"Muck" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a creaking gate and went up a flight of bricked steps to the door. He had guessed right; above a brass knocker filmed with the floating muck of the air he saw the numeral, Two, painted beneath the fanlight. The windows on the left were blank, curtained. The house rose silent and without a mark of life above the obscene clamor of the city. He knocked sharply and waited; then he knocked again. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wildwood covers the virgin mould,—and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above while another ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... vegetable dross into its heart which it is our business to clear away; for impure oil is death to colour. No; take your oil and pour it into a bottle with water. In a day or two the water will turn muddy: that is muck from the oil. Pour the dirty water carefully away and add fresh. When that is poured away, you will fancy the oil is clear. You're mistaken. Reicht, fetch me that!" Reicht brought a glass trough with a glass lid fitting tight. "When your oil has ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... for me; that means money, and rules, sportsman form, and sech muck. I likes to pick out my own pals, go permiskus, and trust to pot-luck. A rush twelve-a-breast is a gammock, twelve squeakers a going like one; But "rules o' the road" dump you down, chill yer sperrits, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... al-ta,"[4] said the Indian woman, uncovering the steaming mass and placing the clams on a sliver found near by. "De-late kloshe muck a muck alta."[5] ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... a muck soon," he said, "against all this talk about genius and high art, and the rest of it. It will be the ruin of us, as it has been of Germany. They have been for fifty years finding out, and showing people how ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... omelets, wonderful salads of eggs, anchovies, and tunny-fish, ducks with oranges and olives, and other delicacies of the Provencal cuisine prepared by a consummate artist, and those four English cubs termed them all "muck," and clamoured for plain roast mutton and boiled potatoes. It really was a case of casting pearls before swine! Those ignorant hobbledehoys actually turned up their noses at the admirable "Cotes du Rhone" wine, and begged for beer. In justice I must add that we were none ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... instinct, confound 'em," lamented Dank; "they know the real article, and you can't fool 'em. She knows that he is the high muck-a-muck in this party and she won't even look at me, you take ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... She-she-took-a-muck was a ferocious whale supposed to have lived at Hell's Gate, and to have swallowed Indians and their canoes. The whale was killed by ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... the small deck or platform. It took them a little while to become accustomed to the darkness, but soon they were able to make out that they had run on the muddy bank of the ocean beach. The tide was low and the Porpoise had rammed her nose well into the soft muck, which accounted ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... I want to set them free. How can I lie? How can I crawl through the muck and filth of a divorce? I can't. (Moves to end of table and stands there facing front.) But I must set them free somehow. They're such good people, my wife and Victor. I ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... pressure upon the molten mixture from which the things were to crystallise, I hit upon some researches of Daubree's at the Paris Laboratorie des Poudres et Salpetres. He exploded dynamite in a tightly screwed steel cylinder, too strong to burst, and I found he could crush rocks into a muck not unlike the South African bed in which diamonds are found. It was a tremendous strain on my resources, but I got a steel cylinder made for my purpose after his pattern. I put in all my stuff and my explosives, built up a fire in my furnace, put the whole concern in, and—went ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... or a slave's: Marcus Aurelius on his throne was a king, for nothing could conquer him; but Epictetus in chains was equally unconquerable and equally a king. We all have the choice between the Crown and the Muck Rake, and I think we sometimes turn to the straws and the rubbish, not because they are fascinating to us, but because they seem the only things open to us: we do not feel as if our lives had anything to ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... no more tendency to prevent offences than the cholera, or an earthquake like that of Lisbon, would have. The energy for which the Jacobin administration is praised was merely the energy of the Malay who maddens himself with opium, draws his knife, and runs a-muck through the streets, slashing right and left at friends and foes. Such has never been the energy of truly great rulers; of Elizabeth, for example, of Oliver, or of Frederic. They were not, indeed, scrupulous. But, had ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... take their degree, when Joel, who had gone home on a visit, was wrecked on the Island of Nantucket, and, with the rest of the ship's company, was either drowned or murdered by the Indians. The name of Caleb, Chee-shah-teau-muck, Indus, is still to be seen in the registers of those who took their degree, and there are two Latin and Greek elegies remaining, which he composed on the death of an eminent minister, bearing his signature, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... how sweet 'twould be to sail wid a full crew o' Salterses?" said Long Jack. "Ha'af in the furrer an' other ha'af in the muck-heap, as Ca'houn did not say, an' makes out he's ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... bargain, (e) Spirituality is better than money. He who has made an idol of his wealth, who in gaining it has lost his soul, who has allowed money to come between him and God, has paid too great a price for it. He has well been depicted by John Bunyan as the man with the muck-rake gathering straws, whilst he does not see the golden crown that is held above him. Christ tells us God regards such a ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... meeting took place in Essex Hall, Essex Street, Strand, on September 17, 1926. G.K. summed up their aim in the words: "Their simple idea was to restore possession." He added that Francis Bacon had long ago said: "Property is like muck, it is good only if it be spread." The following week the first committee meeting took place. Chesterton was elected President; Captain Went, Secretary, and Maurice Reckitt, Treasurer. It was planned to form a branch in Birmingham. Alternative names were discussed: The Cobbett Club, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... all kinds from every available source. Remember that anything which will rot will add to the value of your manure pile. Muck, lime, old plastering, sods, weeds (earth and all), street, stable and yard sweepings—all these and numerous others will increase your garden ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... so much accustomed the latter to mask his features, that they are rarely to be seen in their primitive state. Not satisfied with these triumphs, our monk descended even into the kingdoms of the dead—tore skulls from the graves, and the bones of animals from the muck-heaps; and showed his visitors why the dead were dead, and, from their bones, how it was impossible that they should be otherwise than dead. In a word, he proved, clearly and unanswerably, that death never ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... American Muck Book; treating of the Nature, Properties, Sources, History, and Operations of all the principal Fertilizers and Manures in Common Use, with Specific Directions for their Preservation, and Application to the Soil ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... the side of the hill behind the Bar, and on the latter also, glance spots of azure and crimson, in the forms of blue and red shirted miners bending steadily over pickax and shovel, reminding one involuntarily of the muck-gatherer in The Pilgrim's Progress. But no; that is an unjust association of ideas, for many of these men are toiling thus wearily for laughing-lipped children, calm-browed wives, or saintly mothers, gathering around the ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... lead me back to the main band. The signs were few and barely sufficient to allow me to keep up the pursuit. It was not until I came to a spring, the overflow of which had made muck of the ground, that I was afforded an opportunity to inspect the two sets of tracks. One set was made by moccasins almost as small as those I had given ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... layer of soil from 1 foot to 2 feet thick; (2) a layer of burnt clay from 3 to 12 inches thick (though usually varying from 4 to 8 inches) and broken into lumps, never in a uniform, unbroken layer; immediately below this (3) a thin layer of hardened muck or dark clay, though this does not always seem to be distinct. At this depth in the mounds of the eastern part of Arkansas are usually found one or ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... people were, they were still fearful savages. Messengers arrived from the neighbouring town to announce the death of their chief, Matiamvo. That individual had been addicted to running a-muck through his capital and beheading any one he met, till he had a large heap of human heads in front of his hut. Men were also slaughtered occasionally, whenever the chief wanted part of a body ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... wall; till wid his knockin' over the wather-bucket, an' shcrapin' aff the morthar, an' upsettin' the hod o' bricks, an' makin' the monks forgit where they'd put things, it got so that they were in a muck o' shweat every hour o' the day; an' from that time it got to be said, when anything wint wrong widout a raizon, ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... a Home Rule town far off as I can see it. Mud huts, whitewashed cabins with no upstairs, muck-heaps, and bad fences. Can spot a Home Ruler as far as I can see him. Darned if I couldn't track him by scent, like a foxhound. That's the rank and file—very rank, I should say, most of them. And old J. Bull concludes to let the dunghill folks, powerful ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the gross and dirty huts of the off-colors (half-castes). The house, which was in the middle of the plot, was a bulging hovel of green brick, no more stately or respectable than any of the huts round about. As our horses picked their way through the muck underfoot, and we rode down to it, the off-colors swarmed out of their burrows and grinned ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... that only waited for hands to pick 'em up.—Lies!—lies from beginnin' to end! I say to you this is the hardest and cruellest country ever created, and a man like me's no more good here than the muck—the parin's and stale fishguts and other leavin's—that knocks about a harbour and washes against the walls. I'll tell you the only use I'll have been here, doctor, when my end comes: I'll dung some bit o' land for 'em with ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... plumb to blazes, Eb Flanders! Go on! Git outer here! You a kunsterble! You aint fit to ketch muck-worms! Arrestin' boys for burglary, when the worst land-shark in the country is runnin' a bunco-game right under yer face an' eyes! Go over an' arrest them fellers,—arrest ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... faced that blank staring hell of anonymousness, that bottomless, weak, watery muck of irresponsibility—that terrific, devilish vagueness which a crowd is and which a crowd has to ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the run-way at a place indicated by Binu Charley, and, sometimes crawling on hands and knees through the damp black muck, at other times creeping and climbing through the tangled undergrowth a dozen feet from the ground, they came to an immense banyan tree, half an acre in extent, that made in the innermost heart of the jungle a denser jungle of its own. From out of its black depths came the voice ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... out a thread with little din, And beeking my cauld limbs afore the sun. What brings my bairn this gate sae air at morn? Is there nae muck to lead? ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... waiting for things to cool down. As soon as the muck-rakers wear out their rakes, and the great American public finds some other kind of hysterics to keep it worked up to a proper temperature, I shall mosey back and resume business at the old stand. But why tell you the story of my life? Play ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... to her.] Listen! I worked right in our mine with my father when I was only eight years old! That's why I ain't better educated—I worked for ten years there down in the dirt and muck! ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... a man who had come up in the draft with me on the 4th, rolling around in the death agony, tossing his head loosely about in the wild pain of it, his pallid face a white mark in the muck underfoot. A burly German reached the spot and without hesitation plunged his saw-edged bayonet ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... mean house, with little accommodation for man or beast, being, indeed, as much farmhouse as hostel, with naught but the flaming sign to tell me I might wade through the muck and litter to the door and there ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... Instead of the ordinary eulogy of the size and success of the Company, Miss Tarbell presented many of its unfair practices. At the same time and in the same publication Lincoln Steffens was exposing the seamy side of municipal affairs in "The Shame of the Cities." Between 1901 and 1906 one of the muck-rake periodicals increased its sales threefold, ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... then?" he asked. "Red, yaller, muck-dirt colour?"—and he stared significantly at the Tailless Tyke, who was lying at his master's feet. The little man ceased rubbing his knees and eyed the boy. David shifted uneasily beneath that ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... the hangars. Time, about eleven, The air full chill, the ground a mess of muck, And long time gazed I on the wintry heaven And thought of many a deed of Saxon pluck; How DRAKE, for instance, good old DRAKE of Devon, Played bowls at Plymouth Hoe. Twelve-thirty struck. No one had vaulted through the air's abyss; DRAKE would have plunged tail up ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... I don't think it would much matter if it did; it is that turned already with the sight of these blackamoors and their filthy, thieving ways. They are only fit for muck, they are; and they smell bad enough ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... feet in the churned-up muck of the field edge. The ground, covered with a scum of ice at night, was a trap for animals as well as vehicles. Breaking through that glassy surface to the glutinous stuff beneath, they suffered cuts deep enough to ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... is like me, a Hamley of Hamley, and no one who sees him in the street will ever think that red-brown, big-boned, clumsy chap is of gentle blood. Yet all those Cumnor people, you make such ado of in Hollingford, are mere muck of yesterday. I was talking to madam the other day about Osborne's marrying a daughter of Lord Hollingford's—that's to say, if he had a daughter—he's only got boys, as it happens; but I'm not sure if I should consent ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... other, with loud conviction: "Yes, and always will be, thank Gawd!" This ended the talk. But the last speaker, turning round, saw her two-year-old daughter asprawl in the garden, and with sudden change from satisfied drawl to shrill exasperation, "Git up out of all that muck, you dirty little devil," she said. For she was a cleanly woman, proud of her children, and disliking ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... have done your work, and I fling you away, as I fling away all my tools at my pleasure. There, in the green muck and slimy filth, you will ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... stable-yard. I know of nothing more calculated to make a man sick of this world, than a stable-yard on a rainy day. The place was littered with wet straw, that had been kicked about by travellers and stable-boys. In one corner was a stagnant pool of water, surrounding an island of muck; there were several half-drowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable, crest-fallen cock, drenched out of all life and spirit; his drooping tail matted, as it were, into a single ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... transfer from nursery to orchard, the better. It is to be placed in good ground, well drained and deeply spaded or plowed. The apple-tree thrives on many kinds of land, but light sand, hard clay, and muck are equally to be avoided. "Good corn land" is commonly considered to be good apple land. Certain soils and regions are particularly adaptable to commercial apple-growing, but the amateur may plant quite independently of this fact. ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... a fine lot of muck-raking you did," charged Clarence. "Well, I'll give you another item for your paper. I have ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... face and the voice of an angel, and the heart of the Man with the Muck-rake. God save me from them from this ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... well to talk about compensation. How do I know what your compensation will be? How do I know you will make it worth my while? I don't want no compensation. I want my 'ouse. Cheek I calls it, to come down here wanting to muck me ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... don't it?" the other went on, in his sneering way. "You're the Great Muck-a-muck, and will carry off the prize for the long distance run, I suppose you mean? Well, with the great luck you have, perhaps you will—if you're there when the pistol cracks for the start. Now, go on and tell me what you mean, and ...
— Fred Fenton on the Track - or, The Athletes of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... to pick my fat friend up. Boggsie's getting out of the whole thing without spending a bean knocked him cold. But he got his wind later. You ought to have heard his speech down there at the house, with a plate of melted strawberry muck in one hand and a glass of sour in the other, replying to Boggsie's vote of thanks to us two, and skinning his face at the Brown girl. Oh, ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... general names of humus and humic acid, which may, in a slight degree, affect the growth of plants, but their practical importance is of too doubtful a character to justify us in considering them. The application of manures, containing organic matter, such as peat, muck, animal manure, etc., supplies the soil with carbon on the same principle, and the decomposing matters also generate[Q] carbonic acid gas while being decomposed. The agricultural value of carbon in the soil depends (as we have stated), not on the fact ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... on muck-raking. We have a splendid series on Aged Paupers, demanding better treatment and more sanitary conditions. Also we are going to run "Barbarous Venezuela" and show up thoroughly the rotten political ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... won't be difficult for our lobsters to lick 'em on land. P'r'aps there'll be an exchange of prisoners, an' we may have a chance of another brush with them one o' these days. If the wust comes to the wust, we can try to break out o' jail and run a muck for our lives. Never say die ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... have no pleasure in sadness, Bitterness, cant nor disdain. Hearts to thy piping beat bravely in gladness Through poverty, exile or pain. Gold is denied us—thine image we fashion Out of the slag or the muck. We are thy people in court or by campfire,— We are thy ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... sin bravely, but believe more bravely still"—this is the chef d'oeuvre of the muck-rakers in Luther's life. The reader has the entire passage which contains the outrageous statement of Luther before him, and will be able to judge the connection in which the words occur. What caused ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... like molten lead in the sunshine. They could not travel very close to its bank, for here the ground was uncertain. Once Sam left the highway to get a better view of the stream, and, before Cujo noticed it, found himself up to his knees in a muck which stuck to ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... disgust and repugnance in the new-comers, who cannot yet bear to be ordered about, least of all to be maltreated by negroes like themselves, while, on the contrary, they submit willingly and with affection to the orders of a white." This Manual, which reads like a treatise on muck or the breeding of cattle, proceeds to say, that, if the planter would preserve his negroes' usefulness, he must be careful to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... of the growing State, the law is aided by quickly executed decrees of vigilance committees. Self-appointed popular leaders, crafty politicians, scheming preachers, aspiring editors, and ambitious demagogues crop up. They are the mushroom growth of the muck-heap ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... sap which produces the plant is such as "the tree doth excerne and cannot assimilate," and Browne ("Vulgar Errors") was of the same opinion. But the opposite opinion was perpetuated in the very name ("Mistel: fimus, muck," Cockayne),[163:1] and was held without any doubt by most of ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... for bright sunlight. They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, their white walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks between the styes. Their lissom and statuesque inhabitants become softened and bent, and pad dejectedly through the muck as though they were ashamed to live, but had to go on with it. The palms which look so well in sunny pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle. They have not that equality with the storm which makes the Sussex beech and oak, heavily based and strong-armed, stand with ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... 'What do I care about being confessed before the angels, or about the Holy Spirit to teach me? What I want is my share of the paternal acres. A rabbi who will help me to these is the rabbi for me.' John Bunyan's 'man with the muck-rake' had his eyes so glued to the ground and the muck that he did not see the crown hanging above him. How many of us find the sermon time a good opportunity for thinking about investments ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... letter he begs the Society to be cautious and offer no encouragement to any disposed "'to run the muck' (sic) (it is Sir George's expression) against the religious and political INSTITUTIONS of Spain"; but "the delicacy of the situation does not appear to have been thoroughly understood at the time ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... worked in a muck with their rubber sea-boots worn out by constant chafing, sweaters torn, the blades of their shovels reduced by the work demanded of them, the drills, shortened by steady sharpening, gone like the spare ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... Muck, O. Absolute: novelist; of low German extraction; born Rotterdam; educated Muckendorf; escaped to America; long unrecognized; leaped into prominence by writing "The Social Gas-Pipe," a powerful indictment of ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... was the solemn reply; "I was just thinkin' I felt as if I'd been readin' one of those muck-rakin' yarns ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... balustrades of palaces—wherever it might be I was whirling with this old earth around, I've had your face to look at. And when I couldn't see for the darkness—rolled up in my rubber poncho, in no more romantic a place than the muck of a swamp, I've looked up through the swaying branches—or in the lee of a windy hill, it might be, with no more to hinder than the clear air, I've looked up and marked your face in the swirling clouds: your nose, your chin, the lips so shyly smiling. And if through the clouds a pair of stars ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... bad sleugh brought opportunity to make experiment of the new system. The team stuck fast in the black muck, and every effort to extricate them served only to imbed them more hopelessly in the sticky gumbo. Time passed on. A dark and lowering night was imminent. The Bishop grew anxious. Macmillan, with whip and voice, encouraged his team, but all in vain. The Bishop's anxiety increased with the approach ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... possessed for one of those noisome tasks that are done a dozen times a day by the bath nurses in the receiving department of a charity hospital. When she returned, Susan too was in her chemise and ready to begin the search for the man, if man there was left deep buried in that muck. While Susan took off the stinking and rotten rags, and flung them into the hall, Clara went to the bathroom they and Mollie shared, and filled the tub with water as hot as her hand could bear. With her foot Susan pushed the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... impossible for any girl, once she has attained the age of fifteen, to continue unacquainted with the main facts of life, and some are initiated at an even tenderer age. How is it possible for any maiden to remain unenlightened in this regard these days when sensational, muck-raking prints throw the searchlight of publicity into every boudoir and spicy details of society's philandering fill column after column in the breakfast table newspaper? No matter how little curiosity a healthy-minded girl may have, by reason of a ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... inventive genius, who has labored long and hard, Till success has crowned his research, should receive a just reward. The Machine's a great invention, that's continually clear, Out of nothing but corruption making millions every year— Out of muck and filth of cities making dollars neat and clean— Where's the fellow ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... Lord God: Behold, I will bring a King of kings from the north, with horses and with chariots, and with horsemen and companies and muck people. He shall slay with the sword thy daughters in ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... in a low tone, moved as always by the grandeur and beauty of the scene—"listen! Don't you hear them calling? Don't you feel the mountains sending their message to these poor insects who squirm and wriggle in this bit of muck men call their world? God, man! if only we, in our work, would heed the ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... these islands is composed mostly of a fine sandy loam, very easily cultivated. In most of them are swamps and marshes, which serve to furnish muck and other vegetable deposits for fertilizing; but the idea of furnishing anything to aid the long over-worked soil seems to these proprietors like returning to the slave some of the earnings taken from him or his ancestors, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... her shiftless husband at the inn was one of Mrs Durbeyfield's still extant enjoyments in the muck and muddle of rearing children. To discover him at Rolliver's, to sit there for an hour or two by his side and dismiss all thought and care of the children during the interval, made her happy. A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came over life ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... short-lived, and venom evaporates.[FN430] It appears to me that when I show to such men, so "respectable" and so impure, a landscape of magnificent prospects whose vistas are adorned with every charm of nature and art, they point their unclean noses at a little heap of muck here and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... hogs that were in the pen were hungry and fierce. Even a grown person would have been in danger from the beasts. The pen, too, was knee-deep in soft muck and was as dark as a dungeon. In his efforts to escape the hogs, the boy had wallowed round in the muck. The hole was out of his reach, and the sty was strongly planked up to the barn floor ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... Anonyma to howl unanswered. I shall also treat with scornful silence the miserables who, when shown a magnificent prospect, a landscape adorned with the highest charms of Nature and Art, can only see in a field corner here and there a little heap of muck. 'You must have been looking for it, Madam!' said, or is said to have said, sturdy old ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... go by yesterday;" and Jimmie pointed to enormous footprints in the muck of a marshy place. "Verrie big moose—we make call at next camp—think ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... and if I'd been treated right by those I brought into the world I'd be worth twice as much. Fabian was good as far as he went, but he was a coward. You"— a look of fury entered the dark eyes—"you were no coward, but you didn't care a damn. You wanted to paddle about with muck of imagination—" he pointed to the statue on ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... succeed in blinding himself to that fact. Even the garish, cheap environments, the glitter and tinsel, the noise and brutality, had utterly failed to tarnish Beth Norvell. She stood forth different, distinct, a perfectly developed flower, rarely beautiful, although blooming in muck that was overgrown with noxious weeds. Winston remained clearly conscious that some peculiar essence of her native character had mysteriously perfumed the whole place—it glorified her slight bit of ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmers door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... a girl come up here, from a place where a girl is guarded like a pearl of great price, into the muck and excitement of the getting together of a Broadway production in which she is directly interested. I don't know what to do. If I spend my time hovering over her, her show will go cold and break her. ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... get everything whitewashed. The group of three commissioners sat for months and in that time they exposed to the burning sun of publicity the muck of thievery and dishonor on which Lake City's placid ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... approach of the sounds within, among which he heard the full, manly voice of Robert Willoughby, calling on the garrison to be firm, he raised an answering yell to those of the Mohawks, the war-whoop of his tribe, and plunged into the fray with the desperation of one who ran a muck, and with the ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... knots. We'll jog down to forty-nine, forty-five, or four about, and three east. That puts us say forty miles from Torbay by nine o'clock to-morrow morning. We'll have to muck about till dusk before we run in and try our ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... try to cut it short," answered Buster Beggs, who, this term, was the leader of the society, or Right Honorable Muck-a-Muck, as he ...
— Dave Porter and His Rivals - or, The Chums and Foes of Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... you must," Peter went on. "I've got work, too." He pointed at his pile of dirt on the table. "You see, there's gold in all that muck, and—I've ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... be discouraging to the driver for pleasure to find in rainy weather almost bottomless muck and mud on portions of the main travelled highway between New York and Buffalo, but that, for the present, is normal. The manufacturer may regret the condition and wish for better, but he cannot be heard to complain, and if the machine, with reasonably careful driving, ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... followed the spring through four feet of tufa and muck. Then they came to a layer of solid tufa two feet thick, then one foot of muck in which they found another log. Below this were three feet of tufa, and there seventeen feet below the apex of the mound they found the embers ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, partly from the anxiety I connected with his image for some days) fastened afterwards upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse than himself, that ran "a-muck" {18} at me, and led me into a world of troubles. But to quit this episode, and to return to my intercalary year of happiness. I have said already, that on a subject so important to us all as happiness, we should listen with pleasure to any man's experience or ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... where shepherds have encamped; and the palings were broken, the water in the trenches was disappearing, while fragments of glass and the bones of apes were to be seen amid the miry puddles. A scrap of cloth hung here and there from the bushes, and the rotten flowers formed a yellow muck-heap beneath the citron trees. In fact, the servants had neglected everything, thinking that the ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... the influence of the twin operas was deplorable. I have attempted to characterize that influence in general terms, but in order that the lesson may be more plainly presented it seems to me best to present a few examples in detail. The eagerness with which writers sought success in moral muck, regardless of all artistic elements, is strikingly illustrated in an attempt by a German writer, Edmund von Freihold, [Footnote: I owe this illustration to Ferdinand Pfobl's book "Die Moderne Oper."] to provide "Cavalleria rusticana" with a ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... October, and if he detects traces of the white grub, cross-plow it again just as the ground is beginning to freeze. Early in the spring he can cover the surface with some fertilizer—there is nothing better than a rotted compost of muck and barn-yard manure—at the proportion of forty or fifty tons to the acre. Plow and cross-plow again, and in each instance let the first team be followed by a subsoil or lifting plow, which stirs and loosens the substratum without bringing it ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... replied absently. "F'r instance, Aunt Julia, I don't see what you want to go walking with Newland Sanders for, when you said yourself you wished he was dead, or somep'n, after there got to be so muck talk in the family and everywhere about his sayin' all that about the Bible when you hurt your thumb. All ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... to the lions, or bowstring 'em in the harems. And in the days of real chivalry they burned 'em at the stake or locked 'em up in convents or castles. But don't you worry, Jim, Charity has you for a champion and she's mighty lucky. Go on and fight the muckers and the muck-rakers, and don't let the reporters or the preachers scare you away from doing the one ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... larger and clearer in the public estimation. The conservation movement cannot be checked by the baseless charge that it will prevent development, or that every man who tells the plain truth is either a muck-raker or a demagogue. It has taken firm hold on our national moral sense, and when an issue does ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... Ile neuer lin, But I will thorough thicke and thinne, Vntill at length I bring her in, My dearest Lord nere doubt it: Thorough Brake, thorough Brier, Thorough Muck, thorough Mier, 310 Thorough Water, thorough Fier, And thus ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... bad about his, I'll lend him a safety-pin from my shirtwaist," drawled Rupert, lounging up, hooking his own mask. "I ain't muck-raking, but he broke his rear axle at Indianapolis, last ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram |
