"Mud" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... companions proceeded in the boats nine miles up the inlet, which they discovered terminated in a river. This they entered with the flood, and found fresh water three miles from the mouth. Here they saw a large village on a sand-bank entirely surrounded by mud, probably considered a sufficient protection from their enemies. They were particularly struck by the great size of the pine trees which grew on the banks. One measured nineteen feet eight inches in girth at the height of ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... artillery, burst into threatening shouts and furious outcries against the national guard. "Down with the red flag! Shame to Bailly! Death to La Fayette!" The people in the Champ-de-Mars responded to these cries with unanimous imprecations. Lumps of wet mud, the only arms at hand, were cast at the national guard, and struck La Fayette's horse, the red flag, and Bailly himself; and it is even said that several pistol shots were fired from a distance; this however was by no means proved,—the people had no intention of resisting, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... round here big enough to drown a baby kitten, except that little mud-puddle up at Fisher's, and they've dragged every inch of that. ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... half-an-hour when the wind took his cap and blew it into the middle of a pond, where it lay soddening out of reach. So he took off his shoes and walked into the pond to fetch it out, stirring up the yellow mud in thick soft clouds. But as he stooped to grab his cap, something else stirred the mud in the middle, and a body heaved itself sluggishly into view. At first Hugh thought it must be the body of a sheep that had tumbled into the water, but to his amazement the sulky head of ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... impudence. "You were bundled back to Scotland almost before daylight. Lord Coombe knew about it. We laughed immensely together. It was a great joke because Robin fainted and fell into the mud, or something of the sort, when you didn't turn up the next morning. She almost pined away and died of grief, tiresome little thing! I told you Eileen was preparing to assault. Here she is! Hordes of girls will now advance upon you. ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ville en monolithe," as it has been aptly called, for it is literally scooped out of one mountain block—live a few poor people, foddering their wretched goats at carved piscina and stately sideboards, erecting their mud-beplastered hovels in the halls of feudal princes. From Les Baux road to Fontvieille, 7m.; whence rail to Mont-Majour and Arles ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... his genius as he himself had; every one who knew him—really knew him—loved him. Those who did not know him belaboured him in the press or by word of mouth, and much honour and profit did they get by it. He stands unsmirched by the mud thrown by his detractors; he stands undamaged even by the adulation ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... recent victories, than of having procured excellent winter quarters for his army in Philadelphia. Here they spent the winter within the splendid mansions of that city, feasting upon the best the country afforded; while the American army were suffering in their mud huts, half clothed, with famine staring them in the face. Many of the soldiers were seen to drop dead with cold and hunger; others had their bare feet cut by the ice, and left their tracks in blood. The American army exhibited in their quarters at Valley Forge such examples of constancy ...
— Reminiscences of the Military Life and Sufferings of Col. Timothy Bigelow, Commander of the Fifteenth Regiment of the Massachusetts Line in the Continental Army, during the War of the Revolution • Charles Hersey
... started early in the morning, allowing the beeves to graze and rest along the road, and securing good pastures for them at night. Several times it rained, making the road soft, but I stripped off my shoes and took it barefooted through the mud. The lead ox was a fine, big fellow, each horn tipped with a brass knob, and he and I set the pace, which was scarcely that of a snail. The days were long, I grew desperately hungry between meals, and the novelty of leading that ox soon lost its romance. But I was determined not ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... receive unmoved a frenzied public ovation. A lump rose in his throat. After all, this delirium of joy was sincere. He stood for the moment the idol of the populace. For him this vast concourse of human beings had waited in rain and mud and now became a deafening, seething welter of human passion. He gripped the rail tighter and closed his eyes. He heard as in a dream the voice of the mayor behind him: "Say a few words. They won't hear ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... commerce. The clerks who passed with their packages of samples under their arms, the vans of the express companies, the omnibuses, the porters, the wheelbarrows, the great bales of merchandise at the neighboring doors, the packages of rich stuffs and trimmings which were dragged in the mud before being consigned to those underground regions, those dark holes stuffed with treasures, where the fortune of business lies in embryo—all these things ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... time had been worn by Sally Brass;—and her shoes being extremely large and slipshod, flew off every now and then, and were difficult to find. Indeed the poor little creature experienced so much trouble and delay from having to grope for them in the mud, and suffered so much jostling, pushing, and squeezing in these researches, that between it, and her fear of being recognized by some one, and carried back by force to the Brasses, when she at last reached ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... had been stopped crowded near the bridge in the trampled mud and gazed with that particular feeling of ill-will, estrangement, and ridicule with which troops of different arms usually encounter one another at the clean, smart hussars who moved ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... spectators—and although the boys watched for nearly an hour, neither beast nor reptile were seen to rise again to the surface. The bear no doubt had been drowned at once, and the alligator, after having suffocated him, had hidden his carcass in the mud, or dragged it along the bottom to some other part of the bayou—there to make a meal of ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... and power that was in himself. Here was the sort of man I should like to be, I thought, here was the true hard case, no bully, no ruffian, but a man, a good man, a man so hard and bright, so finely tempered, he was to the rest of us as steel to mud. Oddly enough, as I had this thought, it also occurred to me that there was a man in the ship who might with justice claim to be Newman's peer, another man of heroic stature—poor ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... community his manhood. The average boy is just like a little steam-engine with steam always up. The play is his safety-valve. With the landlord in the yard and the policeman on the street sitting on his safety-valve and holding it down, he is bound to explode. When he does, when he throws mud and stones, and shows us the side of him which the gutter developed, we are shocked, and marvel much what our boys are coming to, as if we had any right to expect better treatment of them. I doubt if Jacob, in the whole course of his wizened ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... not make any commentary on the thing that could blur the outline of its almost cruel actuality. I will not talk nor allow any one else to talk about "clericalism" and "militarism." Those who talk like that are made of the same mud as those who call all the angers of the unfortunate "Socialism." The women who were calling in the gloom around me on God and the Mother of God were not "clericalists"; or, if they were, they had forgotten it. And I will bet my boots the young men were not "militarists"—quite ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... streams of refugees wheeling their poor little lares et penates, their meagre treasures, on trucks and handcarts; first must you listen to the cheery joke that the Angel of Death finds on the lips of the soldier, to the songs that encourage you in the dogged marches through the dark and the mud, to the talk during the long nights when the men collect round the brazier fire and think of their wives and kiddies at home, of murky streets in the East End, of quiet country inns where the ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... only child. The wording of the will is, 'as a sacred charge and with full power.' Incidentally, as it were, one of his junior partners has been ordered a long sea voyage, and another has to go somewhere for mud baths. The junior partners were my idea, and were suggested solely that their senior might be left more or less free from business care, but it was impossible that Willie should have selected sound, robust partners—his ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... little above the surface of the water, and, holding it nearly horizontal, briskly rotates the water by imparting to the shovel a slight circular motion, passing into an elliptical one (front to back). This causes the finer mud to be suspended in the liquid, which is then run off, leaving the body of the ore in the centre of the shovel. This is repeated until the water after standing a moment is fairly clear. About half as much water as before is brought on; then, with a motion ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... fragments of ribbons and rags stalked up to me, gravely twisting a child's paper whirligig. Behind him was his servant bending under the load of a crate of mud toys. The two were loading up two camels, and the inhabitants of the Serai watched them with shrieks ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... in those earlier hours of civil war. Patrick Henry Hanway, rather from a blind impression of possible pillage than any eagerness to uphold a Union which seemed toppling to its fall, enlisted for ninety days. As he plowed through rain and mud on the painful occasion of a night march, he addressed the man on his right in these ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... a lively double-quick toward some friendly bushes, the boys rolled down their sleeves and pantaloons, and one or two took the extra precaution to wash the mud off ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... windows, as if the life of trade had concentered itself in that one article; wet leaves of the horse-chestnut or elm trees, torn off untimely by the blast, and scattered along the public way; an unsightly accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew the more unclean for its long and laborious washing;—these were the more definable points of a very somber picture. In the way of movement, and human life, there was the hasty ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... dampness increased, and a passing car got his mud-guard. It was a big car which crackled with language as it whizzed on its way, and Mr. Twist, slewed by the impact half across the road, then perceived on which side he had ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... one direction; a multitude of men of all ranks, peers and yokels, prize-fighters and Jews, and the last came to plunder, and are now plundering amidst that wild confusion of hail and rain, men and horses, carts and carriages. But all hurry in one direction, through mud and mire; there's a town only three miles distant which is soon reached, and soon filled, it will not contain one-third of that mighty rabble; but there's another town farther on—the good old city is farther on, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... boy hardly need ask the conductor how far west he is if he can catch a glimpse of one of the rivers. All the rivers of the plains are alike full of yellow mud, because the soil of the plains melts at the touch of water. These are our spendthrift rivers, full to the banks at times, but most of the year desperately in need of water. It is only with the greatest effort that they can keep their places in the summer: there is just ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... with souls in which usually some flaw has to be concealed; often taking revenge with their works for an internal defilement, often seeking forgetfulness in their soaring from a too true memory, often lost in the mud and almost in love with it, until they become like the Will-o'-the-Wisps around the swamps, and PRETEND TO BE stars—the people then call them idealists,—often struggling with protracted disgust, with an ever-reappearing phantom of disbelief, which makes them cold, and obliges them ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the peasants would regard this supposed punishment as a valuable privilege. And whilst this discussion about the necessity of introducing an ideal system of obligatory education was being carried on, the street before the windows of the room was covered with a stratum of mud nearly two feet in depth! The other streets were in a similar condition; and a large number of the members always arrived late, because it was almost impossible to come on foot, and there was only one public conveyance in the town. Many members ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... up the shoe. It was for a small foot, but might belong to either a girl of fourteen or so or to a small woman. She could see the print of the other shoe—yes! and there was the impress of the stockinged foot in the mud. ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... The readier victims: this was all they won. All food they loathe; and 'gainst their deadly thirst Call famine to their aid. Damp clods of earth They squeeze upon their mouths with straining hands. Where'er on foulest mud some stagnant slime Or moisture lies, though doomed to die they lap With greedy tongues the draught their lips had loathed Had life been theirs to choose. Beast-like they drain The swollen udder, and where milk was not, They sucked the life-blood forth. From herbs ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... also, it follows that his decrees and his operation do not destroy our freedom. Some men have sought some reason therein. They have said that we are made from a corrupt and impure mass, indeed of mud. But Adam and the Angels were made of silver and gold, and they sinned notwithstanding. One sometimes becomes hardened again after regeneration. We must therefore seek another cause for evil, and I doubt ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... a year, as a rule, the Nile rises and overflows its banks. The waters spread out over the country and cover it with rich mud. In this mud much cotton, sugar, grain, and rice ...
— Highroads of Geography • Anonymous
... strength again. I at once resumed my journey, and trotted down the hill at a pace which surprised myself. As I got warm with my exertions, the stiffness seemed by degrees to leave my limbs; I ran, I bounded along, over grass and stone through broad patches of mud which showed too plainly to what height the river had lately risen, out of breath, yet with a spirit that would not let me flag, I still flew on, nor slackened my speed until I had got to the first few houses of the town. There I stopped indeed, and fell; for it then seemed as if my bones ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... indeed, showed evident traces of hard service, and, though notably well cut, were far from new or smart. They were sad-coloured, moreover, as is the fashion of garments designed for work. And this weather-stained, mud-bespattered costume, taken in connection with her pale, sensitive face, her gallant bearing, and the luminous smile with which she greeted not only Dr. Knott but the slightly flustered Clara, offered a picture pensive in tone, but very harmonious, and of a singularly sincere and restful ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... was at one time, in the eighteenth century, a high-spirited and highly cultivated aristocracy. The broken greenhouses and mouse-eaten libraries, that were designed and collected by men who voted with Grattan, are perhaps as mournful in the end as the four mud walls that are so often left in Wicklow as the only remnants of a farmhouse. The desolation of this life is often of a peculiarly local kind, and if a playwright chose to go through the Irish country ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... danger. I went a kos up the river to the house of a blacksmith, saying that the flood had swept me from my hut, and they gave me food. Seven days I stayed with the blacksmith, till a boat came and I returned to my house. There was no trace of wall, or roof, or floor—naught but a patch of slimy mud. Judge, therefore, Sahib, how far the river ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... hiding a mud-sling in your silk swallow-tail. Perhaps you forget a courtier's principal duty should be the culture of tact, and tact is nothing whatever but helping me exaggerate my humours until ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... sacks, crowded the sidewalks. The gutter was choked with an overflow of refuse cabbage leaves, soft oranges, decaying beet tops. The air was thick with the heavy smell of vegetation. Food was trodden under foot, food crammed the stores and warehouses to bursting. Food mingled with the mud of the highway. The very dray horses were gorged with an unending nourishment of snatched mouthfuls picked from backboard, from barrel top, and from the edge of the sidewalk. The entire locality reeked with the fatness of a hundred thousand ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... government was left overturned, under the protection of an escort of assassins, in the ensanguined mud, upon the reeking bodies of its former, headless, bearers, until its new supporters had adjusted the rival pretensions of silk and satin, and had consulted the pattern book of the laceman in the choice of their embroidery. On one side of the arch which leads into the antiroom ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... of the snow came a frost that put shackles on the very wind. It fell black and sudden on the country, turning the mud floors of the poorer dwellings into iron that rang below the heel, though the peat-fires burned by day and night, and Loch Finne, lying flat as a girdle from shore to shore, crisped and curdled into ice on ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... him was the sight of a long, uprooted tree which, coming down the creek, when the water was rapidly falling, had swung around in such position that the roots caught fast in the clayey soil on the bank, and the limbs were imbedded in the sand and mud on the other shore. The result was as good a bridge as a ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... school. Mr. and Mrs. Ashford and the boys were come on the same errand, in spite of the cloud of dust rising from the newly-demolished lath-and-plaster partition. The boys looked with longing eyes at the gun in his hand, and the half-frozen compound of black and red mud on his gaiters; but they were shy, and their enmity added to their shyness, so that even when he shook hands with them, and spoke good-naturedly, they did not get ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which Jemima came sweeping like a torrent. With a single bound her horse rushed in between them, leaving the widow's gauntlet glove in the grasp of that frightened man, and the cornelian-headed whip deep in the mud of the highway. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... of pursuit began to be heard in the distance, and he hastened on again, panting with weakness, pain and affright. Leaving the path, he plunged deeper into the woods, ran for some distance along the edge of a swamp, and leaping in up to his knees in mud and water, doubled on his track, then turned again, and penetrating farther and farther into the depths of the morass, finally climbed a tree, groaning with the pain the effort cost him, and concealed himself ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... heart disease, and had a baby three weeks old. But what a place for a baby! There were two windows, two feet by two feet, next to the street, so splashed on the outside and stained by the dust and mud that they admitted but little light. A tidy housewife might say, Why don't the woman wash them? How can she stop to wash windows, with a baby three weeks old and four helpless little ones besides, crying around her with ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... wilderness claims him quickly. "There's a little creek with a bad mudhole just this side of the ford," Bill went on. "All the horses got through but Baldy, and he could have made it easy if he'd tried. But what did he do but just sit back on his haunches in the mud, like an old man in a chair, his head up and his front legs in his lap, and just give up? Quite a sight—that horse sitting in the mud. I had to snag ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... a good look at the poor fellow I knew he was one of ours. His hands and face were as black as a negro's, and all of him from the waist down was beneath the mud. He had not strength to move his hands, but his "voice was a good deal too strong," for he started to talk to me in a shout: "It's so good, matey, to see a real live man again. I've been talking to dead men for days. There ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... atrocious, abominable morning!" grunted Gwen, peering disconsolately through the window into the damp garden. "It's sheer cruelty to be expected to turn out and tramp two miles through the mud. We oughtn't to have to go to school when ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... toward the door. Father Bazonge was a man of fifty; his clothes were covered with mud where he had ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... side. And again coming together, they resume their former places, and thereafter remain apart. Consequently the space between them, enclosed, as it is, by the aqueducts, comes to be a fortress. And the barbarians walled up the lower arches of the aqueducts here with stones and mud and in this way gave it the form of a fort, and encamping there to the number of no fewer than seven thousand men, they kept guard that no provisions should thereafter be brought into the city ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... account of Halicarnassus's assertion, that, if two women walking in the road on a muddy day meet a carriage, they never keep together, but invariably one runs to the right and one to the left, so that the driver cannot favor them at all, but has to crowd between them, and drive both into the mud. That is palpably interested false witness. He thinks it is fine fun to push women into the mud, and frames such flimsy excuses. But as a woman's thoughts about women, this woman's utterances are deserving ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... see if they could make any arrangement for us. The Matron there was very kind, and telephoned to every one she could think of, and finally got a message that we were expected, and were to sleep at the Reserve. So we trudged once more through the mud and rain. The "Reserve" was two small, empty rooms, where thirty Sisters were going to pass the night. They had no beds, and not even straw, but were just going to lie on the floor in their clothes. There was obviously no room for six more of us, ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... is it that a woman would make a cheat in giving the mule animal of not sufficient strength to carry food to poor boys of France in the trenches when there is too much mud for gasoline!" I exclaimed with a great horror from knowledge given me by my Capitaine, ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... in our village was stolen as frequently as three times in one night. This was the way of it. One Todd, a foot-slogging Lieutenant, foot-slogged into our midst one day, borrowed a hole from a local rabbit, and took up his residence therein. Now this mud-pushing Todd had a cousin in the same division, one of those highly trained specialists who trickles about the country shedding coils of barbed wire and calling them "dumps"—a sapper, in short. One afternoon the sapping Todd, finding some old ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... exposed. It is a matter of history that they eventuated in the taking of the great fortress of Sebastopol. Before the railway was made, all the shot, all the shell, and all the ammunition necessary for the siege, had to be carried from Balaclava to the camp, a distance of five miles up hill, through mud and sludge, upon the backs of the soldiers. An immense proportion of our troops was told off for this most laborious service; of whom no less than 25 per cent per month perished in its execution. On the day the railway was ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... announced that something was wrong, and across a large fern I saw a small face in a great deal of agony. 4. Budge was hurrying to the relief of his brother, and was soon as deeply imbedded as Toddie was in the rich, black mud at the bottom of the brook. 5. I dashed to the rescue, stood astride the brook, and offered a hand to each boy, when a treacherous tuft of grass gave way, and, with a glorious splash, ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... times it had been surrounded by aguish marshes which had rendered the town unhealthy, but now that modern enterprise had drained the fenlands, Beorminster was as salubrious a town as could be found in England. The rich, black mud of the former bogs now yielded luxuriant harvests, and in autumn the city, with its mass of red-roofed houses climbing upward to the cathedral, was islanded in a golden ocean of wheat and rye and ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... on the ramparts (of his forts) Sataghnis and other weapons. He should store wood for fuel and dig and repair wells for supply of water to the garrison. He should cause all houses made of grass and straw to be plastered over with mud, and if it is the summer month, he should, from fear of fire, withdraw (into a place of safety) all the stores of grass and straw. He should order all food to be cooked at night. No fire should be ignited during the day, except for the daily homa. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... to talk about something else. I never told you, did I, that Amasai and Carrie got married last May? They are still working here, but so far as I can see it has spoiled them both. She used to laugh when he tramped in mud or dropped ashes on the floor, but now—you should hear her scold! And she doesn't curl her hair any longer. Amasai, who used to be so obliging about beating rugs and carrying wood, grumbles if you suggest such a thing. Also his neckties are quite dingy—black and brown, where they used ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... the lawn as if it were water, low towards its surface, but never alighting? You never see them grubbing after worms. Nothing less than things with wings like themselves will satisfy them. They will be obliged to the earth only for a little mud to build themselves nests with. For the rest, they live in the air, and on the creatures of the air. And then, when they fancy the air begins to be uncivil, sending little shoots of cold through their warm feathers, they vanish. They won't stand it. They're off to ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... of mud obtained from the bottom, in the vicinity of our anchorage, revealed some shells of foraminifera. The density of the sea water, and the dip of the magnetic needle were ascertained here, as well as at other points in the Arctic; and as the observations are entirely new, I give the results in ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... Atlantic, named Atlantides, greater than Europe and Africa, and that the kings of these parts were lords of a great part of Spain; but that, by the force of great tempests, the sea had overflowed the country, leaving nothing but banks of mud and gravel, so that no ships could pass that way for long after. It is also recorded by Pliny[12], that close by the island of Cadiz, there was a well inhabited island called Aphrodisias, towards the Straits of Gibraltar, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... Constable, of which, if I can continue in the mood, I will enclose you a sketch. It is very good: but how you and Morton would abuse it! Yet this, being a sketch, escapes some of Constable's faults, and might escape some of your censures. The trees are not splashed with that white sky-mud, which (according to Constable's theory) the Earth scatters up with her wheels in travelling so briskly round the sun; and there is a dash and felicity in the execution that gives one a thrill of good ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... 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 ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... full agreement with him, and, in truth, delay was absolutely necessary as a march now would have been accompanied by new and great dangers, snow slides, avalanches, and the best of the paths slippery with mud and water. When the rain ceased, although a warm sun that followed it hastened the melting of the snow, Will released the animals from the stable and with pleasure saw them run about among the trees, where the snow had melted and sprigs of hardy grass were again showing green against the earth. ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... work at those unspeakably odious garments, Clarissa," he said, "for pity's sake do it out of my presence. Great Heavens! what cultivator of the Ugly could have invented those loathsome olive-greens, or that revolting mud-colour? evidently a study from the Thames at low water, just above Battersea-bridge. And to think that the poor—to whom nature seems to have given a copyright in warts and wens and boils—should be made still more unattractive by such clothing as that! If you are ever rich, Clarissa, and take to ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... who sprang out-of-doors at the first alarm. When they were driven out the gate was closed after them; but they fired through the loopholes; especially into one of the block-houses, where the chinks had not been filled with mud, as in the others. They thus killed a negro, and wounded one or two other men; yet they were soon driven off. Robertson's return had been at a most opportune moment. As so often before and afterwards, he had saved ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the name frequently applied to the grisly bear by western hunters. "I calc'late it's nothin' new to see Caleb's fut in the mud." ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... his eyes as black as the night. When he laughed or sang—and he laughed and sang all the time—his mouth was like a rose in the morning, when the dewdrops hang on its outer petals. And he was strong and good. If it happened that a heavy cart was stuck in the mud of the road and the oxen could not budge it, Ghitza would crawl under the cart, get on all fours, and lift the cart clear of the mud. Never giving time to the driver to thank him, his work done, he walked quickly away, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the high stars alone, Nor in the cup of budding flowers, Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone, Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, But in the mud and scum of things There alway, ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... told you, I have plenty to spare. I will put those two little ones and Polenka into some good orphan asylum, and I will settle fifteen hundred roubles to be paid to each on coming of age, so that Sofya Semyonovna need have no anxiety about them. And I will pull her out of the mud too, for she is a good girl, isn't she? So tell Avdotya Romanovna that that is how I am spending her ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... barely scratched the surface of the earth. Roads were wheel tracks in the mud. Bridges were fords that became more or ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... and some thorny bushes had survived; but after the torrential winter rains the whole expanse would blossom like the rose. I traversed the plain afterwards in spring, when cornfields waved for miles around its three mud villages, wild flowers in mad profusion covered its waste places, and scarlet tulips flamed amid ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... spare, and in my search for antiquarian lore, I have actually undermined the old wall of the fellows' garden, and am each morning in expectation of hearing that the big bell near the commons-hall has descended from its lofty and most noisy eminence, and is snugly reposing in the mud. Meanwhile accident put me in possession of a most singular and remarkable discovery. Our chambers—I call them ours for old association sake—are, you may remember, in the Old Square. Well, I have been fortunate ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... to obey the order. But the horse was self-willed, and she was light; and in truth the heaviness of the ground would have been nothing to him had he been fairly well ridden. But she allowed him to rush with her through the mud. As she had never yet had an accident she knew nothing of fear, and she was beyond measure excited. She had been near enough to see that a man fell at the brook, and then she saw also that the huntsman got over, and also the gentleman in black. It seemed ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... whom Maida did not know. For a time she watched them, fascinated. But, presently, the school children crowding into the shop took all her attention. After the bell rang and the neighborhood had become quiet again, she resumed her watch of the mud-puddle fun. ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... witness. He glances casually at a huge, towering vermilion construction that is whizzing towards him on four wheels, preceded by a glint of brass and a wisp of steam; and then with disdain he ignores it as less important than a mere speck of odorous matter in the mud. The next instant he is lying inert in the mud. His confidence in the goodness of God had been misplaced. Since the beginning of time God had ordained ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... she had spoken of her family! It was to earn tobacco for her father and a new frock for her pretty sister that she left thus, so early in the misty morning, and rode in public conveyances, or tramped through the streets of Paris in the mud. The sight of her, more than what she said, gave the weak and melancholy Amedee courage ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... blithe and kind and beautiful. But some months after she came, there was a mystery about her: every Tuesday evening she disappeared; we tried to watch her, but in vain, she was always off by nine P. M., and was away all night, coming back next day wearied and all over mud, as if she had travelled far. She slept all next day. This went on for some months and we could make nothing of it. Poor dear creature, she looked at us wistfully when she came in, as if she would have told us if she could, and was ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... carrying a knife to clear the road. For a little way we followed a fairly open path that had previously been cleared by Louis, but by and by it began to close up and become treacherously boggy underfoot. Several times we were ankle-deep in mud and water, and Louis had to slash down the tall vegetation that obstructed our way. Before long he cried out: 'Behold your banana patch!' And there it was, sure enough—a great number of sturdy, thickset young plants, many with bunches ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... pervaded also by virulent cholera, was a ghastly journey. That melancholy pilgrimage, every 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 and pathetic words by Surgeon-Major Evatt, one of the few medical officers whom, ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... Gershom to shovelling slush—and you complain of his methods! Well, I admit that he may have been a trifle too zealous about it; he may have spattered things a bit more than was necessary, but after all, he got some of the mud out of the way, didn't he? There are people," he added, "who believe that the wind he raised swept ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... of a jealous woman Poison more deadly than a mud dog's tooth. It seems his sleep was hindered by ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... headway to all the working. They are worked altogether by boys from eight to twelve years of age, on all-fours, with a dog belt and chain. The passages being neither ironed nor wooded, and often an inch or two thick with mud. In Mr. Barnes' pit these poor boys have to drag the barrows with one hundred weight of coal or slack sixty times a day sixty yards, and the empty barrows back, without once straightening their backs, unless they chose to stand under the shaft, and run the risk of having their heads ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... means the mud. But one can express it more strongly in German, and I am inclined to think that Napoleon, who, when he felt like it, had something cynical about him, really meant ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... luxury at Newport is thryin' f'r a mile a minyit in his autymobill an' th' on'y leisure class left in th' wurruld is th' judicyary. Mind ye, Hinnissy, I'm not sayin' annything again' thim. I won't dhrag th' joodicyal ermine in th' mud though I haven't noticed that manny iv thim lift it immodestly whin they takes th' pollytical crossing. I have th' high rayspict f'r th' job that's th' alternative iv sixty days in jail. Besides, me ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... heart thumping, but borne up by a towering resolve, Peter took his stand beside one of the front wheels. "The—the road is—it's closed," he said, his voice trembling. The hand which held the knife stole below the shiny mud-guard and rested on the smooth, unyielding rubber. "The road is closed," ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... went gloves and tie, when it was time to start for church, and Esmeralda at least was proudly conscious of her stylish appearance, when half-way along the muddy lane the Trelawneys' carriage bowled past, and the laughing eyes of the stranger met hers once more. The mud flew from the carriage- wheels, and she held up her skirts with a great display of grey-gloved hands, and backed up against the hedge, frowning and petulant—my Lady Disdain in ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... having been impeded by so many disadvantages, the soldiers, although they were retarded during the whole time, by the mud, cold, and constant showers, yet by their incessant labour overcame all these obstacles, and in twenty-five days raised a mound three hundred and thirty feet broad and eighty feet high. When it almost touched ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... me. That is a pity, but I can have one plucked out. Then I shall watch my Cheylas as they widen your mouth from ear to ear, take out the cartilage from your nose, wither your hair till it will always be like rotted hay, and turn your skin—which is like velvet now—the colour of baked mud. They will as deftly strip you of that beauty which has robbed me as I pluck up this blade of grass.... Oh, they will make you the most hideous of living things, they assure me. Otherwise, as they agree, I shall kill them. This done, you may go freely to your lover. I fear, ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... briefly describe Lee's connection with the subsequent events. He bore an important part in the operations against the Mexicans, guiding the troops when they set out about three o'clock in the morning on a tedious march through darkness, rain, and mud; an elevation in the rear of the enemy's forces being gained about sunrise. An assault was at once made on the surprised Mexicans, their intrenchments were stormed, and in seventeen minutes after the charge began they were in ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... cell behind it, motioning us to follow. And there, on the one stool which the place contained, sat a big, hulking fellow that looked like a navvy, whose rough clothes bore evidence of his having slept out in them, and whose boots were stained with the mud and clay which they would be likely to collect along the riverside. He was sitting nursing his head in his hands, growling to himself, and he looked up at us as I have seen wild beasts look out through ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... tolerably safe and need only look out for ruts and holes in the street, lo! a furious galloping behind you, and some half dozen of the "gilded youth" of Maritzburg dash past you, stop, wheel round and gallop past again, until you are almost blinded with dust or smothered with mud, according to the season. This peril occurred several times during my drive to and from the park, and I can only remark that dear old Scotsman kept his temper better than I did: perhaps he was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... slipped quietly forth in the darkness. He was gone three hours, and in that time he blazed such a trail as a madman might have taken. A bit of every fringe of rush or reed he came to he broke; and he stamped with his foot in the slimy mud on the edges of ponds and pools. "These fools," said he, "know naught of the fens or the Broads, and they will believe all that they see; for the broken bits and the footprints will speak to them of the young lord and his serving-man, and they will listen and hasten on. It is easy to lead ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... volunteers. On the 1st of June the Saskatchewan, swelled by the melting of the snow near the Rocky Mountains, rose twelve feet and the current of the little rivers bounding Pine Island ran back into the lake, which it filled with mud. ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... of no good from interfering with one's neighbours, poor or rich. And I hate the sight o' women going about trapesing from house to house in all weathers, wet or dry, and coming in with their petticoats dagged and their shoes all over mud. Janet wanted to join in the tracking, but I told her I'd have nobody tracking out o' my house; when I'm gone, she may do as she likes. I never dagged my petticoats in my life, and I've no opinion o' that sort ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... sorts. Rice. Growes in water. Their ingenuity in watering their Corn-lands. Why they do not always sow the best kind of Rice? They sow at different times, but reap together. Their artificial Pooles, Alligators harbor in them. They sow Corn on the mud. A sort of Rice that growes without water. The Seasons of Seed-time and Harvest. A particular description of their Husbandry. Their Plow. The convenience of these Plowes. Their First plowing. Their Banks, and use of them. Their Second plowing. ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... regarded them proudly and Robert did not withhold admiration. They were pioneers, fine brass creatures, and when handled right they were a wonderful help in the forest. He did not blame the gunners for patting the barrels, for scraping the mud of the creek's crossing from the wheels, and for speaking to them affectionately. Massive and polished they gleamed in the sun and ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of the children had the measles, and three of them died; two others seemed near death's door. Two women were hauling a small tree-top to their door to chop for night-wood. The feet of these poor women were exposed to the mud and snow, which was melting. O, what squalid wretchedness was here! Not a bed, chair, table, or whole dish in this gloomy abode! I inquired how they slept. I was shown a rag-carpet on the fence, which they obtained ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... assailed by the natives. The tide was out, and the bottom was soft and dangerous. With little regard to the danger, however, the bold cavalier spurred his horse into the slimy depths, and followed by his men, with the mud up to their saddle-girths, they plunged forward until they came into the midst of the marauders, who, terrified by the strange apparition of the horsemen, fled precipitately, without show of fight, to ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... As I was saying, Sir, the adulteration of Butter has been pushed to such abominable lengths that no British Workman knows whether what he is eating is the product of the Cow or of the Thames mud-banks. (A snigger.) Talk of a Free Breakfast Table! I would free the Briton's Breakfast Table from the unwholesome incubus of Adulteration. At any rate, if the customer chooses to purchase butter which is not butter, he shall do it knowingly, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... week he fell upon a young man of Barnstaple, Sir Richard, a hosier's man, sir, and plebeius (which I consider unfit for one of his blood), and, moreover, a man full grown, and as big as either of us (Vindex stood five feet four in his high-heeled shoes), and smote him clean over the quay into the mud, because he said that there was a prettier maid in Barnstaple (your worship will forgive my speaking of such toys, to which my fidelity compels me) than ever Bideford could show; and then offered to do the same to any man who dare say that Mistress Rose Salterne, his worship ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... and earthquake activity around Pacific Basin; hurricanes along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts; tornadoes in the midwest and southeast; mud slides in California; forest fires in the west; flooding; permafrost in northern Alaska, a major ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... moment a carriage drove hastily by, all mud bespattered, and lying open in defiance of ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Baskerville in the meantime sounded about the bay between the brig and the western shore and found very good anchorage in all parts: at about one mile to the westward of our situation the bottom was of mud, and the depth nine and ten fathoms: the land appeared a good deal broken, like islands, but from the vessel the coast seemed to be formed by a continuity of deep bays that may perhaps afford good anchorage. ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... fill full a canto of a poem. So spent was Britain's single line, so worn and thin, that after all the men available were brought, gaps remained. No more ammunition was coming to these men, the last rounds had been served. Wet through, heavy with mud, they were shelled for three days to prevent sleep. Many came at last to sleep standing; and being jogged awake when officers of the line passed down the trenches, would salute and instantly be asleep again. ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... there—ti-tree, flooded gum, and so forth—but they looked brown and ragged. One standing by itself, a giant white cedar, which in spring was a mass of white and mauve bloom and in winter of scarlet berries, had a wide strip of brown mud between it and the water that had ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... him than with the executioner, whom all despise, and who dares not enter an honest man's house. But that you were more despised and disgraced than the miserable man who had stripped you in the open market and whipped you through the streets; that the boys had pelted you with mud, and that the streets became red with the blood ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... joy, I actually succeeded in reaching the doorstep, over which I tumbled into a pool of muddy water that lay before my father's cottage door. Ah, how vividly I remember the horror of my poor mother when she found me sweltering in the mud amongst a group of cackling ducks, and the tenderness with which she stripped off my dripping clothes and washed my dirty little body! From this time forth my rambles became more frequent and, as I grew older, more distant, until at last ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... absolutely impassable. Wheels sank to the hubs in red mire, and I actually stood for an hour and watched four or five men work to save a mule, which had stepped into a deep sink, from drowning, or, rather, suffocating in the mud. The Atlanta of today is a ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... entered a passage behind the Great White Throne and started on what might well be called the Water Route, for no dry spot is touched on the round trip; but if one goes prepared for such a journey it is well worth the effort and the mud. If the visitor is a man, the suit worn should be one he is ready to part with, or overalls; ladies receive the same advice even to the overalls, as some of the most beautiful portions of the cave, which we failed to see, can be visited only in that objectionable costume. To visit ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... out of the window again. Professor Biggleswade suddenly remembered the popular story of the great scientist's antecedents, and reflected that as McCurdie had once run, a barefoot urchin, through the Glasgow mud, he was likely to have little kith or kin. He himself envied McCurdie. He was always praying to be delivered from his sisters and nephews and nieces, whose embarrassing demands no ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... warship afloat at that date. As a snag-boat, formerly used by Eads, she had "had two hulls so joined and strengthened that she could get the largest kind of a cottonwood tree between them, hoist it out of the mud, and drag it clear of the channel." These hulls were now joined together; and while the boat was armored on the same general plan as the seven contract gunboats, she was so much more completely iron clad as to avoid ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... as to the ownership of the cravat. He was equally certain that the same stranger had, while standing at the window, drugged his curried mutton, and so deprived the stables of their watchman. As to the missing horse, there were abundant proofs in the mud which lay at the bottom of the fatal hollow that he had been there at the time of the struggle. But from that morning he has disappeared, and although a large reward has been offered, and all the gypsies of Dartmoor are on the alert, no ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... everybody quite forgot about him. Johnnie and the twins were too busy putting mud poultices on their wounds, to ease their aches and pains, to think of the prisoner they had left on the farmhouse porch. It was not until the next day that Johnnie Green remembered his new pet. And when he went to see him then the honey ...
— The Tale of Buster Bumblebee • Arthur Scott Bailey
... in the country and was acquainted with every path and cross-road could have done it, and on this point the conviction of the court is unalterable; you were seen conducting the enemy's artillery over roads that had become lakes of liquid mud, where eight horses had to be hitched to a single gun to drag it out of the slough. A person looking at those roads would hesitate to believe that an army corps could ever have passed over them. Had it not been for you and your criminal action in settling ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... those who haunt the Ideal; there, dear friend, we "recognise" each other, and shall always do so,—but not "in the mud," illustrated by a fascinating poet, too much celebrated and tainted by the triviality of vulgar applause—Heine. Amongst other things he had predicted that the Cathedral of Cologne would never be finished. "In vain will Franz Liszt give his ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... that a strange cur one day bit a sheep in rear of the flock, unseen by the shepherd. The assault was committed by a tailor's dog, but not unnoticed by the other, which immediately seized the delinquent by the ear and dragged him into a puddle, where he kept dabbling him in the mud with the utmost gravity. The cur yelled. The tailor came slipshod with his goose to the rescue, and flung it at the sheep-dog, but missed him, and did not venture to pick it up till the ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... to his patron saint to favor his choice of a lottery ticket; if it turn out an unlucky number he will take the little leaden image of the saint from his pocket, revile it, spit on it, and trample it in the mud. Another man, when his prayer for success is not followed by victory, sends gifts to the church, flogs himself in public and fasts. Xenophon gives us in his Economics the prayer of a pious Athenian of his time, in the person of Ischomachus. "I seek to obtain," says the latter, "from ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... bade the mud from Dives' wheel To spurn the rags of Lazarus? Come, brother, in that dust we'll kneel, Confessing Heaven that ruled it ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... rolled down as dey hard him. He tole 'em how he use to lib in Car'lina—how he wus a slave; how he'd 'most nuffin' to eat; how he wus wucked in de swamp; how, 'fore de sun rose, an' 'way inter de night, he use to stan' in de mud an' de water, till his bones war sore, his heart wus weary, his soul wus faint. How his massa flog him, 'cause he couldn't wuck no more, till de blood run down his back, an' it wus a ridged like de ploughed groun'. How his wife wus whipped to death afore his bery eyes; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... with the dust and mud of the drain-pipe that it was misleading to call himself a white rabbit. He was far from it. He was as dark as any wild rabbit of the woods—darker, in fact, for there was no white fur under his stomach or ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh |
