"Mud" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... preoccupation with permanency. Jerrybuilding, architectural mode since the first falsefront was erected over the first smalltown store, practically disappeared. The skyscrapers were no longer steel skeletons with thin facings of stone hung upon them like a slattern's apron, while the practice of daubing mud on chickenwire hastily laid over paper was discontinued. Everyone wanted to build for all time, even though the Grass might seize upon their effort next week. In New York the Cathedral of St John the Divine was finally completed and a new ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... that died in the last than the flame we light in the lamp to-day is the same that went out yesternight. It is as if a stone were thrown into a pool—that is the life, the splash of the stone; all that remains, when the stone lies resting in the mud and weeds below the waters of forgetfulness, are the circles ever widening on the surface, and the ripples never dying, but only spreading farther and farther away. All this seemed to me a mystery such as I could ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... ideally convenient arrangement (particularly for ladies) to have to climb into a motor, by means of a ladder, over the back! I understood that though Broughton's design had all sorts of capital new arrangements with regard to cushions and clocks and looking-glasses, and mud-guards, he had, most unfortunately, quite ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... major. "Better let the mud dry, it will come off much better then. A hyena once served me the same. I didn't mind that, though all the fellows cracked their waistbands laughing at me. Why shouldn't piggy have his fun as well as another—eh, Mark? Come ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... hero hired a hand cart he saw in a blacksmith's yard labeled "For Sale." He drove it as near to the swamp island as he could, without getting stuck in the mud. Then, he called to Hiram, who put himself in wading trim. The empty gasoline cans were over to the cart by Hiram. Dave trundled them to the town, got them filled and to the island, and, returning the cart, was ready to prepare ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... encumbered the streets so that it was hard to pick our way through. The smell of decaying bodies tainted the air. The fields had been inundated in the valleys; the water was subsiding; here and there corpses lay in the mud. Old trenches everywhere; thousands of rudely heaped graves, marked by two crossed sticks; miles on miles of rusty barbed-wire defenses, with dead cows or horses entangled in them, slowly rotting, haunted by the ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... him to Lafayette and informed the mud- covered gentleman that he could get a train from that city to Chicago at ...
— The Day of the Dog • George Barr McCutcheon
... quarter of barley, beans, peas, and oats 11/2d. A master carpenter, 3d. a day, other carpenters, 2d. A master mason, 4d. a day, other masons, 3d., and their servants, 11/2d. Tilers, 3d., and their "knaves," 11/2d. Thatchers, 3d a day, and their knaves, 11/2. Plasterers, and other workers of mud walls, and their knaves, in like manner, without meat or drink; and this from Easter to Michaelmas; and from that time less, according to the direction ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Sunday, Dalaber rose at five o'clock, and as soon as he could leave the Hall, hastened off to his rooms at Gloucester. The night had been wet and stormy, and his shoes and stockings were covered with mud. The college gates, when he reached them, were still closed, an unusual thing at that hour; and he walked up and down under the walls in the bleak grey morning, till the clock struck seven, "much disquieted, his head full of forecasting cares," but resolved, like a brave man, that come ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... they shone forth in strange colors, and took the form of hieroglyphics. It was the mummy case on which I gazed. At last it burst, and forth stepped the thousand years' old king, the mummy form, black as pitch, black as the shining wood-snail, or the slimy mud of the swamp. Whether it was really the mummy or the Marsh King I know not. He seized me in his arms, and I felt as if I must die. When I recovered myself, I found in my bosom a little bird, flapping its wings, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... that shines over all the tales, the folklore simplicity with which 'a man or a woman' are spoken of without further identification, the love—one might almost say the lust—for the qualities of brute materials, the hardness of wood, and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man—these influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... betook ourselves to our books and papers, with a sense of unusual depression in the atmosphere. It was a gray, dull, cheerless afternoon, and more than one of us, looking out at the mud bank, which, at low water, then occupied the space now laid out as gardens, wondered how River Hall, desolate, tenantless, uninhabited, looked under that sullen sky, with the murky river flowing onward, day and night, day ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... replied Aubrey, "Most assuredly I am! I love and honour Christ with every fibre of my being. I long to see that Divine Splendour of the ages stand out white and shining and free from the mud and slime with which His priests have bespattered Him. I believe in Him absolutely! But I can find nowhere in His Gospel that He wished us to turn Religion into a sort of stock-jobbing company managed ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... midst of the battle, and no certain intelligence was afterward received of him. It is true that some Moslems found his favorite steed, a milk-white horse, bearing a saddle of gold, sparkling with rubies, plunged in the mud of the river, as also one of his sandals, adorned with rubies and emeralds, but the other was never found; nor was Roderic, although diligently searched for, ever discovered either dead or alive, a circumstance which led the Moslems to believe that he ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... based upon physical grounds. The river Acheloues, running between Acarnania and AEtolia, and flowing into the Ionian Sea, carried with it a great quantity of sand and mud, which probably formed the islands at its mouth, called the Echinades. The same solution probably applies to the narrative of the fate of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... thoughts. Most lives, though their stream is loaded with sand and turbid with alluvial waste, drop a few golden grains of wisdom as they flow along. Oftentimes a single cradling gets them all, and after that the poor man's labor is only rewarded by mud and worn pebbles. All which proves that I, as an individual of the human family, could write one novel or story at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... broke they were still in Germany, but near the frontier, and in a sparsely peopled district. They were both nearly dead-beat, covered with mud from head to foot, and with their clothes torn half off their backs. It seemed a risky business to let themselves be seen anywhere in that condition, but finally Max chose a lonely farm-house, and, after cleaning himself up as much as possible, managed to make a purchase of a ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... unconcerned about his weapon, were pressing him with weapons of their own, which he was much more anxious to avoid than they his missiles. These were two pairs of very dirty hands filled and covered with liquid mud with which the damsels attempted to decorate his person. Okoya was clearly on the defensive, and the advantage so far seemed on the side of his aggressors. Shyuote flew to his assistance. Rushing to a large vessel of burnt clay, standing alongside the wall and filled ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... some built for me. The day they arrived, much to my disappointment, I found the trousers were made of white canvas. Their newness was appalling and I pictured myself in them with feelings of dismay. I robbed them of their whiteness that night by mopping up a lot of mud with them behind the gymnasium. When they had dried—by morning—they looked like a pair of ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... forth and worship. I find a sweetness in the aching dreariness of Sabbath afternoons in genteel suburbs—in the evil-laden desolateness of waste places by the river, when the yellow fog is stealing inland across the ooze and mud, and the black tide gurgles softly round ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... halting-place in whose course was marked by graves, and from which the living emerged 'gaunt and haggard, marching with a listless air, their clothing stiff with dried perspiration, their faces thick with a mud of dust and sweat through which their red bloodshot eyes looked forth, many suffering from heat prostration,' dwells in the memory of British India as the 'death march,' and its horrors have been recounted in vivid ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... rascals! Would you have me expose the fulness of my plumes to the inclemency of the rainy season, and let the mud receive the impression of my shoes? Begone; take away ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... and masonry as that green net did obviously works in dimensions of which we've never dreamed. The only thing we're sure of is that we were brought to this purple world deliberately and intentionally by an intelligent being of some kind, scooped up like tadpoles from a mud-puddle and dumped here in this elaborate enclosure It had already ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... garments, so that it resembled a Cossack prince—all ermine and vermin. Its narrow streets, huddled between strong walls, were over-run with pigs and chickens and filled with refuse. They were often ill-paved, flooded with mud and slush in winter. Moreover they were dark and dangerous at night, infested with princes and young nobles on a spree and ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... unable to push off, and asked her to help, so she stood up and, with the other oar, moved to assist him. The shifting of her weight must have loosened the boat, as at that very moment her brother gave a shove and they shot off the mud with a lurch, sending her with great violence into the bottom of ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... emeralds. I want something more than troops of beautiful slaves, music and dances. I want Europe to talk of me. I am wearied of hearing nothing but Ibrahim Pasha, Louis Philippe, and Palmerston. I, too, can make combinations; and I am of a better family than all three, for Ibrahim is a child of mud, a Bourbon is not equal to a Shehaab, and Lord Palmerston only sits in the Queen's second chamber of council, as I well know from an Englishman who was at Beiroot, and with whom I have formed some political relations, of which perhaps ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... requisite during the performance of so long a journey through a thinly-inhabited region. The upper garment scarcely covered the knee, over which stockings of red cloth were seen, reaching half-way up the thigh; round the leg were bandages or cross-garterings well bespattered with mud; low boots or buskins protected the feet and ankles; to these spurs were fastened, the head being spear-shaped and something crooked in the shank. His beard was forked, and this appendage, apparently the result of a careful and anxious cultivation, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... brilliant sky we steamed steadily up the mighty river; the sunset was glorious as we leaned on the port railing; and after nightfall the moon, nearly full and hanging high in the heavens, turned the water to shimmering radiance. On the mud-flats and sandbars, and among the green rushes of the bays and inlets, were stately water-fowl; crimson flamingoes and rosy spoonbills, dark- colored ibis and white storks with black wings. Darters, with snakelike necks and pointed ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... proximity of so strong a force. The great difficulty was to discover a way of getting from Pehtang on to some of the main roads leading to the Peiho; for the whole of the surrounding country had been under water, and was more or less impassable. In fact, the region round Pehtang consisted of nothing but mud, while the one road, an elevated causeway, was blocked by the fortified camp just mentioned as having been discovered by the reconnoitering party. A subsequent reconnaissance, conducted by Colonel (now Lord) Wolseley, revealed the presence of a cart-track which might prove ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... dying with envy, the victim of jealousy. She is a hundred leagues lower in society than her sister. They renounce each other as they both renounced their father. Madame de Nucingen would lap up all the mud between the Rue Saint-Lazare and the Rue de Crenelle to gain admission to my salon." What the duchesse did not reveal was that Anastasie had a lover, Count Maxime de Trailles, a gambler and a duellist. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... everything tight up there where my home is," returned Mrs. Quack. "He comes earlier up there and stays twice as long as he does here, and makes ten times as much ice and snow. We get most of our food in the water or in the mud under the water, as of course you know, and when the water is frozen, there isn't a scrap of anything we can get to eat. We just HAVE to come south. It isn't because we want to, but because we must! There is nothing ...
— The Adventures of Poor Mrs. Quack • Thornton W. Burgess
... factory, the workshop, the banks and offices. In the munition works, in the shipyards, in the engineering shops, in the aeroplane sheds, they work in tens of thousands—risking life and health in some cases, but thinking little of it, compared with what their men are doing, knee-deep in snow and mud and water in the trenches. "Is the work heavy?" you ask. "Not so heavy as the soldiers'." "Are the hours long?" "Six days and nights in the trenches are longer." "We are going to win and you are going to help us"—and the munition girl and the land ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... branches of a hemlock covering me. Happily they were but the lesser boughs, and not yet alight; and at his own desperate peril, Randolf came back with his axe, and cut them off, then dragged me after him into the mud. Never bath more welcome! We had to dispute it with buffaloes, deer, all the beasts of the wood, tame and cowed with terror, and through them we floundered on, the cold of the water to our bodies making the burning atmosphere the more intolerable round our heads. At last we came ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... waters; and which in consequence never require any fertilizer. [The carabao.] The carabao, the favorite domestic animal of the Malays, and which they keep especially for agricultural purposes, prefers these regions to all others. It loves to wallow in the mud, and is not fit for work unless permitted ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... a nursery in the spring should be unpacked immediately on arrival, the roots dipped in thin mud, then heeled in until permanently planted, even if the delay is but a ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... had been conducting the siege, that months and months must elapse ere the investment could be completed and the city surrounded by a ring of forts connected by a moat. Meanwhile the miserable Godons, up to the ears in mud and snow, were freezing in their wretched hovels,—mere shelters of wood and earth. If things went on thus they were in danger of being worse off and more starved than the besieged. Therefore, following the example of the late Earl, from time to time they tried ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... genuinely though gently pained that one should have stepped up to the ankles in mud on her account. As I have already said, except in the shop she had never before spoken to Mr. Wardour, and, although he had so simply responded to her exclamation, he did not even know who ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... garments. They squabbled among themselves and shambled listlessly along the narrow path that led past the row of shacks toward the commissary. The path was black with coal dust and slate dumped along the way to fill the mud holes. ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... wafer, fainted in the red wind of a summer morning as the two men leaped a ditch soft with mud. The wall was not high, the escape an easy one. Crouching, their clothes the colour of clay, they trod cautiously the trench, until opposite a wood whose trees blackened the slow dawn. Then, without a word, they ran across the road, and, in a few minutes, were lost in ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... brow, for they were recalling the most hateful memory of his life—a thought for which he felt he ought to die; but it passed almost instantly, and in the most prosaic tones he said, "Good friends, I'm hungry. I've splashed through Virginia mud twelve mortal hours to-day. Grace, be prepared for such havoc as only a cavalryman can make. We don't get such fare as this at ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... be maintained; also grand-guards and pickets around the front and flanks of the whole army. The freezing and thawing and the constant moving of supply trains caused deep mud in the roads and camps. The brigade commanders of the Third Corps, and of other corps as well, were, alternately, detailed as corps officer-of-the-day, the duties of which lasted twenty-four hours, and required the officer to ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... including mirrors, combs, and even wigs and wig boxes, as well as a glass tube for stibium or eye paint. There are ivory pillows or head rests, models of the ghostly boats of the underworld, and a vast variety of children's toys, including wooden dolls with strings of mud beads to represent hair, porcelain elephants, and wooden cats; and there are children's balls made of blue glazed porcelain, and of leather stuffed with chopped straw. There are many games and amusements, such as stone draught ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... charming sketch you're making. You take that ordinary common grey from the palette, and it becomes beautiful. If I were to take the very same tint, and put it on the paper, it would be mud.' ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... range of mountains that intersects the island, and surrounded by walls, in the form of a hexagon, flanked with bastions, the capital has many fine houses; but these are mostly in ruins, and the inhabitants occupy tenements reared of mud and brick, and rather repulsive in appearance. At that time, however, the state of Nicosia was very different. As the capital of the Lusignans, the city exhibited the pomp and pride of feudal chivalry, with much of the splendour ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... rains set in," said Hooker, "and all operations were for a while suspended, the army literally finding itself buried in mud, from which there was no hope ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... caught at a thorough disadvantage; he was dripping with rain and covered with mud, and, confronted thus suddenly with the girl of whom his heart was full, his usual ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... cuisine, where lodged the cuisinier, mechanician, menusier, etc., who had made room for me (some ten days since) on their own initiative, thus saving me the humiliation of sleeping with nineteen Americans in a tent which was always two-thirds full of mud. Thither I led the tin-derby, who scrutinised everything with surprising interest. I threw mes affaires hastily together (including some minor accessories which I was going to leave behind, but which the t-d ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... Makar!" was Gubin's command, and once more I posted myself at the bottom of the well. About three sazheni in depth, and lined with cold, damp mud to above the level of my middle, the orifice was charged with a stifling odour both of rotten wood and of something more intolerable still. Also, whenever I had filled the pail with mud, and then emptied it into the bucket and shouted "Right away!" the ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... his call and all looked at the hat, which had been lying in the mud at the side of the pool. Then a match was struck, and all gazed around and into the pool while this faint illumination lasted. No other trace of the missing ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)
... morning, through mud, through mire, they came to our cottage. The poor princess was forced to change shoes and stockings. M. de Lally is more accustomed to such expeditions. Nothing could be more sweet than they both were, nor ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... continued from the very date of the Peace even to this day, and every day growing more grievous, unless they endure patiently, unless they prostrate themselves and lie down to be trampled on and pushed into mud, their Religion itself forsworn, there impends over them the same calamity, the same havoc, which harassed and desolated them, with their wives and children, in so miserable a manner three years ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... clean a mud-stained habit is to dry it thoroughly and brush the mud off. Any white marks of perspiration from the horse which may remain after a skirt has been thoroughly brushed and beaten, may be removed by benzine collas, or cloudy ammonia diluted with water, or they may be sponged ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... so it seems—from its being a very rainy night in late October, and from young Kendrick's wearing an all-concealing motoring rain-coat and cap. He had been for a long drive into the country, and had just returned, mud-splashed, when his grandfather, having taken it into his head that a message must be delivered at once, requested his grandson ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... makes them willing too often to discharge their burden of attendance on these officious gentlemen. It is true, that the nauseousness of such company is enough to disgust a reasonable man; when he sees, he can hardly approach greatness, but as a moated castle; he must first pass through the mud and filth with which it is encompassed. These are they, who, wanting wit, affect gravity, and go by the name of solid men; and a solid man is, in plain English, a solid, solemn fool. Another disguise they have, (for fools, as well as ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... slightly nearer approach to the White Nile, coming out immediately opposite the fortified camp of Omdurman, which the Mahdi made his headquarters and capital after the famous siege of 1884. There was nothing attractive or imposing about Khartoum. It contained 3000 mud houses, and one more pretentious building in the Governor's official residence or palace, known as the Hukumdariaha. It is surrounded by a wall and ditch, except where the Blue Nile supplies the need; ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... of one row of miserable huts, sunk beneath the side of the road, the mud walls crooked in every direction; some of them opening in wide cracks, or zigzag fissures, from top to bottom, as if there had just been an earthquake—all the roofs sunk in various places—thatch off, or overgrown with grass—no chimneys, the smoke making its way through a hole in the roof, or ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... still. A few children were jumping over the mud-puddles, and an old washerwoman was putting a wooden vessel under the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... singing larks, hang white companies of chiding seagulls. Here at high tide extends a sheet of water large enough, when the wind blows up the estuary, to breed waves that break in foam and spray against the barges, while at the ebb acres of mud flats are disclosed on which the boats lean slanting till the flood lifts them again and makes them strain at the wheezing ropes that tie ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... Great rains and appalling mud and very limited communications have delayed the final battles of Tunisia. The Axis is reinforcing its strong positions. But I am confident that though the fighting will be tough, when the final Allied assault is made, the last vestige of Axis power will be ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... air, as well as the transparent, is in both cases saturated with aqueous vapor;—but also in both, observe, vapor that floats everywhere, as if you mixed mud with the sea; and it takes no shape anywhere: you may have it with calm, or with wind, it makes no difference to it. You have a nasty haze with a bitter east wind, or a nasty haze with not a leaf stirring, and you may have the clear blue vapor with a fresh rainy ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... door, which he did, for that purpose. On passing out the dead and wounded, I was insulted by the soldiery, and on my replying, was charged upon, and with difficulty escaped, without being butchered; they likewise insulted the wounded as I gave them up, and threw the dead down in the mud, and spurned at them in a very ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... across the country, and the monarch beguiled the weary hours as well as he could by watching this road from under the trees, to see if any soldiers came along. There was one troop that appeared, but it passed directly by, marching heavily through the mud and rain, the men intent, apparently, only on reaching their journey's end. When night came on, Richard Penderel returned, approaching cautiously, and, finding all safe, took the king into the house with him. They brought him to the fire, changed and dried his clothes, and gave ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... and takes a view of his book or map, which bids him be careful, in that place, to turn to the right-hand way. And had he not here been careful to look in his map, they had all, in probability, been smothered in the mud; for, just a little before them, and that at the end of the cleanest way too, was a pit, none knows how deep, full of nothing but mud, there made on purpose to destroy ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... once more, leant back, and looked out of the carriage window at the street all sloppy with mud, and the poor people seeming so miserable in the rain which had been falling ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... wife shrank back, but even in her shivering terror she noticed, as one notices small details in a time of peril, that his shoes were caked with red mud and that his every step left a wet track on the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... used in the platz when it does not storm; and the bands play choice overtures and selections from the operas in fine style. The bands are always preceded and followed by a great crowd as they march through the streets, people who seem to live only for this half hour in the day, and whom no mud or snow can deter from keeping up with the music. It is a little gleam of comfort in the day for the most wearied portion of the community: I mean those who ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud, mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Rastignac has enrolled himself,—the scamp will make his way!—Madame d'Aiglemont and her salon, the Lenoncourts, the Comtesse Ferraud, Madame d'Espard, the Nucingens, the Spanish ambassador, in short, all the cliques in society are flinging mud upon you. You are a bad man, a gambler, a dissipated fellow who has squandered his property. After paying your debts a great many times, your wife, an angel of virtue, has just redeemed your notes for one hundred thousand francs, although her property was separate from yours. ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... Name applied by bushmen in New Zealand to the insect Weta (q.v.). (2) A trunk embedded in the mud so as to move with the current—hence the name: a snag is fixed. (An American use of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... hats that are like nothing you ever saw, and very muddy streets, and there you have it. The 'ricksha men have their legs fitted with tight trousers and puttees to end them, and they are graceful. They run all day, through the mud and snow and wet in these things made of cotton cloth that are neither stockings nor shoes but both, and they stand about or sit on steps and wait, and yet they get through the day alive. I am distracted between the desire to ride in the baby cart and the fear of the language, mixed with the greater ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... Jacobin club form a group of "silly people" satisfied "that they were universal geographers because they had ridden post once or twice," and that they were politicians "because they had read 'The Four Sons of Aymon.'"[3393]—But, in this mud, spouting and spreading around in broad daylight, it is the ordinary scum of great cities which forms the grossest flux, the outcasts of every trade and profession, dissipated workmen of all kinds, the irregular and marauding troops of the social ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... was, it cleared the peril by an inch, and then, plunging on to the soft, rough track, capsized gently, mare and all, landing its three occupants a yard or two off with their noses in the mud. ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... of December. One day, after a walk and a tumble in the mud, Bonaparte returned and found a packet of English newspapers, which the Grand-Marshal translated to him. This occupied him till late, and he forgot his dinner in discussing their contents. After dinner had been served ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... to do anything, Eleanor," she said kindly. "I don't want you to make an effort to please me, only to be happy yourself. Why don't you try and see what you can do with this modeling clay? Just try making it up into mud pies, or anything." ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... the most strenuous winter that the writer has ever experienced: a dark, dreary winter of almost continuous rains, snowflakes, cold, mud and slush. Reading of the severity of English winters at a distance, I never could have realized that the life I have lived in England during the past four months was possible. An existence from which the sun's ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... example, he dragged the pole over in the opposite direction to that in which we had it bent, when I perforce followed with him, and the next moment we were dragging a great alligator through the wet moss and black mud, the creature making very little resistance, for it was on its back, this being the result of Morgan's last movement when he dragged ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... wagon, hain't no dray, Jes come to town wid a load o' hay. I hain't no cornfield to go to bed Wid a lot o' hay-seeds in my head. I'se a "round-town" Gent an' I don't choose To wuk in de mud, an' do widout shoes. ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... for its hippopotami, was reached in a short time, and we began to thread the jungle along its right bank until we were halted point-blank by a narrow sluice having an immeasurable depth of black mud. The difficulty presented by this was very grave, though its breadth was barely eight feet; the donkeys, and least of all the horses, could not be made to traverse two poles like our biped carriers, neither could they be driven ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... believe that there is some reason to fear it. Well, I must bestir myself this afternoon and get little Jem's Christmas cake packed up for him. He will enjoy it, if the blessed boy is not drowned in mud ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... from cutting my throat as I slept that evening. Afterwards a mere wave of the hand towards the whip made him move with alacrity. At the end of the journey, when I gave him a good "tip," he knelt down gallantly in the mud of Mustapha Pasha and kissed my hand and carried it ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... wot ses 'is mind an' never puts on no frills. 'Bus-conducting oughter be done by belted earls an' suchlike, it ain't a real man's job. Pore devils,' I ses, lookin' at 'em bouncin' along, doin' the pretty to all the nobs, wivout so much as puttin' their toe in the mud. 'Pore devils.'" ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... along the Pacific "Ring of Fire"; the country is subject to frequent and sometimes severe earthquakes; mud slides; tsunamis ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... sailor is there in the passage above quoted! Is there no remedy, and no physician for the frailties and degradations of poor Jack, who, whatever be his faults, 'leads the way aloft on dark and stormy nights?' 'If the constituents of London mud can be resolved, if the sand can be transformed into an opal,' to use the noble simile of a great living writer, 'and the water into a drop of dew or a star of snow, or a translucent crystal, and the soot into a ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... began. The moon rode high among fleecy clouds, but on either side of the road gulfs of darkness lay under motionless foliage. Sometimes the smoky light from the swaying lantern shone on a wet black branch, snapped by the gale and lying in the path, and Eleanor, seeing it, wedging her heels into the mud and sliding stones of the road, and straining backward between the shafts, would say, "A snake.... I must save Maurice." Sometimes she would hear, above the crunching of the wheels behind her, a faint noise in the undergrowth: a breaking ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... streets were too often littered with the refuse which careless householders, reckless of fines, flung into the open way. In wet weather the rain roared along the kennel, converting all the accumulated filth of the thoroughfare into loathsome mud. The gutter-spouts, which then projected from every house, did not always cast their cataracts clear of the pavement, but sometimes soaked the unlucky passer-by who had not kept close to the wall. Umbrellas were the exclusive privilege of women; men never thought ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... mud cabin on the Curragh, not a hundred miles from here. My father was kill . . . but never mind about that now. When he left us it was middling hard collar work, I can tell you—what with me working the bit of a croft and ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... History of Massachusetts; the manuscript shared the fate of its {92} author's chairs and tables, and went with them out into the gutter. It was picked up, preserved, and exists to this day, its pages blackened with the Boston mud. Many papers and records of the province which Hutchinson had in his care for the purpose of ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... shots in the Co. Our rapid firing often aroused the settlers, and they began to talk about us saying "we were growing up to be outlaws." This greatly pleased us. Just befor I was nine years old my folks got it into their heads to send me to school agin, thinking I might be Henry Clay or Govener Mud or some other larkie—as usual I raked up a row and the teacher had us expelled for carrying six ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... EEL.—These are usually in mud, among weeds, under roots or stumps of trees, or in holes in the banks or the bottoms of rivers. Here they often grow to an enormous size, sometimes weighing as much as fifteen or sixteen pounds. They seldom come forth ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... always endeavour to choose the best places of the fell—those that are most inaccessible to the fox and are best protected against bad weather. Among the birds of the north the kittiwake is the best builder; for its nest is walled with straw and mud, and is very firm. It juts out like a great swallow's nest from the little ledge to which it is fixed. Projecting ends of straw are mostly bent in, so that the nest, with its regularly rounded form, has a very tidy appearance. The interior is further lined with a soft, carefully arranged ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... the wide forest, was our young man's instant determination. But before he started there was something else he thought of. He took off his coat, and with a bunch of leaves he brushed it. Then he arranged the plumes of his hat and brushed some mud from them, gave himself a general shake, and was ready to make a start. All this by a fugitive pursued by savage pirates on a desert island! But Dickory was a young man, and he wore the ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... log-road. Louder and louder the terrific yells of the outlaws and savages rang out on our flanks; I saw our soldiers in the ravine running frantically in all directions, falling on the log-road, floundering waist-deep in the water and mud, slipping, stumbling, staggering; while faster and faster cracked the hidden rifles, and the pitiless bullets pelted them from the ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... somewhat of a disappointment. Soerine was not what they had expected her to be, and her home was not up to much. As far as Granny found out from Ditte's description, it was more like a mud-hut, which had been given the name of dwelling-house, barn, etc. In no way could it be compared with the hut on ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... size, and children in nothing else. They congregate together in sober little groups, and hold mysterious conversations, in a dialect which we cannot understand. If they ever do tumble down, soil their pinafores, throw stones, or make mud pies, they practise these juvenile vices in a midnight secrecy which no ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... didn't know Jean. When she saw that great fat man abusing her brother and tracking mud all over her kitchen floor at the same time, instead of being frightened, as she should have been, Jean shook her cooking-fork at Angus Niel and stamped her foot ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... untoward event was imputed to supernatural causes. Did the butter or soap delay its coming, the churn and the kettle were bewitched. Did the chimney refuse to draw, witches were blowing down the smoke. Did the loaded cart get stuck in the mud, invisible hands were holding it. Did the cow's milk grow scant, the imps had been sucking her. Did the sick child cry, search was made for the witches' pins. Were its sufferings relieved by death, glances were cast ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... Shrinking from view, his wasting form he laid, Or to the restless sea and roaring wind Gave the strong yearnings of a ruined mind; On the broad beach, the silent summer day, Stretched on some wreck, he wore his life away; Or where the river mingles with the sea, Or on the mud-bank by the elder tree, Or by the bounding marsh-dyke, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Whitehaven. The tide was out. They lay completely helpless, clear of water, and grounded. They were sooty in hue. Their black yards were deeply canted, like spears, to avoid collision. The three hundred grimy hulls lay wallowing in the mud, like a herd of hippopotami asleep in the alluvium of the Nile. Their sailless, raking masts, and canted yards, resembled a forest of fish-spears thrust into those same hippopotamus hides. Partly flanking one side of ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... old days in Virginia, when mud a foot deep, with the rain dashing in our faces, was what we had for weeks at a time. This couch doesn't equal a feather ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... could reach cover the clouds broke over our heads, drenching the poor coolies to the skin, but they took it in good part, laughing as they scuttled along the trail. The rain kept on for some hours, and the road was alternately a brook or a sea of slippery red mud; the pony, with the cook on his back, rolled over, but fortunately neither was hurt; coolies slid and floundered, and the chair-men went down, greatly to their confusion, for it is deemed inexcusable for a ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... Bell presulis en tenet ossa Duresme dud[u] prior his post pontificat[u] Gessit atq' renuit primum super o[m]ia querit Dispiciens mud[u] ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... arable land, and was ploughed up with the rest of the field every autumn, after which it was trodden out afresh. The thaw had so loosened the soft earth, that lumps of stiff mud were lifted by his feet at every leap he took, and flung against him by his rapid motion, as it were doggedly impeding him, and increasing tenfold the ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... which $500 worth of paid-for advertisements wouldent bring 'em. And their church stock goes up to 200 per cent. above par. Big crowds rush to hear the guzzlin divine extort. And, sir! before you know it, that preacher is richer'n mud, and just as likely as not, owns stock in a race-course or a lager-bier brewery. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... M. Am. Soc. C. E.—The speaker would like to know whether anything has been done in the United States toward utilizing marsh mud for fuel. ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... fallen upon the member from New York. The gentleman took it seriously, and it has given his strut additional pomposity. The resemblance is great. It is striking. Hyperion to a satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dung-hill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion. Shade of the mighty Davis, forgive the almost profanation ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... a score of years ago a group of children huddled about the pot-bellied stove in a little log church in the mountains of Georgia. They had trudged through snow and mud and a cold, biting wind to reach this one-room church house. Though the older folk were eager to teach the children lessons of Scripture, few of them could read or write. A mountain child, like every other child, delights in hearing an older person read, ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... feet above the stream and about 8 feet above the bottom land below it. This is the first considerable area of bottom land in the canyon. The cist is 2 feet square inside and occupies the whole width of the rock. An exceptionally large amount of mud plaster was used on the walls, which are better finished outside than inside. Access was had by hand-holes in the rock, now almost obliterated. Originally the structure consisted of two ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... flight, as he said, is winged in a lower region of the air. As the traveller stands on the noble bridge that now spans the valley of the Avon, he may recall Burke's local comparison of these busy, angry familiars of an election, to the gulls that skim the mud of the river when it is exhausted of its tide. He gave his new friends a more important lesson, when the time came for him to thank them for the honour which they had just conferred upon him. His colleague had opened the subject of the relations between ...
— Burke • John Morley
... steamer stopped at last, her screw whirled up from the bottom clouds of yellow mud, the mingled deposits of the Caroni and the Orinoco. In half an hour more we were on shore, amid Negroes, Coolies, Chinese, French, Spaniards, short-legged ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... hair on the back of a dog, long before any other dogs are in sights. And, indeed, the case is much that of a country dog come to town, so that growls are in order at every corner. The only being in the universe at which I have ever snarled, or with which I have rolled over in the mud and fought like a common ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... She did not answer immediately. Somerfield was coming towards them, his pink coat splashed with mud, his face scratched, and a very distinct frown upon his forehead. She looked away from him to the Prince. Their eyes met for ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... this thicket there was a broad ditch, with more mud and dead fern in it than water, a ditch strongly suspected of snakes, and beyond the ditch the fence that enclosed Squire Tempest's domain—an old manor house in the heart of the New Forest. It had been an abbey before the Reformation, and ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... formed; the clay out of which it is fabricated." We find him next in Jeremiah's "Arise and go down unto the Potter's house," etc. (xviii. 2), and lastly in Romans (ix. 20), "Hath not the potter power over the clay?" No wonder that the first Hand who moulded the man-mud is a lieu commun in Eastern thought. The "waste of agony" is Buddhism, or Schopenhauerism pure and simple, I have moulded "Earth on Earth" upon "Seint Ysidre"'s ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... Toms. He was one of Dad's tenants, a big purple-faced man, who drank a lot and never took much exercise. They found him in a ditch with his clothes all torn and covered with mud. He had been run to death; there was no wound on his body, but his heart was broken." Her thoughts recurred to the stone against which they leant, and his quaint conceit. "You were rather rash to go offering burnt sacrifices about here, don't you ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... answered father, as the gray machine pulled gallantly through a few hundred feet of thick, black mud and turned from the wilderness into the public square of the metropolis of ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... long, dreary days, no freshening motion in the atmosphere is perceptible. 'A fire?'—yes; then why is my grate full of grey, cold ashes, and one little spark in the corner? 'A fountain springing into everlasting life?'—yes; then why in my basin is there so much scum and ooze, mud and defilement, and so little of the flashing and brilliant water? 'The power that works in us' is sorely hindered by the weakness in which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... galoshes, slipped into those of Fortune. Thus caparisoned the good man walked out of the well-lighted rooms into East Street. By the magic power of the shoes he was carried back to the times of King Hans; on which account his foot very naturally sank in the mud and puddles of the street, there having been in those days no pavement ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... come from the universal Ruling Power, either directly or by way of consequence. And accordingly the lion's gaping jaws, and that which is poisonous, and every hurtful thing, as a thorn, as mud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful. Do not therefore imagine that they are of another kind from that which thou dost venerate, but form a just opinion of the source ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... red-haired Dementyev and saw the picket ropes of the roan horses, when Lavrushka gleefully shouted to his master, "The count has come!" and Denisov, who had been asleep on his bed, ran all disheveled out of the mud hut to embrace him, and the officers collected round to greet the new arrival, Rostov experienced the same feeling as when his mother, his father, and his sister had embraced him, and tears of joy choked him so that he could not speak. The regiment was also a home, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... and rising on her hind legs she advanced with ferocious prowls, when the second barrel, though I do not think it took effect, served to frighten her, for turning round she retreated, followed by the cubs. Some natives then waded through the mud to the Moorman, who was just exhausted, and would have been drowned but that he fell with his head upon a tuft of grass: the poor man was unable to speak, and for several weeks his intellect seemed confused. The adventure sufficed to satisfy him that he could not again depend upon a charm ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... quarreling with this poor woman? Let her take some fire if she likes." Then the Prudhan's widow used to go to the hearth and take a few sticks from it; and while no one was looking, she would quickly throw some mud into the midst of the dishes which were being ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... Madame de la Grenouillere regarded the creature she had rescued. It was a true type of the street-cat. His natural hideousness was increased by the accidents of a long and irregular career; his short hair was soiled with mud; one could scarcely distinguish beneath the various splashes his gray fur robe striped with black. He was so thin as to be nearly transparent, so shrunken that one could count his ribs, and so dispirited that a mouse might have beaten him. There ...
— The Story of a Cat • mile Gigault de La Bdollire
... of which a West African native is capable. At midday the solitary thorn afforded a transparent shade; for the rest of daylight the dwelling sweltered and boiled unprotected. Round house and tree ran a mud wall, about five feet high, loop-holed at intervals. And just inside the house door was fastened a rack of three ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... share in this prerogative. To avoid being jolted, he simply took up the pavement in Janina and the neighbouring towns, with the result that in summer one was choked by dust, and in winter could hardly get through the mud. He rejoiced in the public inconvenience, and one day having to go out in heavy rain, he remarked to one of the officers of his escort, "How delightful to be driven through this in a carriage, while you will have the pleasure of following on ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... encountered had left undone in the drenching way, the brook I blundered over head and ears into had completely effected; and though my subsequent souse just afterwards into the fishpond could make me no wetter, that deficiency was amply made up for in mud; and as I had thrown off my knapsack, I had no precise notion where, in order that I might run all the lighter without it, which has only just now been picked up and returned to me, and so not a dry rag of my own to help myself to, I was right glad to rig myself out in the squire's clothes, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... you it's difficult, when you look at this peaceful landscape; but try to call up something as different as darkness is to light. Forget the river, and the houses, and the pretty branching canals, and see nothing but marshes, wild and terrible, with sluggish rivers crawling through mud-banks to the sea, beaten back by fierce tides, to overflow into oozy meers and stagnant pools. Think of raging winds, never still, the howling of seas, and the driving of pitiless rains. No other views ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... angels sometimes, but the earth in such spots looks like heaven always—especially the mountain-tops so near the sky, so near the stars, so near the sun, with the clouds below them, and the humanity of the world and its mud far below them again—all but the spirit of adoration which one has carried up thither one's self. I do not wonder the heathen of whom the Hebrew Scriptures complain offered sacrifices on every high hill: they seem—they are—altars ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... than half an hour we gained possession of all below [the hill], and we would have captured the heights above on the same day, had we had all our forces, for the Moros fled in so great fright that Corralat himself had covered his face with mud so as not to be recognized by our men. This was told us by one of his servants, a Christian, who came to us the following morning, reporting a great number of Moros wounded—especially the king of the Lake, who was suffering ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... for in a bride by Saxo's heroes, and chastity was required. The modesty of maidens in old days is eulogised by Saxo, and the penalty for its infraction was severe: sale abroad into slavery to grind the quern in the mud of the yard. One of the tests of virtue ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... wants to win out in the Thanksgiving game too much to get lost now. Trust him to get up the bluff some way, and back to town by the Main street bridge like as not, before we get there. There's no shelter between here and Lagonda Ledge. Let's all cut for it before the rain beats us into the mud." ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... and laughing in jarring contrast. Rubbing his eyes and looking about him, he sees the cause of the strange disturbance, which proceeds from some ragged boys, of the class commonly termed "wharf-rats" or "mud-larks." Nearly a dozen are gathered together, and it is they who laugh; the angry voices come from others, around whom they have formed a ring and ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... found the first sign of gold, and that he stopped for a while to rest and smoke his pipe, and also to trim his lamp; that he fell asleep, and slept for an hour or two, and dreamed that he was sitting on a nugget of gold that was as large as his father's mud cabin in Ireland, and that he was wondering how he could get it up the shaft, when he was awakened by a drop of water which trickled from the ground overhead, striking ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... morning—dress'd in their dammasks, padusoy, gauze, ribbins, flapets, flowers, new white hats, white shades, and black leather shoes, (Pudingtons make) and finished journey, & garments, orniments, and all quite finish'd on Saturday, before noon, (mud over shoes) never did I behold such destruction in so short a space—bottom of padusoy coat fring'd quite round, besides places worn entire to floss, & besides frays, dammask, from shoulders to bottom, not lightly soil'd, but as if every part had rub'd tables and chairs that had long been ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... habit of bullying, knocking down and keeping honest folks under their pikes, a gang of confirmed scoundrels making public brigandage a cloak for private brigandage, inhabitants of the slums glad to bring down their former superiors into the mud, and themselves take precedence and strut about in order to prove by their arrogance and self-display that they, in their turn, are princes.—"Take a horse, the nation pays for it!"[33151] said the sans-culottes of Bordeaux to their comrades in the street, who, "in a splendid ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... conference—and there were portholes through which they could look. The city which was Naples seemed to swing smoothly past the ship. They saw other ships. A cruiser was under way with its anchor still rising from the water. It dripped mud and a sailor was quite ridiculously playing a hose on it. It ascended and swayed and its shank went smoothly into the hawse-hole. There were guns swinging skyward. Some were still covered by canvas hoods. The ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the surface, the elegances and suavities of life die out one by one as we sink through the social scale. Fortunately, the virtues are more tenacious of life, and last pretty well until we get down to the mud of absolute pauperism, where ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... fields and meadows, and I marvelled at the regular, park-like look of the country, as though stamped from one design continually recurring, like our butter at Carvel Hall. The roads were sometimes good, and sometimes as execrable as a colonial byway in winter, with mud up to the axles. And yet, my heart went out to this country, the home of my ancestors. Spring was at hand; the ploughboys whistled between the furrows, the larks circled overhead, and the lilacs were cautiously pushing forth their noses. The air was heavy with the perfume ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a smooth, mud-colored rock, that looks like a great boulder. The meteorite is ten feet long, eight feet wide, and six feet thick. It weighs ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 50, October 21, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... itself was built of mud bricks," Bingham would rejoin. "And the noblest mountain in the world, when you come right down to details, is only a heap of dirt and rocks strewn over with sticks and stones. But if you will just step back far enough to get the proper point ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... lived in villages or "Pahs," comprising a number of small circular huts, with a larger one for the Chief, mud-walled and thatched with grass or flax. The pahs usually occupied a commanding position, and were fenced round with one or more palisades of ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... cutting rain as never had it been my ill-chance to ride through. From Lespinasse to Fenouillet the road dips frequently, and wherever this occurred it seemed to us that we were riding in a torrent, our horses fetlock-deep in mud. ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... hundred and eighty-six white wage slaves lived in these pest holes under the earth. One-thirteenth of the population of the city lives thus underground to-day. Hundreds of these cellars are near the river. They are not waterproof. Their floors are mud. When the tides rise the water floods these noisome holes. The bedding and furniture float. Fierce wharf rats, rising from their dens, dispute with men, women and children the right to the shelves above ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... glow that was enjoyable beyond anything he could have imagined. He knew he must be in a deplorable condition; he could feel the sweat running down his forehead into his eyes and his shirt clinging to his body under his light coat. Up to the knees he was soaking wet, and splashed with mud higher still; his clothes were torn by the brambles, and so were his hands and face. He felt happy—happy, in spite of the news that had come to him. At that moment his run seemed to him to hold an epic quality—the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... slipshod, flew off every now and then, and were difficult to find again, among the crowd of passengers. Indeed, the poor little creature experienced so much trouble and delay from having to grope for these articles of dress in mud and kennel, and suffered in these researches so much jostling, pushing, squeezing and bandying from hand to hand, that by the time she reached the street in which the notary lived, she was fairly worn out and exhausted, and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... pressure groups: Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD) and affiliates; Movement for Unity and Democracy (MUD) ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... "No; only mud, sticky mud, no matter how far they went; and at last they got tired of it, and turned back to find that the water had risen, and was close up to the top of the arch under which they had crept, so that they had to wait half a day before ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... an hour afterward, the duck started up, uttering its wild alarm note. In the stillness I could hear the whistle of its wings and the splash of the water when it took flight. Near by I saw where a raccoon had come down to the water for fresh clams, leaving its long, sharp track in the mud and sand. Before I had passed this hidden stretch of water, a pair of strange thrushes flew up from the ground and perched on ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... so that in summer the whole side of the car maybe made transparent. New Jersey is, to the apprehension of a traveller, a double-headed suburb rather than a State. Its dull red dust looks like the dried and powdered mud of a battle-field. Peach-trees are common, and champagne-orchards. Canal-boats, drawn by mules, swim by, feeling their way along like blind men led by dogs. I had a mighty passion come over me to be the captain of one,—to glide back and forward upon a sea never roughened by storms,—to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the lower end of the pool and stirred up a cloud of mud which hung in the still water, and sent a long tail floating like a curtain over the rapids just below. Then she went quietly round by land, and sprang into the upper end of the pool with all the noise she could. The fish had crowded to that end, but this sudden attack sent them off in a panic, ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... rain the mud in the streets is beyond anything," Alexey Yegorytch announced, making a final effort to deter his master from the expedition. But opening his umbrella the latter went without a word into the damp and sodden garden, which was dark ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... indicates, the port of the ancient Tiber. The road which leads from Transtevere runs along the river, which rolls through a plain strewn with ruins and indented with barren hills, its brackish water discolored from the sand and mud of the Apennines. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... that completed the happiness of that wonderful day occurred just as they were getting out of the boat on the shore by Richardson's. In a mud-hole between two rocks they discovered a tiny striped snake, hardly bigger than a lead pencil, in the act of swallowing a little green frog, and they passed a rapt ten minutes in witnessing the progress of this miniature drama, which culminated happily in the victim's ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... Tacuba, once the theatre of fierce and bloody conflicts, and where, during the siege of Mexico, Alvarado of the Leap fixed his camp, now present a very tranquil scene. Tacuba itself is now a small village of mud huts, with some fine old trees, a few very old ruined houses, a ruined church, and some traces of a building which—assured us had been the palace of their last monarch; whilst others declare it to have been the site ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... of manufacture. Then we decide that if Matilda had called for a strip of linen two thousand feet long, whereon to write the warlike history of a spouse who began his gentle part toward her (for so history avers) by pulling her from her horse and rolling her in the mud because she refused to marry him, it would have been forthcoming as easily as two hundred. Should the Queen of England require a stretch of linen as long as from England to America, whereon to record the successes of ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... thing!—A fine lad, young, And strong, and beautiful as a lad may be, And king of a fair country, thrust from horse By a foul blow, and sprawled upon the ground,— Legs wide asunder, fist full of brown mud, Hair in his eyes,—most pitiful unkingly! Bring me a mug of wine, good ...
— The Lamp and the Bell • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... soldiers, who officiated as precentor to a congregation of three hundred of his companions. They all appeared very devout, and joined loudly in the prayers. Sir Moses was so much fatigued that it was with the greatest difficulty and pain that he walked to the Synagogue and back through mud and rain. The barracks were near the English quay, at least two ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... easy to twist out of shape what I have just said, easy to affect to misunderstand it, and, if it is slurred over in repetition, not difficult really to misunderstand it. Some persons are sincerely incapable of understanding that to denounce mud-slinging does not mean the indorsement of whitewashing; and both the interested individuals who need whitewashing, and those others who practice mud-slinging, like to encourage such confusion of ideas. One of the chief counts against those who make indiscriminate assault ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... up again three feet high, aunt. Then when the girls and you have gone in — for I hope that you will change your mind at the last — I will brick up the rest of it, but using mud instead of mortar, so that the bricks can be easily removed when the time comes, or one or two can be taken out to pass in food, and then replaced as before. After you are in I will whitewash the whole cellar, and no one ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty |
