"Droppings" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... formed of what any soil in this country would produce until it had been properly worked, dressed, cleansed, and purged of that sour quality that was naturally inherent in it, which it derived from the droppings of wet from the leaves of gum and other trees, and which were known to be of an ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... pine overlooking the fern-covert. Lady Blandish was recumbent upon the brown pine-droppings, gazing through a vista of the lower greenwood which opened out upon the moon-lighted valley, her hands clasped round one knee, her features almost stern in their ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Lemnian caves of fire The mate of her who nursed Desire Moulded the glowing steel to form Arrows for Cupid thrilling warm; While Venus every barb imbues With droppings of her honeyed dews; And Love (alas the victim heart) Tinges with gall ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... carrying with him a tomahawk, I remember, he led us down across the sand to where the ship lay, so deeply bedded that one stepped over her rail as it might have been the coaming of a hatch. Her deck, and indeed every uncovered part of the Livorno, was encrusted in the droppings of multitudinous sea-fowl. For almost as many years as I had lived, probably, these creatures had made a home of the derelict. To be sure, they had as good a right to it as we had; yet I remember how keenly we resented ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... be prepared for now. The first step towards success is to accumulate a long heap of horse-droppings with the least possible amount of litter. Let this ferment moderately, and turn it two or three times, always making a long heap of it, which keeps down the fermentation. When the fire is somewhat taken out of it, make up the bed with a mixture of about four parts of the fermented ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... them with mats. Take them back to the house before the buds begin to move. Shape the trees in winter, and summer prune as may be necessary. They require syringing as well as rich feeding when carrying a crop. A mixture of poultry droppings or night soil (half a barrowful) added to the same amount of sifted soil and of wood ashes, with a peck of soot and a peck of bone dust, all made into a compost a few days before use, is a strong surface-dressing. ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum
... They breed in filth, human waste, animal droppings, decayed animal or vegetable matter, and are so made that they carry filth wherever they go. Since the fly alights wherever it pleases, it carries dirt from outside and ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... cramped, twisting thoroughfare was full of people like this; they overflowed from the single narrow border of pavement to the left and walked indifferently upon the road among the straw-scatterings and the dung-droppings; and when the tramcar swept through and past with prodigious whistlings and ringings, they swerved as little as possible aside, for three parts of the tide of them were neither white nor black, but many shades ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... acceptable to him: For a waxen taper, which they had lighted up before the coffin, and which naturally must have burnt out within ten hours, lasted eighteen days entire, burning day and night; and it was observed, that the droppings of the wax weighed more than the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... tomb her form she flung, and pour'd Her tears in floods upon the graven lines: And with her bosom bar'd, the cold stone warm'd. His sisters' love their fruitless offerings bring, Their griefs and briny droppings; cruel tear Their beauteous bosoms; while they loudly call Phaeton, deaf to all their mournful cries. Stretch'd on his tomb, by night, by day they call'd. Till Luna's circle four times fill'd was seen; Their blows still given as 'custom'd, (use had made Their ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... recent, the sand may sometimes, where it is very loose and dry, be seen running back into the tracks, and by following them to a place where they cross water, the earth will be wet for some distance after they leave it. The droppings of the dung from animals are also good indications of the age of a trail. It is well to remember whether there have been any rains within a few days, as the age of a trail may sometimes be conjectured in this way. It is very easy to tell whether tracks have been made before or ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... place. These roosting places are always in the wood, and sometimes occupy a large extent of forest. When they have frequented one of these places for some time, the appearance it exhibits is surprising. The ground is covered to the depth of several inches with their droppings; all the tender grass and underwood destroyed; the surface strewed with large limbs of trees, broken down by the weight of the birds clustering one above another, and the trees themselves, for thousand of acres, killed ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... circumspectly down the trail, staying a little off it, studying tracks and droppings, noticing evidences of browsing on the shrubs—mostly old—pausing to examine tufts of hair and an occasional feather. Halfway down the slope he flushed a bird about ptarmigan-size, grayish brown ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... And in the porches of my ears did pour The leperous distilment; whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That, swift as quicksilver, it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body; And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood; so did it mine; And a most instant tetter bark'd about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust All my smooth body. Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand, Of life, of crown, of queen, at ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... pensioner who wore a white cap, drew her money from the Court, and expended it here, and a feeble, gouty old sailor who had bidden the sea farewell. Out in the street, on the sharp-edged cobble-stones, the sparrows were clamoring loudly, lying there with puffed-out feathers, feasting among the horse-droppings, tugging at them and scattering them about to the accompaniment of a storm ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... growing by the wall. Make a summerhouse here. Scarlet runners. Virginia creepers. Want to manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur. All soil like that without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this that is? The hens in the next garden: their droppings are very good top dressing. Best of all though are the cattle, especially when they are fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Best thing to clean ladies' kid gloves. Dirty cleans. Ashes too. Reclaim the whole place. Grow peas in that corner there. Lettuce. Always ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... copper, supporting a crooked mirror in a frame of which the gilding had turned black. In a line with the bed-room was the oratory, a little room with bare walls; in the corner stood a heavy case for holding sacred pictures, and on the floor lay the scrap of carpet, worn threadbare, and covered with droppings from wax candles, on which Glafira Petrovna used to ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... now take it, and that of truth, into observation that, until the tenth of her reign, the times were calm and serene, though sometimes overcast, as the most glorious sun-rising is subject to shadowings and droppings, for the clouds of Spain, and the vapours of the Holy League, began to disperse and threaten her felicity. Moreover, she was then to provide for some intestine strangers, which began to gather in the heart of her kingdom, all which had relation and correspondency, each one to the other, to dethrone ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... he peeled off his outer clothes and lay on the floor in front of the range. It threw out a violent heat, but not too much for him; he luxuriated, basked in it, delighting in the rosy patches that grew on the stove's rusty surface, the bright droppings from its grate. Holding his stiff feet out to it, he cooked himself, stretching and turning like a cat. Finally, he lay quiet, his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes touching points that the red light played upon, and listened ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... to it the gull flapped its wings and flew away and she saw that the thing was not a stone but the figure-head of a ship, the form of a woman with ample breasts, broken and scarred by years of weather and stained with the droppings of gulls. The arms were gone, but the great face remained almost in its entirety staring away across ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... left his gloves behind where he sat in his chair, and hath sent me to fetch them; it is such an old snudge, he'll not lose the droppings ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... the dead: White milk, and lucid honey, pure-distill'd By the wild bee—that craftsman of the flowers; The limpid droppings of the virgin fount, And this bright liquid from its mountain mother Born fresh—the joy of the time—hallowed vine; The pale-green olive's odorous fruit, whose leaves Live everlastingly—and these wreathed flowers, The smiling ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... or farther, the fall comes. To live, we have to descend, often very low, alas! The Crested Lark crumbles the mule-droppings in the road and thus picks up his food, the oaten grain which he would never find by soaring in the sky, his throat swollen with song. We have to descend; the stomach's inexorable claims demand it. The Spiderling, therefore, touches land. ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... islands off the coast of Peru that had beds of guano, often 100 ft. thick, due to the droppings of penguins and other sea birds, now all but, if not ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... edges of which my mule maliciously walked as though to mark them out with her shoes—we arrived, by an almost perpendicular descent, at the end of our journey. It was a vast desert of rocks, absolutely bare, all white with the droppings of gulls and sea-fowl, for the sea is at the bottom, quite near, and the silence of the place was broken only by the flow of the waves and the shrill cries of the wheeling circles of birds. My ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... the human, With his droppings of warm tears, And his touches of things common Till they rose to touch the spheres! Our Theocritus, our Bion, And our Pindar's shining goals!— These were cup-bearers undying, Of the wine ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... together, as my fortune was, Watching folk's faces to know who will fling The bit of half-stripped grape-bunch he desires, 115 And who will curse or kick him for his pains— Which gentleman processional and fine, Holding a candle to the Sacrament, Will wink and let him lift a plate and catch The droppings of the wax to sell again, 120 Or holla for the Eight and have him whipped— How say I?—nay, which dog bites, which lets drop His bone from the heap of offal in the street— Why, soul and sense of him ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... provincial school. Rodolphe, who was the child of prodigality, always spent his allowance in four days; and, not choosing to abandon his holy but not very profitable profession of elegiac poet, lived for the rest of the month on the rare droppings from the basket of Providence. This long Lent had no terrors for him; he passed through it gaily, thanks to his stoical temperament and to the imaginary treasures which he expended every day while waiting for the first of the month, that Easter which terminated his fast. He lived ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... stumbling, jades will mend their pace. What crowds of these, impenitently bold, In sounds and jingling syllables grown old, Still run on poets, in a raging vein, Even to the dregs and squeezings of the brain, Strain out the last dull droppings of their sense, And rhyme with all the rage ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... the rusty evidences acrosss the narrow muddy ditch of cow-droppings that had once been a High Street. He was clearly disposed to be sceptical, and yet there the ruins were! He grappled with ideas beyond the strength ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... their adventure, told them that, in her young days, she and her female companions were once returning home from a grand festival, and adopted another plan for ascertaining if they were all together. Gathering some of the cattle-droppings, they kneaded them into a cake, in which they each made a mark with the tip of the nose, and then counted the marks—a plan which the Gooroo and his disciples should make use of ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... became evident to little William that the albacores had sought the companionship of the Catamaran less from the idea of obtaining any droppings there might be from her decks, than as a protection against their formidable pursuer,—the sword-fish. Indeed, this is most probably the reason why not only the albacores and their kindred the bonitos, but several other kinds of ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... large number of them were constantly on the wing, showing against the sky light as if they were leaving the chimney. But they did not leave it. They rose up a few feet and then resumed their positions upon the sides, and it was this movement that caused the humming sound. All the while the droppings of the birds came down like a summer shower. At the bottom of the shaft was a mine of guano three or four feet deep, with a dead swift here and there upon it. Probably one or more birds out of such a multitude died every night. I had fancied there would be many more. It was a long time before ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... germination; because if birds devoured them prematurely the seed would fall inert. But simultaneously come the ripeness and the soft sweet pulp, and the rich colouring, so that the birds may be attracted to eat the fruit, and spread the seed in their droppings. Zeuxis, a famous Sicilian painter four hundred years before Christ, depicted currants and grapes with such fidelity that birds came and tried to peck them ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... she heaps up, in the uninhabited vestibule, a conglomeration of rubbish, whatever chance may offer in the neighbourhood of the nest: little pieces of gravel, bits of earth, grains of sawdust, particles of mortar, cypress-catkins, broken leaves, dry Snail-droppings and any other material that comes her way. The pile, a real barricade this time, blocks the reed completely to the end, except about two centimetres (About three-quarters of an inch.—Translator's Note.) ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... quart pots to authorize it, it were sufficient This great Lorde, this worthie Lord, this noble Lord, thought no scorne (Lord haue mercy vpon vs) to haue his great veluet breeches larded with the droppings of this daintie liquor, & yet he was an olde senator, a cauelier of an ancient house, as it might appeare by the armes of his ancestrie, drawen very amiably in chalke, on the in side of his ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... candle, Alfaretta, while I unfasten the door," commanded the Madam, and the girl had to obey. But her hand shook so that she scattered "droppings," which even at that moment did not escape the mistress's critical eye and which would have to be cleaned up as ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... longer. Then pour off from the top as much of the whey as you can; tie up the curd in a linen cloth or bag, and hang it up to drain out the remainder of the whey; setting a pan under it to catch the droppings. After all the whey is drained out, put the curd into the cheese-tray, and cut it again into slices; chop it coarse; put a cloth about it; place it in the cheese-hoop or mould, and set it in the screw press for half an hour, ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... animals for the building of their tissues, and another part goes in solution to the sea to be taken up by sea plants and animals. In places where the bones and excrements of land animals or the shells and droppings of sea animals accumulate, deposits of phosphatic material may be ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith |
