hole and the brush and sandbags removed, and as quickly as the message was sent, the camouflage ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant

... even to the slight curved exterior of the chisel; but the logs had been hewn by a larger instrument, in the shape of an axe. On the floor of the dwelling lay a slab of freestone, 3 feet long and 14 inches thick, in the centre of which was a small pit three quarters of an inch deep, which had been chiselled out. This is presumed to have been used for holding nuts to be cracked by means of one of the round shingle stones, also found there, which had served as a hammer. Some entire hazel-nuts and a great quantity of broken shells were strewed ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... rending, tearing sound, and the earth split into another great crack just beneath the spot where the horse was standing. With a wild neigh of terror the animal fell bodily into the pit, drawing the buggy ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... lasted many minutes, ten at the most, during which time all the blood in my body seemed to be pounding and surging in my head, and the green grass and the sky to be flying past me, all mixed up together, and behind, and on all sides, came the pit-pat of horses' feet, and then someone seized my pony's rein, and brought him up with a jerk, and my father and I were sitting in the midst of two hundred armed riders, whose leader, a tall man, with a thin cunning face, regarded us ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson

... ascetic Buddhism was removed; the cults and mysteries, the dogmas of an ancient naive philosophy discarded; the crude science of a Ptolemy who conceived the earth as a flat terrestrial expanse and hell as a smoking pit beneath proved false; the revelation of a Holy City of jasper and gold and crystal, the hierarchy with its divine franchise to save and rule and conquer,—when all these and more were eliminated from Christianity, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... separated itself from the learned men of the age; and at the end of the seventeenth century the houses and societies could be historically pointed out, in which judgments were pronounced upon questions of literature in the same manner as the pit became the tribunal to which plays and play-actors must appeal; we shall not, however, go back so far, but keep the later times always in our view. In those associations in which the Abbe de Chaulieu and other friends of Vendome and Conti led the conversation, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various

... is called, consists of a trench, lined and covered with straw; the potatoes in it being piled in the shape of a house roof, to the height of about three feet. The camps are shallow pits, filled and ridged up in a similar manner, covered up with the excavated mould of the pit. In Russia and Canada, the potato is preserved in boxes, in houses or cellars, heated, when necessary, to a temperature one or two degrees above the freezing-point, by stoves. To keep potatoes for a considerable time, the best way is to place them in thin layers on a platform ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... said Betsy, protectingly; "there's nothing to be afraid of, except getting off on the wrong fork of the road, near the Wolf Pit." ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield

... distance we floated down stream, until we entered the marshy lake in which the Euphrates disappears. Beyond this we came to a desolate, wooded, sunless spot; there we landed, Mithrobarzanes leading the way, and proceeded to dig a pit, slay our sheep, and sprinkle their blood round the edge. Meanwhile the Mage, with a lighted torch in his hand, abandoning his customary whisper, shouted at the top of his voice an invocation to all spirits, particularly ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various

... occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages for seven long years. It was the strangest of detachments. We would sit under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures who had fallen into an enchanted pit, and he would do his considerable best to work us up to enthusiasm for, let us say, a Greek play. If we flagged he would lash himself to revive us. He would walk about the class-room mouthing great lines in a rich roar, and asking us with a flushed ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... lead, I can't follow. I have been waiting about, until I could discover, for a certainty, at what time he starts; if I couldn't have made sure of it, I should have stayed there.—This would be a bad pit for a man to be flung into with his hands tied. These slippery smooth walls would give him no chance. And I suppose those gates would suck ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... is the foundation cream out of which bonbons and various other fancy candies are made. It is also used for stuffing dates, taking the place of the pit. While it is not so desirable for the centers of chocolate creams as for most of the other candies for which it is used, it can, of course, be coated with chocolate if desired. Some persons have an idea that fondant and related candies are difficult to make, but ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences

... a pain in his breast. I opened the bosom of his shirt, and found two deep gashes made by the panther's claws, extending from the left shoulder to the pit of the stomach. I also received a few scratches, but our stout ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders

... remnants of the charging divisions; those who deserted the crater, to scramble over the debris and run back, were shot down; then all that was left to the shuddering mass of blacks and whites in the pit was to shrink lower, evade the horrible mitraille, and wait for a charge of their friends to ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke

... faith and th' cause of it, All-damning gold, was damn'd to th' pit; Their troth seal'd with a clasp and kisse, Lasted until that extreem day, In which they smil'd their souls away, And in each other breath'd ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace

... such a pit would be dug, widening out from the top to the bottom, so that the creatures which fell in would be unable to escape; and he understood the hideous snarling of some beast, for as he cautiously rose to a standing ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn

... of Joseph, in passing through the pit and the prison, on the way to his real mission, the experience of Israel in Egypt from the death of Joseph until the time of their deliverance at the Red Sea, and the experience of Nehemiah and Daniel, captives at Babylon, who were there ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... remainder consists of greyish slate clay increasing in density as the pits do in depth: in this occur strata of lignite very imperfectly formed, which gives the grey mineral a slaty fracture, and among this the amber is found. {78} The deepest pit was about 40 feet, and the workmen had then come to water. All the amber I saw, except a few pieces, occurred as very small irregular deposits, and in no great abundance. The searching occupies but little time, ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... after a brief space spent in inspecting the three magnificent winding and fan engines, the Guibal fan, and the framework for screening the coal, they were conducted by Mr. James Gilchrist, manager, down into the workings in the ell seam at a depth of 118 fathoms. Here at the pit bottom, in the roads and at the face, twenty-one Swan lamps were burning, giving forth a brilliant, steady flame, the luminosity of which, while sufficient to supply the desired light, had none of the disagreeable ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various

... shade of the precipices on both sides falls blacker and blacker. The clouds gather overhead. Doleful voices, the clanking of chains, and the rush of many feet to and fro, are heard through the darkness. The way, hardly discernible in gloom, runs close by the mouth of the burning pit, which sends forth its flames, its noisome smoke, and its hideous shapes to terrify the adventurer. Thence he goes on, amidst the snares and pitfalls, with the mangled bodies of those who have perished ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... over this letter. Its brief, stern truth was exactly the tonic she needed. Like a strong hand it reached down into her direful pit of morbid musings, and, clinging to it, she struggled back into the sunlight. Above all and in spite of everything, she must not fail the ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... Kallikrates, and would have slain me, and taken him to husband, but he loved me and feared her, and would not. Then did she take us, and lead us by terrible ways, by means of dark magic, to where the great pit is, in the mouth of which the old philosopher lay dead, and showed to us the rolling Pillar of Life that dies not, whereof the voice is as the voice of thunder; and she did stand in the flames, and come ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... which projected from the tall grass over the narrow track. Such spears are hard to see, especially for anyone travelling at a good speed, and I was told that the points were poisoned. Another trap, common in New Guinea, is to place a fallen tree across the track and dig a deep pit on the other side from which the enemy is expected to come. This pit is filled with sharp upright spears, and then lightly covered over so that a man stepping over the tree, which hides the ground on the other side, will fall ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker

... a deep, dark pit, and lay in its miry bottom, groaning and utterly unable to move. He heard a man walking by close enough to see his plight. But with stately tread he walked on without volunteering to help. ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon

... least there was the dreadful Case of the Major-General's Bath. Of this Draycott speaks first hand; he, personally, was an awe-struck spectator. Now the question of baths on that boat was not one to be trifled with. The queue for the pit of a popular play was as nothing to the procession that advanced to the bath in the morning. And the least penalty for sharp practice with regard ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... mark of singular approval with which one of my pit audience favored me. My son had named to him several objects he offered in succession; but not feeling satisfied, my incredulous friend, rising, as if to give more importance to the difficulty he was about ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne

... the outlying peat knoll, where an extra supply of fuel had been left under shelter during the previous autumn. Quite half of it still remained, and the "fause-hoose," or cavernous pit left from the digging out of the peats, afforded the best of cover. From it Stair would be able to follow the spy with his rifle all the way to the posts of the Preventive men which had been established on the rising ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett

... these materials, Jews and Christians, disciples of the Persians, have you formed your New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse, your paradise, your heaven, copied in all its parts from the astrological heaven of Hermes: and your hell, ye Mussulmans, your bottomless pit, surmounted by a bridge, your balance for weighing souls and good works, your last judgment by the angels Monkir and Nekir, are likewise modeled from the mysterious ceremonies of the cave of Mithras** and your heaven differs not in the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... Ben had fallen into a pit dug by the Filipinos for the purpose of catching their enemies. It was an old trick, and one which had been used quite extensively at the opening of the rebellion, but which was now falling into disuse, for the reason that ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer

... "O king, make use of patience in all thine affairs, so wilt thou attain thy desire, for that God the Most High hath appointed the issue of patience [to be] in abounding good, and indeed by patience Abou Sabir ascended from the pit and sat down upon the throne." "Who was Abou Sabir," asked the king, "and what is his story?" And the youth ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... the little door of the pilot-pit in the wasp's head swung wide, and a heavily-swaddled figure clambered out. This figure stood a moment, peering about through goggles. Then with a free, quick stride, he started forward toward the gallery where he had seen Bohannan and ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... men circled, like beasts in a pit, Howland in the attitude of a boxer, Jean with his shoulders bent, his arms slightly curved at his side, the toes of his moccasined feet bearing his weight. Suddenly he launched himself ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood

... and that she washed his "foul clothes"—that by degrees he came to be wealthy and rode in his own yellow coach—that his wife went abroad in society "in a flowered tabby gown"—that Pepys forsook his habits of poverty and exchanged his twelve-penny seat in the theatre gallery for a place in the pit—and that on a rare occasion (doubtless when he was alone and there was but one seat to buy) he arose to the extravagance of ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks

... God on his throne and his celestial court about him, was only a little way overhead—just beyond the blue dome. Hell was underneath the surface of the earth. Volcanoes and mysterious caverns were vent-holes or gate-ways of the pit; and devils came and went at will. Even after it was conceded that the earth revolved, there were found writers who accounted for the diurnal revolution by attributing it to the movements of damned souls confined ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... world today, the surging and understandable tide of nationalism is marked by widespread revulsion and revolt against tyranny, injustice, inequality and poverty. As individuals, joined in a common hunger for freedom, men and women and even children pit their spirit against guns and tanks. On a larger scale, in an ever more persistent search for the self-respect of authentic sovereignty and the economic base on which national independence must rest, peoples sever old ties; seek ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower

... the bones of their dead, and deposit them, with great ceremony, in a common place of burial. The whole nation was sometimes assembled at this solemnity; and hundreds of corpses, brought from their temporary resting-places, were inhumed in one common pit. From this hour the immortality of their souls began." This evidently implies a period during which the souls were wandering at a distance from the place of their eternal repose. Does the following passage throw any light upon it? The reader must decide the point for himself. ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... gone much further under the circumstances. Maybe he would have kissed my arm, though, from wrist to pit. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer

... and especially Fort Wylie. Emplacements had been constructed in many more places than there were guns available to fill them, and, in order to ensure that the exact positions from which shells would be actually thrown should be unknown to the British commander, the guns were shifted from gun-pit to gun-pit the night before the battle. The artillery at the disposal of General Botha was far less numerous than that of his opponent. On the day of the fight a 120 m/m howitzer was mounted on the crest of Vertnek (or Red Hill) on the right, a field gun ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice

... to Naples doesn't grin a recognition to me; not a waiter from the Trois Freres to the Wilde Mann doesn't trail his napkin to earth as he sees me. Ministers speak up when I stroll into the Chamber, and prima donnas soar above the orchestra, and warble in ecstasy as I enter the pit. ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever

... Alfred Domett, says: "The first night was magnificent ... there could be no mistake at all about the honest enthusiasm of the audience. The gallery (and this, of course, was very gratifying, because not to be expected at a play of Browning) took all the points quite as quickly as the pit, and entered into the general feeling and interest of the action far more than the boxes.... Altogether the first night was a triumph."—Robert Browning and ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... this visualized game of memory the exercise palled on me. Exercise it was, for there could be no real contest when the same player played both sides. I tried, and tried vainly, to split my personality into two personalities and to pit one against the other. But ever I remained the one player, with no planned ruse or strategy on one side that the other side did not ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... passed over her, but she made no effort to return my acknowledgement. As we cast our eyes dilating with horror, down some horrible pit upon whose verge we suddenly find ourselves, she allowed her gaze for a moment to dwell upon my face, then with a sudden lifting of her hand, pointed towards the door as if to bid me depart—when it swung open with that shrill rushing of wind that involuntarily awakes a shudder within you, and ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green

... force, got upon the stage, and took up her child, and carried it away off the stage from Hart." This pleasant playgoer likewise says, in 1667-8, "when I began first to be able to bestow a play on myself, I do not remember that I saw so many by half of the ordinary prentices and mean people in the pit at 2s. 6d. a-piece as now; I going for several years no higher than the 12d. and then the 18d. places, though I strained hard to go in then when I did; so much the vanity and prodigality of the age is to be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various

... For Lucy, though to herself she would call him a traitor,—and would think him to be a traitor, still regarded him as the best of mankind, as one who, in marrying such a one as Lizzie Eustace, would destroy all his excellence, as a man might mar his strength and beauty by falling into a pit. For Lizzie Eustace Lucy Morris had now no forgiveness. Lucy had almost forgotten Lizzie's lies, and her proffered bribe, and all her meanness, when she made that visit to Hertford Street. Then, when Lizzie claimed ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... well, O poet, that dost deem the fair and tall Urania of her ways not mutable, When things shall thee befall What thou art toil-ed in her sweet, wild spell. Do they strow for thy feet A little tender favour and deceit Over the sudden mouth of hidden hell?— As more intolerable Her pit, as her first kiss is heavenlier-sweet. Are they, the more thou sigh, Still the more watchful-cruel to deny?— Know this, that in her service thou shalt learn How harder than the heart of woman is ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson

... everything out. Above all he wished to avoid a rough and tumble, in which he would stand no chance at all. He had speed, wind, and nerve to pit against ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner

... Don't ye be afeard or 'shamed loike. No matter what ye've done or where ye've been or who ye've been with, a mither's heart welcomes ye back jist the same as when yes were a babby an' slept on me breast. A mither's heart ud quench the fires o' hell. I'd go inter the burnin' flames o' the pit an' bear ye out in me arms. So niver fear. Now that I've found ye, ye're safe. Ye'll not run away from me ag'in. I'll hould ye—I'll hould ye back," and the poor creature clasped Alida with such conclusive energy that she screamed ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe

... it meets another track from the west, and a small work defends their junction. Below it, outside the walls, we found a well sunk about eight feet in the granite, and cemented with fine lime, the red plaster in places remaining. Above this pit a Mihrb, or prayer-niche, fronting Meccah-wards (more exactly 175 degrees mag.) shows the now ruinous mosque: the Bedawi declare that it was built by a "Pasha." Higher again, upon a terreplein, are lines of tanks laid out with all that lavishness of labour which ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... on the stage. Then, when their holiday was ended, they reappeared in the same piece. This reappearance was a revelation. Until then, of the two singers, the man had been the most prized. Older and more accustomed to the public, whose foibles and preferences he had studied, he held the pit and boxes under the spell of his voice. Beside him, the other one seemed but an admirably gifted pupil, the promise of a future genius; but her voice was young and had angles in it, just as her shoulders were too slight and thin. And when on her return ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet

... Molly, squirming on the ground, for she had struck the pit of her stomach on a round rock the size of a football and the wind was knocked ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White

... On the 16th of October 1793, the coffin of Louis XV. was taken out of the vaults; and, after a stormy debate, it was decided to throw the remains of all the kings, even those of Henry IV. and Louis XIV. which were yet to a great degree preserved entire, into a pit, to melt down their leaden coffins on the spot, and to take away and cast into bullets whatever lead remained in the church; ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... am forced to tell thee thou art trifling with the Church. Miserable man! another evasion, and I leave thee, and fiends will straightway gather round thy bed, and tear thee down to the bottomless pit." ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... damp chill of the city's evening fog to the market-place, hoping, even unconsciously, to stand beside the pit into which the marvellous boy had been thrust; but we grew bewildered. And as we stood upon the steps looking down upon the market—alone in feeling, and unconscious of every thing but our own thoughts—St. Paul's ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... maintain them therein, and the royal chapel at Holyrood-House ordered to be repaired for popish service. By which means a door was opened for that swarm of Jesuits and priests, ascending as locusts out of the bottomless pit, which quickly overspread the lands. But notwithstanding of all this indulgence and royal toleration granted to these three forementioned parties, yet there is no favor nor mercy for the honest and faithful sufferers, ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery

... gigantic funnel-shaped gulf directly beneath the city of Jerusalem, shaped into nine vast circles or pits with a common center that reached down to the center of the earth like a circular flight of stairs. In the lowest pit of all Satan himself was to be found, ruling his kingdom. On the other side of the earth was a wide sea, from which arose a mighty mountain called the Mount of Purgatory—the place where the souls of human beings did penance for their sins until they ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards

... living in the land of shadows with nothing to hit out at, nothing to feel the sting of my fist against. The fight was going on above me and below me and we in the middle only heard the din of it. It was as though we had climbed half way up a rope leading from a pit to the surface. We had climbed as far as we could and unless they hauled from above we had to stay there. If we let go—poor devils, we thought there was nothing but brimstone below us. So we couldn't do much but ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton

... practical men were turned thereby to the long-neglected possibilities of steam. Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping, because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, because at any time the labourers might be obliged to sit at the pit's mouth for weeks together, whistling for a gale or waiting for the water to be got under again. But steam had already been used for pumping upon one or two estates in England—rather as a toy than in earnest—before the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... is another point of view in which we must look at this past creation. Suppose that we were to sink a vertical pit through the floor beneath us, and that I could succeed in making a section right through in the direction of New Zealand, I should find in each of the different beds through which I passed the remains of animals which I should find in that stratum ...
— The Past Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley

... the proviguere," said Aslitta, laughing loudly. "The prisoners are chained, their legs are broken, and they are hurled head foremost into a pit about four feet deep. Then the pit is filled with dirt, leaving the legs exposed up to the knees. It recalls little trees ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere

... not disturb the popular fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity. There are various reasons for this forbearance: one is old; one is rich; one is good-natured; one is such a favorite with the pit that it would not be safe to hiss him from the manager's box. The venerable augurs of the literary or scientific temple may smile faintly when one of the tribe is mentioned; but the farce is in general kept up as well as the Chinese ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... an' goin'. He spotted Joe right off; fixed him wi' his eye an' focussed him dead centre, an' talked right at him. An' Joe wus iled—that iled he couldn't keep a straight trail fer slippin'. Say, speakin' metaphoric, that feller got the drop on pore Joe. He give him a dose o' syllables in the pit o' the stummick that made him curl, then he follered it right up wi' a couple o' slugs o' his choicest, 'fore he could straighten up. Then he sort o' picked him up an' shook him with a power o' langwidge, an' sot him down like a spanked kid. Then he clouted ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum

... rouse himself mentally, to prod his brain to action, to pit it in a fight for life against these self-confessed criminals and murderers with their mask of culture, who surrounded him now. Was there a way out? What was it the Tocsin had said—"the most powerful and pitiless organisation of criminals the world ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... stairway to a cistern cut in the rock. Inside of this spiral staircase, instead of concentric circles which twist around with each complete turn, the involutions become wider as they proceed, in such a way that the bottom of the pit is three times as large as the opening. Is it an architectural freak, or did some reasonable cause determine such an odd construction? It matters little to us. The result was to cause in the cistern that vague reverberation which anyone may hear upon placing a shell at his ear, and to make you ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne

... mean. Our lives cannot be judged by our deeds; they must be judged by our desires or rather by our moral attitude. It is not what we do so much as what we try to do that counts in the formation of character. All fall short, all fail, but in the end those who seek to climb out of the pit, those who strive, however vainly, to fashion failure to success, are, by comparison, the righteous, while those who are content to wallow in our native mire and to glut themselves with the daily bread of vice, are ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard

... do something with such parts of their land, also. So, one of the first things that was done with Cousin Harriet's "alkali sink" was to make some redwood drains, shaped like the letter V, and place these about three feet below the surface. A "sump," or drainage pit, was dug, too, into which the drains might discharge the alkali water. The hired men expected Claude to help dig the "sump," and it proved quite hard work. So did the pounding of the "hard pan" on the alkali tract, itself. The tough, ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford

... inquisitive when being driven towards the city, and wanted to have a look round. I managed to quiet him by giving him pieces of lump-sugar. He arrived safely at the Crystal Palace, and has lived in an aviary till the beginning of last month, when he was put into his new bear-pit. The little fellow has grown twice the size he was when he first came. He is very playful, but sometimes he shows his teeth ...
— Baby Chatterbox • Anonymous

... no light on the formation of this world, which is not a shapeless mass of a philosophical abstraction called matter, but a regular and beautiful building, composed of a great variety of matters. Was it so from eternity? No man who was ever in a quarry, or a gravel pit, will say so, much less one who has the least smattering of chemistry or geology. Do you assert the eternity of the fifty-seven single substances, either separate or combined in some other way than we now find them in the rocks, and rivers, and atmosphere of the earth? Then ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... pit up the airch o' lilies to welcome our friends. They come every year, and a gude mony o' them too, so we pit up that bit thing ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... she said at length, her voice still thrilled with the sorrow of her great motherless, "ye see, lassie, ah've naebody but Wully an' Betsey to look to. Ma Jeams left me a wee bit siller, but it's no enough gin a wes pit oot in the warld, an' if Wully slips awa' ah canna say whit'll happen—so ah must look for a hame, ye ken. An' there's this ane ah kin have." She tossed her head towards the receding farm-house. The coquettish all-sufficient air ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... and with a proud and familiar gesture he took his beautiful white beard in his hand, and, closing his, fingers over it, ran them down to the point, which he held for a minute at the pit of his stomach, as if once more to verify ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... novelists up to the seventeenth century? And if so, can he not understand how Angela de Foligni, the lovely Italian widow of the fourteenth century, had her terrific temptations, to which, if she had yielded, she might have fallen to the lowest pit of hell, let that word mean what it may; and temptations all the more terrific because she saw every widow round her considering them no temptations at all, but yielding to them, going out to invite them in the most business-like, nay, duty-like, way? ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... of Lord Shandon's cow: I wonder what they gave her, Paddy. That I mightn't!—but these would eat a pit of potatoes. Any how, they're good for the teeth. Paddy, what's the reason they send all the good mate from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various

... Chapel First known when lost The Word These things that Poets said Home Aspens An Old Song There was a Time Ambition No one cares less than I Roads This is no case of petty Right or Wrong The Chalk-Pit Health Beauty Snow The New Year The Brook The Other House and Man The Gypsy Man and Dog A ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas

... without a word more, sat down by the pillar and looked vacantly before him while the new prisoners told their story. Ben Aboo was a villain. The people of Tetuan had found him out. His wife was a harlot whose heart was a deep pit. Between them they were demoralising the entire bashalic. The town was worse than Sodom. Hardly a child in the streets was safe, and no woman, whether wife or daughter, whom God had made comely, dare show herself on the roofs. Their own women had been carried off to the palace at the Kasbah. ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine

... dark that I would not wait for him there as for the dawn. There is no flood I would not cross to him; there is no deep pit in which I would not seek him, were he fallen there! He has done wrong, and I am unhappy for it. But never think, never dream, that, though I see the dark and broken ground, I would leave that country, or am less than wholly loyal ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... and so constructed that the manure can be readily removed. It is desirable that the manure be placed in these fly-proof receptacles as soon as possible after it is voided. The essential point is that flies be prevented from reaching the manure, and for this reason the pit or bin must be tightly constructed, preferably of concrete, and the lid kept closed except when the manure is being thrown in or removed. The difficulty has been that manure often becomes infested before it is put into the container, and flies frequently breed out before it is emptied ...
— The House Fly and How to Suppress It - U. S. Department of Agriculture Farmers' Bulletin No. 1408 • L. O. Howard and F. C. Bishopp

... eyes met then, filled with evil light. It was as if for an instant they were permitted to look into the pit, and see the possibilities of wickedness, and exult in it. The lurid glare of their thoughts played in their faces. All the passion of hate and revenge rushed upon Kate in a frenzy. With all her heart she wished this might be. She looked her co-operation ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... same way, were not disappearing at all. They simply had strong redoubts of sandbags built round them, the opening in front being partly concealed by bushes. On each side of the gun, inside the redoubt, was a pit, with a little side passage or tunnel, where two or three gunners could lie in perfect security, and yet be ready at an instant's notice to serve their gun. As for the kopjes themselves, every rock and stone ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps

... with the gander following him to advertise the show; and when he came in he looked them over and found that each one had as pretty a pair of fangs as you would wish to see. He told me about it and I confess that it gave me a gone feeling in the pit of my stomach, for I remembered how I had felt around for them in the box with my ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe

... in the effort, I should be tortured to death, or confined indefinitely in a dungeon. Should your friends attempt your rescue or ask your release you would be murdered and dropped into come deep secret pit to destroy all evidence, when all would deny that you ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... of singular elevation, passionately exclaiming: "Oh, that a man who could have entertained the gods with high conceits and philosophic parle,—could have communed with spirits of the skies, should be assailed and pestered from the pit!—Go on, woman, we will exorcise you, we will purge you, though you be fouler than the Augean stable, that had been left uncleaned for thirty years; ay, though you be as foul as is the stall that holds the grimy company of the lost, and which goes ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege

... no longer conveniently throw the earth from the hole he took a "skep" or leaf basket, which lay handy, and, placing it beside him, put as much of the sandy soil as he could carry into it, and then lifting shot it on the edge of the pit. For three-quarters of an hour he laboured thus most manfully, till at last he came down on the stonework. He cleared a patch of it and examined it attentively, by the light of the dark lantern. It appeared to be rubble work built in the form of an arch. He struck it with ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard

... there was no war in which one of the men trained by him in the jungles of Nicaragua did not distinguish himself. In his memoirs, the Englishman, General Charles Frederic Henningsen, writes that though he had taken part in some of the greatest battles of the Civil War he would pit a thousand men of Walker's command against any five thousand Confederate or Union soldiers. And General Henningsen was one who spoke with authority. Before he joined Walker he had served in Spain under Don Carlos, in Hungary under Kossuth, ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... it for a rule, No creature smarts so little as a fool. Let peals of laughter, Codrus! round thee break, Thou unconcern'd canst hear the mighty crack: Pit, box, and gallery in convulsions hurl'd, Thou stand'st unshook amidst a bursting world. Who shames a scribbler? break one cobweb through, He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew: 90 Destroy his fib or sophistry, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... for sliding and skating in the Regent's Park and the Serpentine, when the weather permitted; for going to the play, whither they were often conducted, by Mr. Osborne's orders, by Rowson, Master George's appointed body-servant, with whom they sat in great comfort in the pit. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... condition by wearing a basket of empty shells on her back.[103] Among the Kia blacks of the Prosperine River, on the east coast of Queensland, a girl at puberty has to sit or lie down in a shallow pit away from the camp; a rough hut of bushes is erected over her to protect her from the inclemency of the weather. There she stays for about a week, waited on by her mother and sister, the only persons to whom she may speak. She is allowed to drink water, but may not ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... inside the house at one end, with the fire and ash-pit doors opening into a shed outside, to prevent any escape of gas into the house while replenishing the fire. It will be necessary to place the furnace low enough to allow a proper rise to the flue. ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward

... settlement he invited Tim and Sambo to accompany him, and to dig a pit in which to catch the animal. We had a short time before manufactured some wooden spades, which served very well for digging in soft ground: we each took one, and Kallolo having fixed on a spot over which he considered the tapir was accustomed to ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston

... intention of waylaying and murdering him. But Hunyady got wind of the whole plot, and when he arrived at the place of ambush it was at the head of two thousand picked Hungarian warriors. Thus it was Czillei who fell into the snare. "Wretched creature!" exclaimed Hunyady; "thou hast fallen into the pit thou diggedst for me; were it not that I regard the dignity of the King and my own humanity, thou shouldst suffer a punishment proportioned to thy crime. As it is, I let thee off this time, but come no more into my sight, or thou shalt pay for it ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson

... was trembling. Perhaps her nerves had been overwrought. The Punch-Bowl looked to her like the Bottomless Pit. ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

... waited for Rosalie. When she drew near he held out his hand, which she grasped eagerly, taking it for that of her lover; and, seizing his opportunity, the Prince passed a cord round her arms, and throwing off his invisibility cried to his spirits to drag her into the lowest pit. ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various

... mother's hopes. She was experiencing some of that peaceful melancholy which comes from the renunciation of demands for self, and from taking the ordinary good of existence, and especially kindness, even from a dog, as a gift above expectation. Does one who has been all but lost in a pit of darkness complain of the sweet air and the daylight? There is a way of looking at our life daily as an escape, and taking the quiet return of morn and evening—still more the star-like out-glowing of some pure fellow-feeling, some generous impulse breaking our inward darkness—as ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... imposed upon their exportation, amounting at present (1783) to more than five shillings the ton, or more than fifteen shillings the chaldron, Newcastle measure; which is, in most cases, more than the original value of the commodity at the coal-pit, or even at the ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... a strange glow in his eyes. "He loved beauty. And this woman was beautiful, almost too beautiful for the good of one's soul, I guess. And he must have loved her, for when she went out of his life it was as if he had sunk into a black pit out of which he could never rise. I have asked myself often if he would have loved her if she had been less beautiful—even quite plain, and I have answered myself as he answered that question, ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood

... trees. Then the boy answered me, 'My king, why should I fear when you are with me?' I was ashamed, and took Harek's harp from him—for he carried it—and went forward boldly, singing the song of Gunnar in the snake pit. And it seemed to me that Harek would have chosen that song as fitting my case; for, putting Danes for snakes, I was in a close place enough. The warriors came out when they heard me; and I was well treated, and listened as I drank. ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler

... what he was about. Music was the subject of conversation; the praises of a new composer were being sung, when Krespel, smiling, said in his low, singing tones, "I wish the devil with his pitchfork would hurl that atrocious garbler of music millions of fathoms down to the bottomless pit of hell!" Then he burst out passionately and wildly, "She is an angel of heaven, nothing but pure God-given music!—the paragon and queen of song!"— and tears stood in his eyes. To understand this, we had to go back to a celebrated artiste, who had been the subject of conversation ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various

... Escondidas, we began a descent, which seemed absolutely endless. Time after time we thought we had reached the bottom, only to find that we were on a terrace from which another drop led us still further down. On and on into this bottomless pit we descended to Ziracuaretaro, a striking town. Banana plantings surrounded the houses; orange-trees covered with their golden spheres reared themselves to the unusual height of thirty feet or more; mameys, with their strange nut-brown ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr

... son, and father, in Bologna, set their women to sale. In all Lombardy were not to be found three men who were not rascals; and in Genoa and Romagna people went about pretending to be men, but in reality were bodies inhabited by devils, their souls having gone to the 'lowest pit of hell' to join the betrayers of their ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... the Benham Sentinel in favor of Lyons evoked sympathetic echoes over the State, which promptly convinced the political chieftains that he was the strongest candidate to pit against Patterson. The enthusiasm caused by the suggestion of his name spread rapidly, and at the end of a week his nomination at the convention ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... which gave them a high place in the legendary lore of the north, in which Ragnar Lodbrok is one of the chief heroes. At length Ragnar was taken prisoner by King Ethelred of England and thrown into a pit full of serpents, where he died. Afterwards Iwar and his brothers invaded England, conquered that country, and avenged their father by putting Ethelred to death by torture. Iwar took England for his kingdom and the realms of the north were divided among his brothers, and many more were the wars ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris

... Erfurt usually began at seven o'clock; but the two Emperors, who always came together, never arrived till half-past seven. At their entrance, all the pit of kings rose to do them honor, and ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... name any subject on which a good poem might not possibly be written. To divide subjects into two groups, the beautiful or elevating, and the ugly or vicious, and to judge poems according as their subjects belong to one of these groups or the other, is to fall into the same pit, to confuse with our pre-conceptions the meaning of the poet. What the thing is in the poem he is to be judged by, not by the thing as it was before he touched it; and how can we venture to say beforehand that he cannot make a true ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... a sigh. "Well—there's prayer and fasting; but there'll be considerably more fasting than prayer, I should imagine. I assure you, I do pray that he doesn't make a fool of himself and marry some woman out of the bottomless pit of Bohemia." ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... sure you are no stranger to. 'Pulci, pulci.' If you have not had a colony of them settled upon you, and quartered, and giving you no quarter, you have been an exception to travellers in Italy. Well, I will pit any two pulci of Porto Rico against any ten you can bring from Italy, and I should be sure to see them bite the dust before the bites of ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse

... oppressively monotonous. For although the nature or courage of the revolts might differ with the occasion, the results were invariable; and the heads of all his chief enemies, of many of his generals, of most of his councillors, met in the capacious pit which yawned in Omdurman. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill

... morning again to the Lord Treasurer, who is quite recovered; and I stayed till he went out. I dined with a friend in the City, about a little business of printing; but not my own. You must buy a small twopenny pamphlet, called Law is a Bottomless Pit.(6) 'Tis very prettily written, and there will be a Second Part. The Commons are very slow in bringing in their Bill to limit the press, and the pamphleteers make good use of their time; for there come out three or four every day. Well, but is not it time, methinks, ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... Germans was so thick with dead that I believe I saw one soldier to every two yards. You might have walked for a mile on bodies without ever putting foot to the ground. They buried their dead when they had time, piling fifteen or twenty in a shallow pit." ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... Flaubert's fiction, a meaning more amply expressed in Salammbo, where not one foolish woman alone but thousands on thousands of men, women, and children, mingled with charging elephants and vipers, flounder and fight in indescribable welters of blood and filth, and go down to rot in a common pit. If I read Flaubert's meaning right, all human history is there; you may show it by painting on broad canvas a Carthaginian battle-scene or by photographing the details of a modern bedroom: a brief brightness, night and the odor of ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... on the south shaft was started on June 9th, 1904, with the sinking of a 16 by 16-ft. test pit in the center of the south half of the south shaft, which reached disintegrated rock at a depth ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace, Francis Mason and S. H. Woodard

... knew that it must have fallen out of the nest by accident. So he ran after the frightened little bird and picked it up very carefully. Just then O-loo-la the Wood Thrush flew down into a bush by the side of the trail and began to plead, "Pit'y! pit'y! don't hurt him! Let him go, little boy; please let him go!" ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix

... year the masawe, a dracaena that grows in profusion on the grassy hillsides of the island, becomes fit to yield the sugar of which its fibrous root is full. To render it fit to eat, the roots must be baked among hot stones for four days. A great pit is dug, and filled with large stones and blazing logs, and when these have burned down, and the stones are at white heat, the oven is ready for the masawe. It is at this stage that the clan Na Ivilankata, favoured of the gods, is called on to ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... that Una saw in the situation of Jerry and Marcia was a friend who needed helping, who was worth helping from the snare of an utterly worldly and heartless woman. I am sure that her knowledge of the world must have made her task seem hopeless and it must have taken some courage to pit her own charm in the lists against one of Marcia's known quality. But if she was unhappy, no sign of it reached my eyes. Only her mother, who sometimes raised her eyes and calmly regarded her daughter, had an inkling of ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... that of Peru was undoubtedly the proudest during the earlier Spanish colonial period, for the holder of the high office governed not merely a country, but the greater half of a vast Continent. Seeing that the colonial policy of Spain invariably tended to pit one of her subordinate Powers against another in order to avoid the acquirement of too much authority on the part of any special person, it was only natural that the authority of the Viceroy, although great, was not supreme even in his own dominion. There were matters ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... did not get the chance. The Germans left alive leaped out of the shallow pit in which the gun had been hidden, and ran toward the rear. But they had not gone far before they were wiped out of existence by the explosion of a shell which fell right on ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates

... If we pit ourselves against one of God's eternal truths, is that truth going to suffer? Rather shall we not beat ourselves to pieces against God's adamant? If a thing is true, nobody is going to take it away from the world; ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... innocent institution of one of the grossest pieces of folly and superstition. But they did not stop here; they became so extravagantly credulous, as to believe that the phantom drank the libations that had been poured forth, while the relations were feasting on the rest of the sacrifice round the pit: and from hence they became apprehensive lest the rest of the dead should promiscuously throng about this spot to get a share of the repast they were supposed to be so fond of, and leave nothing for the dear spirit for whom the feast was intended. They then made two pits or ditches, into one ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... uniting the rose-tints of their colour with those of the face, in the utmost perfection, and the carnation of the cheek does not appear to be painted, but truly flesh and blood. He who looks earnestly at the pit of the throat cannot but believe that he sees the beating of the pulses. Mona Lisa was exceedingly beautiful, and while Leonardo was painting her portrait, he took the precaution of keeping some one constantly near her to sing or play on instruments, or ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell

... storm, however, and rushed in at the breach. The Honourable Elijah Pogram and Martin found themselves, after a severe struggle, side by side, as they might have come together in the pit of a London theatre; and for four whole minutes afterwards, Pogram was snapping up great blocks of everything he could get hold of, like a raven. When he had taken this unusually protracted dinner, he began to talk to Martin; and ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... a large percentage of iron oxide, where the bulk of the gold is impalpably fine, and contained in the "gossan." At the end of the blanket table, or at any point where the crushed stuff last passes before going to the "tailings heap," or "sludge pit," a "saver" is placed. The saver is a strong box about 15 in. square by 3 ft. high, one side of which is removable, but must fit tight. Nine slots are cut inside at 4 in. apart, and into these are fitted nine square perforated copper plates, having about eighty to a hundred ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... I saw an Angel come down from Heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... big pit here among the rocks and bait it with the two dead wildcats. We can drag the wildcats on the ground around here and to the pit, and maybe the lion will follow the trail up ...
— Out with Gun and Camera • Ralph Bonehill

... Considering his style, his abrupt change of subject, and his sudden digressions, I felt as tho I had been called on to act in one of those improvised Italian comedies in which, if the actor stops short for a word, the pit and the gallery hiss him mercilessly. I immediately assumed the style of a financier, and replied that I was acquainted with ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... be without the hope of a delivery or outgate. Hence crieth Heman, Psalm lxxxviii. 4-5, "I am counted with them that go down into the pit, free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more, and they are cut off from thine hand." Yea, they may be driven to the very border of despair, and conclude that there is no hope, as the church did, Ezek. xxxvii. 11, "Our bones are dried, and ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)

... the gloom there steals a silvery radiance, a far-off hope, an infinite compassion for all weakness and imperfection. One can hardly love Rousseau, though one does not wonder that there were many found to do so; and instead of judging him, one cries out with horror at the slime of the pit where he lay bound. ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... Prayer in that it can trace a genealogy running up through ages of such uncertain reputation? Have we not been accustomed to regard those times as hopelessly corrupt, impenetrably dark, universally superstitious? Ought we not to be mortified, rather than gratified, to learn that from the pit of so mouldy a past our book of prayer was digged? Would not a brand-new liturgy, modernized expressly to meet the needs of nineteenth century culture, with all the old English idioms displaced, every rough corner smoothed and every ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... three of us would ride to a sand-pit on Mont Noir and blaze away with our revolvers. Incidentally, not one of us had fired a shot in anger since the war began. We treated our revolvers as unnecessary luggage. In time we became skilled in their use, and thereafter learnt ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson

... the cries and groans were hushed, the hunters strode away, and over the mountains fell the calm that for thousands of years had not been so rudely broken. That night, when the moon shone into this pit of death, a corpse arose, walked to a rock just within the entrance, and ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... wouldn't at the church-door, till her father threatened her with bread and water; and how they have been living ever since as happy as two turtle-doves down in Devonshire,—till that scoundrel, Lieutenant Smith, went to Bideford! Smith has been found dead at the bottom of a saw-pit. Nobody's sorry for him. She's in a madhouse at Exeter; and Jones has disappeared, and couldn't have had more than thirty shillings in his pocket." This is quite as much as anybody ought to want to know previous to the unravelling of the tragedy of the Jones's. But ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... manure can be readily removed. It is desirable that the manure be placed in these fly-proof receptacles as soon as possible after it is voided. The essential point is that flies be prevented from reaching the manure, and for this reason the pit or bin must be tightly constructed, preferably of concrete, and the lid kept closed except when the manure is being thrown in or removed. The difficulty has been that manure often becomes infested ...
— The House Fly and How to Suppress It - U. S. Department of Agriculture Farmers' Bulletin No. 1408 • L. O. Howard and F. C. Bishopp

... universal of sins and the most hateful. Dante placed Lucifer, the embodiment of selfishness, down below all other sinners in the dark pit of the Inferno, frozen in a sea of ice. Well did the poet know that this sin lay at the root of all others. Think, if you can, of one crime or vice which has ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall

... to deceive the world, but to deceive ourselves, as Quintilian says, Vitam fallere, To draw on still, and amuse, and deceive our life, till it be advanced insensibly to the fatal period, and fall into that pit which Nature hath prepared for it. The meaning of all this is no more than that most vulgar saying, Bene qui latuit, bene vixit, He has lived well, who has lain well hidden. Which, if it be a truth, the world, I'll swear, is sufficiently deceived. For my part, I think ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley

... this should have been our doom, when all was almost gone, when we were down the hill, when the pit's mouth was opened, and we were at the falling in, and at the very shaking hands with Rome; the Lord, strong and gracious, pitied us, looked on us, and cried, saying, "Return, return, ye backsliding people; come, and I will heal your backslidings." The Lord hath been so saving, ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various

... of taking a chance. The odds would be with him, since he had the revolver ready to his fingers. But before that indomitable ease his courage ebbed. He had not the stark fighting nerve to pit himself against such a ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine

... the feathers, it is probable that young cuckoos when looked at in the nest, and a hen with her chickens when approached by a dog, feel at least some terror. Mr. Tegetmeier informs me that with game-cocks, the erection of the feathers on the head has long been recognized in the cock-pit as a ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin

... time, too, a celebrated dramatist produced a piece in which the hero performed prodigies under the excitement of patriotism, and the labor of his pen was incontinently damned for his pains; both pit and boxes—the galleries dissenting—deciding that it was out of all nature to represent a monikin incurring danger in this unheard-of manner, without a motive. The unhappy wight altered the last scene, by causing his hero to be rewarded by a good, round ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... and it was his custom to spend several mornings every week chasing the boars which abounded in the mountains a few miles from the city. One day, rushing downhill as fast as he could go, he put his foot into a hole and fell, rolling into a rocky pit of brambles. The king's wounds were not very severe, but his face and hands were cut and torn, while his feet were in a worse plight still, for, instead of proper hunting boots, he only wore sandals, to enable him to run ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various

... be carefully attended to. The latter can be easily covered so no flies can get in and if the filthy and in every way dangerous pit under the privy be filled and the dry-earth closet substituted one of the greatest sources of danger, especially in the country and in towns with inadequate sewerage facilities, will be done away with. After these things are done ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane

... he was experiencing, honest fear, and he knew that there was a "gone" feeling in the pit of his stomach, and a trembling of the knees ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London

... But, some three fathoms from this point of the meeting waters, and beneath it, just where the curve is deepest, a single crag, as large as a drinking-table and no larger, juts through the foam, and, if a man could reach it, he might leap from it some twelve fathoms, sheer into the spray-hidden pit beneath, there to sink or swim as it might befall. This crag ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard

... at the Versailles affair, where parties were incinerated; for which, in Yorkshire, there is a local word—crozelled, applied to those who lie down upon a treacherous lime-pit, whose crust gives way to their weight. But if he meant security in the sense of public funds, Chief-Justice was still more in error, as he will soon learn. For the British Railways now yield a regular income of three millions per ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... taste in the mouth, nausea, copious vomitings, sudden hiccough, purging, pains resembling those caused by colic, frequent and violent cramps, sense of choking, severe heartburn, pain at the pit of the stomach, difficult breathing, wildness of speech, cramp in ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... night from dome to pit. George and I had rehearsed our new act both morning and afternoon, South watching us without intermission. South was terribly nervous and anxious, half disposed, at the last minute, to forbid it, although it had been announced on the bills for a week. But a ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various

... two thousand two hundred and forty pounds. His holding an extraordinary large cart-horse; and breaking a rope which will bear three thousand five hundred weight. Beginning exactly at two, and ending at four. The boxes, 4s.; the pit, 2s. 6d.; first gallery, 2s.; upper gallery, 1s. Whereas several scandalous persons have given out that they can do as much as any of the brothers, we do offer to such persons L100 reward, if he can perform the said matters of strength ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... but easy it was as compared with what lay beyond and above it. Nevertheless, many Argonauts had never penetrated even thus far, and of those who had, a considerable proportion had turned back at the giant pit three miles above. One look at the towering barrier had been enough for them. The Chilkoot was more than a mountain, more than an obstacle of nature; it was a Presence, a tremendous and a terrifying Personality which overshadowed the minds of men and could neither be ignored ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach

... Hi seed the time Hi'd 'a' stopped yer jorrin', Dave!" said a quavering voice, dominating some argument at the other end of the table. "Hi seed me fightin' in a sawr-pit f'r tew hewrs an' sebmteen minits, by the watch; an' fetched 'ome in a barrer. Now wot's the hupshot? Did 'n' Hi say, 'Look hout! we'll git hit ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... and then he seized his weapons, and takes his horse and mounts, and rides to Thorolfsfell. There he saw a great reek of coal smoke east of the homestead, so he rides thither, and gets off his horse and ties him up, but he goes where the smoke was thickest. Then he sees where the charcoal pit is, and a man stands by it. He saw that he had thrust his spear in the ground by him. Brynjolf goes along with the smoke right up to him, but he was eager at his work, and saw him not. Brynjolf gave him a stroke on the head with his axe, and he turned so quick ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous

... development of moral fibre. We become mentally clever by playing at the game of life. We match our courage against its adversities and acquire fearlessness. We try our optimism against its disappointments and learn cheerfulness. We pit our patience against its failures and gain persistence. We are torn from the pinnacle of ambition by opponents and learn toleration of others. We fall from the heights of vanity and pride, and learn to be modest and humble. We encounter pain and sorrow and learn sympathy with ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers

... breath of poison-flowers: A languid humour stole among the hours, And if their smiles encountered, he went mad, And raged deep inward, till the light was brown Before his vision, and the world, forgot, Looked wicked as some old dull murder-spot. A star with lurid beams, she seemed to crown The pit of infamy: and then again He fainted on his vengefulness, and strove To ape the magnanimity of love, And smote himself, a shuddering heap ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... now I must tell you my own little news. Beelzebub has taken a worse devil to himself, so that I am likely to be trodden down into the very middle of the pit. I choose to tell you because I won't have you think that I have ever kept anything secret from you. If I describe the roars of Mrs. Beelzebub to you, and her red claws, and her forky tongue, and her fiery tail, it is not because I like her as a subject ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope

... is read. In conclusion, the editor ventures to hope that the work will not be unwelcome to the numerous and growing class who love English for its own sake as the noblest tongue on earth, and who desire not to forget the rock from which it was hewn, and the pit from which it ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele

... empire early in the fifth century, are symbolized by a volcanic mountain cast into the sea and spreading its streams of molten lava in every direction. The fearful pest of Mohammedanism is a dense smoke issuing from the bottomless pit and darkening the heavens. The Saracens of Mahomet are swarms of locusts appearing upon the earth, with scorpion stings, tormenting men five months, or, prophetically, one hundred and fifty years. On ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith

... moment Wolsey, with all his astuteness, was digging his own pit. If he succeeded, he would fall to make way for the Boleyn faction. If he failed, he involved the Catholic cause in his downfall. The first step in the business was the demand for permission to marry a lady not named, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... very busy talking to a person in the box, and, having been accustomed to hear and see partial riots in the pit, I paid no attention; never dreaming that my poor hat and feathers, and cloak, were the cause of the commotion, till an officer in the national guard very politely knocked at the door of the box, and told me I must either take them off or leave ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe

... helping them to while away the time of waiting. The niggers sang and danced, and made faces, while the people looked on with appreciative gravity, like royalty listening to de Reske, and they were very generous of applause and halfpence at the end of the performance. Then, when the niggers moved to the pit doors, paper boys came along offering Tit-Bits and 'extra specials'; after that three little girls came round and sang sentimental songs and collected more halfpence. At last a movement ran through the serpent-like string of people, sounds were heard behind the door, ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham

... but the little hunchback stopped on the margin, and looked once more into the pit where the ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... scale, though simple as it was vast. It was formed for the occasion. About fifty square pits, some four feet in length, and about half as deep, had been dug on the table-land in the vicinity of the castle. At each corner of each pit was a stake, and the four supported a rustic gridiron of green wood, suspended over each pit, which was filled with charcoal, and which yielded an equal and continuous heat to the animal reposing on the gridiron: in some instances ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... endeavour to pit my strength against that of the nameless thing, I sprang back across the room and took up the weapon which had been left in my charge earlier in the night, but which I had been unable to believe it would be necessary ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... a phrase of Peter E. Noyes', that queer echo of Emerson whom people are always rediscovering and forgetting again, a phrase that sticks in my mind,—"Every living soul is heir to an empire and has fallen into a pit." It's an image wonderfully apt to describe my change of mental attitude, and render the contrast between those intensely passionate personal entanglements that had held me tight and that wide estate of life that spreads about us all, open to all of us in ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... said Maggie, in a disappointed tone. 'And what for should ye?' said her lord and master; 'to dance a' night, I'se warrant, and no to be fit to walk your tae's-length the morn, and we have ten Scots miles afore us? Na, na. Stable the steed, and pit your wife to bed when there's night wark ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop

... Prince d'Artois have hastened to help. Wondrous leather-roofed Floating-batteries, set afloat by French-Spanish Pacte de Famille, give gallant summons: to which, nevertheless, Gibraltar answers Plutonically, with mere torrents of redhot iron,—as if stone Calpe had become a throat of the Pit; and utters such a Doom's-blast of a No, as all men must credit. (Annual Register (Dodsley's), ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... were near him faded into nothing that really mattered, compared to the greater, stealthy horror that he knew was coming, born of the shuddersome, shut silence that ensued. There was neither air nor view—no sense of time or space—nothing but the coal-black pit of terror yawning—cold sweat in the heat, and a footfall—an undoubted footfall—followed by another one, too heavy for ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... Tom! You are certainly the crackerjack when it comes to laying a trap to trip a scamp up. Why, he'll fall into that pit head over heels; and I do hope we can snatch the paper away from him before he has a chance to ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster

... thinking a good deal of Mrs. McCarty, and Mrs. McCarty's daughters got to thinking a good deal of him. And Boatswain Bill, who lived at the house of the 'Nine Nations'-the house they said had a bottomless pit-and English used to fight a deal about the Miss McCartys, and Bill one night threw English over the high stoop, down upon the pavement, and broke his arms. They said it was a wonder it hadn't a broken his neck. Fighting Mary (Mary didn't ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... known the woodcraft of the youth against whom he was so eager to pit himself, he would have turned and fled from the spot as from a plague; but he had never heard the name of Deerfoot, and little dreamed of the skill of ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... often water to be seen in these Lowlands. A spring-fed lake far down in a caldron pit, spilling into a trench; low-lying, land-locked little seas; canyons, some of them dry, others filled with tumultuous flowing water. Or great gashes with water sluggishly flowing, or standing with a heavy slime, and a pall of uprising vapor in the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... get two or three men first thing tomorrow morning, and we'll do it reight. You be up there by half-past eight o'clock, and we'll soon satisfy you as to whether there's owt i' t' shape of a dead man or not i' t' pit. You hev' grounds for believin' 'at ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher

... round with a look of defiance. As nobody uttered a word, he said with a loud voice: "Look ye, fellow miners, I am one of the oldest men about the works here above; see here, comrades, and ye ragamuffins there, host and peasants I mean, these dollars my prince and lord has gained from our pit." ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... "Hamlet" at Drury Lane "towards the defraying the charge of repairing and fitting up the chapel in Russell Court," said performance to be given "with singing by Mr. Hughes, and entertainment of dancing by Monsieur Cherier, Miss Lambro his scholar, and Mr. Evans. Boxes, 5s.; pit, 3s.; gallery, 2s.; ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... logs of the houses were caulked with a mixture of mud and moss, and left in that condition in the meantime, until the pit-saw could be set to work to produce boards for the better protection of the walls without and within. The window and door frames were also made, and covered temporarily with parchment, until the arrival of the ship should enable ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne

... Tony as if a thick mist of darkness fell all about him, and as if he were sinking down, down, very low into some horrible pit where he would never see the light of day again. But by-and-bye he came to himself, and found old Oliver sobbing in short, heavy sobs, and swaying himself to and fro, while Beppo was licking Dolly's hand, and barking with a sharp, quiet bark, as he had been wont to ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton

... fled to England and began making stained glass at London, Stourbridge, and Newcastle-on-Tyne. In 1589 there were fifteen glass-houses in England. Then, because so much wood had been used in the iron foundries, the supply became exhausted and sea or pit coal had to be used instead. People were forced to try, in consequence, a different kind of melting pot for their glass and a new mixture of material; in this way they stumbled upon a heavy, brilliant, white crystal metal which the French called 'the most beautiful glassy substance ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett

... upon his own ground above her. If she could reach him, well and good, if not, the helping hand was not proffered, and she fell back, hopeless. Later on he discovered his mistake. She became ill very gradually, and M'Kay began to see in the distance a prospect of losing her. A frightful pit came in view. He became aware that he could not do without her. He imagined what his home would have been with other women whom he knew, and he confessed that with them he would have been less contented. He ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford

... devolved were consulting with the farmer's wife about preparations for tea, any stray guest might search for wood-plants in the skirts of the copse on the hill behind, or talk with the children who were jumping in and out of an old saw-pit in the wood, or if contemplative, might watch the minnows in the brook, which was here ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau

... from the terrace at the white bear in his pit, when a high voice came above the moderate tones of the crowd; Henry took Gertie's arm, and began to talk rapidly of Nansen and the North Pole, but this did not prevent her from glancing over her shoulder. The people gave ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge

... Florida or Cuba, to escape the crudity of the northern March; "May be we'll meet up again there!" some of them said, innocently unsuspicious of what sort of characters they were addressing. Paradise and the Pit travel side by side on this earth, and find ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... better still, a canvas-back. Cut off the head and most part of the neck; cut off the pinions and pull out the tail feathers, make a plastic cake of clay or tenacious earth an inch thick and large enough to envelop the bird and cover him with it snugly. Dig an oval pit under the fore-stick, large enough to hold him, and fill it with hot coals, keeping up a strong heat. Just before turning in for the night, clean out the pit, put in the bird, cover with hot embers and coals, keeping up a brisk fire over it all night. ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears

... all these things worketh God oftentimes with Man to bring back his Soul from the Pit to be enlightened with the ...
— Illustrations of The Book of Job • William Blake

... close upon the edge of escape, it was dragged back by another and prevented. The wild host was divided against itself. Here dwelt the Shadow I had "imagined" weeks ago, and in it struggled armies of lost souls as in the depths of some bottomless pit whence there is no escape. The layers mingled, fighting against themselves in endless torture. It was in this great Shadow I had clairvoyantly seen Mabel, but about its fearful mouth, I now was certain, hovered another figure of darkness, a figure who sought to keep it in existence, since to her ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood

... being plunged into the pit of destruction by an evil destiny which you may avert. I implore you, as the son does the mother whom he cannot leave, and with the warmest affection of a loving child, send the necklace and bracelets which you received from me to Master Rene ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... useless. What could you do against a dozen bandits who spring out of some pit, ruin, or aqueduct, and level ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... stiff, which will happen within twenty-four hours, you are to begin to lay your second or last coat of one inch thick over the first, to be prepared as follows: Take Roche, or unslaked lime, one part, by measure; fine pit sand, one part; clinker, or forge dust, finely powdered, two parts; clay or lome, by measure also, one part: let these different ingredients (taking the precaution of first slaking the Roche lime) be well mixed together, and then screened ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger

... dogs do seem to have consciences in such matters,—was nowhere to be found, though, after the lapse of nearly a week, he again appeared at the work; and his master, slipping a rope round his neck, brought him to a deserted coal-pit half-filled with water, that opened in an adjacent field, and flinging him in, left the authorities no clue by which to establish his identity with the robber and assassin of ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... The next moment she was galloping along the grassy border of the heath in wild flight from her worst enemy, whom yet she could never by the wildest of flights escape; for when, coming a little to herself as she approached a sand pit, she pulled up, there was her enemy—neither before nor behind, neither above nor beneath nor within her: it was the self which had just told a lie to the servant of whom she had so lately boasted that he never told one in his life. ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... serious affair. He loaded the launch with a thousand pounds—all she could carry—and started home immediately after sundown; but even then he lost from a hundred to a hundred and fifty pounds before he had the stuff cached in McClintock's bamboo-covered sawdust pit. This ice was used for refrigerator purposes ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... pulverised and boiled to make much-prized gelatine. To his fish and flesh the Eskimo adds a bewildering plenitude of wildfowl. Last spring, eighteen hundred geese and ducks were killed by Eskimo on Herschel Island sand-pit. It is the paradise of pot-hunter and wing-shot. Captain Ellis of the Karluk, with one Eskimo fellow-sportsman, got a bag of 1132 ducks, geese, and swans in three days' shooting, to send to the wrecked ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... Justice, we were led up to the fatal Pit or Hole, down which many had been cast headlong. There we found one poor Soldier alive, who, upon his throwing in, had catch'd fast hold of some impending Bushes, and sav'd himself on a little Jutty within the Concavity. On ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe

... said he "wad gie him a chance;" and so he tied him to his cart. Young Rab, fearing some mischief, had been entering a series of protests all the way, and nearly strangling himself to spite James and Jess, besides giving Jess more than usual to do. "I wish I had let Sir George pit that charge into him, the thrawn brute," said James. But Ailie had seen that in his foreleg there was a splinter of wood, which he had likely got when objecting to be hanged, and that he was miserably lame. So she got James to leave him with her, and go straight into Edinburgh. She gave him ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... shot firing. The detecter tube, although protected by two thicknesses of gauze, admits of this being done by the use of a special form of valve turned by the mouthpiece of the detecter. The system of firing shots or using open lamps in the same pit where safety lamps are used is exceedingly objectionable; still, under certain conditions shots may be fired without danger. Whether safety lamps or candles are used, it is thought the use of the detecter will afford such a ready means of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various

... measurable freedom in the use of the ballot, the present agencies at work for his advancement, like industrial and the higher education and the acquisition of property, and organized agitation in the North for his rights can do little to rescue him from the deep pit into which American race prejudice has pushed and penned him. The colored American child has a poorer chance to rise in the scale of being to-day than had the colored American child of a generation ago. He has a poorer chance in the ...
— The Ballotless Victim of One-Party Governments - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 16 • Archibald H. Grimke

... been a great swell at home, where you would have shuddered if Bond Street had seen you carrying a parcel no larger than your card-case; but those considerations rarely troubled you here. Very likely, your servant was lying crouched in a rifle pit, having "pots" at the Russians, or keeping watch and ward in the long lines of trenches, or, stripped to his shirt, shovelling powder and shot into the great guns, whose steady roar broke the evening's calm. So if you did not wait upon yourself, you would stand a very fair chance of being starved. ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole

... heavy; breathing was difficult. He looked up and made out the dim square by which Betty knelt. He could go a little further without danger, since if the air grew worse he could still turn and run back up the steps? The floor seemed to be pitching still more steeply. Fearful of a precipice or a pit and a fall, he went down on his hands and knees and crept on. Thus he held his poor torch before him and thus he made a first discovery. The smoke was drifting steadily into his face. And that meant a ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory

... supernatural power of the images of the gods accepted, only it was imputed to the influence of devils. The lunatic was troubled by a like possession. If a spring discharged its waters with a periodical gushing of carbonic acid gas, it was agitated by an angel; if an unfortunate descended into a pit and was suffocated by the mephitic air, it was by some daemon who was secreted; if the miner's torch produced an explosion, it was owing to the wrath of some malignant spirit guarding a treasure, and whose solitude had been disturbed. There was no end to the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... plays without chorus, had not the special dancing-stage (-orchestra-) with the altar in the middle, on which the Greek chorus performed its part, or, to speak more correctly, the space thus appropriated among the Greeks served with the Romans as a sort of pit; accordingly the choral dance at least, with its artistic alternations and intermixture of music and declamation, must have been omitted in Rome, and, even if the chorus was retained, it had but little importance. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... to his seat in the stalls of the Straw Exchange Theatre and turned to watch the stream of distinguished and distinguishable people who made their appearance as a matter of course at a First Night in the height of the Season. Pit and gallery were already packed with a throng, tense, expectant and alert, that waited for the rise of the curtain with the eager patience of a terrier watching a dilatory human prepare for outdoor exercises. Stalls and boxes filled slowly and hesitatingly with a crowd whose component ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... him as he beat the foam, and inch by inch he lost; And nearer, nearer drew the fall, and fiercer grew the fight, Till on the very cascade crest a last farewell he tossed. Then down and down and down they plunged into that pit of dread; And mad we tore along the shore ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service

... Simeon, being raised from the dead, write what occurred during their sojourn in the realm of Hades: "While we were lying, along with our fathers, in the depth of the pit and in the uttermost darkness, suddenly there appeared the golden hue of the sun, and a purple royal light shining in upon us. Then the father of all mankind and all the patriarchs and prophets rejoiced, saying: 'That light is the author of ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... colliery as a breaker-boy, where his task was to pick out stones and other foreign substances from the fuel. Sixpence a day was the wage. Soon at twopence more he was promoted to drive the gin-horse that, circling around a capstan, hoisted the buckets of water and coals out of the pit. At fourteen he became his father's assistant in the fire-room at Dewley Burn at a shilling a day. At fifteen he obtained a foreman's position in another colliery. At seventeen he had gone over ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... constructed of regular slopes, or plains of uniform character, we could easily apply to it all our rules; but, broken as it is into hills and valleys, filled with stones here, with a bank of clay there, and a sand-pit close by, we are obliged to sacrifice to general convenience, often, ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French

... living that had never been twenty miles from the Scottish capital, who could state to the Commissioners that both his father and grandfather had been slaves—that he himself had been born a slave—and that he had wrought for years in a pit in the neighbourhood of Musselburgh ere the colliers got their freedom. Father and grandfather had been parishioners of the late Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk. They were cotemporary with Chatham and Cowper, and Burke and Fox; and at ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... and all the others smiled. "She may have gone through a good deal," they remarked, "but how can she ever presume to pit herself against an old lady like you? So why don't you, venerable senior, tell her what it is so that ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... of the time—the little time—we shall have to live together. But I won't talk of death; I will imagine us immortal, or forget that we are otherwise. By God's blessing, in a few weeks we may be taking our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the pit at Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of them at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget that we are assailable; we are strong for the time as rocks,—the wind is tempered ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... a hunter was roaming through the wildwood when he heard a voice crying piteously for aid. Following the sound, the hunter plunged ahead, and discovered a dwarf caught in a pit which had been dug to ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston

... imposed upon him for such heinous offence as the murder of an innocent girl, it was simply the attempt of a clever attorney to remove the stigma attached to an unfortunate and much-maligned client. The dead body of Mary Ashford was found in a pit of water in Sutton Coldfield, on the 27th of May, 1817, she having been seen alive on the morning of the same day. Circumstances instantly, and most naturally, fastened suspicion of foul play upon Abraham ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... of the pits, and we will say, An evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall see what will become of his dreams. And Reuben heard it, and delivered him out of their hand; and said, Let us not take his life. And Reuben said unto them, Shed no blood; cast him into this pit that is in the wilderness, but lay no hand upon him: that he might deliver him out of their hand, to restore him to his father. And it came to pass, when Joseph was come unto his brethren, that they stript Joseph of his coat, the coat of many colours that ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various

... He had slowed down his machine, and was running even with the gasolene car now. He noticed that it was a new one, of six cylinders, and looked speedy. Perhaps he was foolish to pit his untried car against it. Yet he had confidence in his battery ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton

... shouted a rough, bully-looking man behind him, with a terrible oath; "I'll pitch you into the pit, if ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown

... that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the Lord: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged. Look unto Abraham, your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone, when childless, and increased him. Behold, I have comforted Zion, and heaped upon her blessings ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal

... busied about his dooryard, albeit with his rifle standing ready to hand, and to-day he wore his shirt with the arm-pit pistol holster ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... was not touched, either by the mother or her attendants, until the afterbirth was expelled. The birth and recuperation were carried out in a pit filled with warm ashes. A slow birth was blamed on the belief that the mother had slept too much or been ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs

... presence of which would indicate incomplete combustion. The theoretical maximum of CO{2} for refuse burning is about 20%; and, by maintaining an even clean fire, by admitting secondary air over the fire, and by regulating the dampers or the air-pressure in the ash-pit, an amount approximating to this percentage may be attained in a well-designed furnace if properly worked. If the proportion of free oxygen (i.e. excess of air) is large, more air is passed through the furnace than is required for complete combustion, and the heating of this excess is clearly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... died, and by December, Behring's own condition had become hopeless. Hunger and grief had added to his misery, and in his sand-hut he died. He was almost buried alive, for the sand rolled down from the pit in which he lay and covered his feet. He would not have it removed, for it kept him warm. Thirty more of the little expedition died during that bitter winter on the island; the survivors, some forty-five persons, ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... There wasa chewink in the Stanley woods, that brought off a brood of four, under the safe shelter of a rank thistle leaf, in the midst of trampling herds of cattle driven wild by flies. There was a ground sparrow near the Hale sand pit, covered by a base leaf of another thistle, and beneath a third on Bob's lease, I had made a study of an exquisite nest. Protection from the rank leaves was not all the birds sought of these plants, for goldfinches were darting around inviting all creation to "See me?" ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter

... down; Then fastening ropes, drag them along the streets, Crying in scorn, This, this was that rich head Was crown'd with garlands, and with odours, this That was in Rome so reverenced! Now The furnace and the bellows shall to work, The great Sejanus crack, and piece by piece Drop in the founder's pit. ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson

... presently found himself close to the hole of the pit, a black pit open to the level of the soil, emitting the breath of ages, malarious and glacial. Frightened, he stopped short, and curled himself into a corner, his cap over his eyes. But the damp saltpetre of the walls affected him, and suddenly a stentorian sneeze, which made the tourists ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet

... picking the easiest ways over the mist-moistened stones, he led his companions lower and lower down the rock wall till, when they reached the next projection, and on passing round, it was to find themselves in what was little more than a huge rock pit, facing a mass of water which fell from quite two hundred feet above them into a vast cauldron of white foam, which chafed and roared and cast up clouds of spray as it whirled round and then rushed ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn

... distance, quarrelling and making a most indecent noise the whole of the time it lasted. This being done, the union-jack was taken off, and the body was slowly lowered into the earth, and I wept bitterly as I gazed for the last time upon all that remained of my generous and intrepid master. The pit was speedily filled, and I returned to the village, about thirty yards to the east of the grave, and giving the most respectable inhabitants, both male and female, a few trifling presents, entreated them to let no one disturb ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various

... the shores are of mud instead of sand, they pare off in summer the superficial part of this mud, which has been overflowed by the sea-water, and lay it up in heaps, to be used in the following manner: Having first dried it in the sun, and rubbed it into a fine powder, they dig a pit, the bottom of which is covered with straw, and from the bottom a hollow cane leads through the side of the pit to a jar standing below the level of the bottom. They then fill the pit almost full of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr

... opinion is the same still. He will stand the great test that one can go into the world with him and not be ashamed of him. I know, dearest, even without that shake of the head, the small value you attach to this, but it is a great element in that droll contract, by which one person agrees to pit his temper against another's, and which we are told is made in heaven, with angels as sponsors. Mr. Walpole is sufficiently good-looking to be prepossessing, he is well bred, very courteous, converses ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... where we find the desired condiment in various stages of color and refinement. It is whitened with clay, in large funnel-shaped vessels, open at the bottom, to allow the molasses to run off. Above are hogsheads of coarse, dark sugar; below is a huge pit of fermenting molasses, in which rats and small negroes occasionally commit involuntary suicide, and from which rum is made.—N. B. Rum is not a wicked word in Cuba; in Boston everybody is shocked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... great haste, and then hurried back to the theatre where a queue of people had already formed outside the entrance to the pit. Soon after he joined the queue, the doors were opened, and in a little while he found himself sitting at the end of the second row. He had chosen this seat so that he might be able to hurry out of the theatre quickly, without disturbing anyone, ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine

... "and of an island called Barataria. I governed it to perfection for ten days; and lost my rest all the time; and learned to look down upon all the governments in the world; I got out of it by taking to flight, and fell into a pit where I gave myself up for dead, and out of which I escaped ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... some 30 feet or more, as I found when my men lowered me down with a rope, at my command. When my feet touched bottom I lighted the candle, which had been put out in the descent, and looked around. The place was of small extent—little more than a pit—and it seemed to be a natural cavity, with nothing remarkable about it. But I turned my attention to the floor, which felt curiously soft and greasy to the touch. It was strewn with pieces of human bones and skulls! The gruesome place weighed rather upon me, I confess, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... still from its lofty moral tone, its gloomy fatalism, and its contempt for temporary renown. As we read its sombre pages we see the wheel of fortune revolving; the same motion which makes the tiara glitter one moment at the summit, plunges it at the next into the pit of pain and oblivion. Steadily, uniformly, the unflinching poetasters grind out in their monotonous rime royal how "Thomas Wolsey fell into great disgrace," and how "Sir Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, was causeless imprisoned and cruelly wounded"; ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... and that the heavenly abode is occupied solely by the demon of War, who is busy pounding up the Greek States in a huge mortar. However, his benevolent purpose is not in vain; for learning from Hermes that the goddess Peace has been cast into a pit, where she is kept a fast prisoner, he calls upon the different peoples of Hellas to make a united effort and rescue her, and with their help drags her out and brings her back in triumph to earth. The play concludes with the restoration of ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... for every interval of twenty-four hours sinks a man so much the deeper in the mire when renewed accommodation-bills with his name upon them are ripening in the iron safes of Judah. Philip Sheldon found himself sinking gradually and almost imperceptibly into that bottomless pit of difficulty in whose black depths the demon Insolvency holds his dreary court. While his little capital lasted he had kept himself clear of debt, but that being exhausted, and his practice growing worse day by day, he had been fain to seek assistance from money-lenders; ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... of the youngest of their house, who had sprained her ankle in the garden of Nero's tower. The lots of the champions were drawn by an old and respectable citizen; and they descended into the arena, or pit, to encounter the wild bulls, on foot as it should seem, with a single spear. Amidst the crowd, our annalist has selected the names, colors, and devices, of twenty of the most conspicuous knights. Several of the names are the most illustrious of Rome and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... the fire-arms and bottles. Behold the weapons. The dark pit lies near him with many cross-bars, cages and clouds. An evil combination—imprisonment, though your sunlight has only been dimmed. If so, your will, patient labor and strong desire can yet win for you. The flag of victory is now so limp. This ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara

... dreadful state Ireland is in! The common toast among the low Irish is, 'The Feast of the Pass-over.' Some allusion to Bonaparte, in a play lately acted at Dublin, produced thunders of applause from the pit and the galleries; and a politician should not be inattentive to the public feelings expressed in theatres. Mr. Perceval thinks he has disarmed the Irish. He has no more disarmed the Irish than he has resigned a shilling of his own public emoluments. An Irish peasant fills the barrel of ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... playing, and it was whispered that he had been already offered an appointment in Dresden. The friends of Bach insisted that he should engage Marchand forthwith in a contest in defence of the musical honour of his nation, and as Bach was by no means indisposed to pit himself against the conceited Frenchman, he gave his consent to the challenge being dispatched. Marchand, for his part, showed an equal readiness to meet Bach, foreseeing an easy victory over his antagonist. ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham

... of wedding-law slighted, Penance of maidens and bootless task, Wasting of water down leaky cask, Crime in the prison-pit slowly requited. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... fear and hate: Some sickening round of long endeavour, No light, no rest, no outlet ever: All at a pace that must not slack, Tho' heart would burst and sinews crack: Fog in one's eyes, the brain a-swim, A weight like lead in every limb, And a raw pit that hurts like hell Where once the light breath rose and fell: Do you but keep me, hope or none, Cheery and staunch till all is done, And, at the last gasp, quick to lend One effort more to serve ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot

... upon the iron door and burst it in. On the other side stood Udea's seven brothers, who said, 'Come, rest yourself a little on this mat.' And the man-eater sat down, and he fell right into the burning pit which was under the mat, and they heaped on more wood, till nothing was left of him, not even a bone. Only one of his finger-nails was blown away, and fell into an upper chamber where Udea was standing, and stuck under one of ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various

... Abdul. Ah, thank goodness!" Michael gave an exclamation of pleasure; he had caught a glint of sunshine, had felt a breath of desert air. The Living Aton was penetrating the rat-pit. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... the days when Joseph's brothers gambled for his coat of many colors when they put him in the pit, the desire to venture in games of chance has been rampant in the human breast, and even "men of the cloth" have proved no exception to the rule. I recall an instance when I was going down the river on the Natchez. As I got aboard the boat I said to myself, "Everything looks blue; I've got no ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol

... or Rascal's Corner. They are the sons of one Beastly, whose mother bore them in Flesh Square: they live at the house of one Shameless, at the sign of the Reprobate, next door to the Descent into the Pit, whose retainers are Mr. Flatter, Mr. Impiety, Mr. False-Peace, Mr. Covetousness, who are housed by one Mr. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... sick, but were fain to leave them there aloft, in the sunshine, like Dives in his torments, crying aloud for a drop of water to cool their tongues; and every man a great stinking vulture or two sitting by him, like an ugly black fiend out of the pit, waiting till the poor soul should depart out of the corpse: but nothing could avail, and for the dear life we must down again and into the woods, or be burned up ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... the flag was raised, and a chamber of stone work, large enough to receive a moderately-sized crock or pit, was disclosed. Alas! it was empty. But in the earth at the bottom of it, Miss Baily said, she herself saw, as every other bystander plainly did, the circular impression of a vessel: which had stood there, as the mark seemed to indicate, for a very ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu

... Armstrong said: "If such are the evidences of justification and a saving faith, then have I had them, too; but why bring they to me no confidence or holy joy? Why is my soul cast down, and why do I feel like one who stumbles towards a pit? Alas! my flesh quivers and my heart trembles at the thought ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... tawdriness from disuse and neglect, and a rather garish effect which marched evenly with the brick-and-terra-cotta fronts in Texas Street and the American-Tudor cottages of the suburbs, it was a creditable relic. The auditorium was well filled in pit, dress-circle and gallery when Kent and his guest edged their way through the standing committee in the foyer; but by dint of careful searching they succeeded in finding two seats well around to the left, with a balcony pillar to separate them ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde

... a convicted felon to escape the doom justly imposed upon him for such heinous offence as the murder of an innocent girl, it was simply the attempt of a clever attorney to remove the stigma attached to an unfortunate and much-maligned client. The dead body of Mary Ashford was found in a pit of water in Sutton Coldfield, on the 27th of May, 1817, she having been seen alive on the morning of the same day. Circumstances instantly, and most naturally, fastened suspicion of foul play upon Abraham Thornton. He was tried at Warwick, at the Autumn Assizes of the same year, and acquitted. ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... Macready; but on one pint all agree, & that is that Ed draws like a six ox team. Ed was actin at Niblo's Garding, which looks considerable more like a parster, than a garding, but let that pars. I sot down in the pit, took out my spectacles & commenced peroosin the evenin's bill. The awjince was all-fired large & the boxes was full of the elitty of New York. Several opery glasses was leveld at me by Gothum's farest darters, but I didn't let on as tho I noticed it, tho mebby I did take out my sixteen-dollar ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne

... is that civilised man moves in a much too narrow range of affinities. He has forgotten the rock from which he was hewn, and the hole of the pit from which he was dug. He has reduced the keyboard of his sympathies by whole octaves. The habit of shutting up his body within walls, has produced the corresponding habit of shutting up his mind within walls. Hence Nature, which should be an object of delight to him, becomes ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... bits of money that Shakro gained by begging made but little difference in the state of our affairs, for his belly was a bottomless pit, which swallowed everything that fell in its way; grapes, melons, salt fish, bread, or dried fruit; and as time went on he seemed to need ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky

... Unitarian wickedly interrupted, to remind his Presbyterian brother that his own church had quenched those very certain fires that once burned under the pit in which lay ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... let me tell you," answered Tommy, laughing heartily. He had not time to say more. The shout of "Tally ho!" and the merry sound of the huntsman's horn, put all the pack in motion. The lane led up hill, and then widened out on some wild open rounded downs, with here and there a white chalk-pit, showing the character of the soil. Up it they tore—for the scent was strong, and they were eager to make up for the time ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... brows at him, and said gravely, 'This is the temptation thou art falling into, as have thousands before thy time. Give him the rein a second time, and he will bear thee to the red pit, and halt upon the brink, and pitch thee into it among bleeding masses and skeletons of thy kind, where they lie who were men like to thee, and were borne ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... of tempering the gun-tubes was also witnessed by the Board. The excavation of the pit is, as at St. Chamond, 15 meters deep, with the furnace at one end and the oil tank (100 tons) at the other. One side of the upright furnace is constructed in the form of a door, which, by a convenient arrangement for swinging, is made to turn on its hinges. Thus, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... is set down in its principles, and he that doth any way confute that spirit, presently it falls a raging, and cries out, serpent, liar, wolf, dragon, devil, be silent with thy serpentine wisdom, and smoke of the bottomless pit. Now in this the devil is wonderfully cunning; for least he should indeed be discovered, he doth set the face hard against the truth, and counteth it such a deadly enemy, that he will not, cannot bear it; but lets ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... makes Joe grin and stagger, whereat the Old Un, standing upon his chair, hugs himself in an ecstasy, and forgetful of such small matters as five-dollar bills, urges, prays, beseeches, and implores the Guv to "wallop the blighter on the p'int, to stab 'im on the mark, and to jolt 'im in the kidney-pit." ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol

... standards and are glad to put away what is inferior for what is better. Therefore we can never excuse ourselves for resentment or resistance because other people resent or resist. There can be no possible excuse for resistance to the behavior of others, and it is safe to say that we must never pit our wills against the wills of other people. If we want to do right and the other man wants us to do wrong, we must pass by his will, pass under it or over it, but never on any account resist it. There has been more loss ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call

... I would not let slip: I took notice that now poor Christian was so confounded, that he did not know his own voice; and thus I perceived it: just when he was come over against the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones got behind him, and stepped up softly to him, and whisperingly suggested many grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had proceeded from ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... dirt, eight hundred feet thick, that shut out from me the light of day, I rested for awhile. I had done no physical work for ten years. I was physically soft. To put me down in the mines and set me to digging coal was wicked. It was murder. Down in that dark pit how I suffered! There was no escape from it. There was the medicine. I had to take it. I do not know, but it seems to me that when a man is sent to that prison who has not been in the habit of performing physical labor, he should not be put to work in the mines until he becomes accustomed ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds

... Hell! I know thee now; thou cam'st But once in thine own form, and ever since Hast been too near me in a worser one. Back to the pit, I say! No more ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith

... and a letter of warning coming at the same time to Mr. Stewart, he and his Chinamen took refuge with the Protestant missionary in Atuona. That night the store was gutted, and the bodies cast in a pit and covered with leaves. Three days later the schooner had come in; and things appearing quieter, Mr. Stewart and the captain landed in Taahauku to compute the damage and to view the grave, which was already indicated ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Martian engineers in fitting it artificially to support life, had roughed it into a sphere and pulverized quantities of the rock into soil. Here, at the apex, was a ring of rough naked hills enclosing a pit into which the sun could not look. Ling, catching up with Parr on the brow of the circular range, pointed ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman

... other great ladies had their hair so, though I do not like it; but my wife do mightily—but it is only because she sees it is the fashion. Here I saw my Lord Rochester and his lady, Mrs. Mallet, who hath after all this ado married him; and, as I hear some say in the pit, it is a great act of charity, for he hath no estate. But it was pleasant to see how every body rose up when my Lord John Butler, the Duke of Ormond's son, come into the pit towards the end of the play, who was a servant—[lover]—to Mrs. Mallet, and now smiled upon her, and she on him. I ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... was near believing myself in the neighbourhood of a certain evil place, where I should be punished for all my croakings. We travelled at this rate, I dare say, fifteen miles, without seeing a single shed: at last, one or two miserable cottages appeared, darkened by heath, and stuck in a sand-pit; from whence issued a half-starved generation, that pursued us a long while with their piteous wailings. The heavy roads and ugly prospects, together with the petulant clamours of my petitioners, made me quite uncharitable. I was in a dark, remorseless mood, which lasted me till we reached ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... Grammar, by the aid of which he gained some knowledge of the structural rules of English. He had already become acquainted with Paradise Lost, and was another proof of Matthew Prior's axiom, 'Who often reads will sometimes want to write,' for he had begun to write verse when only 'a bonnie pit lad.' For more than forty years of his life he laboured in 'the coal-dark underground,' and is now the caretaker of a Board-school in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. As for the qualities of his poetry, they are its directness and its natural grace. He has ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... furious drive against the Duke. There was a moment of suspense. The Duke did not give way. His arm shot out and the unfortunate Count turned completely round and fell. Charles de Morlay's sword had pierced beneath the right arm pit, entering the lung. The blood streamed from the wounded man's mouth. The Doctor and the seconds carried him into the room which Jeanette had prepared. The Duke, sorely moved, followed them. Albert saw him and held out a hand which the Duke pressed gently, bending his head. The ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt

... till the "pits" are worked out. It was my task to cart clay in the afternoon to fill them up again. It was an idle enough kind of job. All I had to do was to walk alongside my horse, a big white beast with no joints at all except where its legs were hinged to the backbone, back it up to the pit, and dump the load. But, walking so in the autumn sun; I fell a-dreaming. I forgot claybank and pit. I was back in the old town—saw her play among the timber. I met her again on the Long Bridge. I held her hands once more in that last meeting—the while I was mechanically ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis

... not the slightest fear," Sir George answered dryly. "Besides, I don't think any class of women workers—not even the pit-brow women—are necessarily coarse and masculine. And I differ from you, too, with regard to that head," he added, fixing his keen, kindly eyes deliberately on Beth's cranium till she laughed to cover her embarrassment, and put up ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... ideas, or interrupt the laying on of a broad flat wash. Now and again, lazily, I lean back to watch the witless hoverings of a big butterfly, or sleepily listen to the increasing sound of the tom-toms and the yells of the beaters, whose voices, as those of demons of the pit, rend the peaceful air and add to ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... influx to the Tuileries. Marks of attachment were exhibited even in external symbols; the women wore enormous bouquets of lilies in their bosoms and upon their heads, and sometimes even bunches of white ribbon. At the play there were often disputes between the pit and the boxes about removing these ornaments, which the people thought dangerous emblems. National cockades were sold in every corner of Paris; the sentinels stopped all who did not wear them; the young men piqued themselves ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan

... possibilities of steam. Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping, because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, because at any time the labourers might be obliged to sit at the pit's mouth for weeks together, whistling for a gale or waiting for the water to be got under again. But steam had already been used for pumping upon one or two estates in England—rather as a toy than ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... of heretics, that the daemons were the authors, the patrons, and the objects of idolatry. [38] Those rebellious spirits who had been degraded from the rank of angels, and cast down into the infernal pit, were still permitted to roam upon earth, to torment the bodies, and to seduce the minds, of sinful men. The daemons soon discovered and abused the natural propensity of the human heart towards devotion, and artfully withdrawing the adoration ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... plans.' In his right-hand pocket were two notes, a rosary, and his seals. In the left his ink-stand, a small looking-glass, and a comb. His watch was kept in the breast of his coat, and in another small pocket, nearly under his arm-pit, was his purse. ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... to the Downes, or towards Boulogne, where they say the Dutch fleet is gone, and stays. We concluded upon private meetings for a while, not having any money to satisfy any people that may come to us. I bought two eeles upon the Thames, cost me six shillings. Thence with Sir W. Batten to the Cock-pit, whither the Duke of Albemarle is come. It seems the King holds him so necessary at this time, that he hath sent for him, and will keep him here. Indeed, his interest in the City, being acquainted, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys

... go? It was difficult to find a house that satisfied the whole family. One was too far off, and looked into a tan-pit; another was too much in the middle of the town, next door to a machine-shop. Elizabeth Eliza wanted a porch covered with vines, that should face the sunset; while Mr. Peterkin thought it would not be convenient to sit there looking ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale

... sat himself down on the very same piece of timber—took his pit-cap off his head—slowly wiped with it the perspiration from his hair and face—and then, looking for some seconds into the hole or shaft close beside him through which he had been lifted, as if he were calculating the number of cubic yards that had been excavated, he quite coolly, ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various

... More frequently it was difficult. Occasionally it was impossible. When a landing was accomplished, they used to set to work without delay. There was no time to lose. Some bored holes in the rock for hold-fasts; others, with pick and chisel, cut out the foundation-pit. Then the courses began to be laid. On each occasion of landing the smith had to set up his bellows, light his fire, and work in hot haste; because his whole shop, except the anvil, had to be taken down, and carried away every tide! Frequently, in fine weather, this ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne

... a battle," said Zherkov to Bolkonski, pointing to the accountant, "but he feels a pain in the pit of his stomach already." ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... and how much there be. Then we will go away quick, before it gets into our eyes and steals away our judgment. And in this way we may return in the end, with more grub, and possess it all." So we looked upon the great vein, which cut the wall of the pit as a true vein should, and we measured it, and traced it from above and below, and drove the stakes of the claims and blazed the trees in token of our rights. Then, our knees shaking with lack of food, and a sickness in our ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London

... all—from Dardale Moss, as black as pitch and as rotten as the grave, up that zigzag wall you call a road, that looks like chalk in the moonlight, through Dunner Cleugh, as dark as a coal-pit, and down here to the George and the Dragon, where you have a roaring fire, wise men, good punch—here it is—and a corpse in your coach-house. Where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together. Come, ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... comin' at. Well, I caught a sight at the woman; knew her at the glance. I got a sight at her one night in the Pit at the House of the Nine Nations. 'Here! I wants you,' says I, takin' what there was left of her by the arm. She shrieked, and crouched down, and begged me not to hurt her, and looked wilder than a tiger at me. And then the whole den got into a fright, and young ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... let me go! Please—please let me go!" She struggled frantically against him. Then, finding herself helpless in his grasp, she covered her face with her hands, pressing them hard against her cheeks. But she might as well have tried to pit her puny strength against an avalanche. In a moment he had forced down her shielding hands, bending her slender body backwards so that her face lay just below his lips—shelterless and at his mercy. And then she felt his mouth crushed savagely on hers and the turbulence of his passion ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler

... 5: The audience, whenever an individual hisses against the sense of the house, always silence the offender by crying, "there's a goose in the pit (or wherever it is) turn him out," and if he persists they expel him by force. It is to be hoped our audiences would follow the example. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter

... before Henry Clay started his cigar business, y'understand, and when them boys gets a craving for schnapps after July 1st, they would oser go to the nearest Carnegie Library and read over the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution till that gnawing feeling at the pit of the stomach had passed away, understand me. At least, Abe, that is what I think is going to happen, and from the number of people which is giving out prophecies to the newspapers about what is going ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass

... verily believe (said Luther) that the day of judgment draweth near, and that the angels prepare themselves for the fight and combat, and that within the space of a few hundred years they will strike down both Turk and Pope into the bottomless pit of hell. ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... happen that the earth had been fresh turned. While he stood, the young bulls pressing behind suddenly put their horns to his flanks and urged him forward. Mawoh! The old bull stepped on to the newly turned earth, and went down into a pit that the hunters had dug. He called to the troop to run from the danger, and they crashed through the wood ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville

... the burial of the dead. Never did Cranston take the field without Margaret's stowing in the corner of his saddlebag a little prayer-book of her church, and this the captain had handed silently to Davies. Side by side the forms of the two sergeants and their comrade troopers were laid in the sandy pit. Reverently the bearded, war-worn men uncovered and stood with drooping heads while their grave young officer read the solemn words. Here and there along the big circle of their surrounding foe the faint distant crack of ...
— Under Fire • Charles King

... the muir. As we cam' through the scented birks, we saw a trottin' burnie wimplin' 'neath the white-blossomed slaes and hirplin' doon the hillside; an' while a herd-laddie lilted ower the fernie brae, a cushat cooed leesomely doon i' the dale. We pit aff oor shoon, sae blithe were we, kilted oor coats a little aboon the knee, and paidilt i' the burn, gettin' geyan weet the while. Then Sally pu'd the gowans wat wi' dew an' twined her bree wi' tasselled broom, while I had a ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... manifest their decided conviction, that the appointment of all the means of grace, flowed from that glorious transaction concerning which it is said, "As for thee also, by the blood of thy covenant I have sent forth thy prisoners out of the pit wherein ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham

... cruelly your innocence you tell: Shew heaven, and damn me to the pit of hell. Now I believe you; 'tis not yet too late: You may forgive, and put a stop to fate; Save me, just sinking, and no more to rise. [She frowns. How can you look with such relentless eyes? Or let your mind by penitence be moved, Or I'm resolved to think you never loved. You are not cleared, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden

... are just a woolly lamb and want a dog to look after you. Who is he? On a first night he gives away his stall and sneaks into the pit. When you send him to a picture-gallery, he dodges the private view and goes on the first shilling day. If an invitation comes to a public dinner, he asks me to go and eat it for him and tell him what it's all about. ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome

... tarts; for sliding and skating in the Regent's Park and the Serpentine, when the weather permitted; for going to the play, whither they were often conducted, by Mr. Osborne's orders, by Rowson, Master George's appointed body-servant, with whom they sate in great comfort in the pit. ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... in faith the leadings of the Holy Spirit, and, through divine strength, to become as a whole burnt sacrifice on the altar of that gracious Redeemer, who had, in his rich mercy, plucked her from the pit of destruction. Having had much forgiven, she loved much, and shrunk not from the many and deep humiliations which were involved in such a course of dedication to her Lord. Even her external appearance strikingly bespoke her ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley

... of "cherry lips"[54:1] and "cherry-nose,"[54:2] and the game of "cherry-pit."[54:3] We have the authority of Pliny that the Cherry (Prunus Cerasus) was introduced into Italy from Pontus, and by the Romans was introduced into Britain. It is not, then, a true native, but it has now become ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... into Agrippina's snare. Fury at Nero's madness for his wife. Now what if we could raise Poppaea up As Agrippina's chief antagonist: We match the mistress 'gainst the mother—pit Passion 'gainst gratitude—a sudden lure 'Gainst old ascendency, the noon of beauty Against the evening of authority, The luring whisper 'gainst the pleading voice, The hand that beckons 'gainst the arm that sways, And set a woman to defeat a woman. To Nero I have whispered that she dotes Upon his ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips

... sooner closed his speech than clamour prevailed, all crying at once: Blast! burn! annihilate! to the pit with them! to Tartarus! to the Giants! Zeus ordered silence again, and then, 'Your wishes,' he said, 'shall be executed; they shall all be annihilated, and their logic with them. But just at present chastisement is not lawful; you are aware that we are now in the four months of the long ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... divided against itself and cannot stand. It is going to pieces. Jesus in his revelation to St. John caused to be written these words: "And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford

... to join him in the venture, the Snibston estate was purchased in 1831: and shortly after, Stephenson removed his home from Liverpool to Alton Grange, for the purpose of superintending the sinking of the pit. He travelled thither by gig with his wife,—his favourite horse "Bobby" performing the journey by ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... representation is also mentioned by Spence, in a letter to his mother:-"In spite of the excellence," he says, "of the actors, the greatest part of the entertainment to me was the countenances of the people in the pit and boxes. When the devils were like to carry off the Damned Soul, every body was in the utmost consternation and when St. John spoke so obligingly to her, they were ready to cry out for joy. When the Virgin appeared on the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... her in an open coffin, and began their march to the place of burial, the husband walking at the head of the company. They proceeded to a high mountain, and when they had reached the place of their destination, they took up a large stone, which covered the mouth of a deep pit, and let down the corpse with all its apparel and jewels. Then the husband embracing his kindred and friends, suffered himself, without resistance, to be put into another open coffin with a pot ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown

... intervals of six or eight feet, leaving each chamber entirely open like a stall upon the passageway which passed through the centre of the house from end to end. At each end was a doorway covered with suspended skins. Between each four apartments, two on a side, was a fire-pit in the centre of the hall, used in common by their occupants. Thus a house with five fires would contain twenty apartments and accommodate twenty families, unless some apartments were reserved for storage. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... part?—thy worse! A loathsome ulcer, reeking with the stench from the pit! Better have given thy body to the stake, than have let in one unhallowed desire upon thy soul. How far ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... lions also. I left a large party of them cutting up the elephant, and walking on, shot a zebra. The body, I knew, would attract the lions, so I signed to Bigg to get a hole dug near the spot, that it might serve as a rifle-pit for us. He and I took up our post there, while the natives hid themselves away in the surrounding bush to watch my proceedings. I had not long to wait before some jackals came screeching up to partake of the banquet they had ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... won them their bread. But most of the men who were in the outer court rushed up to the inner gates within which stood the alabaster shrine of the Hathor. Some flung themselves upon the ground and clutched at it, as in dreams men fling themselves down to be saved from falling into a pit that has no bottom. Yet as in such an evil slumber the dreamer is drawn inch by inch to the mouth of the pit by an unseen hand, so these wretched men were dragged along the ground by the might of their own desire. ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

... able to do his friend a good turn! [Footnote: Common Journals, Nov. 20, 1643; Baillie, II. 101 (and note), and 120-121. Baillie, at the very time he was privately wishing he had his friend Rowallan's Psalms to pit against Rous's, was becoming acquainted with Rous; to whom in a month or two he dedicated a sermon of his preached before the Commons. He there calls Rous his "much honoured friend." Rowallan's Psalms remain in MS. to this day; but specimens of them have been ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... to safer ground, 'my brother Tom is in London, and in wretched health. His angel is from the wrong quarter, from the nethermost pit. I seriously believe that she has a plan for killing her husband. You remember my mentioning in a letter his horse-accident? He has never recovered from that, and as likely as not never will. His wife brought him away from Madeira just when ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing

... to make love to her. He was far too clever for that. He knew that with a woman like Kitty, in Kitty's state of mind, he had nothing to gain by making love. Neither did he propose to pit his will against hers. That course had answered well enough in the time of his possession of her. Passion, which was great in her, greater than her will, made his will powerless over her. His plan was to match the forces of her brain with superior, ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair

... went up to Gnitaheid, and there found Fafnir's slot, or track, along which he crawled to the water. There on the way Sigurd made a large pit, and went down into it. When Fafnir crawled from the gold he blew forth venom, but it flew over Sigurd's head. When Fafnir crept over the pit, Sigurd with his sword pierced him to the heart. Fafnir shook himself, and beat with his head and tail. Sigurd leapt from ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson

... used to stop for a moment or so on my way to or from the pit head and watch these poor women at work. Some of them went barefoot, but the most of them wore wooden shoes. They appeared to be pretty much of one class, uneducated, dull, and just about as ruggedly built as their men. They seemed quite capable of handling ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various

... was then carried, in procession round the village, preceded by music, and on returning to the post a hog was sacrificed to ... the village deity ... the blood from the carcass being allowed to flow into a pit prepared to receive it. The victim, made senseless by intoxication, was now thrown into the pit, and his face pressed down till he died from suffocation in the blood and mire, a deafening noise with instruments being kept up all the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... stem and pit cherries (there should be two cups when pitted). Heat to boiling point in their own juice, then chill them. Line a perforated pie pan with Rich Paste, moisten the rim with cold water and lay around a strip of pastry one inch wide, press lightly. Brush the pastry over with slightly ...
— Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners - A Book of Recipes • Elizabeth O. Hiller

... do in fancy, a causal being can do in reality. The most colossal imaginative human intelligence is able, in mind only, to range from one extreme of thought to another, to skip mentally from planet to planet, or tumble endlessly down a pit of eternity, or soar rocketlike into the galaxied canopy, or scintillate like a searchlight over milky ways and the starry spaces. But beings in the causal world have a much greater freedom, and can effortlessly manifest their thoughts into instant objectivity, without any material or ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... threatened to enforce my order, and punish severely any man who assisted; and placed a police guard for the purpose of seeing that no one did so. She remained sitting by the edge of the water without eating or drinking. The next day the body of her husband was burned to ashes in a small pit of about eight feet square, and three or four feet deep, before several thousand spectators who had assembled to see the suttee. All strangers dispersed before evening, as there seemed to be no prospect of my yielding to the urgent solicitations ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... their own throats Against the splintered gates of audience 'Twere wholesomer to take them in at mouth Than ear. These shall burn first: their ignible And seasoned substances—trunks, legs and arms, Blent indistinguishable in a mass, Like winter-woven serpents in a pit— None vantaged of his fellow-fools in point Of precedence, and all alive—shall serve As fueling to fervor the retort For after cineration ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... and her words full of contempt. The white ring of her gun barrel covered him squarely. It was directed at the pit of his stomach, while her eyes, alight with cold purpose, stared unflinchingly into his drunk and ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... <Hole, cavity, excavation, pit, cache, cave, cavern, hollow, depression, perforation, puncture, rent, slit, crack, chink, crevice, cranny, breach, cleft, chasm, fissure, gap, opening, interstice, burrow, crater, eyelet, pore, bore, aperture, orifice, vent, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... the depths of the pit that Chaka had dug for me, and blessed my Ehlose who had put into my heart those words which I should answer. I hoped also that Chaka would now let me go; but it was not to be, for this was but ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard

... ridge up to which the ranked furrows rose like aspiring angels. No valley, confused with needless cottages and towns, can have been so utterly valleyish as that abyss into which the down-rushing furrows raged like demons into the swirling pit. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... it is not worth a visit at the present day, for the trees have grown too thick and choked it. But when Rickie was up, it chanced to be the brief season of its romance, a season as brief for a chalk-pit as a man—its divine interval between the bareness of boyhood and the stuffiness of age. Rickie had discovered it in his second term, when the January snows had melted and left fiords and lagoons of clearest water between the inequalities of the floor. The place looked as big as Switzerland ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster

... hit wat[gh] a brem brest & a byge wrache, [Sidenote: The devil would not make peace with God.] & [gh]et wrathed not e wy[gh], ne e wrech sa[gh]tled, Ne neu{er} wolde, for wylnesful, his wory god knawe, Ne pray hym for no pit, so proud wat[gh] his wylle, 232 [Sidenote: Affliction makes him none the better.] For-y a[gh] e rape were rank, e rawe wat[gh] lyttel;[13] a[gh] he be kest into kare he kepes no bett{er}. [Sidenote: ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various

... springs, (Priscus, p. 42.) Dubos (Hist. Critique, tom. i. p. 475) observes, that the magazines which the Moors buried in the earth might escape his destructive search. Two or three hundred pits are sometimes dug in the same place; and each pit contains at least four hundred bushels of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... lost, and wandered back through the darkness, one by one, into heaven; but the last, lighted on by their own lurid splendours, said, 'Wherever we go, there is heaven!' And deeper and lower descending, lost their shape and their nature, till, deformed and obscene, the bottomless pit closed ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... these two men divided the political power of Athens between them, until in the end Aristides said that the city would have no peace until it threw the pair of them into the pit kept for condemned criminals. So just was Aristides that, on one of his enemies being condemned by the court without a hearing, he rose in his seat and begged the court not to impose sentence without giving the accused ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... resolved to pit the resources of the outer world against the militarism of Napoleon; and, drawing the resources of the tropics to the new power-looms of Lancashire and Yorkshire, they might well hope to pour their unequalled ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... Restormel iron-mines. She was one of the comparatively few ladies who have ventured into the nether darkness of a pit. She saw her underground subjects as well as those above ground, and to the former no less than to the latter she bore the kindly testimony that she found them "intelligent good people." We can vouch for this that these hewers and drawers ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler

... a shock," was the answer. "I have been dragged back into the black pit of twenty ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... was beginning at Pont-a-Mousson, for the town was always as black as a pit. On my way home I saw a furtive knife edge of yellow light here and there under a door. The sentry stood by his shuttered lantern. Suddenly the first of the trench lights flowered in the sky over the long dark ridge of ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan

... sent to bring you here was merely a ruse of mine. Murderer and treacherous dog that you are, so you thought to get me here in the house among your hired assassins by means of the letter which you compelled my dear mistress to write? Are you mad that you should pit your paltry ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White

... prayer, Hezekiah's life was prolonged fifteen years, the grateful king rendered to God a tribute of praise for His great mercy. In this song he tells the reason why he thus rejoices: "The grave cannot praise Thee, death cannot celebrate Thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth. The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day."(964) Popular theology represents the righteous dead as in heaven, entered into bliss, and praising God with an immortal tongue; but Hezekiah could see no such glorious prospect ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... men-at-arms of the French party went before and lay in ambush, waiting to surprise them. They intended to capture the damsel, cast her into a pit, and keep her there beneath a great stone, in the hope that the King who had sent for her would give a large sum for her rescue.[458] It was the custom for freebooters and mercenaries thus to cast travellers into pits delivering them on payment of ransom. Eighteen ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... wide, sneering mouth, who seemed disquietingly familiar and in whom I gradually recognized one of my Antomir teachers—one of those who used to punish me for the sins of their other pupils. The past suddenly sprang into life with detailed, colorful vividness. The black pit of poverty in which I had been raised; my misery at school, where I had been treated as an outcast and a scapegoat because my mother could not afford even the few pennies that were charged for my tuition; the joy of my childish existence in spite of that gloom and martyrdom—all ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... been shut up in a coal work, from the falling in of the pit, and have had nothing to eat for two or three days, have been as much intoxicated by a bason of broth, as a person in common circumstances with two or three ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett

... saved, and the piquancy of the double sensation was the hidden drug of Annie's life. She dallied with thoughts of eternal suffering as a Flagellant with imagings of torture, and when her mind was reeling at the very edge of the pit she would pull herself back with a loud outcry on the Almighty, followed by a collapse as sensuous ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... his very solicitude Lanyard emerged from the skylight hatch, waved a hand in gay salute, then turned to stare down into the flaming pit ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... way to the window and bought a couple of pit-stalls; the mate, who had not consulted him, bought upper-circles, and, with a glance at the ladies, pushed ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs

... he'd ha hoisted his broad pendant afore this, would old Ding-dong, pit-boy and powder-monkey and all, only for that. And as I'd ha gone h'up with him as he went h'up, so I goes down with him when he goes down. I know'd old Ding-dong. He was the man for me. Talk o fightin!—Dicky Keats, Ned Berry, the ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant

... formed of a rude people, emerging from fetish and demon worship, can be readily supposed. I suspect the converts made by the monk Augustine and his companions had not a little in their character and conduct to show the pit from which they had been taken; and yet that was the dawning of a day for the Anglian and Saxon race in our country for which we have abundant reason to be thankful. There is no doubt much imperfection in Kol and Santhal converts, but we may well anticipate ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... the potato pit, as we now have it, in Ireland was the following advice given in Pue's Occurrences of ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... Toulan, and is buried with him, and I cart then enjoy my life, and shall not need to live in anxiety, and in perpetual fear of being betrayed. But," he continued, after a brief pause, "what is done, must be done quickly, otherwise I may fall into the very pit I have digged for Toulan! If the little Capet is fairly carried to a place of safety, and escapes out of the republic, Toulan can avenge himself by reporting the whole story and bringing me to misfortune. I must, therefore, while I am secure, take away from the fellow the means of betraying ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach

... too sure that it is impossible," replied I; "a horse once cleared the mouth of a chalk pit with me on its back, when I was a boy; Lawless remembers it." "Eh! what? Mad Bess!" returned Lawless; "I should think I did too; I rode there afterwards and examined the place—a regular break-neck-looking hole as ever I saw in my life. Tell ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... pure delight to Mr. and Mrs. W. Keyse. The Waterloo Arrival platform sent thrills through their boot-soles to the roots of their hair. They sat in the Pit at the Oxford that night, and there was a South African sketch on with two of the chronic-est jossers you ever see, gassing away in khaki behind earthworks of sacks stuffed with straw, and standing up to chuck sentimental ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... brush of the broom and then pad the hollow part with cotton batting, covering it with a piece of cloth sewed in place. Such a crutch does not heat the arm pit and there is an elasticity about it not to be had in the wooden crutch. The crutch can be made to fit either child or adult and owing to its cheapness, can be thrown away when no longer needed. —Contributed by Katharine ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... curved tiers. The operating pit paved with white tiles. The usual operating table has been pushed to one side, and in place of it there is a small glass-topped bedside table. On it, a large roll of aseptic cotton, several pads of gauze, a basin of bichloride, ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken

... made the house of Dogon to shake from its very foundation; and the hopes of the lords of the Philistines even while their hearts were merry, and when they were anticipating the joy of plundering this continent, were at that very time buried in the pit they had digged. The People shouted; and their shout was heard to the distant end of this Continent. In each Colony they deliberated and resolved, and every Stampman trembled; and swore by his Maker, that he would never execute a commission which he ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams

... before him, and his Butler at the Head of his Footmen in the Rear, we convoy'd him in safety to the Play-house, where, after having marched up the Entry in good order, the Captain and I went in with him, and seated him betwixt us in the Pit. As soon as the House was full, and the Candles lighted, my old Friend stood up and looked about him with that Pleasure, which a Mind seasoned with Humanity naturally feels in its self, at the sight of a Multitude of People who seem pleased with one another, and partake of the same common Entertainment. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... me no light on the formation of this world, which is not a shapeless mass of a philosophical abstraction called matter, but a regular and beautiful building, composed of a great variety of matters. Was it so from eternity? No man who was ever in a quarry, or a gravel pit, will say so, much less one who has the least smattering of chemistry or geology. Do you assert the eternity of the fifty-seven single substances, either separate or combined in some other way than we now find them in the rocks, and rivers, and atmosphere of the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... abominably. For two years he had contrived to hide his secret. He had marched, counter-marched, fed, slept, and fought with his comrades; had dodged with them behind cover, loaded, fired, charged with them; had behaved outwardly like a decent soldier, but almost always with a sickening void in the pit of the stomach. Once or twice in particularly bad moments he had caught himself blubbering, and with a deadly shame. He had not an idea that at least a dozen of his comrades—among them Dave and Teddy—had seen it, and thought ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... forty guineas by opening his box door and allowing those in the lobbies to take a peep for a guinea apiece. We made an attempt on Saturday to get into the pit, but it was quite impossible. I would not for the world but have been here during the fever, although what many people complain of is very true, that it spoils all conversation and society, and ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley

... lean over him and put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar. It expressed Frescobaldi's conception of a derrick, and a touch of nature had been added in the flame of brandy, which burned luridly up from a small pit in the centre of the base, and represented the gas in combustion as it issued from the ground. Fulkerson burst into a roar of laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi's personal tribute to Dryfoos. Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, while he explained the work of sinking ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... agreeably to the Vicar's argument and my own inclination, it is a great question whether the plague would not have proved too strong for Betty Nasroth, and her prediction gone to lie with me in a death-pit. As things befell, I lived, hearing only dimly and, as it were, from afar-off of that great calamity, and of the horrors that beset the city. For the disease did not come our way, and we moralised on the sins of the townsfolk with sound bodies and ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope

... lilies of France on his shield. But let us on to the sweets, for we have dined well, and need a toothsome morsel. If you could see, mon vieux, and had set eyes on her, I should have my doubts of you also, for she is as the fairy light that draws the unwary into the Pit of Death. Can you guess? No! Then I will tell you. What think you of the Demoiselle de Paradis? Yes! Hiss, hiss! Sus, sus! On ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats

... behind the structure was the smoking hut, or defumador, as it is called. Inside this are a number of sticks inclined in pyramid form and covered with palm-leaves. In the floor a hole was dug for the fire that serves for coagulating the rubber-milk. Over this pit is hung a sort of frame for guiding the heavy stick employed in the smoking of the rubber. At this time the process had not become for me the familiar story that it was destined to be. Beneath the hut were several unfinished paddles and a canoe under construction. The latter are invariably ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange

... exercise such as only boys, at that time, were accustomed to. She became expert in rowing, riding, skating and shooting, developed great endurance, filled her room with snakes and insects and birds' nests, and in a clay pit at the end of her father's garden modelled rude ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... middling sort of people, as citizens, their wives and daughters, and other jilts. The boxes are filled with lords and ladies, who give money to see their follies exposed by fellows as wicked as themselves. And the pit, which lively represents the pit of hell, is crammed with those insignificant animals called beaux, whose character nothing but wonder and shame can compose; for a modern beau, you must know, is a pretty, neat, fantastic outside of a man, a well-digested bundle of costly ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... darkness in the woods is the darkness of the pit itself. She found a fallen tree, and climbed on it to rest and think. Night in gloomy places brings an eerie feeling sometimes to the bravest—dormant sense impressions, running back to the cave age and beyond, become active, ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... for 'em, waitin'. Of course the New York parties who helped Robert, policemen, doctors, and nurses, thought very little of it, it wuz so common, all over the land, they said, such things was happening all the time from the same cause. And we knew it well, we knew of the wide open pit, veiled with tempting covering, wove by Selfishness and Greed, scattered over with flimsy flowers of excuse, palliation, expediency that tempts and engulfs our brightest youth, the noblest manhood, old and young, rich ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... purpose of the text are somewhat obscure. It is one of a string of proverb-like sayings which all seem to be illustrations of the one thought that every kind of work has its own appropriate and peculiar peril. So, says the Preacher, if a man is digging a pit, the sides of it may cave in and he may go down. If he is pulling down a wall he may get stung. If he is working in a quarry there may be a fall of rock. If he is a woodman the tree he is felling ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... caper in connection with taking snap shots these days is to buy a developing outfit and upset the household from pit to dome while you are squeezing out pictures of every dearly beloved friend ...
— Get Next! • Hugh McHugh

... I dream that I should bring such a blow upon you, my best friend, my guardian angel! I have come to tell you that your friend is ruined, that he is falling into the pit, and would not drag you down with him, but save me... no! even you cannot save me. I should push you away; I am ruined, Tatyana, I am ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... that uncontrollable appetite for enjoyments which should be the prerogative of men endowed with giant powers; the men who feel the need of counterbalancing their gigantic labors by pleasures which bring one-sided mortals to the pit. ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac

... young man, and right glad am I to find one who thinks with me. For the other practices, they are none of mine, and is it not written 'In the same pit which they laid privily is ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... In a pit about eight feet deep, twenty feet long, and ten feet wide, laid up on the sides with stones, a fire of hickory had been made, over which, after the wood had burned down to coals, a whole ox, divested of its hide and entrails, had been suspended on an enormous spit. Being turned ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore









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