"Rotten" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... least hopes of mercy for his soul, O how precious is it! He that was wont to make orts[8] of the gospel, and that valued promises but as stubble, and the words of God but as rotten wood; now, with what an eye doth he look on the promise? Yea, he counted a peradventure of mercy more rich, more worth, than the whole world. Now, as we say, he is glad to leap at a crust; now, to be a dog in God's house is counted better by him than to 'dwell in the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... you think I want you to keep me? I haven't come to that yet." His tone was rapidly losing its veneer of restraint. "Guess I can work all right. No, no, my girl, you haven't got to keep me yet. But money gets money, and you ought to realize it. I admit my luck at 'draw' has been bad—rotten!" He violently knocked his pipe out on a plate. "But it's got to change. I can play with the best of 'em, an' they play a straight game. What's losing a few nights, if, in the end, I get a big stake? Why Restless helped himself to a hundred dollars ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... your luck when I saw you in the quad. I can't think why anybody should take these wretched games so seriously; it seems to me a perfectly rotten thing ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... and unfilial as it may seem to you, I shall fight you and your machine to a finish. You think I can't do it? I'll show you. I've got five days, and they are all my own. This campaign has been rotten to the core from the very beginning. You have tried to keep me from finding it out, and you have partly succeeded. But I know a little, and inside of the next twenty-four hours I shall know more. That's my last word, dad, and it breaks my heart to have to say ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... the far-reaching effects of the Reform Bill (S582) of 1832, which, on the one hand, put an end to many "rotten boroughs," and on the other, granted representation in Parliament to a number of large towns hitherto without a voice in that body. Three years later (1835) came the Municipal Reform Act. It placed the government of towns, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... stands a large wooden ladder, tall enough to reach to the top of the roof, for fire is very common, and generally ends in everything being demolished by the flames. Buckets of water, passed on by hand, can do little to avert disaster, when the old wooden home is dry as tinder and often rotten to the core. ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... and devilry. The streets were rainbow with motley wear and thunderous with the roar and laughter of the crowd, recruited by a vast inflow of strangers; from the windows and roofs, black with heads, frolicsome hands threw honey, dirty water, rotten eggs, and even boiling oil upon the pedestrians and cavaliers below. Bloody tumults broke out, sacrilegious masqueraders invaded the churches. They lampooned all things human and divine; the whip and the gallows liberally applied availed ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... all that has passed can not spur him into an exhibition of proper spirit. If he had the love for me he professed it could not help stimulating him to some show of manliness. I will fling him out of my heart and my world as I would fling a rotten apple out ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... Cave!" almost howled Swankie. "Wha iver heard o' smugglers hidin' onything there? The air in't wad pushen a rotten." ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... had made, but which I could not get into the water. He said that was big enough: but then, as I had taken no care of it, and it had lain two or three and twenty years there, the sun had split and dried it, that, it was in a manner rotten. Friday told me such a boat would do very well, and would carry "much enough vittle, drink, bread;" that ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... put this hempen caudle o'er thy head. See downward yonder is thy master's walk; And like a Judas, on some rotten tree, Hang up this rotten trunk of misery, That goers-by thy wretched end may see. Stirr'st thou not, villain? get thee from my door; A plague upon thee, haste and hang thyself. Run, rogue, away! 'tis thou that hast undone Thy noble master, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... two demerits of polygamy and six of monogamy. These six demerits which the author is pleased to term a "bombshell," he introduces on account of his moral convictions no less than humanitarian considerations. The same author terms monogamy a "worm-eaten and rotten-rooted tree." The worm that is devastating the fairest tree of Eden and draining its richest juices is what our contemporary thinks, may be "plausibly termed, a necessary evil." It is claimed ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... a melancholy place, haunted by dismal reverberations and a deathlike atmosphere—everywhere mildewed, faded, and half rotten with decay. It was a place where crimes might be committed, unrecorded and unsuspected—where screams would lose themselves in vacancy, and desolation and solitude would swallow up the ghastly evidences of outrage. Here was the fitting scenery for tales of preternatural terror or ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... here. Lord Rosebery has sunk into complete insignificance, and his state of health is doubtful. The Government is rotten, but continues to hold together. I think something must occur before long ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... the dark days of the Restoration, English resistance to tyranny was strongly supported on the ecclesiastical side by the martyr steadfastness of the Scotch till the joint effort triumphed in the Revolution. It is singular and sad to find Scotland afterwards becoming one vast rotten borough managed in the time of Pitt by Dundas, who paid the borough-mongers by appointments in India, with calamitous consequences to the poor Hindoo. But the intensity of the local evil perhaps lent force to the revulsion, and Scotland has ever since been a distinctly ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... were missed! My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood, Drop water gently till the surface sink, And if ye find ... Ah God, I know not, I! ... Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, And corded up in a tight olive-frail, Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli, Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape, Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast ... Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all, That brave Frascati villa with its bath, So, let the blue ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... land in this nineteenth century era is one whit purer or better in its spiritual or moral character than was Jerusalem a thousand years ago? Does it influence commerce, trade, governments, laws—even civilisation? If it did, not one rule or law that binds the rotten fabric of civilised life together would stand for a single moment. Why? Because no one would lie; no one would cheat; no one would murder, either wholesale because of country prejudices, or retail because of private animosities. Everyone would be honest, charitable, ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... if I could shoot. I said yes, but that I didn't care to go out shooting because I had nothing but a rotten old ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... Richard had even-disadvantage in these respects: but the absolute weight of metal was, at the outset, greatly in favor of the Englishman. The Richard then passed to windward of the Serapis, receiving her fire, which did much damage to the rotten hull of the old Indiaman. Jones next attempted a movement to get into position to rake his antagonist from stem to stern, which resulted in a momentary collision. There was an effort to board the Serapis, which was repulsed, when Captain Pearson called out, "Has your ship ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... predecessors; and yet that the charge to the public was less than it had been when the vessels were unseaworthy, when the sailors were riotous, when the food was alive with vermin, when the drink tasted like tanpickle, and when the clothes and hammocks were rotten. It may, however, be observed that these two representations are not inconsistent with each other; and there is strong reason to believe that both are, to a great extent, true. Orford was covetous and unprincipled; but he had great professional skill and knowledge, great industry, and a strong ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... issue of a jury system so degraded as to have become the sport of a political "faction," but he dwelt on the public danger which sprang from the parasites of the courts, the gloomy brood of public accusers which is hatched by a rotten system, feeds on the impurities of a diseased judicature, and terrifies the commonwealth by the peril that lurks in its poisonous sting. This speech was to be studied by eager students for years to come as a master work in the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Annan, all say that the exhibition is rotten. You say so every year; so does the majority of people. And the majority will continue saying the same thing throughout the coming decades as long as there are any ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... Audley-end, when the Queen was there; to which place Gabriel came ruffling it out, hufty tufty, in his suit of veluet—" which he had "untrussed, and pelted the outside from the lining of an old velvet saddle he had borrowed!" "The rotten mould of that worm-eaten relique, he means, when he dies, to hang over his tomb for a monument."[93] Harvey was proud of his refined skill in "Tuscan authors," and too fond of their worse conceits. Nash alludes to his travels in Italy, "to fetch him twopenny worth of Tuscanism, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... case of Louis Napoleon. He had the ability to achieve a position; he had been the lath painted to look like steel. He had all the externals which the layman associates with victory until he went to the supreme test, which ripped him into slivers of rotten wood. The little Napoleon had been one of the premier's favorite bugaboo examples of stage realism tried out in real life. But it was ridiculous to compare him with the stalwart figure sitting across the table, who had spoken the language ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... province of that Church, and received her power and jurisdiction from the Holy See. It was not until the sixteenth century that she apostatised, and was cut off from the stem, out of which she had sprung, as a rotten branch is lopped off from a healthy tree. It was not until then that she became a Church apart, distinct from the Church of God, no longer the Catholic Church in England, but henceforth the National Church of England and of England alone. The pre-"Reformation" Church was, ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... summoned, excited in Burke both indignation and contempt. And the leaders of the Constituent who came first on the stage, and hoped to make a revolution with rose-water, and hardly realized any more than Burke did how rotten was the structure which they had undertaken to build up, almost deserved his contempt, even if, as is certainly true, they did not deserve his indignation. It was only by revolutionary methods, which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... in Lake County. On a rotten log. Not previously reported from Ohio, and evidently rare ...
— Ohio Biological Survey, Bull. 10, Vol. 11, No. 6 - The Ascomycetes of Ohio IV and V • Bruce Fink and Leafy J. Corrington
... days, and encamping on the snow at night, they at last came to a spot where the ice was dangerous. "It was weak and rotten, and the dogs began to tremble." Proceeding at a brisk rate, they had got upon unsafe ice before they were aware of it. Their course was at the time nearly up the middle of the channel; but as soon as possible they turned, and by a backward circuit reached the shore. The dogs, as ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... was trampled through brush higher than their heads. Gordon glanced swiftly in the direction in which Buckley Simmons had vanished. "He won't be back," she added contemptuously, "for a half hour. He'll stay down there and drink rotten whiskey and sputter over rotten stories." Without further parley she proceeded in the direction indicated; and, following her, Gordon dismissed Buckley ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... much to atone for and to suffer until his death. The auditor Grimaldos died, soon after Pardo's banishment, "from a painful disease, in which the tongue with which he had spoken so much evil of his illustrious Lordship became rotten, and the arm with which he had seized the anointed of the Lord was withered." The auditor Viga, who went to seize the Dominican provincial, Calderon, died in exile, in Cagayan, without having consented to make his ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... sloping down at the back. Close beside the shed grew a tall and luxuriant maple. The lower limbs had been chopped off, and the trunk rose clear to a height of nearly twelve feet before the massive limbs branched out. The twins had discovered that by climbing gingerly on the rotten roof of the woodshed, followed by almost superhuman scrambling and scratching, they could get up into the leafy secrecy of the grand old maple. More than this, up high in the tree they found a delightful arrangement of branches that seemed positively made for them. These branches must be ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... the throne. He was favorable to parliamentary reform. The ferment on this subject caused the resignation of the Wellington ministry, which was succeeded by the ministry of Earl Grey. A bill for reform was presented to Parliament, depriving eighty-eight "rotten or decayed" boroughs, where there were very few inhabitants, of a hundred and forty-three members of the House of Commons, who were given to counties or to large towns, such as Birmingham and Manchester, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... imagination and a continually rebellious desire to get out of Simon Crood's cage and spread her wings in flight—anywhere, so long as Hathelsborough was left behind. She had told Brent plainly that she thought him foolish for buying property in the town; what was there in that rotten old borough, said Queenie, to keep any man of spirit and enterprise there? Brent argued the point in his downright way: it was his job, he conceived, to take up his cousin's work where it had been laid down; he was going to ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... that a man could use to a woman, and welted her across the face with the stick he had in his hand. I had sprung for the poker, and it was a fair fight between us. See here, on my arm, where his first blow fell. Then it was my turn, and I went through him as if he had been a rotten pumpkin. Do you think I was sorry? Not I! It was his life or mine, but far more than that, it was his life or hers, for how could I leave her in the power of this madman? That was how I killed him. Was I wrong? well, then, what would either of ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... not bring Ambrose back. A brief line, written in November from the Italian lakes, told me that he had "a rotten cough," and that the doctors were packing him off to Egypt. Would I see the architects for him, and explain to the trustees? (The Academy already had trustees, and all the rest of its official hierarchy.) ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... done it! Wrung my own, too! What's to become of me, Steptoe? Is the best thing I can do to shoot myself? Think it over. I'm ready to. I'm not sure that it wouldn't be a relief to get out of this rotten life. I'm all on edge. I could jump out of that window as easily as not. But it wasn't the girl's fault. She's a poor little waif of a thing. You must look after her and keep me from seeing her again, but she's not bad—only—only—Oh, my God! ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... "If we're so rotten as all that," he snarled, "how could we make money and pay dividends? No doubt you are right in your criticisms of our methods. But if I had a man like you around here, continually finding fault and picking ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... a talk with this Russell—caught him after the inquest. I believe there's something rotten about that alibi of his; but I couldn't shake him; and the Otis testimony's sound. So we'll have to quit counting on Russell's proving his own guilt. We've got that little job on our hands, and the best way to handle it is to ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... role of trespasser. It is your insistence, instead of going away with me, that I should trespass. And I can't help it. I think away from you, try to force my thoughts elsewhere. I did half a chapter this morning, and I know it's rotten and will have to be rewritten. For I can't succeed in thinking away from you. What is South America and its ethnology compared to you? And when I come near you my arms go about you before I know what ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... in the harbor grew black and rotten in the March suns; in April there were blue waters and a windy, white-capped gulf again; and again the Four Winds light begemmed ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... with truth, put such a strain on me to be careful of each word that you could have knocked me down with a feather after I was released. When my evidence was read over (they always do that to every witness before he leaves the court) it seemed to me I'd given the most rotten answers every time; but I couldn't have made them any better if I'd tried to explain them away, or amend them as I should have had the right to do; so I let ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... rolling troughs, that rowing became almost impossible, and the miserable old boat shipped quantities of water. At last, after a stronger pull than usual, Walter's oar creaked, snapped, and gave way, flinging him on his back. The loosened twine with which it had been spliced was half rotten with age; it broke in several places, the oar blade fell off and floated away, and Walter was left holding in both hands a ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... who might have been something if he had left himself in your hands, has some notion of standing aloof: he writes against theatricals after having done a bad play; he writes against France which is a mother to him; he picks up four or five rotten old hoops off Diogenes' tub and gets inside them to bay; he cuts his friends; he writes to me myself the most impertinent letter that ever fanatic scrawled. He writes to me in so many words, 'You have corrupted Geneva in requital of the asylum she gave you;' as if I cared ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... never redeemed, form the foreground of the picture; while the large frames full of ticketed bundles, which are dimly seen through the dirty casement up-stairs—the squalid neighbourhood—the adjoining houses, straggling, shrunken, and rotten, with one or two filthy, unwholesome-looking heads thrust out of every window, and old red pans and stunted plants exposed on the tottering parapets, to the manifest hazard of the heads of the passers-by—the noisy men loitering under the archway at the corner of the court, or about the gin-shop ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... a good time," he said, "when all the old men and chiefs are here together, to decide what the people shall do. We came over the mountain to make our lodges for next year. Our old ones are good for nothing; they are rotten and worn out. But we have been disappointed. We have killed buffalo bulls enough, but we have found no herds of cows, and the skins of bulls are too thick and heavy for our squaws to make lodges of. ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... heavy heart to read such accounts of the consequence of your quarrel with that puritanic, rotten-hearted, hell-commissioned scoundrel A——. If, notwithstanding your unprecedented industry in public, and your irreproachable conduct in private life, he still has you so much in his power, what ruin may he not bring on some others ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... rights and keep my commandments, you shall never again be brought into bondage by your enemies.' The United States says that their army is legal, but I say that such a statement is false as hell, and that those States are as rotten as an old pumpkin that has been frozen seven times over and then thawed in a harvest sun. We can't have that army here and have peace—you might as well tell me you could make hell into a powder-house. And so we shall melt ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... of vast extent; but, as it is commanded by the heights from which I was descending, it appeared to want strength if approached from the south. The ramparts were built with great solidity; but rusty old dismounted cannon, obliterated embrasures, and palisades rotten from exposure to the weather, showed that to stand a siege it must undergo a considerable repair." Several days were devoted to a general reconnoissance of the place; but the result was not satisfactory—"I must say that Roustchouk pleased me less than ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... said Septimius, "the next century shall make up for it; for then we will contrive deep philosophies, take up one theory after another, and find out its hollowness and inadequacy, and fling it aside, the rotten rubbish that they all are, until we have strewn the whole realm of human thought with the broken fragments, all smashed up. And then, on this great mound of broken potsherds (like that great Monte Testaccio, which we will go to Rome ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is so outraged by this system of economic individualism that he bursts out with irritable impatience against those who speak of infusing into it a more Christian spirit. For him the whole body of our industrialism is rotten with selfishness and covetousness, the high note of service entirely absent from it, the one energy which informs it the energy of aggressive self-seeking. Such a system cannot be patched. It is anti-Christian. ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... there were three old chestnut-trees, and on a rising ground in the centre might be seen a parasol made of thatch, held up by the trunk of a tree. Under the slatework lining the walls, a big vine-tree, badly fastened, hung from one place to another after the fashion of a rotten cable. The gate-bell, which it was rather hard to pull, was slow in ringing, and a long time always elapsed before it was answered. On each occasion he experienced a pang of suspense, a fear ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... "Isn't that rotten?" said Alaric sympathetically. "I was a bit plungy myself—first one side and then the other." And he yawned and stretched languidly. "Hate to have one's night's rest broken," he concluded. Mrs. Chichester looked at ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... adapts itself to modern civilisation. Catholicism expects civilisation to adapt itself to it. Folk climb from the one big branch to the other big branch, and think they have made a prodigious change, when the main trunk is rotten beneath them, and both must in their present forms be involved sooner or later in a common ruin. The movement of human thought, though slow, is still in the direction of truth, and the various religions which man sheds as he advances (each admirable in its day) will serve, like ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... of those lords was vicious in its origin,—and that force is at least as bad as fraud. As to the title by succession, they will tell you that the succession of those who have cultivated the soil is the true pedigree of property, and not rotten parchments and silly substitutions,—that the lords have enjoyed their usurpation too long,—and that, if they allow to these lay monks any charitable pension, they ought to be thankful to the bounty of the true proprietor, who is so generous towards a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... his name it was also Jones — He swore that he'd leave them old red hills and stones, Fur he couldn't make nuthin' but yallerish cotton, And little o' THAT, and his fences was rotten, And what little corn he had, HIT was boughten And dinged ef a livin' ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... with me; I got badly stung as high as the elbows by the stinging plant; I was nearly hung in a tough liana - a rotten trunk giving way under my feet; it was deplorable bad business. And an axe - if I dared swing one - would have been more to the purpose than my cutlass. Of a sudden things began to go strangely easier; I found stumps, bushing ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... many years. Poor old M. Arouet closed his old eyes without the least conception what a prodigious ever-memorable thing he had done unknowingly, in sending this Francois into the world, to kindle such universal 'dry dung-heap of a rotten world,' and set it blazing! Francois, his Father's synonym, came to be representative of the family, after all; the elder Brother also having died before long. Except certain confused niece-and-nephew personages, progeny of the sisters, Francois ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... with the sole exception of Baudelaire, who inspired and spurred him on to astounding atrocities of the needle and acid. This diabolism, this worship of Satan and his works, are sincere in the etcher. A relic of rotten Romanticism, it glows like phosphorescent fire during his last period. The Church has in its wisdom employed a phrase for frigid depravity of the Rops kind, naming it "morose delectation." Morose Rops became as he developed. His private life ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... some fever he had taken, and their own lives were so much the more precious that so much of them was gone! Like most of us, they were ready to do THEIR NEXT BEST for him. They spared some of their own poor comforts to furnish the skeleton bed for him; and there he lay, like one adrift in a rotten boat on the ebbing ocean of life, while the old woman trudged away to the village to tell the doctor that there was a young Scotch gardener taken suddenly ill at their ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... fell on the town, I felt his lean claws clutch me down. It seemed as if the hands of death Were beating at my breast for breath; His arms were like a twisted rope Of rotten strands that tugged at hope. 'Listen, my father, listen well!' The wind went ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... tribulations? Thou wast our warrior once; thy sons long dead Against a foe less foul than this made head, Poland, in years that sound and shine afar; Ere the east beheld in thy bright sword-blade's stead The rotten corpse-light of the Russian star That lights towards hell ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... head-gardener the strictest orders to watch the trees carefully, for the magician had warned my father that if one unripe fruit were plucked from the tree, all the rest would become rotten at once. When it was quite ripe the fruit would become a ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... could see into your room as well as into his!" He slapped me boisterously on the back, but his gray eyes were suspiciously moist. "Dear old Petrie! Thank God for our friends! But you'd be the first to admit, old man, that you're a dead rotten actor! Your portrayal of grief for the loss of a valued chum would not have convinced a soul ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... signs of terrorism, growing out of nothing into a sudden burst of indignation, knocked over the most absolute of autocracies. Just to look, it is hard to believe it true. As a Socialist said to me to-day: "The empire was rotten ready. One kick of a soldier's boot, and the throne with all its panoplies disappeared, leaving nothing ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... them. The traveller must also pass over many a field of snow not yet melted by the sun, and frequently concealing chasms and masses of lava; and this is attended with danger almost as great. At every footstep the traveller sinks into the snow; and he may thank his lucky stars if the whole rotten surface does not give way. In September the violent storms of wind and rain commence, and heavy falls of snow may be expected ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... or prickles, or have serrated edges, a sweep of which may tear the traveller's clothes, or lacerate his hands or face. Then there are at every turn and corner rough trunks of fallen trees, visible or concealed, often more or less rotten and treacherous, to be got over; and such things are frequently the only means of crossing ditches and ravines of black rotting vegetable mud. Moreover the paths are often very steep; and, indeed, it is this fact, and the presence of rough stones and roots, which renders the very prominent outward ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... the cellulose, the latter being converted into hydrocellulose. When dried, the cellulose is very brittle and powdery, which in the case of cotton yarn being so treated would show itself by the yarn becoming tender and rotten. The degree of action varies with the temperature (the higher this is the stronger the action), and also according to the strength of the acid solution. Thus a 10 per cent. solution of sulphuric acid used at a temperature ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... the thick undergrowth, the intertwining vines, and the heavy lower branches of the trees, make it difficult even to see into the dark recesses of the forest. But in the winter all is open. The low wet places, the deep holes, the rotten bogs, everything on the ground that is in the way of a good run and a jump, is covered up. You do not walk a hundred yards under the bare branches of the trees before up starts a rabbit, or a hare, ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... houses were built like huge square boxes, covering nearly the whole of the lot. Some light came in at the ends, but the middle was always black. Forty thousand windows, cut by order of the Health Board that first year, gave us a daylight view of the slum: "damp and rotten and dark, walls and banisters sticky with constant moisture." Think of living babies in such hell-holes; and make a note of it, you in the young cities who can still head off the slum where we have to wrestle with it for our sins. Put a brand upon the ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... Christmas, on a visit, and who had imbibed a double portion of the mania, in consequence of his having licked up the froth and saliva which had been vomited forth by the ministerial agents and tools of the rotten borough, or corporate town, of which his master was one of the rotten limbs. How often have I seen one of these self-sufficient cubs, with all the solemn mummery, without half the sense, of an ape, deliver what the fool vainly called his opinion, which consisted ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... said. "Here is Cowley's Poems—in such a state that I doubt if anything would ever make a book of it again. I thought by the back all was wrong inside! See how the leaves have come away singly: the paper itself is rotten! I doubt if there is any way to make paper so far gone as this hold together. I know a good deal can be done, and I must learn what is known. I shan't be master of my trade till I know all that can be done now to ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... out of people, and some will always be slave-drivers; they will bow to you, and then take it out on the others. Harkaman's nose was twitching as though he had a bit of rotten fish ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... about—about my marriage. Perhaps you'll understand. You see, I meant to be true to Agatha. But it was so cursed lonesome down there—worse than Siberia or mid-ocean. We were surveying near the west coast—rotten country— and I met her at her father's place. You see, they raise cattle and all that sort of thing there. Her old man—I should say Mr. Grimes—is the cattle king of Patagonia. He's worth a couple of millions easy. Well, to make a long story ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... admirable directness]: The boys wanted me to sit in a little game to-night, but the truth is I have been wanting for a long time to speak to you of a certain matter, and to-night seems a good chance to get it off my chest. A man feels pretty rotten writing a letter like this, but I've thought it over for more than a month now, and I feel that no matter how badly you and I both feel, the thing to do is not to let things go too far before we think the thing pretty thoroughly over and make sure ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... rotten bad move! I ought to have been strapped for it. Oh, Tom, Tom, it takes more'n a red coat with chinchilla to make a black-hearted thing like me into the girl he ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... sailors, these seemed mostly townspeople, collected here out of curiosity. The stranger was outlandishly arrayed in the sorry remains of a half-Indian, half-Canadian sort of a dress, consisting of a fawn-skin jacket—the fur outside and hanging in ragged tufts—a half-rotten, bark-like belt of wampum; aged breeches of sagathy; bedarned worsted stockings to the knee; old moccasins riddled with holes, their metal tags yellow with salt-water rust; a faded red woollen bonnet, not unlike a Russian ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... human nature could get out of such transaction. There was no good soldiering on the part of the French except by gleams here and there; bad soldiering for the most part, and the cause was radically bad. Let us be brief with it; try to snatch from it, huge rotten heap of old exuviae and forgotten noises and deliriums, what fractions of perennial may turn up for us, carefully forgetting ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... vin-egar, Fr. aigre, sour, Lat. acer, keen. It seems hardly possible to explain the modern sense of nice, which in the course of its history has traversed nearly the whole diatonic scale between "rotten" and "ripping." In Mid. English and Old French it means foolish. Cotgrave explains it by "lither, lazie, sloathful, idle; faint, slack; dull, simple," and Shakespeare uses it in a great variety of meanings. It is supposed to come from Lat. nescius, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... made, In vain was youth by us received, That we her constantly betrayed And she at last hath us deceived; That our desires which noblest seemed, The purest of the dreams we dreamed, Have one by one all withered grown Like rotten leaves by Autumn strown— 'Tis fearful to anticipate Nought but of dinners a long row, To look on life as on a show, Eternally to imitate The seemly crowd, partaking nought Its passions and its modes ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... no thanks for his offer; I was listening. I saw the ruined gentleman stiffen his neck and hold his head higher than ever. I beat against the walls and the old linden trees with such force that the thickest branch broke, although it was not a bit rotten. It fell across the gate like a broom, as if some one was about to sweep; and a sweeping there was indeed to be. I quite expected it. It was a grievous day and a hard time for them, but their wills were as stubborn as their necks ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... "Yer rotten liar, take that!" cried Jonah, and struck him full on the mouth with his fist. The man clapped his hand to his cut lip, and looked at the blood in amazement. The shock cleared his brain, and he remembered with terror the tales of deadly revenge taken by the pushes. He looked wildly ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... blanket slung on his shoulder. The way she went gave no shelter save the trees and caves which had been used to cache buffalo meat and hides in old days. But beyond this there was danger in travelling by night, for the springs beneath the ice of the three lakes she must, cross made it weak and rotten even in the fiercest weather, and what would no doubt have been death to Ba'tiste would be peril at least to her. Why had she not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... matter settled, the three children set off on their way clown the narrow spiral staircase, at the bottom of which Alan, who led the way, stopped in order to assist the girls over some rotten boards. The whole passage required careful walking, to avoid dangerous holes, and thin, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... in glory! Oh, there's bad language from a fellow that wants to pass for a jintleman. May the divil fly away with you, you micher from Munster, and make celery-sauce of your rotten limbs, ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... devoutly hoped, were confining their attention strictly to their meal. I was getting on splendidly, and could just make out the outline of one of them through the dense bush, when unfortunately my guide snapped a rotten branch. The wily beast heard the noise, growled his defiance, and disappeared in a moment into a patch of even thicker jungle close by. In desperation at the thought of his escaping me once again, I crept hurriedly back to the camp, summoned the available ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... supply of water had failed. The well was deep, and, like Jacob's well, many had been in the habit of coming thither to draw. My father had called in advisers, men of experience, and they decided that the lower part of the pump was rotten, and must be removed. It had probably stood there more than fifty years, and had been so useful in its day, that it was like an old and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Cleanthes is very like this: he had his gums swollen and rotten; his physicians advised him to great abstinence: having fasted two days, he was so much better that they pronounced him cured, and permitted him to return to his ordinary course of diet; he, on the contrary, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... With only suffering stain by him) for him Shall fly out of itself: nor sleep, nor sanctuary, Being naked, sick, nor fane, nor capitol, The prayers of priests, nor times of sacrifices, Embankments all of fury, shall lift up Their rotten privilege and custom 'gainst My ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... wrapped himself up in the quilt. He felt cold. His bare feet stuck out, and he couldn't pull the quilt over so as to cover them. Nikolay Parfenovitch seemed to be gone a long time, "an insufferable time." "He thinks of me as a puppy," thought Mitya, gnashing his teeth. "That rotten prosecutor has gone, too, contemptuous no doubt, it disgusts him to see ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... brand of the slave is the tint of his skin, Though his heart may beat loyal and true underneath; While the soul of the tyrant is rotten within, And his white the mere cloak to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Harp • Various
... dug, this way and that; and Jonathan found nought, and Parsons found nought; but Hacker came upon a box, and they dragged it out of the earth, and underneath of it was another box like the first. They was a pair of old rotten wood chests, by the look of them, made of boards nailed together with rusty nails. No locks or keys they had; but that was no matter, for they fell abroad at a touch, and inside of them was a lot of plate—candlesticks, snuffers, tea-kettles, ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... he was apologizing. "That sounded rotten. I'm sorry. But you see, I didn't know the chap. It's his wife that I'm trying to find. She was married to a man named Pollock when I knew her. I was rather a pal of Pollock's, belonged to the same squadron and was shot down at the same time. I've been a prisoner in Germany. ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... when Marsden's cattle first came they broke a couple of the posts around the hay-corral, and that when we re-set them we found that the butt-ends of the posts were beginning to get pretty rotten?" ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... wet as water now," said she; "but we must not quarrel with anything to-day on that account; and matting will dry on the hill better than at home. If it turns out rotten, we must try and spare a piece of the cloth from overhead, to lay underfoot: but George will feel it more like home, if he has a bit of matting to trip ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... is pledged to pay for your sins;" "Burial is the only medicine for the dead;" "Swift water never gets to the sea;" "With good neighbors you can marry off even your blind daughter;" "You can't get sugar out of every stone;" "Out of a hawk's nest comes a hawk;" "A fat ox and a rotten shroud are good for nothing;" "There are seven tastes as to a man's dress, but only one as to his stature" (i.e., his own); "A good head will find itself a hat;" "At the attack of the wolf the ass shuts his eyes;" "If you ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... impressions of smell great difficulties occur. Even normal individuals often have a passionate love for odors that are either indifferent or disgusting to others (rotten apples, wet sponges, cow-dung, and the odor of a horse-stable, garlic, assafoetida, very ripe game, etc.). The same individual finds the odor of food beautiful when hungry, pleasant when full-fed, and unendurable when he has ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... will become the city of taste and the noble delights; but it will never be able to regain its power." It has, in fact, been killed by this very theory of nationality; for the only cognate races, Spain and Italy, are two countries of which the one is rotten, the other just entered upon the convalescent stage. Thus it is clear that Germany will, for a time, exercise the supreme sway in Europe. But the future belongs neither to her nor to Russia, but, if not to England herself, at any rate to the Anglo-Saxon race, which has revealed a power of expansion ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... we had evidence sufficient of the vindictive feeling held by the rabble against Europeans, and at the same time the various ways they resorted to, to give us an idea of their superiority. They drew our attention to some old cannon mounted on rotten gun-carriages; they pointed out the strength of their fort, the sharpness of their krisses and spears; and we could not but smile at the false estimate of their and our capabilities. They expressed curiosity to see our swords, which are always made ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... courage to face the difficulties of enjoying pictures. He zig-zagged home, mourning: "What's the use. And I'll be hung if I'll try any other offices, either. The icy mitt, that's what they hand you here. Some day I'll go down to the docks and try to ship there. Prob'ly. Gee! I feel rotten!" ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... the fells, and the brawling river bending round the gray enclosure. But finally, after a period of quiet and gradual decay, the ruin of Long Whindale chapel had become a quick and hurrying ruin that would not be arrested. When the rotten timbers of the roof came dropping on the farmers' heads, and the oak benches beneath offered gaps, the geography of which had to be carefully learnt by the substantial persons who sat on them, lest they should be ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the house where the Violettes and Gerards lived, a large five-story building, upon whose roof still trembled in the wind the masons' withered bouquets. But that was all. In front of them, on the lot "For Sale," enclosed by rotten boards, where one could always see tufts of nettles and a goat tied to a stake, and upon the high wall above which by the end of April the lilacs hung in their perfumed clusters, the rains had not effaced this brutal declaration of love, scraped with a knife in the plaster: ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... wave got under the bow and lifted it high. Then down it went as a man would crash his palms together, bursting out the forepeak like a rotten apple. Thus weakened forward, the loss of the foremast was an imminent certainty. And there were two men in the fore rigging! Captain Ephraim leaned far out from the mainmast; the tug men could see him plainly as he pointed at the tottering ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... leaves with withered ones, as if they were to confound ripe apples with rotten ones. I think that the change to some higher color in a leaf is an evidence that it has arrived at a late and perfect maturity, answering to the maturity of fruits. It is generally the lowest and oldest leaves which change first. But as the perfect winged and usually bright-colored insect ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... pointing out that if anything at all is to be done with Kensington Gardens, why not make a real good Rotten Row there? That would he a blessing and a convenience. We're all so sick and tired of that squirrel-in-a-cage ride, round and round Hyde Park, and that half-and-half affair in St. James's Park. No, Sir; now's the time, and now's the hour. There's plenty of space ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various |
