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More "Ditch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... opinion," he replied. "I have no idea. I was lying in a ditch inanimate. This is a degrading confession, sir; I can only say in self-defence that perhaps (in your good-nature) you have made yourself partly responsible for my shame. I am not used ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I'm going to put the best there is in me into this problem. I never tackled anything in my life that appealed to me more powerfully. If that's any comfort just now, I offer it. If you were my brother I couldn't be more anxious to pull you out of this ditch. Now, trust me, and try to ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... he made me go before to pilot him. I am absent at times, especially towards evening, and the consequence of this pilotage was some narrow escapes to the Monk on horseback. Once I led him into a ditch, over which I had passed as usual, forgetting to warn my convoy; once I led him nearly into the river instead of on the 'moveable' bridge which incommodes passengers; and twice did we both run against the diligence, which, being heavy and slow, did communicate ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... these and such like texts—'The adulteress will hunt for the precious life' (Prov 6:26). 'Whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding. He that doeth it destroyeth his own soul' (Prov 6:32). 'A whore is a deep ditch, and a strange woman is a narrow pit' (Prov 23:27). 'Her house inclineth unto death, and her paths unto the dead. None that go under her return again, neither take they hold of the paths of life' (Prov 2:18,19). 'She hath cast ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Why not proclaim that Densuke murdered Jusuke? Once the gate is passed—and this Daihachiro[u] goes in company so far—it is Densuke who is the murderer of Jusuke. Remain in this place until night. Then off with the body; pitch it into the ditch of Kuroda Ke, or that of Saio[u] Dono. Daihachiro[u] now takes his meal. There is nothing wrong with it?" He looked meaningly at Densuke. The latter, with eyes on the shining sword, at once denied all defilement. He now plumed himself on the care taken of the Danna's interests. ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... for the protection and enclosure of cattle; and as the wealth of the country consisted principally in its herds, it was an important object. Its form is circular, having an internal diameter averaging from forty to two hundred feet, encompassed by a mound and outer fosse or ditch. In some localities, where stone is abundant and the soil shallow, rude walls have been formed: the raths, however, are principally earthwork alone. Forts were erected for defence, and the surrounding ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... should have to take up our night's lodging in the Gig, for though he knew that the gates of the Fortress were closed at 9, our sturdy Dutchman moved not a peg the faster. However, we escaped the evil, and 10 minutes before 9 we passed the drawbridge of the ditch leading to the Antwerp gate, which had been the grave of the 1st Column of Guards, led by General Cooke, ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... of the falling snow,—the air a dizzy maze of whirling, eddying flakes, noiselessly transforming the world, the exquisite crystals dropping in ditch and gutter, and disguising in the same suit of spotless livery all objects upon which they fall. How novel and fine the first drifts! The old, dilapidated fence is suddenly set off with the most fantastic ruffles, scalloped and fluted after an unheard-of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... a reply when suddenly the earthquake which wrought such dire results to the two of whom they were speaking shook the ground. The two men were thrown against each other and both went in a heap to the bottom of the ditch. The breath was knocked out of their bodies, and every thought was driven from their minds except the instinctive desire to remain alive until ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... ditches, and when the bottom was worn out of his shoes and the soles of his feet began to get sore from the shovel, he hit on a plan: he cut the bottom out of a tin can and stuck his toe into the cylinder. And the first evening when he came home from the ditch- digging. and was struggling to remove from himself that sticky clay which is peculiar to the soil of Manitoba, he could not help saying to his wife: It's really remarkable how filthy the mud is here ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... site was chosen from the first for its immediate defensive value, the direct result of its geographical features. The position was of both tactical and strategic importance. In Roman times, however, its tactical value decreased when the great wall was built that stretched with its lines of mound, ditch, stone-rampart, and road, and its series of camps and forts, from near the mouth of the Tyne to Solway Firth. Henceforth the wall marked the debatable frontier, but York never lost its strategic value. It was thus used by the Romans, William I., Edward I., Edward II., and Edward ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... be experienced while allaying it; for this, we know, we shall be able to accomplish in a very short time. Indeed, so trifling is the annoyance we feel from ordinary thirst, that it is rare when we are compelled to stoop, either to the ditch or the pond, for the purpose of assuaging it. We are dainty enough to wait, until we encounter a cool ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... poor mother! On either side the road was a broad, deep ditch, and the rough, uneven soil caused the carriage to jolt fearfully, which was another great danger; and, as it so often happens in the country, the road was deserted, and no one to be seen who might give ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... for the third house past the poplar. First there was a plank bridge across a grass-grown ditch; then a tiny patch of garden; then a humble whitewashed cottage with a small leaded casement window on each side of the front door. Unlike Hope Cottage, it did not look at all the residence of Miss Janet and Miss ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... and I would like to see Mexico dismembered; but before I would see one State of this Union severed from the rest, I would die in the last ditch." ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... two castles, the largest of which the Spaniards named Real Filippe, but since the Revolution it is called Castillo de la Independencia. It has two round towers, wide, but not very high. The court-yards are spacious. The walls are thick, rather low, and surrounded by a ditch, which can be filled with water from the sea. To the south of this castle there is a smaller one, called El Castillo del Sol. Before the War of Independence they mounted both together four hundred pieces of cannon, many of which ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... give England the control of the sea, and relieved her from all danger of a French invasion. Even the "wet ditch," as Napoleon was wont contemptuously to call the English Channel, was henceforth an impassable gulf to his ambition. He might rule the continent, but the sovereignty of the ocean and its islands ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... nice! And who do you think would go trotting about after the pony? I suppose you would leave that to Mr. Van Brunt; and I should have to go trotting about after you, to pick you up in case you broke your neck in some ditch or gulley it would be a very nice affair ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... did his duty with an intolerable mixture of pedantry and rigor*: I was seized with a nervous attack in the middle of the road, and they were obliged to lift me out of my carriage, and lay me down on the side of the ditch. This wretched commissary fancied that this was an occasion to take compassion on me, and without getting out of his carriage himself, he sent his servant to find me a glass of water. I cannot express how angry I felt ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... occupation of the said Robert Stoughton; together also with all the ground and soil lying and being between the said nether rooms last before expressed, and the aforesaid Great Barn, and the aforesaid pond; that is to say, extending in length from the aforesaid pond unto a ditch beyond the brick wall next the ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... principally in the ward of Tondo, where dwellings with thatched roofs were allowed to be constructed. In the wet season the part of this ward nearest to the city was simply a mass of pollution. The only drainage was a ditch cut around the mud-plots on which the huts were erected. Many of these huts had pools of stagnant water under them for months, hence it was there that the mortality from fever was at its maximum ratio in ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... behind breastworks. The troops of Tholouse fired wildly, precipitately, quite over the heads of the assailants. Many of the defenders were slain as fast as they showed themselves above their bulwarks. The ditch was crossed, the breastwork carried at, a single determined charge. The rebels made little resistance, but fled as soon as the enemy entered their fort. It was a hunt, not a battle. Hundreds were stretched dead in the camp; hundreds were driven into the Scheld; six or eight hundred took ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... a nightmare tramp. The rain never ceased. By day we lay in icy misery, chilled to the bone in our sopping clothes, in some dank ditch or wet undergrowth, with aching bones and blistered feet, fearing detection, but fearing, even more, the coming of night and the resumption of our march. Yet we stuck to our programme like Spartans, and about eight o'clock on the third evening, hobbling painfully along ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... knights, all of whom Sir Isumbras successively overthrew. So dreadful was the stroke of his spear, that many were killed at the first encounter; some escaped with a few broken bones; others were thrown headlong into the castle ditch, but the greater number consulted their safety by a timely flight; while the queen contemplated with pleasure and astonishment the unparalleled exploits of her ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... was Proserpine, the daughter of Ceres, whom he carried off as she was gathering flowers in the plains of Enna, in Sicily. The victims offered to the infernal gods were black: they were killed with their faces bent downwards; the knife was applied from below, and the blood was poured into a ditch.] ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... your bullets fly wide in the ditch, Don't call your Martini a cross-eyed old bitch; She's human as you are—you treat her as sich, An' she'll fight for the ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... the 9th of December, in 826; with it is said to have been brought a considerable portion of the relics of St. Gregory the Great. The rich shrines of SS. Sebastian, Gregory, and Medard, were plundered by the Calvinists, in 1564, and the sacred bones thrown into a ditch, in which there was water. Upon the declaration of two eye-witnesses, they were afterwards found by the Catholics; and in 1578, enclosed in three new shrines, though the bones of the three saints could not be distinguished from each other.[4] The head of this martyr, which was given ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... quantities of hurdles and fascines being made; which, as I hear, are to be employed in one of two different plans. The first plan is, To attack the French retrenchment generally; the ditch which is before it, and the morass which lies on our left wing, to be made passable with these fascines. The other plan is, To amuse the Enemy by a false attack, and throw succor into the Town.—One ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... fled to their bridge of boats; while the English sallied out, yelling their insults at Joan. She turned, she gathered a few men, and charged. The English ran before her like sheep; she planted her banner again in the ditch. The French hurried back to her, a great Englishman, who guarded the breach, was shot; two French knights leaped in, the others followed, and the English took refuge in the redoubt of Les Tourelles, their strong ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... extraordinary strength that they were proof against artillery—at all events, any artillery of the calibre possessed by the besiegers. Whish resolved to effect their destruction by mines. On the 18th three mines were exploded, and the counterscarp was blown into the ditch. A shaft was then sunk under the trench, and a gallery cut towards the wall. At the same time a battery was placed on a level higher than the citadel itself; another carrying eighteen and twenty-four pounders was placed close up to the wall. From this battery the most extraordinary ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of fire. About two hundred yards to his left, he saw the top of a small ditch. Using the ditch for cover, the Belderkans could sneak to the top of ...
— The Green Beret • Thomas Edward Purdom
... Restored the embalmers' ruining, and shook The light out of the funeral lamps, to be A mimic day within that deathy nook; And she unwound the woven imagery 605 Of second childhood's swaddling bands, and took The coffin, its last cradle, from its niche, And threw it with contempt into a ditch. ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... gains from thee!" Despoiled of crown and scepter, by the hands They hang him on a column—neath their feet They roll him down.—They with great clubs deface And beat him; then from Tervagant they snatch His carbuncle; Mohamed in a ditch Throw down—there bitt'n, trampled on, ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... buildings to the jolting road—now, these objects showed that they were nearing Rome. And now, a sudden twist and stoppage of the carriage inspired Mr Dorrit with the mistrust that the brigand moment was come for twisting him into a ditch and robbing him; until, letting down the glass again and looking out, he perceived himself assailed by nothing worse than a funeral procession, which came mechanically chaunting by, with an indistinct show of dirty vestments, lurid torches, swinging ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... do you?" said the pines. "If you get to the town, they will turn you into an irrigating ditch, and set you to ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... castle in the corner, {10} or angle, formed by the junction of the two rivers; that junction was, within comparatively modern times, not where it is now, but some 200 yards eastward, on the other side of the field called "The Holms," where there is still a muddy ditch. ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... together through miles of country, the farmers and servants tipping and staring after her as she laid her silver-handled whip upon her pony. She knew not the meaning of fear, and would take a fence or a ditch that a man might pause at. And so I fell into the habit of leading her the easy way round, for dread ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... number of wild beasts did I see in the way! Oh, what a number of powers were there that inflicted punishment upon me! And it came to pass that when I had been cast into the outer darkness, I saw a great ditch which was more than two hundred cubits deep, and it was filled with reptiles; each reptile had seven heads, and the body of each was like unto that of a scorpion. In this place also lived the Great Worm, the mere sight of which terrified ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... organizes his activities, shuffles and reshuffles his ideas and experiences, looking for the new combinations we call "imaginations." The kitten in its play prepares to catch its prey later on; and the child digging in a ditch and making believe "this is a house" and "this is a river" is a symbol of Man the mighty changing the face of Nature. The running and catching games like "Tag" and "I spy," "Hide and go seek," "Rellevo" are really war games, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... that week Desiree took her excursion again. The violets reminded her of the little moss-covered mound on which she had picked them, seeking them under the leaves, her fingers touching Frantz's. They had found these great water-lilies on the edge of a ditch, still damp from the winter rains, and, in order to reach them, she had leaned very heavily on Frantz's arm. All these memories occurred to her as she worked. Meanwhile the sun, shining in at the open ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... scorcher of a jolt! I hope none of the wheels break down!" answered the other, over his shoulder; but he dared not take his eyes off the uneven "tote" road which they were following, for more than a second at a time, lest some unfriendly root hurl him into the ditch, a wreck. ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... I can look out over it. The drainage of the flat now runs off through a great open ditch which I combined with my neighbors to have dredged through by a floating dredge in 1897. The barge set in two miles above me, and after it had dug itself down so as to get water in which to float, it worked its way down to ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... baseball events was never put to a greater test. And the seven Stars, with the score tied, exhibited the temper and timber of a championship team in the last ditch. It was so splendid that almost instantly it caught ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... Union lines reach the strong defences of Peachtree Creek. Here Confederate Gilmer's engineering skill has prepared ditch and fraise, abattis and chevaux-de-frise, with yawning ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... American history, we have been engaged in change—in a perpetual peaceful revolution—a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions—without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... would not dismount! Instead of five years, let three years pass, and this clamorous Parlement shall have both seen its enemy hurled prostrate, and been itself ridden to foundering (say rather, jugulated for hide and shoes), and lie dead in the ditch. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... was storm in the air; a slight shower watered the dust on the road and the grass in the ditch; the left side of the wood remained in the shade; the right side, lightly stirred by the wind, glittered all wet in the sun; everything was in flower, and from near and far the nightingales poured forth their song. 'I fancy there was an oak here that understood me,' ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... account in the Marine National. That's where he keeps his little wad, because I took him over and introduced him there myself. Well, sir, in the meantime I'll call up Matt and precipitate a devil of a row with him over the phone. I'll tell him I've made up my mind to fight him to the last ditch and that those libels will not be lifted until he lifts them himself. Of course, he'll figure right away that he won't need a certified check to-day, and maybe he'll neglect to provide himself with one; or he may be chump enough to figure we'll take his check uncertified, and if he does ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... that direction, her eye fell upon the form of a young Indian who was leaning against the corner of the picketed bastion on her left, in the shallow, dry, and grass-covered ditch that surrounded it. At first her glance caught an indistinct human form dressed in the Indian garb, but as her gaze settled on the object, her surprise was great to recognise Waunangee, who was even then looking at ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... keep the ashes and rich soil on the surface, and for this reason a bed is sometimes damaged by a too deep working. Rake carefully, getting off all the roots and trash. The bed should be drained by a little ditch around it on the upper side. If it is very early in the Fall, the seed should not be sown until the danger of very warm days has passed. After the last of November the sowing should be as soon as the ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... him to a point at the lower end of the yard, on the opposite side from the garden, and left him. But he was inclined to give trouble when they both reappeared with a gun, and in a whisper announced that they must march first up the ditch which ran by the spring around the foot ...
— Two Little Confederates • Thomas Nelson Page
... Bong's timely alarm, every one had got out of the way in good season. All fear of earthquake being removed, the crowd flocked back eagerly to stare down into the wrecked tunnel, which formed now a sort of gaping, chaotic ditch, with sides at some points precipitous and at others brokenly sloping. The throng was noisy with excited interest and with relief at having escaped so cleanly. The break had run just beneath one corner of the keepers' cottage, tearing away a portion of the foundation and wrenching ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... you, if you do. It is not because of the "me," of course, but because of the great patience and faithfulness of Him who is the Light. A very rickety cheap lantern may carry a clear light, and the man in the ditch find good footing ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... moments later he saw the car round the bend in the road just beyoud him. It came tearing along, swerved unsteadily from one side of the road to the other, then was brought to a sudden, grinding stop, narrowly missing a plunge into the roadside ditch. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... required a pretty rapid pace to keep one's self warm a-walking. Day before yesterday I saw a party of boys skating on a pond of water that has overflowed a neighboring meadow. Running water has not yet frozen. Vegetation has quite come to a stand, except in a few sheltered spots. In a deep ditch we found a tall plant of the freshest and healthiest green, which looked as if it must have grown within the last few weeks. We wander among the wood-paths, which are very pleasant in the sunshine of the afternoons, the trees looking rich and warm,—such ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... old belt of forts and the new enceinture of the fortified camps, which have been advanced far outside of the reach of the old forts. The main wall, ten meters (33 feet) high, consists of ninety-four bastions and is surrounded by a ditch fifteen meters wide. Behind the wall a ringroad and a belt line run ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... unknown multitudes of properties, and not solely by a few determinate ones—which are parted off from one another by an unfathomable chasm, instead of a mere ordinary ditch with a visible bottom—are the only classes which, by the Aristotelian logicians, were considered as genera or species. Differences which extended only to a certain property or properties, and there terminated, they considered as differences only in the accidents ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... natives; and, having aneurism of the heart, was cautioned by his medical attendant never to use violent exercise; but, disregarding this, when he had nearly recovered, he went one day to visit a friend at the gaol in which he ought to have been confined, and in springing over a ditch near it, fell dead on the other side, and wholly unprepared to appear before that tribunal, to which he will one day or other be summoned, to answer for ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... work, without finding it save in street gangs and at labor that was mostly done by Greeks and Italians fresh from Europe. A man had to begin at the bottom, he realized, but he did not desire to begin at the bottom of a ditch. He did not seek for such small clerical jobs as he knew himself able to fill. He did not mean to sit on a high stool and ruin his eyes over interminable rows of figures. That much at least the North had done for him—fixed ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... snow. There were no cars running across country, and indeed not even sidewalks, since it was an unfrequented part of the town with no residences for many blocks until one reached the little, tumbledown section in the Hollow. Here and there were heavy drifts, and now and then an unexpected ditch in the path gave Carol a tumble into the snow, but, laughing and breathless, she was pulled out again and they ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... to build up organic matter from air, water, and salts, but devouring their neighbours. These units were not closed in with cellulose, but remained naked, with their living matter or protoplasm flowing out in changeful processes, such as we see in the Amoebae in the ditch or in our own white blood corpuscles and other amoeboid cells. These were the originators of the animal kingdom. Thus from very simple Protists the first animals and the first plants may have arisen. All were still very minute, and it is worth remembering that had there been ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... great citie and populous, built with stone, hauing faire and large streetes, with a faire riuer running by it, which falleth into the gulfe of Bengala. It hath a faire castle and a strong with a very faire ditch. [Sidenote: The great Mogor.] Here bee many Moores and Gentiles, the king is called Zelabdim Echebar: the people for the most part call him The great Mogor. From thence we went for Fatepore, which is the place where the king ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... was followed by a collection of small huts on the banks of the stream, built by those who craved the protection of the fortress. They built a rampart of earth and a wide ditch to defend it, and to this they added from time to time until the works became so extensive that a town sprang into being, which from its strategic position on the borders of France soon became of great ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... joined the remark of Leonard Swett, that "any man who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man would wake up with his back in the ditch." ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... shame upon it. The drainage was so bad that in rainy weather the gutters soon became torrents. Several facetious poets have commemorated the fury with which these black rivulets roared down Snow Hill and Ludgate Hill, bearing to Fleet Ditch a vast tribute of animal and vegetable filth from the stalls of butchers and greengrocers. This flood was profusely thrown to right and left by coaches and carts. To keep as far from the carriage road ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rain i' torrent fell, And o what awful news to tell, It lookt as claads wur baan to shutter, For every dyke, an' ditch, an' gutter, A regeler deluge did resemble. Which made the Haworth folk to tremble. Sum tried to stop its course wi' stones, An' sum dropt on their marrow bones, An' hoped that if the world wur draaned, The railway ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... insist that he was never more sober in his life, but that Horton and Cox were "pos-(hic)-tively-(hic)-beasley." All three would then start off, bent on seeing one another safely home, and, like the blind leading the blind, generally fall into the ditch. Three irate women would then make their appearance on the scene, and they would each be led home, declaring they were never more sober in their lives. Fox found that Cox was known by his friends ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... the dark; and then the very next thing I know'd was something blowing in my face, and woke up and found a white heifer snuffing at me. 'Twas broad daylight, and me lying under a hedge in among the cuckoo-pints. I was wet through, and muddy (for 'twas a loamy ditch), and a bit dazed still, and sore ashamed; but when I thought of the bargain I'd made for master, and of the money I'd got in my waistcoat, I took heart, and reached in my hand to take out the notes, and see they weren't ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... head in assent. "Nurse, I once saw a robin's nest when I was in England; it was in the side of a mossy ditch, with primroses growing close beside it; it was made of green moss, and lined with white wool and hair; it was a pretty nest, with nice eggs in it, much better than your ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... of all, he accomplished nothing at any point. Celer vigorously repulsed Grosses. Flaccus, being unable to preserve the whole circuit of the ditch intact by reason of its size, constructed another within it. This fixed in his opponents' minds the impression that he was afraid, and so he enticed them within an outer ditch, where by a charge upon them when ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... clamp that jolted the whole train, and they slowed down just enough not to knock into flinders a hand-car that was sailing ahead of them, down-grade. "The pilot hit it a lick that tossed it into the ditch," No. 4's crew had explained, and beside it ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... distance of a few hundred yards, defended by a mound and a ditch, rose the irregular and fortified dwelling of Anlaf. It was wrapped in flames from top to basement, and even as we looked one of the towers gave way, and fell upon the hall beneath, with hideous din, ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... hurried out, ere her father could detain her. She entered a narrow path which ran behind the houses and was usually deserted, and raced as fast as her feet would carry her to the hut occupied by Frau Molnar, which was close at hand. Springing across the narrow ditch which bordered the back of the yard, she hurried through the kitchen-garden behind the house and in an instant was in the only room it contained except the kitchen. On the bed lay a human form from which came a groan, and beside ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... from her husband; but I did lose my labour, and so walked back again, but with pleasure by the walk, and I had the sport to see two boys swear, and stamp, and fret, for not being able to get their horse over a stile and ditch, one of them swearing and cursing most bitterly; and I would fain, in revenge, have persuaded him to have drove his horse through the ditch, by which I believe he would have stuck there. But the horse would not ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... yards from the line of hills, and three hundred south of the ravine just described, commences another of a more singular nature; with its steep sides, almost exactly perpendicular, it perfectly resembles a ditch cut for purposes of defence. Rising near the middle of the second bottom, it runs westwardly to the upper edge of the first, with a depth at its head of four or five feet, increasing as it descends, and a width of eight or ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... said Gratillet. "Now we must be very careful, for it is pitch dark and banisters are unknown in Uargla. Ah, now I know where the pathway comes from. It is a ditch which gets the ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... furrow, drain, watercourse, ditch, runnel, and watercut, the turbid waters were hurrying, all with one common flow, all with increasing speed, to the Thames. The sound of waters filled the air, dropping, poppling, splashing, trickling, dripping from leaves to earth, falling ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... that very moment a gigantic figure came bursting through the hedge, clearing the ditch in a single bound—and Black George ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... She continued to count up: 'Fowls, geese, calves, all the farm implements. And all left to that trull! May misery eat you up... may the worms devour you in the ditch for the wrong you have done me, and for leaving me no better ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... no longer. Raising himself from the low wall where he had been crouching, he started toward the corner of the prison farthest from the guard-room. At the wall of the building he dropped flat on his face and began to crawl forward, sheltered by the low ground that formed a sort of dry ditch about the basement of the prison. He had barely stretched himself at full length when a bright light was flashed on him from a deep doorway just beyond him, and a voice, mocking and ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... my ears. I was so astonished that I gave the wheel a turn that nearly landed us in the ditch. Will you believe it? Even in that swerve the strange car followed mine, and when I had got her straight in the road, I heard him chuckle again. His manner ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... observation about the invasion beginning near the roots. They knead a ring of clay round the tree, in which ring the soap water runs when they wash the tree, and besides, they fill frequently the little ditch formed by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... watching the scene. There was something about this child that moved me strangely. True, I tried to pooh-pooh away the sentiment, and said to myself: 'Why bother your head about her? She is one of the "refuse;" she will go down into the dark ditch with the rest, baseness to baseness linked.' But when I looked at the modest, happy face, the whole poise of the body—for every fiber of the frame of man or woman partakes of the characteristics of the soul—I could not hold these thoughts ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... eighteen. Before me as before them a continent stretched its great length and breadth. They laughed and joked among themselves and stared about at everything with eager, curious eyes. They were ready for anything, and everything was ready for them—the ditch, the mines, the railroads, the wheat fields. Wherever things were growing and needed men to help them grow, they would play their part. They say there's plenty of room at the top, but there's plenty of room at the bottom, too. It's in the middle that ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... you bury the dead body of an animal which has died of carbuncle, in a ditch five or six feet deep, and cover it with earth, the carbuncle bacteria will be found in the neighboring soil several years after the interment. We can understand, then, that cattle put to graze on this land, or fed by provender from it, may contract the disease. So when ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... and get some experience before you take it upon yourselves to shove a veteran into the ditch," said Marcy loftily. "I've been in the service ever since President Davis issued his call for privateers. You've heard of the Osprey, haven't you? Well, ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... think of anything smarter to do than that, you 'd better quit. You had no business to turn a newspaper against a man who owns half of it without giving him a chance to get off the track. You whistled, Morton, after you had pitched him and his side-bar buggy into the ditch ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... will be ready, instantly the frontier is closed to intelligence, to construct defences suited to a delaying and punishing action. Every human being will be subject to martial law; every resource at military command. Every hill, house, ditch, and tree will be used as cover or protection and ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... was an old mantle which the bishop's gardener had lent him at his master's request. They stripped it from him, and throwing him into a ditch full of snow, "There is your place, poor ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... and the announcement was received with rapturous approval at the North, it was enough to convince every intelligent and reflecting man that no just idea of the struggle we were engaged in was common, and that a blind people were following blind leaders into the ditch,—even into that "last ditch" to which the Secessionists have so often been doomed, but in which they so obstinately continue to refuse to find their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... 'Deus', however, is but another 'automaton', self-worked indeed, but yet worked, not properly working, for he admits no more freedom or will to God than to man? The Lutheran leaves the free will whining with a broken back in the ditch; and Dr. Priestley puts the poor animal out of his misery!—But seriously, is it fair or even decent to appeal to the Legislature against the Methodists for holding the doctrine of the Atonement? Do we not pray by Act of Parliament ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... symmetrical trees of unknown species grew at wide intervals, overtopping a tangle of hedges, rank bushes, vines, and shrubs that appeared to constitute a rough sort of boundary between irregular fields. A tiny swift stream of water hurried by between the straight banks of an obviously artificial ditch. ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... inhabitants, was as completely cut off from communication with the outside world as though it were on an island in the South Pacific. The postal, telegraph and telephone services were suspended; the railways were blocked with troop trains moving westward; the roads were filled from ditch to ditch with troops and transport wagons; and so tightly were the lines drawn between that portion of Belgium occupied by the Germans and that still held by the Belgians, that those daring souls who attempted to slip through the cordons of sentries did so at peril ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... were broken in your face Before a crowd, that badge torn off your breast, And you cast out with hooting and contempt, —Would push his way thro' all the hooters, gain Your side, go off with you and all your shame To the next ditch you choose to die in! Austin, Do you love me? Here's Austin, Mildred,—here's Your brother says he does not believe half— No, nor half that—of all he heard! He says, Look up ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... for some reason, a bitter hatred against another gentleman, named Aubry de Montdidier, his comrade in service. These two having met in the Forest of Bondi, near Paris, Macaire took an opportunity of treacherously murdering his brother-officer, and buried him in a ditch. Montdidier was unaccompanied at the moment, excepting by a dog (probably a wolf-hound), with which he had gone out, perhaps to hunt. It is not known whether the dog was muzzled, or from what other cause it permitted the deed to be accomplished without its ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... of September, 1909, the Spanish government—at the behest of the Catholic Church—arrested Francisco Ferrer. On the thirteenth of October, after a mock trial, he was placed in the ditch at Montjuich prison, against the hideous wall of many sighs, and shot dead. Instantly Ferrer, the obscure teacher, became a universal figure, blazing forth the indignation and wrath of the whole civilized world ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... should be working in the fields or else helping us fight for the church. Why they pay us to do their fighting instead of training you for that purpose I will never understand. Either one of you looks as strong as a bull and with that habit in the ditch, a helmet on your head, wearing corselet and sword you might pass as a soldier. Here come two more of your order; not only the cities but the mountains are full of you. No wonder there is so much poverty in Bologna ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... beach again. However, at nightfall some had begun to dig a shallow line of trenches, well inland across the cliff. Single men and small groups of them, not finding any more Turks where they were, fell back into this ditch and helped deepen it. ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... hundred yards distant. This was the easternmost point of defence, and formed part of the San Antonio causeway leading to the city. It was a work constructed with the greatest skill—bastions, curtain, and wet ditch, everything was complete and perfect—four guns were mounted in embrasure and barbette, and as many men as the place would hold were stationed there. The reserves occupied the causeway behind Churubusco. Independently of his defences, Santa Anna's numbers—nearly five to one—should ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... waste none of it by random or careless shooting. The fort consisted, as all the border fortifications did, of a simple stockade, inside of which was a block-house for the protection of the women and children, and designed also as a sort of "last ditch," in which a desperate resistance could be made, even after the fort had been carried. The stockade was made of the trunks of pine-trees set on end in the ground, close together, but pierced at intervals with port-holes, through which the men of the garrison ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... her. Peach of a girl. Black hair, big, sleepy, black eyes with a fire in 'em. Dressed right. Traveling alone, and minding her own business, too. Had a stateroom in that Pullman there in the ditch. Noticed her initials on ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... has great strength, being on a level with the adjacent country and surrounded by a wet ditch thirty feet wide and very deep; its stagnant water teemed with fish of a large size, but I had no opportunity of ascertaining their species. There was a rude drawbridge across the moat, and the dwellings around the fort were temporary hovels composed ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... he might drown, Grenfell determined to live as long as he could. Perhaps this was a test of courage that God had given him! It is a man's duty, whatever befalls him, to fight for life to the last ditch, and live as long as he can. Most men, placed as Grenfell was placed, would have sunk down in despair, and said: "It's all over! I've done the best I could!" And there they would have waited for death to find them. ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... on the bank of a ditch beside the highroad to Alessandria. He was alone. His left arm was slipped through his horse's bridle; with the other he flicked the pebbles in the road with the tip of his riding-whip. Cannon-balls were plowing the earth about him. He seemed indifferent to this great drama on which ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... wanting therefore the rich graminivorous variety which Nature gives its carpet, and having instead a braird of six days' growth—lean and hungry growth too—of ryegrass and clover. As for the rill, it stagnates in a deep square ditch, which silences its prattle, and restrains its meanders with a witness. The original scene was, of course, imprinted still deeper on Russell's mind than mine, and I was glad to see he was intensely ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... boy, we work for Mellin when we can and we stayed alive till the water come. I get cured of my consumption. But my money is gone. I can buy no tools, no nothing. And, Mr. Secretary, when the canal do come they run it through Mellin's place. My money is gone and I can't afford to dig the long ditch to Mellin's. Mellin's place is green and mine is ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... to that conclusion "There were ten kings ruling over ten provinces; the whole country was divided into military districts or squares ten stadia each way; the total force of chariots was ten thousand; the great ditch or canal was one hundred feet deep and ten thousand stadia long; there were one hundred Nereids," etc. In the Peruvian colony the decimal system clearly obtained: "The army had heads of ten, fifty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. . . . The community at large ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... snapped the farmer's wife. "Nuthin' could please me better. Las' time I went to town one o' them plagued nuisances come hootin' erlong an' made the old mare back us clean inter the ditch—an' I broke a dozen an' a ha'f of aigs right in the lap of my new bombazeen dress. Drat 'em ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... complaine Was griev'd as he had felt part of his paine; 260 And, well dispos'd him some reliefe to showe, Askt if in husbandrie he ought did knowe,— To plough, to plant, to reap, to rake, to sowe, To hedge, to ditch, to thrash, to thetch, to mowe; Or to what labour els he was prepar'd: 265 For husbands life is labourous and hard. [Husbands, husbandman's.] Whenas the Ape him hard so much to talke Of labour, that did from his liking balke, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... entrance into this dayes sport, and glad to see so many dogs, and more men all in pursuit of the Otter; lets complement no longer, but joine unto them; come honest Viator, lets be gone, lets make haste, I long to be doing; no reasonable hedge or ditch shall ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... mouth, a truism in Melanchthon. I thought that the Anglican Church followed Melanchthon, and that in consequence between Rome and Anglicanism, between high Church and low Church, there was no real intellectual difference on the point. I wished to fill up a ditch, the work of man. In this volume again, I express my desire to build up a system of theology out of the Anglican divines, and imply that my dissertation was a tentative inquiry. I speak in the Preface of "offering suggestions towards a work, which must be uppermost ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... Lichfield. Immediately the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go thither. Being come to the house we were going to, I wished the friends to walk into the house, saying nothing to them of whither I was to go. As soon as they were gone I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge and ditch till I came within a mile of Lichfield where, in a great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then was I commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it was winter: but the word of the Lord was ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... slipshod in spots. They talked to him about it and he laughed at them. Then, one day, he left them in the ditch on the big story of the McManus indictment, and the whole town scooped him, and the managing editor told him that he must go. His lapses had become too frequent. They would have to replace him with a man not so brilliant, perhaps, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... "Ditch-water!" she replied. "The world is all asleep, grown grey in slumber; I do not remember any waking movement since quite an eternity; and the last thing in the nature of a sensation was the last time my governess was allowed to box my ears. But ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... crossed at right angles the one down which he had been riding. It was a lonely spot, but yet was a thoroughfare from which the roads diverged to one or two large villages, and led in one direction ultimately to the market-town. Close to the ditch opposite the road down which Amos had come was a white finger- post, informing those who were capable of deciphering its bleared inscriptions whither they were going or might go. Amos hesitated; he had never been ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... and your water-drinking! If you had had no water to drink or wash with for two years but that—that," pointing to the foul ditch below—"if you had emptied the slops in there with one hand, and filled your kettle with ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... suffering man whispers a single word into his ear; that word, like a torch lighted in a mine, reveals to him a Science. All human ideas, arrayed in every attractive form which Mystery can invent surrounded a blind man seated in a wayside ditch. Three worlds, the Natural, the Spiritual, the Divine, with all their spheres, opened their portals to a Florentine exile; he walked attended by the Happy and the Unhappy; by those who prayed and those who moaned; by angels and by souls in hell. When the Sent of ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... grasped the pommel of my saddle, mechanically winding the lines about my wrist, and clung with the tenacity of sin clutching the world. Some soldiers looked wonderingly from the wayside, but did not heed my shriek of "stop him, for God's sake!" A ditch crossed the lane,—deep and wide,—and I felt that my moment had come: with a spring that seemed to break thew and sinew, the blue roan cleared it, pitching upon his knees, but recovered directly and darted onward again. I knew that I should fall headlong now, to be ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... houses having been originally built on the ditch of Hatta fort.) A section of Beldar Sonkars ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... Ultrajectum of the Romans, selected for its site a long raised spur running out from the solid ground of older and higher land into the water-soaked alluvium of the Netherlands. It was the most important town of all this region before the arts of civilization began the conquest by dike and ditch of the amphibian coastal belt which now comprises one-fourth of the area and holds one-half the population of the Netherlands.[413] So ancient London marked the solid ground at the inner edge of the tidal flats and desolate marshes which lined the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... the side. Souse went the sheep into a murky, muddy pool and disappeared. But suddenly its head came up and then its shoulders. And it began half to walk and half swim down what appeared to be a narrow boxlike ditch that contained other floundering sheep. Then Carley saw men on each side of this ditch bending over with poles that had crooks at the end, and their work was to press and pull the sheep along to the end of the ditch, and drive them up a boarded incline into another ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... she had, and the mode of succession; then, when fully satisfied, led the way to show me what his father Dagara had done when wishing to know of what the centre of the earth was composed. At the back of the palace a deep ditch was cut, several yards long, the end of which was carried by a subterranean passage into the palace, where it was ended off with a cavern led into by a very small aperture. It then appeared that Dagara, having failed, in his own opinion, to arrive any nearer to the object in view, gave the excavating ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... consequences, saying to him: "I take no pleasure in the destruction of sinners, but if thou are bound to go to thy destruction, do so! Whosoever leads righteous men astray upon an evil way, will fall into the ditch of his own digging!" Balaam was misled by God's behavior toward him, and thus plunged into destruction. When God first appeared to him and asked him, "What men are these with thee?" this blasphemer thought: "God know them not. It seems ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... closely-trimmed trees and a high hedge, the residence of the cattle gate-keeper, whose duty it was in former years to prevent the straying of animals from the parish of Barnes into that of Putney. The gate has been removed, but the place marks the London boundary, which follows the line of the big ditch due south across the Lower to the ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... method is employed: the water is taken out of the stream in an artificial channel dug in the earth. But in order to get the water at a sufficient height to make it flow over the fields, it is necessary to start a ditch or canal at a favorable point some distance up the stream, perhaps miles from ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... higher than the tallest ladders, and so thick that fire could not heat them from without, nor battering-ram loosen a single block in a single course; and many assaults were repelled, and many a brave soldier fell writhing and broken into the deep ditch ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... then either because he had reached the end of his journey, or because, before attempting that forbidding, sombre pass which is called the Thermopylae of Provence, he wished to enjoy the magnificent view which spread to the southern horizon a little longer, he went and sat down on the edge of the ditch which bordered the road, turning his back on the mountains which rise like an amphitheatre to the north of the town, and having at his feet a rich plain covered with tropical vegetation, exotics of a conservatory, trees and flowers quite unknown in ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MURAT—1815 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... recklessly dominant males of the white. "He enters a world in which there was no place prepared for him." His father was about as sensible of his parental obligations towards him as a toad towards its spawn in the next ditch. To him he "was a broken wineglass from last night's feast." "Often without a family, always without a nation or race, without education or moral training, and despised by the society in which he was born," is it any wonder that the half-caste is the curse of the community in ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... chiefly in Patiala and the Karnal and Hissar districts. It is joined by the Umla torrent in Karnal and lower down the Sarusti unites with it in Patiala just beyond the Karnal border. It is hard to believe that the Sarusti of to-day is the famous Sarasvati of the Vedas, though the little ditch-like channel that bears the name certainly passes beside the sacred sites of Thanesar and Pehowa. A small sandy torrent bearing the same name rises in the low hills in the north-east of the Ambala district, but it is doubtful if its waters, ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... the road," said Charlotte. "He'll be crouching in the ditch when we get there, and he's going to be a grizzly bear and spring out on us, only you mustn't say I told you, 'cos it's to be ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... in ditch and swamp, And torn by thorn and thicket, The dancing-girls of Merry Mount Came dragging ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... no strength whatever: it simply calls the powers that be into increased action, at their own expense. Seeking real strength in stimulus is as wise as an attempt to lift yourself up by your boot-straps. You may gather yourself to leap the ditch, and you clear it; but no such muscular energy can be sustained: exhaustion speedily renders further expenditure impossible. But now suppose a very powerful mental impression be made, say the circumstance of a succession of ditches in front, ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... return home. To-night the harbor looks like only a dark and sinister rent, which the moonbeams can not fathom—a yawning crevasse opening into the very bowels of the earth, at the bottom of which lie faint, small glimmers, an assembly of glowworms in a ditch—the lights of the different ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... consequently?) a greenish tinge pervaded the water, speedily increasing in depth and opacity. In five days, no object could be discerned six inches from the glass, and my beautiful Aquarium was transformed to an unsightly ditch. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... chasms our walls and our poor palisades, Rifleman, true is your heart, but be sure that your hand be as true! Sharp is the fire of assault, better aimed are your flank fusillades— Twice do we hurl them to earth from the ladders to which they had clung, Twice from the ditch where they shelter, we drive them with hand- grenades; And ever upon our topmost roof our banner of ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... George Manners, of Beckfield. When Mr. Manners saw me he seemed much excited, and called out, "Quick! help! Mr. Lascelles has been murdered." I said, "Good God! who did it?" He said, "I don't know; I found him in the ditch; help me to carry him in." By this time I had come up and saw Mr. Lascelles on the ground, lying on his side. I said, "How do you know he's dead?" He said, "I fear there's very little hope; he has bled so profusely. I am covered with blood." I was examining the body, and as I turned it ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Johnnie's old straw hat and his grandmother's sunbonnet bobbing from side to side, and up and down, and backwards and forwards, as the wagon jolted over ruts and stones and thank-you-ma'ams—which were small ridges built across the road, to turn the water into the ditch ...
— The Tale of Sandy Chipmunk • Arthur Scott Bailey
... Slaves of Lamachus! Water, water in a little pot! Make it warm, get ready cloths, cerate greasy wool and bandages for his ankle. In leaping a ditch, the master has hurt himself against a stake; he has dislocated and twisted his ankle, broken his head by falling on a stone, while his Gorgon shot far away from his buckler. His mighty braggadocio plume rolled on the ground; at this ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... built of logs, seventy-five feet long by fifty broad, and a ditch dug surrounding it; the quarter-deck guns were mounted, the colours hoisted, and it was formally christened Fort Dundas, under a royal salute ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... distillery, and windmill. The mansion is generally on an elevated spot, commanding a view of the estate and surrounding country. The cane fields presented a novel appearance—being without fences of any description. Even those fields which lie bordering on the highways, are wholly unprotected by hedge, ditch, or rails. This is from necessity. Wooden fences they cannot have, for lack of timber. Hedges are not used, because they are found to withdraw the moisture from the canes. To prevent depredations, there ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... existence of some great marvel. That he had seen the lady was beyond question. That she had vanished the next moment was also beyond question. That she had hidden behind a tree or gone crouching in a ditch was inconceivable, to say the least of it; so fair and gracious a person would scarcely descend to such undignified manoeuvres, worthy only of a hoydenish peasant girl. And yet, what could possibly have become of her? ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... "Ah, ditch that!" says I. "I caught you actin' like a suspicious character. Now, if you can account for yourself, I may turn you loose; but if you don't, it's a ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... resisting as Saragossa hath resisted during her two sieges, the whole of the military power of the adversary would melt away. Without any advantages of natural situation; without fortifications; without even a ditch to protect them; with nothing better than a mud wall; with not more than two hundred regular troops; with a slender stock of arms and ammunition; with a leader inexperienced in war;—the Citizens of Saragossa ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... the fortifications, in modern fashion, at the weakest part of the wall. Without drawing from my royal treasury, he had commenced the work four months before, and hoped to have it finished in two more. The ditch was being opened effectively at the same time, and to reduce the number of posts for the defense of this city, and that it might be better fortified, all the redoubts which disturbed the communication between the cavaliers were to be destroyed, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... my name. It can always be said: "What does Lord Elgin know of India? He has never been out of Calcutta. He is acquainted only with Bengal civilians and other dwellers in (what is irreverently styled) 'the ditch.'" Indeed, I fear that I am exposed to the same reproach in your circle. I see no remedy for this evil, if I ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... VILLAINS," &c. &c. Rascals as yet unknown! perhaps you, too, may read these words, and may be induced to pause in your fatal intention. Take the advice of a sincere friend, and keep off. To find a man writhing in my man-trap, another mayhap impaled in my ditch, to pick off another from my tree (scoundrel! as though he were a pear) will give me no pleasure; but such things may happen. Be warned in time, villains! Or, if you MUST pursue your calling as cracksmen, have the goodness to try some other shutters. Enough! subside into your darkness, children ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... under their feet there came a protesting grind that nearly drowned their efforts at conversation. Not that that mattered, though, for they were going too fast to talk, anyway. At first they were a bit uneasy, but presently when they found that the car did not jump into a ditch or vault a fence, they got over their nervousness and thoroughly enjoyed the well-nigh breathless sensation. The driver lolled back on his spine with a nonchalance that aroused Clint's admiration and envy. He wondered whether he would ever own a car and be able to go ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... of what the news meant to her, but that night pride and love fought in the last ditch. It seemed to Becky that with Dalton at King's Crest the agony of ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... the boys. The salt fish made us always thirsty, but no other drink than water was ever allowed. However thirsty a slave may be, he is not allowed to leave his employment for a moment to get water; he can only have it when the hands in working have reached the ditch, at the end of the rows. The overseer stood with his watch in his hand, to give us just an hour; when he said, 'Rise,' we had to rise and go to work again. The women who had children laid them down by the hedge-row, and gave them straws and other trifles to play with; ...
— Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America • Moses Grandy
... childish steps, with his little hand tightly clasped in his father's, carry away? What did they bury in that hole, from which an odor of freshly dug earth was emitted—in that hole surrounded by men in black, and from which his father turned away his head in horror? What was it that they hid in this ditch, in this garden full of crosses and stone urns, where the newly budded trees shone in the March sun after the shower, large drops of water still falling from their ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... maister, well overtane, I thought we two should never meete againe: You went so fast that I to follow thee Slipt over hedge and ditch and many ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... thereof, not for that must the sun be blamed, or scorned by others: still less shall the glory of his brightness be dishonoured through their silliness. But while they, self-deprived of light, grope like blind men along a wall, and fall into many a ditch, and scratch out their eyes on many a bramble bush, the sun, firmly established on his own glory, shall illuminate them that gaze upon his beams with unveiled face. Even so shineth the light of Christ ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... through a field observed a cow showing many symptoms of uneasiness, stamping with her feet and looking earnestly at him. At first he feared to approach her, but afterward went toward her, which seemed to please her much. She then guided him to a ditch where her calf was lying helpless; and he was just in time to save it from death, to the no small delight of the cow. Some days after, when passing through the same field, the cow came up to him as if to thank him for his kindness. ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... Spaniards, Alonzo de Monroy, found means to send a messenger to inform Valdivia of his situation; and the governor accordingly hastened to the aid of the besieged with all possible expedition, and found the ditch almost filled with dead bodies, while the enemy, notwithstanding the heavy loss they had sustained, were preparing to renew the assault. Drawing out its infantry from the fort to join the cavalry he had along with him, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... experts verified Robert's most sanguine views after a very brief examination of the deposit. Hardly any preliminary work was needed. In twenty-four hours a small concentrating plant was erected, and a ditch made to drain off the carbonic anhydride in the valley. After dusk a party of coolies cleared the quarry of its former occupants. Towards the close of the following day, when the great steamer once more slowly turned her head to the north-west, Iris could hear the steady ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... "Dead as ditch-water," replied his lordship. "I heard it at the club. There was a lawyer fellow there dining with somebody there, and they got talking about Bingham, when the lawyer said, 'Oh, he's Sir Geoffrey Bingham now. Old Sir Robert's heir is dead. I saw the ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... will, and is minded to help the Trojans, verily then I too would desire that even instantly this might be, that the Achaians should perish here nameless far from Argos: but and if they turn again, and we flee back from among the ships, and rush into the delved ditch, then methinks that not even one from among us to bear the tidings will win back to the city before the force of the Achaians when they rally. But come as I declare, let us all obey. Let our squires hold the ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... know—for he had not seen it happen—that in that moment the slippery, leather-covered note-book had slid from his lolling coat pocket and had fallen with a sharp slap on the white macadam, skidded along and come to rest in the ditch. ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... the submerged bowlders, while twenty feet below them the irresistible onrush of the current slipped smoothly over the rim, sending up a roar like the thunder of breakers. As they struggled up the opposite bank after a final slump into a narrow ditch Creede looked back and laughed merrily ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... the last ditch," writes Sir HENRY NEWBOLT in his New Study of English Poetry; "Latin is trembling at sight of the thin edge of the wedge." Still a hope of saving Latin—within limits—yet remains, if the appeal of "Kismet" in The Spectator meets ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various
... hauled up there taking two-thirds of the road, and started to light his pipe. I was in a hurry to get along, and thought I could just squeeze by; but I made a mistake, and my wagon got upset in the ditch. He went on, grinning at my trouble, and never offering to raise a ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... fight, each man according to his temperament, swearing or laughing, sobbing or singing comic songs, until the case looks grim. Then, though, the same thrill runs through the whole of them, the same fire blazes in their eyes, and the last ditch that they line has been known to be a grave ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... Carberry was one of his father's patients, and Dr. Bird esteemed her very highly, Frank had postponed the reckoning just as long as he could endure the insults of the bully. But he believed the last ditch had been reached, and was determined to no longer raise a hand to ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... inspections and etc. and telling us how to behave when we get up there in the front row and not to stick our head over the top in the day time and you would think we was the home guards or something and at that I guess the home guards is seeing as much of the war as we are in this old ditch but they say it will be different when we get up in front and believe me I hope so and they can't send us there to ...
— The Real Dope • Ring Lardner
... Palel for some hours a start was made, at eleven o'clock at night; and at daybreak we came upon some villages, each house in which was standing alone in a large enclosure, surrounded by a wall, ditch, and hedge. We went at them and carried them, one by one, without any great loss to ourselves. Issuing on the other side, we came upon a plain about a thousand yards across. Beyond this was a bridge, on fire. The enemy were strongly posted in ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... in the wood that day, and sending the team forward, I went to see the business—and a pretty piece of business it turned out. All the food was eaten, the drink swallowed to the last drop, the ship drawn about three roods, and then left in a deep ditch. By this time night was coming on, and the multitude went away, some drunk, some hungry for want of food, but the greater part laughing as if they would split their sides. The merchant cried like a child, ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... all descend, (As morning prayer, and flagellation end)[325] 270 To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames, The king of dikes! than whom no sluice of mud With deeper sable blots the silver flood. 'Here strip, my children! here at once leap in, Here prove who best can dash through thick ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... his end, and that it was against his uncle by blood (whom I was to see presently) that he rebelled later, and by his uncle that he was condemned; and it is yet more piteous to think how he met that end, crying and cringing for fear of his life, both in the ditch in which he was discovered, and afterward in prison. He looked very kindly on me as he passed, lifting his hand to his hat; but I think he would not have so looked if he had known all about me; for he was as venomous against ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... ditch match stretch pitch latch thatch stitch patch sketch fetch hitch scratch match ...
— How to Teach Phonics • Lida M. Williams
... in my dream, so far as this valley reached, there was on the right hand a very deep ditch; that ditch is it, into which the blind have led the blind in all ages, and have both there miserably perished. Again, behold, on the left hand there was a very dangerous quag, into which, if even a good man falls, he finds ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... as suddenly as her companion. Directly facing them was a large bull: it had been feeding in the ditch when they entered the field, and thus they had not perceived its presence; but now it had walked across, and was standing exactly opposite the gate, completely cutting off ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... of a severe fit of the gout; and I sat with him till near nine o'clock. He gave me a Tatler(9) he had written out, as blind as he is, for little Harrison. It is about a scoundrel that was grown rich, and went and bought a coat of arms at the Herald's, and a set of ancestors at Fleet Ditch; 'tis well enough, and shall be printed in two or three days, and if you read those kind of things, this will divert you. It is now between ten and eleven, and I ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... boy they knew never was used to such things, and they were indifferent, as to what his fare chanced to be. He generally managed to satisfy the cravings of hunger on the coarse food given him, but that was all. About this time it happened that the farmer was digging a ditch, and as he was afraid winter would set in before it was completed, Johnny and himself were at work upon it early and late, notwithstanding the wind whistled, and it was so cold they could hardly handle the tools. While thus employed, it chanced that ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... line is given by the gateway, Por Episcopi, which once spanned the passage—now an open space—on the east side of the Archbishop's Palace (plan 17 B). That gateway stood between the Via Teatina and the next street to the north, the Via dei Cerretani, and the Roman north wall and ditch apparently ran along the intervals between these two modern streets—as indeed the lines of certain mediaeval lanes suggest. On the east the 'colonia' is supposed to have stretched to the Via del Proconsolo and the old Por S. Piero, probably the ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... lady—a Mrs. Maginley—arose and expressed her opinions. She had confidence in Mr. Lincoln, but denounced Gen. Banks, who, she said, was a hero in one place and a slave-driver in another. As next President, we may get a ditch-digger—(Mrs. M. evidently intended this as a sly allusion to a distinguished military chieftain)—and then what are we to do? She wished to know who, loving the black man, could ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Ass on account of his greater abundance of food, said, "How shamefully you are treated: at one time grinding in the mill, and at another carrying heavy burdens;" and he further advised him to pretend to be epileptic and fall into a ditch and so obtain rest. The Ass listened to his words, and falling into a ditch, was very much bruised. His master, sending for a leech, asked his advice. He bade him pour upon the wounds the lungs of a Goat. They at once killed the Goat, ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... a ditch, then, for you?" said the Vicar, whose feeling against the ironmonger was much stronger than it had been against the farmer. He could say nothing further, so he turned upon his heel and marched down the length of the shop, while the obsequious tradesman followed him,—again bowing ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... inevitable gaps in the children's minds in connection with the world of living things, such pictures as the following should be in every town school: a pine wood, a rabbit warren, a natural pond, a ditch and hedge, a hayfield in June, a wild daffodil patch, a sheet of bluebells, a cornfield at different stages, an orchard in spring and in autumn, and many others. These must be constantly used when they are needed, and not misused in the artificial ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... gave him a certain likeness to the German emperor, and when he sat down, he took care to show his hands, by placing them prominently on his knees, in order that everyone might appreciate their vigorous hugeness, the prominent veins, and the strong fingers, all this with the naive satisfaction of a ditch-digger. His conversation always turned on feats of strength and before the two artists he strutted as if he belonged to another race, talking of his prowess as a fencer, of his triumphs in the bouts, of the weights he could lift with the slightest effort, of the number of chairs he could jump ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... experience before you take it upon yourselves to shove a veteran into the ditch," said Marcy loftily. "I've been in the service ever since President Davis issued his call for privateers. You've heard of the Osprey, haven't you? ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... votaries could endure; but all must yield, or rather, all must accumulate, ere our conceptions can approach to the German. America and the British colonies round off the picture, adding Cherokees, Redmen and Mongolians ad libitum. The Jew whether in Hounds ditch, Paris Hamburgh, or Constantinople, ever inhales the choicest growths, and the Mussulman's 'keyf' is proverbial. India and Persia dispute with us the palm of refinement and intensity, but the philosopher of Australia is embarrassed when he ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... place I have seen here. The multitude of small gardens and orangeries, among the huge masses of fortifications, many of them seeming almost as thick as the gardens inclosed by them are broad. Pomegranate in (beautiful secicle) flower. Under a bridge over a dry ditch saw the largest prickly pear. Elkhorns for trunk, and then its leaves—but go and look and look.—(Hard rain.) We sheltered in the Botanic Garden; ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... valley bottom, led us up to the high road on the ridge; and there, peering out cautiously, I spied the backs of a rebel company posted across it, a bare two hundred yards away towards Lostwithiel. Their ranks parted and I had time enough, and no more, to push Margery into the ditch and fling myself beside her among the brambles before a team of horses swept by at a gallop, with a cannon bumping on its carriage behind them and dragging a long cloud ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... each homestead, follows in such rapid succession as to give it a continuous line, in appearance, to the passers-by on the steamer. These, denuded of timber to the last tree, the immense fields, only separated by a ditch, or fence, which spread along the river—all greened with the luxuriant sugar-cane, and other crops, growing so vigorously as at once to satisfy the mind that the richness of the soil is supreme—and this scene extending for one hundred and fifty miles, makes it unapproachable by any other cultivated ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... storming with a troop of horse a camp intrenched behind logs and brushwood. He was no doubt amazed at the stupidity of General Howe in issuing such an order, but he attempted to carry it out with his usual courage. He did succeed in floundering over the logs with his troops, but he came to a ditch that was too wide for his horses to leap, and too deep to be ridden through. At this moment he and his men were saluted with a heavy fire from the enemy, and they were compelled to retire in confusion. In this attempt Elijah Clarke was shot through ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... the interstices between the upright bamboos; the ends being fixed firmly in the ground inside, while the sharpened points projected like a row of bayonets, at a height of some two feet above the edge of the ditch. ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... speech on divorce and then, to quote Miss Anthony's own words, "As usual when she had fired her gun she went home and left me to finish the battle." In this case it lasted several days, but Mrs. Stanton knew she could count upon her friend to defend her to the last ditch. Miss Anthony was always on the skirmish line. She would interview the married women who could not leave home and children, get their approval of her plans and then go to the front. Once or twice a year she would gather her hosts for a big battle, but the rest of the time she did ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... C's camp was, on the left side of the road as you faced the works, we soon after began the construction of a fort, called Fort Warren. It was four hundred feet square, strongly and carefully constructed. When finished, the ditch must have been twelve feet deep. The rebels did not get the range of our position at first, but annoyed us a good deal at times by pitching shells around at a venture. In a few days they would strike the ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... belt of forts and the new enceinture of the fortified camps, which have been advanced far outside of the reach of the old forts. The main wall, ten meters (33 feet) high, consists of ninety-four bastions and is surrounded by a ditch fifteen meters wide. Behind the wall a ringroad and a belt line run ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... instinct to the highest exercise of reason,—from apes and baboons to Bacons and Newtons. The blind lead the blind;—the unseeing law operates on the unperceiving creatures; and they go, not together into the ditch, but direct onwards, straight as an arrow, and higher and higher ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... He clenched his fists, and made for his adversary, head down, in the futile Italian fashion. The Englishman stepped aside, landed a left-handed blow behind his ear, and followed it up with a tremendous kick, which sent the fellow upon his face in the ditch under the rocks. Clare looked on, and her eyes brightened singularly, for she had fighting blood in her veins. The man seemed stunned, and lay still where he had fallen. Johnstone turned to the fallen mule, which lay ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... space, our leader bade us in a low voice be careful and follow him closely. We did so and crossed in this way and in single file a narrow plank or wooden bridge; but whether water ran below or a dry ditch only, I could not determine. My mind was taken up at the moment with the discovery which I had just made, that the dark building, looming huge and black before us with a single light twinkling here and there at great heights, was the ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... thing as belief, and one uses up one's heart, one's body, one's beauty, little by little; one is feared like a beast of prey, scorned like a pariah, surrounded by people who always take more than they give; and one fine day one dies like a dog in a ditch, after having ruined ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... always tumbles into the ditch himself Most detestable verses that even he had ever composed She declined to be ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... told them that he was Lord of the Sabbath day. Here he shows too, that he was with his [38]disciples passing to the synagogue to teach; they ask him if it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath day. He asks them if they had a sheep fall into the ditch on the Sabbath, if they would not haul him out? How much better then is a man than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the Sabbath days; and immediately healed the man with a withered hand. Matt. ...
— The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign, from the Beginning to the Entering into the Gates of the Holy City, According to the Commandment • Joseph Bates
... excused herself by saying it was natural to be frightened for any human creature. But, on the other hand, Tom Isdall was a human creature, and she had seen him last week actually thrown from his horse, and had not felt much concern. But then he was not a friend; and he fell into a soft ditch: and there was something ridiculous in it which prevented people from caring about it. With such nice casuistry she went on pretty well; and besides, she was so innocent—so ignorant, that it was easy for her to be deceived. She went on, telling herself that she loved ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... outlying settlements against Indians is a ditch six feet wide and as much deep; but a ditch of this width can be easily leapt, both by men on horseback and on foot. The ditch, too, would itself serve as a shelter, as active men could have no difficulty in getting out of it, and could surround the house by creeping along the bottom of the ditch, ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... having caught one of the Waldenses, bit his right ear off, saying, I will carry this member of that wicked heretic with me into my own country, and preserve it as a rarity. He then stabbed the man and threw him into a ditch. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... approach an unpleasant task in much the same condition as a runner who begins his start such a long distance away that by the time he reaches his objective point—the ditch or the stream which is to test his agility—he is too exhausted to jump across. Worry not only saps vitality and wastes energy, but it also seriously affects the quality of one's work. It cuts down ability. A man can not get the highest quality of efficiency into his ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... talked loudly and rudely, and, so far as Hugh could hear, both coarsely and unamusingly. They laughed boisterously, they made offensive remarks about humble people who passed them. It was the height of humour to push each other unexpectedly into the ditch at the side of the road, and then their laughter became uproarious. It was harmless enough, but it was all so ugly and insolent, that Hugh thought that he had seldom seen anything which was so singularly and supremely unattractive. The performance seemed to have no merit ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... light open buggies whirled along, loaded down with men. Horsemen galloped down the slopes in squadrons—and such horsemen!—cowboys from "Lost Park" and "the Animas." Prospectors like Casey and Kelly who were quite as much at home on a horse as with a pick in a ditch, and men like Marshal Haney and Grassi, who were all-round plainsmen, and by that same token born horsemen. Haney and Kelly rode with Reynolds and Mose, while Cora and Mrs. Reynolds followed in a rusty buggy ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... light compared with that which the Nationalists would have on hands. I am aware that, at the time when we were all talking at concert pitch on the Irish Question, a good deal was said about dying in the last ditch by men who at the threat of any real trouble would be found more discreetly perched upon the first fence. But those who know the temper and fighting qualities of the working-men opponents of Home Rule in the North are under no ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... and her father had been as far as the fields that lay around the town; it was early spring, and she had gathered some of the hedge and ditch flowers, dog-violets, lesser celandines, and the like, with an unspoken lament in her heart for the sweet profusion of the South. Her father had left her to go into Milton upon some business; and on the road home she met her humble friends. The girl looked ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the Sugar Loaf to attack the Forts that are on that side of the Entrance into the Bay, the first of which is Seated under the foot of the Sugar Loaf on a low Isthmus which joyns the Peninsula or point of the Bay with the Land of the Sugar Loaf. It appears to be a square of Stone Work without a Ditch, with Bastions and furnished with Cannon. A little within this fort are 2 battrys of 5 or 6 Guns each. They are designed to play upon Shipping, but neither these battrys or the Fort are out of ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... of that deep, intense emerald hue, which denotes the presence of stagnant water, surrounded by willows at regular distances, and like the garden, separated from the common by a wide, moat-like ditch. That is the parish workhouse. All about it is solid, substantial, useful;—but so dreary! so cold! so dark! There are children in the court, and yet all is silent. I always hurry past that place as if it were a prison. Restraint, sickness, age, extreme poverty, misery, which I have no power to ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... with easy-going manners which would have made the threatened deluge seem of no consequence. "We shall have a first-rate run. A pity you didn't go with us. Have you ever tried your little chestnut at a ditch? you ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... at the total, some may think that the cost of the Industrial Canal is large. So it is—compared with the cost of an irrigation ditch through a 20-acre farm. But comparing the cost with the wealth it is invested to produce—has already begun to produce—it dwindles to a mere percentage. And a comparison of construction costs on the Industrial Canal with similar work done elsewhere during ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... at the offender, her lips rounded into a long-drawn "s-o," the light of anticipated revenge danced in her eyes. At last she knew what to do, O most honorable but very ugly cat! She would throw her into the ditch, where great crawling frogs with popping eyes would stick out long tongues; where flying things would sting, and creeping things would bite; where the great tide would come later and take her out to the big, ...
— Little Sister Snow • Frances Little
... the gentleman addressed as Luke Sturgis. "And show me the man as ain't cur'ous" he said, with a wink, "and I'll show you the man as is good at a plough and inwalable at a ditch, and wery near worth his weight in gold at gapping a hedge, and mucking up a horse-midden, and catching them nasty moles wot ruin the county worse nor ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... admitted the bolting Senator, "but my back is to the wall and I'll die in the last ditch, going down with flags flying, and from the mountain top of Democracy, hurling defiance at the foe, soar on the wings of triumph, regardless of the party lash that barks at ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... Once we met four young elephants, and an old one that played with them, lifting them up with her trunk; they grew enraged on a sudden, and ran upon us: we had no way of securing ourselves but by flight, which, however, would have been fruitless, had not our pursuers been stopped by a deep ditch. The elephants of AEthiopia are of so stupendous a size, that when I was mounted on a large mule I could not reach with my hand within two spans of the top of their backs. In Abyssinia is likewise found the rhinoceros, a mortal enemy to the elephant. In the province of Agaus has been seen the ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... far beyond its path by now; while you shall endure the whole visitation; and if you try to proceed, pass the night in a flea-pestered post-house, or in a ditch ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... of China in this middle period of its existence. His description of the great palace of Kublai, near his capital city of Kambalu, much the largest royal residence in the world, is of sufficient interest to be given in epitome. The palace grounds included a great park, enclosed by a wall and ditch eight miles square, with an entrance gate midway of each side. Within this great enclosure of sixty-four square miles was an open space a mile broad, in which the troops were stationed, it being bounded on the interior by a second wall six miles square. This space, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... concealed moisture. By sinking a shallow well only a few feet deep among the willows, water was struck as it flowed through coarse gravel over a buried ledge of rock that forced the water up nearly to the surface only to sink again in the sand without being seen. A ditch was dug to the well from below and an iron pipe laid in the trench, through which the water is conducted into a reservoir ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... Old Man Wisner—that's the reason," says he. "You see, it's his money that they are working with now," says he. "Their new ditch has cost them more than four times what the engineer said it would—a ditch always does. They've been wasting the water, like grangers always do, and they're fighting among themselves. These States people has to learn how to farm all over again when they go out into that sort of country. ...
— The Man Next Door • Emerson Hough
... luxuriously one against the other. But his plans required more than this, for he had read enough to know that in the United States one is often taken at one's own estimate, and that if he wasn't to find a job as a ditch-digger, he must make a good appearance. And so it was now time to make use of the one Grand Ducal possession remaining to him, a gold ring set with a gorgeous ruby that had once belonged to his father. This ring he had always worn and had removed from his finger at Ushan, in the fear that its magnificence ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... the meantime had gone back to Galway, and Mr. Robert Morris had been murdered. Soon after the death of Mr. Morris the man had been killed as he was mending the ditch, and Captain Clayton found that the tone of the people was varied in the answers which they made to his inquiries. They were astounded, and, as it were, struck dumb with surprise. Nobody knew anything, nobody had heard anything, nobody ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... when the trees wave their arms and shake themselves so violently they are saying to each other something like this: 'See how these good-for-nothing children go in good-for-nothing boats over this good-for-nothing ditch.'" ...
— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... different achievements. What should be the result of such a course? When a horse has run away, and the two flustered people in the gig have each possessed themselves of a rein, we know the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So, when I see a raw youth and a green girl, fluted and fiddled in a dancing measure into that most serious contract, and setting out upon life's journey with ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some make shipwreck, but ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was in my thirteenth year monitor of the playground, when one Dillon, a scion of a titled family, hunted and killed a stray dog there, and much to their credit for humanity a number of other boys hunted and pelted him into a dry ditch or vallum, dug for the leaping-pole under a Captain Clias who taught us athletics. I was technically responsible for this open insult offered to Hibernian nobility, however well disposed to look another way ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... careless shooting. The fort consisted, as all the border fortifications did, of a simple stockade, inside of which was a block-house for the protection of the women and children, and designed also as a sort of "last ditch," in which a desperate resistance could be made, even after the fort had been carried. The stockade was made of the trunks of pine-trees set on end in the ground, close together, but pierced at intervals with port-holes, through which the men ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... small redoubts, facing west. The fort contained ample barracks for the garrison of three hundred men who occupied it, with bomb proofs in which they could take refuge, in the event of a siege. Beyond the moat, a glacis sloped down to another ditch. ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... diameter. These are equally strong, with the peculiarity that if you fire cannon at them the bamboos yield, admit the shot, and then close again. If these stockades are not close to the river side, they usually have a deep ditch round them, and are further protected by what was more serious to us than the escalading, which were abbatis of pointed bamboos, stuck in a slanting direction in the ground. The slight wounds made by these bamboos brought on lock-jaw, and too often terminated fatally. In the attacks ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... before me, if I cannot charm the wild beast of Philistinism while I am trying to convert him, of being torn in pieces by him, and, even if I succeed to the utmost and convert him, of dying in a ditch or a workhouse at ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... out a little car a short time ago. But, alas! it had not been chosen with judgment, and is no use. It has been rather a bother to me, and now it must go back. Mr. Carlile drove it up from Dunkirk, and it broke down six times, and then had to be left in a ditch while he got another car to tow it home. Since then it has ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... class of foods. He is not to ask his servant, the stomach, whether it is willing to do the work of transformation. He is to give it the work to do. The stomach will do it, unless that particular digestive function is lost. It is claimed by some who know more about ditch-digging than about physiology, that alcoholic beverages ruin the lining of the stomach, creating ulcers, and other disorders. This kind of teaching reminds me of a conundrum. 'Why is a scientific temperance man like a dead man in his coffin?' Who ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... cannot tell; Nor do I know his name. Or poor, or rich? I don't mind which; Or learning Latin, or digging ditch; I love ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... as Wherstead! in which Parish my Family resided from about 1822 to 1835, at a large Square House on the hill opposite to the Vicarage. I know no more of Mr. Zincke than his Books, which are very good, I think: there is a bit concerning Hodge the English Labourer's inward thoughts as he works in a ditch through a Winter's Day, that is—a piece of Shakespeare. It is one of my few recital pieces: and I was quoting it the other day to two People, who wondered they had never observed it in the Book it came from, which is 'Egypt under the Pharaohs,' ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... at Patrasche, paused, wondered, turned aside, then kneeled down in the rank grass and weeds of the ditch and surveyed the dog with ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... of it. At last we came again within sound of the sea. There was moonlight, though not much; and by this I could see the three huge towers and broken battlements of Tantallon, that old chief place of the Red Douglases. The horse was picketed in the bottom of the ditch to graze, and I was led within, and forth into the court, and thence into a tumble-down stone hall. Here my conductors built a brisk fire in the midst of the pavement, for there was a chill in the night. My hands were loosed, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so that he could pick at the ear and get the corn. Guido watched the sparrow clear the ear, then he moved, and the sparrows flew back to the copse, where they chattered at him for disturbing them. There was a ditch between the corn and the copse, and a streamlet; he picked up a stone and threw it in, and the splash frightened a rabbit, who slipped over the bank and into a hole. The boughs of an oak reached out across to the corn, and made so pleasant a shade that ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... jingalls and muskets. As the enemy's shot were flying somewhat thickly about us, it would never have done to halt. Captain Tarleton, therefore, having found a native, who, for a bribe, undertook to show the way, pushed on along the causeway till the city ditch was reached. Here it was seen that, on one side of the gateway, part of the wall had tumbled down. Halting for an instant to gain breath, Captain Tarleton singing out, 'On, my lads!' away all hands dashed right up to the wall, and, scrambling over it like cats, jumped down inside, to the great astonishment ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... seventh resolves, this last-ditch effort made no difference. The public printer, conservative Joseph Royle of the Virginia Gazette, refused to publish the resolves at all. What went into print outside the colonies were the four true resolves, plus the three spurious ones, often made more radical in tone as they ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... to find ourselves reposing in a ditch before the day is over,' retorted Bessie. 'I hope you—or the ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... women, I saw the old buffalo trails where these great beasts used to march in single file, each walking in the footsteps of the other until they had worn deep their trail. The snows of many winters have cut the trail deep like an irrigating ditch, and when I thought of the buffalo I cried in my heart. I have taken these great chiefs by the hand, I have been glad to meet them; I must now say farewell forever, and my heart is more lonely than when I ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... to throw earth out of a ditch so deep, that it requires the full strength of a grown man, and loses flesh and health under the exertion; he is twice blown up with his own blast in quarrying, and left for dead, recovers slowly, maimed and scarred, with the loss of an eye. John, when not thirteen, is ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the Poor Boy's sister hid themselves in a ditch near the palace, that the dragon might not see them; but the Poor Boy stationed himself a little behind the gate and waited for the dragon to hurl his club, in order to get near him, for when he no longer had a club he would be obliged ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... had seized him, but to his horror he saw something approach him that made his hair stand on end. He could not at first make it out, but he soon clearly saw that it was a horse that was madly dashing towards him. He had only just time to step on to the ditch, when, horrible to relate, a headless white horse rushed past him. His limbs shook and the perspiration stood out like beads on his forehead. This terrible spectre he saw when close to Tan'rallt, but he dared not turn into the house, ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... boy," whispers he, "this may be fun for you, but it's death to me. He'll hit all the fight out of you in another five minutes, and then I shall go and drown myself in the island ditch. Feint him—use your legs! draw him about! he'll lose his wind then in no time, and you can go into him. Hit at his body too, we'll take care of his ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... her House ready to die in the last Ditch rather than yield to the advocates of Immersion. After viewing the Problem in all its Aspects, he and Honey compromised by deciding that the Bairns ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... on his travels to-night," he said, in a low tone. "Easy served with a bed, that lad be; six foot o' dry peat or heath, or a nook in a dry ditch. That lad hasn't slept once in a house this twenty year, and ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... early in the afternoon before Cerignola, a small town on an eminence about sixteen miles from Barleta, where the nature of the ground afforded the Spanish general a favorable position for his camp. The sloping sides of the hill were covered with vineyards, and its base was protected by a ditch of considerable depth. Gonsalvo saw at once the advantages of the ground. His men were jaded by the march; but there was no time to lose, as the French, who, on his departure from Barleta, had been drawn up under the walls of Canosa, were now rapidly ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... while this work was going on, in pulling the briers out of his clothes and flesh, and being thirsty, he went down to a ditch that was near, and drank, taking up the water in his hands. As he drank, he groaned out, "Oh, can it be that ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... Vautr. edit. "into the foule sea;" in MS. G, "fowsie;" that is, the fosse, or ditch, which extended round the Castle, ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... garrison as might be. About one hundred yards in front of it felled trees were laid across the road, with their branches turned towards the town, forming what soldiers, in the language of their profession, term an abattis. Forty or fifty yards in rear of this a ditch was dug, and a breastwork thrown up, from behind which a party might do great execution upon any body of men struggling to force their way over that impediment. On each side of the highway again, where the ground rises into little eminences, redoubts and batteries were erected, so as to ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... all parts of the island, that Knox says, not the running streams alone, but the reservoirs and ponds, "nay, every ditch and little plash of water but ankle deep hath fish in it."[1] But many of these reservoirs and tanks are, twice in each year, liable to be evaporated to dryness till the mud of the bottom is converted into dust, and the clay cleft by the heat into gaping apertures; yet ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... round. In order to give a classical turn to the conversation, the dominie mentioned the name of Isaac Walton and referred to his poor opinion of the chub in the river Lea. "I know the Lea like a book," said Mr. Bigglethorpe, "and a dirty, muddy ditch it has got to be since old Isaac's time. When I was a schoolboy I went there fishing one afternoon with some companions, and caught not a single fish, hardly got a nibble. We were going home disappointed, when we saw a man at the reservoir above the river, near the Lea ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... his ground well, but lets himself lye fallow and unfilled. He has reason enough to do his business, and not enough to be idle or melancholy.... His hand guides the plough, and the plough his thoughts, and his ditch and land-mark is the very mound of his meditations. He expostulates with his oxen very understandingly, and speaks gee, and ree, better than English. His mind is not much distracted with objects, but if a good fat cow come in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... Butterick has been regarded as one of the most promising northern varieties. Reports which seem to be fairly well authenticated are to the effect that this fine tree has since partially died because of having its roots cut in the digging of a ditch. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... Mandarin or City-god. Every fortified city or town in China is surrounded by a wall, ch'eng, composed usually of two battlemented walls, the space between which is filled with earth. This earth is dug from the ground outside, making a ditch, or huang, running parallel with the ch'eng. The Ch'eng-huang is the spiritual official of the city or town. All the numerous Ch'eng-huang constitute a celestial Ministry of Justice, presided over by ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... as France, with so powerful a population. This seems even to be one of the provisions of Providence against ambition, that an invasion of a populous country is the most difficult operation in the world, unless the people welcome the invader. It gives every ditch the character of a fortress, and every man the spirit of a soldier. I recollect no instance in European history, where an established kingdom was conquered by invasion. They all stand at this hour, as they stood a thousand years ago. In France, we found the people without leaders, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... dug in an amazingly short time. It was rough work, but effective, the ditch, about two feet deep and seven or eight feet wide, extending for nearly two hundred feet. On the side of this furthest from the fire Durland now lined up the Scouts, each armed with a branch covered with ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters - or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed • Robert Maitland
... gaily. After a while he thought he should like to go rather quicker, and so he cried, "Gee up! gee up!" as the man had told him. The horse soon set off at a hard trot, and, before Hans knew what he was about, he was thrown over head and heels into a ditch which divided the fields from the road. The horse, having accomplished this feat, would have bolted off if he had not been stopped by a Peasant who was coming that way, driving a cow before him. Hans soon picked himself up on ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... images that then filled the goldsmith's busy brain, impressed him so pleasantly that he turned, and saw that the damsel was holding a cow by a tether, while it was browsing the rank grass that grew upon the borders of a ditch. ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... here," I said, as I lazily swam to one end, where there were tufts of water weeds, and a kind of natural ditch took off the surplus water into a pool of similar size, a hundred yards away among the trees—a black-looking, overhung place, suggestive of reptiles, and depth, and dead tree-trunks with snaggy boughs ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... Lash, cage, race, buffalo, echo, canto, volcano, portfolio, ally, money, solo, memento, mosquito, bamboo, ditch, chimney, man, Norman,[17] Mussulman, city, negro, baby, calf, man-of-war, attorney, goose-quill, canon, quail, mystery, turkey, wife, body, snipe, knight-errant,[17] donkey, spoonful, aide-de-camp, Ottoman, commander-in-chief, major-general, ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... marriage, when he was with his old father the sexton. Now, how he and Tom manage their matters, I don't know; but Tom gave him a lick on the head with a stick, which killed him on the spot. As the devil would have it, all this was seen by two people, a laborer working in a ditch hard by, and Scantling's son, a boy of ten years old. The end of it is, Tom was instantly pursued, and apprehended; your good uncle, Sir John, was called to take the depositions, and without any remand whatever, committed our good friend for trial. Tom's only chance is to prove that it ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... slopes of the left bank, is surrounded by a wall twenty-five feet high, eighteen thick, three thousand fathoms in length, and defended by twenty-nine massive towers, a miserable earthen citadel of five bastions, which commands the Orcha road, and a wide ditch, which serves as a covered way. Some outworks and the suburbs intercept the view of the approaches to the Mohilef and Dnieper gates; they are defended by a ravine, which, after encompassing a great part of the town, becomes deeper ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... said the bishop; "there is a weakness of heart of which you remind me. You are right, too, for that, indeed, is an immense obstacle. The horse afraid of the ditch, leaps into the middle of it, and is killed! The man who trembling crosses his sword with that of another leaves loopholes whereby his enemy has him in ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Lamb, reading this entry in a dolorous tone of voice, "he may well say that. I paid Hoby three guineas for a pair that tore like blotting paper, when I was leaping a ditch to escape a farmer that pursued me with a pitch-fork for trespassing. But why should W. wear boots in Westmoreland? Pray, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... shepherd-physician, who has regard to nothing but pleasing, and his own advantage—since, not to forfeit it, he refrains from using the knife of justice or the fire of ardent charity! But such men do as Christ says: for if one blind man guide the other, both fall into the ditch. Sick man and physician fall into hell. Such a man is a right hireling shepherd, for, far from dragging his sheep from the hands of the wolf, he devours them himself. The cause of all this is, that he ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... edge of this thicket there was a broad ditch, with more mud and dead fern in it than water, a ditch strongly suspected of snakes, and beyond the ditch the fence that enclosed Squire Tempest's domain—an old manor house in the heart of the New Forest. It had been an abbey before the Reformation, ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... this lewd villain here? O you cheating Rogue, you cut-purse coni-catcher, What ditch, you villain, is my daughter's grave? A cozening rascal, that must make a will, Take on him that strict habit—very that, When he should turn to angel—a dying grace. I'll father in law you, sir, I'll make a will! Speak, villain, where's my daughter? Poisoned, I warrant ...
— The London Prodigal • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... permissible amusement, pretty much at his own modest discretion. A green flat region, made of peat and sand; human industry needing to be always busy on it: raised causeways with incessant bridges, black sedgy ditch on this hand and that; many meres, muddy pools, stagnant or flowing waters everywhere; big muddy Oder, of yellowish-drab color, coming from the south, big black Warta (Warthe) from the Polish fens in the east, the black and yellow refusing ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and silent. After a pause he resumed: "Yes, I was poor. I have endured all the horrors of poverty. I have hungered and thirsted, suffered misery and privation, even as a little boy. Thus lay I once, wretched and forsaken, in a ditch by the highway, and raised my hands to God on high, praying but for a drop of water, but for a morsel of bread. Ah! so strong was the belief of the goodness of God in my heart, that I was convinced He would open the heavens, and reach to me with His own hand the food for which I prayed. I waited ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... with us, who, springing to the front, knelt down to receive the horses. Those with pistols formed the second rank, while those with arquebuses and musketoons drew up behind them. We thus presented a formidable front, while a deep ditch on either side prevented our being taken in flank. The Spaniards, nothing daunted, however, galloped forward. We received them firmly. Several saddles were emptied of their riders, and five or six of the leading horses slain or badly wounded. ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... that dreadful day; but the wise king, Marsilius, at last put some slight degree of method into the general rout. He collected the remnant of the troops, formed them into a battalion, and retreated in tolerable order to his camp. That camp was well fortified by intrenchments and a broad ditch. Thither the fugitives hastened, and by degrees all that remained of the Moorish army ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... that he thought that was only natural, and turned his attention to the more congenial task of passing a cart of hay; it was a matter of some difficulty, for the road was narrow, and there was a ditch on either hand. ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... disgraceful thoroughfare I ever saw in any town. I believe the whole of it, or at any rate a great portion, has been paved with wood; but the boards have been worked into mud, and the ground under the boards has been worked into holes, till the street is more like the bottom of a filthy ditch than a road-way through one of the most thickly populated parts of a city. Had Quebec in Wolfe's time been as it is now, Wolfe would have stuck in the mud between the river and the rock before he ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... of their neighbours. The captain was an old soldier, and when building his house, had had an eye to its defence. He therefore had enclosed the acre or so of ground in which it stood with a high palisade, on the outside of which ran a deep ditch, and this could be filled by diverting a stream from the falls ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... merely shook my head, my excitement was as dead as ditch-water, and my distaste for the prolongation of my mortal span had come back upon me more strongly than ever. Besides, we neither of us knew what the effects of the fire might be. The result upon She had not been of an encouraging nature, and of the exact causes that produced ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... or four inches in diameter, and I loaded them without difficulty. By the time I had hauled a sufficient number for the structure, the trench was deep enough, and we all went to work setting up the sticks. We placed them on the inside of the ditch, propping them up with others, until we had a dozen up, when we began to throw in the dirt around them, jamming it ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... of any kind. The cigar and the cigarette were first introduced among the upper classes of society, and their use has spread downward. They have broken down many barriers, and in many places, and under many and divers conditions, the pipe has followed triumphantly in their wake; but the last ditch of the old prejudice has been found in the convention, which, in certain places and at certain times, admits the cigar and cigarette of fashionable origin, but bars the entry of the plebeian pipe—the pipe which for two centuries ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... families of Rome, who lined the Appian, the Nomentan, and Flaminian Ways with their tombs, even now magnificent in ruin; very different, too, from the columbaria, or pigeon-holes, in which the ashes of the less wealthy were packed away; and still more different from the sad undistinguished ditch that received ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... had put to death those of the Lacedaemonians then in Thebes, he brought succour to his friends, and marched upon Thebes. (22) Finding the entire country fenced with ditch and palisading, he crossed Cynoscephalae (23) and ravaged the district right up to the city itself, giving the Thebans an opportunity of engaging him in the plain or upon the hills, as they preferred. And once ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... be done against an invisible enemy, who strikes and vanishes, swift as the lightning? It is the destroying angel." Captain Hebecourt kept watch and ward at Ticonderoga, begirt with snow and ice, and much plagued by English rangers, who sometimes got into the ditch itself.[540] This was to reconnoitre the place in preparation for a winter attack which Loudon had planned, but which, like the rest of his schemes, fell to the ground.[541] Towards midwinter a band of these intruders captured two soldiers and butchered some fifteen cattle close to ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... year—December, January, and February—in the great city of Kanbalu,[71] situated toward the northeastern extremity of Cathay; and here, on the southern side of the new city, is the site of his vast palace, in a square enclosed with a wall and deep ditch; each side of the square being eight miles in length, and having at an equal distance from each extremity an entrance gate. Within this enclosure there is, on the four sides, an open space one mile in breadth, where the troops are stationed, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... and heat, foul air in their sleeping places, infusoria in the ditch and rain water, and excessive toil in the extremes of heat and cold, make gaps in the ranks of these hired bands every year as if a cannon ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... was not. She was caked with mud and dirt from head to foot, an appalling figure in the lamplight. The rain dripped from her hair, her sinister clothing, her whole person. She looked as if she must have hidden in a wet ditch. I gazed horror-struck at my speckless matting and pale Oriental rugs. I had never allowed a child or dog in the house for fear of the matting, except of course my poor Lindo, who had died a few months previously, ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... me), it appears that the limits of the former are much circumscribed. For, to say nothing of the farther side, with which I am not so well acquainted, the bounds on this side, in old times, came into Binswood, and extended to the ditch of Ward le Ham Park, in which stands the curious mount called King John's Hill, and Lodge Hill; and to the verge of Hartley Mauduit, called Mauduit Hatch; comprehending also Short Heath, Oakhanger, and Oakwoods—a large district, now private property, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... on I rounded a corner and came upon a very miserable figure. He was an old, old man with tinted spectacles and a long white beard, and the raggedest overcoat I ever saw, and he was sitting on the grass with his feet in the ditch apparently doing nothing but simply sitting still. As I approached he peered at me as though he were more than half blind and then in an extraordinary thin, high, piping voice ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... rather the contrary; I will, indeed, allow him courage, and on this account we so far give him credit. We have more respect for a man who robs boldly on the highway, than for a fellow who jumps out of a ditch, and knocks you down behind your back. Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... will be having over the head of being in a breach of promise, and all the expenses of solicitors and lawyers. Then, after that, trying to get the money out of us, and, mind you, we will fight you to the last ditch. ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... down in a meadow where there was a stream in the ditch and ate the 'snack'. We drank the pure water from the brook out of our hands, because there was no farm to get milk at just there, and it was too much fag to look for one—and, besides, we thought we might as well ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... glorious Queen Bess, as her admirers term her, Mathew Hammond, a poor ploughwright, of Hethersett, was condemned as a heretic, had his ears cut off, and after the lapse of a week was committed, in the Castle ditch at Norwich, to the more agonizing torment of the flames. The translation of Dr. Whitgift to the See of Canterbury was the signal for augmented rigour. He was charged by his imperious mistress to restore religious uniformity, which ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... viewed a mound, Memorial of some saint renowned, And then the mouldered ditch and ramp Which marked an ancient Roman camp. Then past Lubnaig on we went, Gazed on Ben Ledi's steep ascent, And passed by lovely stream and valley Through Dochart Glen to reach Dalmally, Where on a rough and winding track We wished ourselves in safety back; Till on our left we gladly saw The spreading ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Mausers and successfully, for only one soldier in the rear by the door escaped, and that merely to fall into the hands of a workman in the courtyard who strangled him. The fight had begun. The soldiers called on their comrades for help. The Reds were strung along in the ditch at the side of the road, three hundred paces from the house, returning the fire of the surrounding Tartars. Several soldiers ran to the house to help their comrades but this time we heard the regular ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... us, of refreshing droughts of pure water, and of delicious cream and butter rolls, which the moss-covered stone shelves far down the well held securely from possible taint. Back of the house ran the babbling brook and emptied into "the ditch," which was often broad and deep enough to merit a more comely name, and was the favorite resort of the young in winter for skating and sledding. But this ancestral home, with all its charms, had passed from view, like man others, leaving but ...
— Annals and Reminiscences of Jamaica Plain • Harriet Manning Whitcomb
... in great numbers—who are naturally so clean, that we defy you to make them bona fide dirty. You may as well drive down a duck into a dirty puddle, and expect lasting stains on its pretty plumage. Pope says the same thing of swans—that is, Poets—when speaking of Aaron Hill diving into the ditch,— ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... to Arthur, seizing his chum by the arm. "Here, get right into the shadow of the hedge here, at the side of the road—there's almost a ditch, too. If he follows us, he may go straight on, and he won't know which direction we took. It's the best ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... go out in the road and sit with our feet in the ditch, like the tramps do," said Jack. "I'll bring the tea in my sponge bag. Rosher used to carry it about in his pocket, full of water for a little squirt he was always firing off in the French class. Pilson had the sentence, 'Give me something ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... beside the hedge, The dog-rose and the vetch, The sworded iris 'mid the sedge, The mallow by the ditch— ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... words, uttered with sudden energy, she spurred her great horse, leaped the ditch, and burst through the dead hedge into the wood, and winded out ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... most cases there was no chance of making out from what scrap of cover the shots had been despatched; while it became evident that, from sheer malignity, the undisciplined members of the enemy's force would crawl in the darkness to some clump of rocks, or into some ditch-like donga, or behind one of the many ant-hills, and lie there invisible, firing as he saw a chance, and only leaving it when the darkness came ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... you would be an insult; but if in the red ditch-water that runs through your heart there be a spark of courage, mount your horse, choose what arms you please, and come forth. I defy ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... one hundred and fifty yards of the place; and there I, and poor little Jones; and the men, spent the night in a dry ditch. An hour before daybreak we were on the alert, and served out rations, and then they began playing tricks on one another as if we were out for a junketing. I sat with my watch in my hand, feeling queer, and wondering whether I was a greater coward than the ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... answer at once. He was hurrying along, his eyes on the telltale marks. He had proceeded some distance from the place where the log was when he uttered a cry. At the same moment he hurried from the road toward a thick clump of bushes that were in the ditch alongside of the highway. Reaching them, he ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-boat - or, The Rivals of Lake Carlopa • Victor Appleton
... burst in, but it was on the other side of the moat. The water was very low, so two boats were dragged up to serve as a bridge, but they were so much below the top of the ditch that a ladder was put down into one, up which Mademoiselle dauntlessly mounted, unheeding that one step was broken, and I came after her. This was our ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... our land, and I've got a pigeon rig up there. But Bull Meadow Hill is higher and a good deal better. It belongs to Amos's folks. He has a pigeon rig and pole on it, and it will be all ready. Amos says Bull Meadow got its name because a bull was drowned in a ditch there nigh on to a hundred ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... weakened by events. You must buy my full obedience, Zaemon, if you want it. Promise me Nais—and your arts I know can snatch her—and I will be true servant to the High Council of the Priest, and will die in the last ditch if need be for the carrying out of order. But let me see Nais given over to the fury of that wanton woman, and I shall have no inwards left, except to take my vengeance, and to see Atlantis piled up ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... out the flint, and bids the nervous hand Trust the mute bayonet and midnight skies, To stretch o'er craggy walls the dark surprise. With axes, handspikes on the shoulder hung, And the sly watchword whisper'd from the tongue, Thro different paths the silent march they take, Plunge, climb the ditch, the palisado break, Secure each sentinel, each picket shun, Grope the dim postern where the byways run. Soon the roused garrison perceives its plight; Small time to rally and no means of flight, They spring confused to every post they know, Point their ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... than any I had ever met with, and we cut down one for a mast to our canoe. We now had the river to our left, and the chain of rocks to our right, which here approached the river, leaving only a narrow pass. At the narrowest part of this we raised a rampart before a deep ditch, which could only be crossed by a drawbridge we placed there. Beyond the bridge, we put a narrow gate of woven bamboos, to enable us to enter the country beyond, when we wished. We planted the side of the rampart with dwarf ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... a time in the country of Japan there lived two frogs, one of whom made his home in a ditch near the town of Osaka, on the sea coast, while the other dwelt in a clear little stream which ran through the city of Kioto. At such a great distance apart, they had never even heard of each other; but, funnily enough, the idea came into both their heads at ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... An outer ditch was dug on a grand scale, and gates and towers were built with no walls to join them and no dwellings within many furlongs of their site. But to those who laughed at the magnificent plan on which the young city had been laid out, the founder declared that the coming time would see his walls built ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... There is no success in life without love and marriage. You had better be the emperor of one loving and tender heart, and she the empress of yours, than to be king of the world. The man who has really won the love of one good woman in this world, I do not care if he dies in the ditch a beggar, his life has been ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... country, young De Clameran was confident of eluding his pursuers. He knew that the next field was a thistle-field, and was separated from the chestnut by a long, deep ditch. ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... there are cast up great heaps of earth instead of a wall, planted with reeds and canes that grow to a prodigious height and thickness. These reeds are continually green, so that there is no danger of fire. There is no ditch or drawbridge before the gates leading to the palace, but, on each side, a wall of stone, about ten feet high, that supports a terrace on which some guns are planted. A small stream runs through the middle of the palace, which is lined with stone, and has steps down to the ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... and our poor palisades, Rifleman, true is your heart, but be sure that your hand be as true! Sharp is the fire of assault, better aimed are your flank fusillades— Twice do we hurl them to earth from the ladders to which they had clung, Twice from the ditch where they shelter, we drive them with hand- grenades; And ever upon our topmost roof our banner ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... as in every war with Poland, Russia was gaining, ever wresting from her rival the provinces of Lithuania, and attaching them to the gigantic empire. In the year 1534, Helene commenced the enterprise of surrounding the whole of Moscow with a ditch, and a wall capable of resisting the batterings of artillery. An Italian engineer, named Petrok Maloi, superintended these works. The foundation of the walls was laid with imposing religious ceremonies. The wall was crowned with four towers at the opening ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... an officer who was endeavouring to get his horse a share of wayside ditch water. I said to him, seeing my chance, that his horse had picked up a stone; if he would wait a moment I would knock it out. On this, and upon his thanking me, I asked where I might find Wayne's brigade, ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... November 24 (13 Richard II.), 1389, Adam Shakespere, who is described as son and heir of Adam of Oldediche, held lands within the manor of Baddesley Clinton by military service, and probably had only just then obtained them. Oldediche, or Woldich, now commonly called Old Ditch Lane, lies within the parish of Temple Balsall, not far from the manor ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... Kief, was induced, upon the payment of an exorbitant sum, to take the boy as a passenger, and at dawn next morning they started upon their slow and tedious journey, followed by the good wishes of the Jewish community. It was an all-day trip to Kief. Over stone and stubble, through ditch and mire moved the lumbering, springless vehicle, and Mendel, who quitted Poltava with an incipient fever, arrived at his destination in a state of utter exhaustion. The carrier set him down at the outskirts ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... of five years, let three years pass, and this clamorous Parlement shall have both seen its enemy hurled prostrate, and been itself ridden to foundering (say rather, jugulated for hide and shoes), and lie dead in the ditch. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of the Oregon Short Line as it traverses the Snake River desert; those bare high plains escarped with basalt bluffs that open every fifty miles or so to let a road crawl down to some little rope-ferry supported by sheep-herders, ditch contractors, miners, emigrants, ranchmen, all the wild industries of a country ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... your four horns show, Show me the four, and don't say 'No,' Or I shall pitch you into the ditch, And the crows that come to the ditch to sup, Will gobble you up, ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... meantime rabbits burrowed under the wire netting to bark his young trees, and an orchardist who held the job of ditch tender along the Tonkawanda, began to take an interest in the Homesteader's daughter. Seldom any smoke went up now from the cabin under the Dolphin's nose. Occasionally there rose a blue thread of it far up on the thinly forested crest of San Jacinto ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... were indifferent, as to what his fare chanced to be. He generally managed to satisfy the cravings of hunger on the coarse food given him, but that was all. About this time it happened that the farmer was digging a ditch, and as he was afraid winter would set in before it was completed, Johnny and himself were at work upon it early and late, notwithstanding the wind whistled, and it was so cold they could hardly handle the tools. While thus employed, it chanced that they got wet to the skin with a drizzling ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... murdered Jusuke? Once the gate is passed—and this Daihachiro[u] goes in company so far—it is Densuke who is the murderer of Jusuke. Remain in this place until night. Then off with the body; pitch it into the ditch of Kuroda Ke, or that of Saio[u] Dono. Daihachiro[u] now takes his meal. There is nothing wrong with it?" He looked meaningly at Densuke. The latter, with eyes on the shining sword, at once denied all ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... a youth swinging a sword at his fellow's face with delighted energy; to see a man riding off vigorously at polo; to see a man hard at it with the gloves on; to see another flinging himself and his horse over a wall or across a ditch; to see a man taking his nerves in hand, to make a two-yard put for a half, when he is one down and two to play; to see these things without seeing that — perhaps often enough in a muddy sort ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... he found himself out of the town, beyond its straggling suburbs, and once more on the solitary road. He had already walked far that day. He was thoroughly exhausted. He sat himself down in a dry ditch by the hedgerow, and taking his head between his hands, strove to recollect his thoughts and rearrange ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... march nearly a month when they came to Turtle Creek, which flows into the Monongahela only eight miles from Fort Duquesne a strong fortress of logs with bastions, ravelins, ditch, glacis and covered ways, standing at the junction of the twin streams, the Monongahela and the Alleghany, that form the great Ohio. Here they made a little halt and the scouts who had been sent into the ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... for Dunkirk. It is clear, then, that its compilers were not so ignorant as that consequential tailor, Francis Place, represented them. Their chief mistake lay in concluding that Bonaparte intended to "leap the ditch." As we now know, his tour on the northern coast was intended merely to satisfy the Directors and encourage the English and Irish malcontents to risk their necks, while he made ready his armada at Toulon for the Levant.[490] Meanwhile ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... together pretty well. The postilion endeavours to break the rapidity of the descent by conducting the wheels over small piles of gravel or rubbish, which are laid at the sides of the road, near the ditch; so that, to those sitting in the cabriolet, and overlooking the whole process, the effect, with weak nerves, is absolutely terrific. They stop little in changing horses, and the Diligence is certainly well managed, and in general ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... diminutive. He directed them to pull the canoe along the nae, or farther side of the Puunui stream. By this course the canoe was brought down as far as Kaalaa, near Waikahalulu, where, when daylight came, they left their burden and returned to Waolani. The canoe was left in the ditch, where it remained for many generations, and was called Kawa-a-Kekupua (Kekupua's canoe), in honor of the servant of the ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... I washed myself with snow, And cleansed my hands with lye, Thou wouldst plunge me in the ditch, So that mine own garments would ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... him; from the houses to the waste piece of ground on which the houses stood, or rather did not altogether tumble down, unfenced, undrained, unlighted, and bordered by a sluggish ditch; from that, to the sloping line of arches, part of some neighbouring viaduct or bridge with which it was surrounded, and which lessened gradually towards them, until the last but one was a mere kennel ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... these ideas, the squire had them all on horseback at an early age, and made them ride, slap-dash, about the country, without flinching at hedge or ditch, or stone wall, to the imminent ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... launched him into a practical existence. They were rising by hundreds from the ooze that cloaked the bottom of the ditch. The sunshine called them up and scattered them into nothingness as they appeared. It was merely by chance that one, in its upward rush, hit his envelope of starwort; it was merely by chance that the envelope needed no ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... castle, strong, and furnished with artillery, whereunto the city is joined directly towards the north with a brick wall; the walls also of the castle are built with brick, and are in breadth or thickness eighteen feet. This castle hath on the one side a dry ditch, and on the other side the river Volga, whereby it is made almost impregnable. The same Volga, trending towards the east, doth admit into it the company of ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt
... mother sits at home with us, as cheery and bright a body as you would find in all France,—and so I know the worth of women. If any rascal were to insult my girl by so much as a look, he would find himself in the ditch with a sore back before he had ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... out, and both sides made ready for the struggle. Wallenstein, though suffering from a severe attack of his persistent enemy, the gout, mounted his horse and prepared his troops for the assault. His infantry were drawn up in squares, with the cavalry on their flanks, in front a ditch defended by artillery. His purpose was defensive, that of Gustavus offensive. The Swedish king mounted in his turn, placed himself at the head of his right wing, and, brandishing his sword, exclaimed, "Now, onward! May our God direct us! Lord! ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... Lindsay, in his "Mind in the Lower Animals," tells of a Newfoundland that, being refused an accustomed outing with the children and being playfully whipped with a handkerchief, took it so deeply to heart that he went and drowned himself by resolutely holding his head under water in a shallow ditch. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... portal, but this is now demolished. You land under the castle, and walking round find yourself in front of it. This was originally inaccessible, for a brook coming down on the one side, a chasm of the rocks on the other, and a ditch in front, made it impervious. But the late Macleod built a bridge over the stream, and the present laird is executing an entrance suitable to the character of this remarkable fortalice, by making a portal between two advanced towers, and an outer court, from which he proposes to throw a draw-bridge ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... withdrew his beams. The carriage set itself again in motion, but at the very moment when the horses passed the heap, they shyed so violently that the carriage was backed into a ditch and overturned. ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... which seems judicial. The tariff movement we should regret deeply (and do, some of us), only I am told it was wanted in order to persuade those who were less accessible to moral argument. It's eking out the holy water with ditch water. If the Devil flees before it, even so, let us be content. How you must feel, you who have done so much to set this accursed slavery in the glare of the world, convicting it of hideousness! They should raise a statue to you in ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... of April 23. No sooner had the daughter gone than the light was run up on the flagstaff, the bridge across the ravine broken down, arms dragged from hiding in the cellars, windows and doors barricaded, sentinels placed in hiding along the ditch between village and fort. For a whole day, no word came. Governor and chancellor were still busy examining witnesses. In the morning came a maid {119} from the governor's daughter with a red thread of warning, ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... principles of topography. Never plot unimportant details. Prominent buildings and farm houses are of value for locating oneself. Woods and orchards are shown for tactical reasons but no one can expect to show every fence, ditch or bit of cover that might ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... recommenced their fire with fresh ardor. Although even this fort had not been constructed with the same strength in the rear as they all presented in the front, the resistance was most vigorous. A premature attempt to throw a pontoon across the ditch was defeated with the loss of sixteen men. The coolie corps here came to the front, and, rushing into the water, held up the pontoons while the French and some English troops dashed across. But all their efforts to scale the wall were baffled, and it seemed as if they had only ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... cry. He had almost reached the road when his foot slipped and down he fell violently on his face. The squirrel, scared to death, ran out of his coat-pocket, and the eel slipped through his fingers into the long grass by the ditch and was ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... entirely carried away. Parts of them were found, on the following morning, on Barnes Common, at the distance of a mile, while other parts were scattered around the fields. He related also, that two horses which were feeding in a shed, were driven, with their manger, into the ditch on the opposite side of the lane; and that a loaded cart was torn from the shafts and wheels, and wafted into an adjoining field. A crop of turnips were mowed down as with a scythe, and a double row of twenty or thirty full-grown elms, which stood on the sides of ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... carriage drove past, my Friar Lawrence was lying in a ditch, while I was behind an oak. We were near enough to discern the niece, and consequently we feared to be recognised. The situation was neither dignified nor romantic. My friend was sanguine, though big ardour was slightly damped by the ditch water. I doubted the expediency of trying the boat-house, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... what Phyllis had read. The Spaniard had a good muster-roll of regulars and aid from Cervera's fleet; was well armed, and had plenty of time to intrench and otherwise prepare himself for a bloody fight in the last ditch. ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... of Maogamalcha, which was defended by sixteen large towers, a deep ditch, and two strong and solid walls of brick and bitumen, appears to have been constructed at the distance of eleven miles, as the safeguard of the capital of Persia. The emperor, apprehensive of leaving such an ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... behind him the broad smooth road, between rustling walls of sugar-cane, that had brought him through Belle Alliance plantation. The way before him was little more than a bridle-path along the earth thrown up beside a draining-ditch in a dense swamp. The eye could run but a little way ere it was confused by the tangle of vegetation. The trees of the all-surrounding forest—sweet-gums, water-oaks, magnolias—cast their shade obliquely along and across his way, ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... to it. Mrs. Wrottesley had been married too long not to know that whatever at the moment engaged her husband's mind required an audience. Her sons also had expected her to watch and applaud them did they in infancy so much as jump a small ditch, and she knew that it was the maternal duty, and admitted, also, that it was the maternal pleasure to watch and applaud until such time as the several wives of her five ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... with him," Trove continued. "His character is like a broken buggy; and his imagination—that's the unbroken colt. Every day, for a long time, the colt has run away with the wagon, tipping it over and dragging it in the ditch, until every bolt is loose, and every spoke rattling, and every wheel awry. I do hope he's ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... shoulder of this island was Fort Moultrie, an irregular fort, without ditch or counterscarp, with a brick scarp wall about twelve feet high, which could be scaled anywhere, and this was surmounted by an earth parapet capable of mounting about forty twenty-four and thirty-two pounder smooth-bore ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... Powers. "He'll be flung into the ditch." He turned abruptly to Frome. "Peter, take me to a room where I can talk to this ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... the ebb tide and wind being against each other. There are about thirty islands here, not large ones, through which we sailed, and reached Boston at four o'clock in the afternoon, our captain running with his yacht quite up to his house in the Milk-ditch.[402] ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... suddenly down the mountain-side from the big village comes a man of some sort; such a strange man, with such a wonderful head ... that all scream: "Oy, Trishka is coming! Oy, Trishka is coming!" and all run in all directions! Our elder crawled into a ditch; his wife stumbled on the door-board and screamed with all her might; she terrified her yard-dog, so that he broke away from his chain and over the hedge and into the forest; and Kuzka's father, Dorofyitch, ran into the oats, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... but I would add, as this conscientious observer does not, that that does not prove that the intelligence of the insect differs essentially from ours; it is a simple question of degree. Look at a boy who is going to jump over a ditch: he begins by spitting into his hands and rubbing them one against the other before taking his spring. In what has this served him? It is not more intelligent than the gesture of the bee who first plunges his head in the cell before freeing his claws, ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... and sympathy with the beautiful life of the world! Surely it showed that she was not bad, that she could have such a moment. It showed her heart was pure; it was only her memory that was foul. It was in vain that she swept and washed all within, and was good, when all the while her memory, like a ditch from a distant morass, emptied its vile stream of recollections into her heart, poisoning all ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... relief of a clear head and cooled blood. The camp had been pitched close under the red wall. A lichen-covered cliff, wet with dripping water, overhung a round pool. A ditch led the water down the ridge to a pond. Cattle stood up to their knees drinking; others lay on the yellow clay, which was packed as hard as stone; still others were climbing the ridge and passing ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... can tell you that in a few words. I have had very little success with the Serbians. They are loyal to their cause and seem determined to fight to the last ditch. But I did get close enough to one man—a member of the general staff—to learn that in the event of reverses to Serbian arms, the Serbian army will ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes
... until the panting steed would have recoiled before a wide hedge—but the emperor cried, "Over it! over it! The princess is beyond!" and the foaming horse gathered up his forelegs for the leap. He made a spring, but missed, and with a loud crash, horse and rider fell into the ditch on the farther side of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... motto, "No Compromise," has been her watchword. Like Garrison, she strikes a body-blow straight from the shoulder. She recognizes no such word as expediency and accepts no halfway measures. Theoretically a non-resistant, she fights to the last ditch and never accepts a defeat as final. She has the natural gift of selecting always the strongest word, and the power of carrying conviction to her audience. She is conventional in outward observances, but most radical in thought and speech. She ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... that at last was I a free man, but I had quite forgot that I must yet cross a deep ditch before I might get right away. This ditch was 10 feet wide, and I durst not attempt to jump it, as I had sprained an ankle in leaving the garden. Looking around for something to help me over my difficulty, ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... The castle, as has been before remarked, was on the summit of a rocky hill. There are precipitous crags on three sides of the hill, and a gradual approach by a long ascent on the fourth side. At the top of this ascent you enter the great gates of the castle, crossing a broad and deep ditch by means of a draw-bridge. You enter then a series of paved courts, with towers and walls around them, and finally come to the more interior edifices, where the private apartments are situated, and where the little ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... I have him out too soon after lunch, and has upset me twice within the last year—once last winter out of a sleigh, and once this summer, when the horses shied at a bicycle, and bolted into the ditch on one side of the chaussee (German for high road), and the bicycle was so terrified at the horses shying that it shied too into the ditch on the other side, and the carriage was smashed, and the bicycle was smashed, and we were all very unhappy, ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... against the sky and she knew they were coming to the Burning Forest. The figure before her sprang across a ditch and went into the forest. Sheen sprang across it too. Burning branches fell across her path as she went on. Hot winds burnt her face. Flames dazzled and smoke dazed her. But the figure before her went straight on and ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... characteristic feature of almost every east-Cuban landscape. The western bluff, from which the trees had been cut away, sloped backward a little more than the other, and about half-way up it, in a network of yellow intersecting paths, stood another blockhouse, surrounded by a ditch and a circular "entanglement" of barbed-wire fencing. At the foot of this bluff, and extending westward under the precipitous declivity of the rampart, were two lines of unpainted, one-story wooden houses, which stood gable to gable at intervals of fifty ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... The inner one was still there, and lay forty feet in breadth, though now only a few feet in depth, round the whole house. A small stream fed it and continued beyond it, so that the sheet of water, though turbid, was never ditch-like or unhealthy. The ground floor windows were within a foot of the surface of ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... gates, and trees; past cottages and burns, and people going home from work. Yoho, past donkey chaises, drawn aside into the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, whipped up at a bound upon the little watercourse, and held by struggling carters close to the five-barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning on the ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... oxen's yoke—happily without doing any damage, further than causing the usually quiet, steady-going beasts to swerve violently to one side—when fortunately a considerable heap of sand prevented the chariot's being overturned into the ditch beside the road. The sharp report and violent shock startled the sleeping travellers in the chariot, and the younger women shrieked wildly in their terror, whilst the duenna, who had met with such adventures before, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... and few carriages. We reached the top in due time, saluted the old man and started back. My friend was at the wheel and did a few turns all right, till we came to a straight shoot, very narrow, a ditch on one side, trees on the other, and just here the brake refused to work. Reaching over I touched his shoulder and suggested that he should go slower. No reply; he was speechless, and we knew at once that he had lost control, ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... evening Siddhartha ordered his carriage in order to go to the river and bathe. Suddenly his horses were frightened by the sight of a dead man whose rotting body lay sprawling in the ditch beside the road. The young prince, who had never been allowed to see such things, was frightened, but Channa told him not to mind such trifles. The world was full of dead people. It was the rule of life that all things must come ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... all lures that debauch the soul, The orgied rites of the rich; To eat my crust as a rover must With the rough-neck down in the ditch. To trudge by his side whate'er betide; To share his fire at night; To call him friend to the long trail-end, And ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... devouring their neighbours. These units were not closed in with cellulose, but remained naked, with their living matter or protoplasm flowing out in changeful processes, such as we see in the Amoebae in the ditch or in our own white blood corpuscles and other amoeboid cells. These were the originators of the animal kingdom. Thus from very simple Protists the first animals and the first plants may have arisen. All were still very minute, ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... too dry for paddles, and Dick pushed with an oar, while Ned used a pole which he had brought along for use with a harpoon. As the trail grew dryer, it became impossible to pole the canoe, and Ned took the painter and, stepping into the nearly dry ditch in front of the canoe, dragged the craft, while Billy got overboard and pushed from behind. Sometimes Ned stopped to kick something out of his path, and at last ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... plus his nose supplied the rest. As the lights came out one by one after twilight, he stirred uneasily at the unwonted stillness in his house. Apparently no one was getting ready for church. Could it be that they were not going; that this thing was to be carried to the last ditch? He decided to ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... child sees prostitutes in the street every day without distinguishing them from other people. In the country he would every day hear it stated in the crudest terms that such and such a girl has been found at night in a barn or a ditch making love with such and such a youth, or that the servant girl slips every night into the coachman's bed, the facts of sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and childbirth being spoken of in the plainest ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a quarrel broke out. Each man felt the others must be in some way responsible for his betrayal in the matter of the contest with Ed Hall and accusations flew back and forth. One of the men threw a heavy stone that ran down along the tracks and jumped into a ditch filled with dry weeds. It made a heavy crashing sound. Hugh heard heavy footsteps running. He was afraid the men were going to attack him, and climbed over a fence, crossed a barnyard, and got into an empty street. As he went along trying to understand ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... Desiree took her excursion again. The violets reminded her of the little moss-covered mound on which she had picked them, seeking them under the leaves, her fingers touching Frantz's. They had found these great water-lilies on the edge of a ditch, still damp from the winter rains, and, in order to reach them, she had leaned very heavily on Frantz's arm. All these memories occurred to her as she worked. Meanwhile the sun, shining in at the open window, made the feathers ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... a girl, a wench. Gotsch, a stone jug. Holl, a dry ditch. Anan? An? an interrogation used when the speaker does not understand a question put to him. To be muddled, to be distressed in mind. Together, an expletive used thus: where are you going together? (meaning several persons)—what are ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 44, Saturday, August 31, 1850 • Various
... despair of the fugitives the Boers came rapidly nearer, while the clump of earth for which they made seemed to be as distant as ever. The only thing they made out was that it became more diffused, and they plainly saw that it was a long ridge of earth freshly thrown up, evidently from a ditch beyond. ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... and a flurry of bodies. The dust of the road arose in a cloud and screened the battle. But at the end of several minutes two dogs were struggling in the dirt and the third was in full flight. He leaped a ditch, went through a rail fence, and fled across a field. White Fang followed, sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with wolf speed, swiftly and without noise, and in the centre of the field he dragged ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... Texans had drawn in running noose. It was Morgan's hope in the first few rods of this frightful journey that a brakeman might appear on top of the train, whose attention he might attract before the speed became so great he could no longer maintain it, or a lurch or a stumble in the ditch at the trackside might throw him ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... Saturday comes, and a sad falling off is there. By the time the sixth or seventh hole is reached, the all-important card has perhaps been torn up into little pieces and flung contemptuously into a convenient ditch. ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... student of commercial matters: rivalries of Banks; Foreign and Municipal Loans, American Rails, and Argentine; new Companies of wholesome appearance or sinister; or starting with a dram in the stomach, or born to bleat prostrate, like sheep on their backs in a ditch; Trusts and Founders; Breweries bursting vats upon the markets, and England prone along the gutters, gobbling, drunk for shares, and sober in the possession of certain of them. But when, as Colney says, a grateful ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the King's Road some one called to him. He turned round in sudden, intense joy, but then his head dropped and he went on without answering. It was only a tramp, who was standing half out of a ditch in a field a little way off, beckoning to him. He came running over the ploughed field, crying hoarsely: "Wait a little, can't you? Here have I been waiting for company all day, so you might as well ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... crossing the ditch that had been dug around the camp among the ruins, and passed through lanes of tents erected among the thick foliage that mantled the broken walls; here and there tracks of mosaic pavement; of temples to Dido or Anna peeping forth beneath either the luxuriant vegetation ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... but love that I'm dealin' out to 'em, God knows! And yet, it's they that are masters of the situation, only they don't know it! There's the pity! They've no leaders, except such as waste their money and leave 'em in the ditch! The world's social schemes, Miss Carmen, don't reach such as these. They're only sops. And they've got the contempt of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... against the Barbarians; he adds, however, in his letter, that the new suburbs which had been built by the merchants and veterans, required some additional defence, and that he had, accordingly, for the greater security of the place, strengthened it with a new ditch: he ended his voyage at Sebastapolis, the most distant city garrisoned by the Romans. The description of the coasts of Asia, from Byzantium to Trebizond, and another of the interior, from Sebastapolis to the Bosphorus Cimmerius, and thence to Byzantium, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... from their root and source, the less vehement and painful will the collision be. But there is the gulf, and there it will remain, until the world is a Church. No doubt some portion of the battlements of organised Christianity has tumbled into the ditch, and made it a little less deep. Christians have dropped their standard far too much, and so the antagonism is not so plain as it ought to be, and as it used to be, and as, some day, it will be. But there it is, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... Patrasche, paused, wondered, turned aside, then kneeled down in the rank grass and weeds of the ditch and surveyed the dog with ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... doing only inspections and etc. and telling us how to behave when we get up there in the front row and not to stick our head over the top in the day time and you would think we was the home guards or something and at that I guess the home guards is seeing as much of the war as we are in this old ditch but they say it will be different when we get up in front and believe me I hope so and they can't send us there to soon to ...
— The Real Dope • Ring Lardner
... bake and cake in the pots; rich, that the little plants may readily find ample nourishment; porous, that water may be soaked up readily, and any surplus drained off freely. A soil answering all these requirements is made as follows: cut from an old ditch or fence-side, thick sods, and stack them with the grass sides together to rot. This heap should be forked over several times, when it has begun to decompose. In dry weather, if within reach of the hose, a good soaking occasionally will help the process along. ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... was away through the brush. Speed and the utmost caution were necessary. If a limb cracked, if he fell over a hidden ditch, the quarry would be frightened away. He must see what was going on, see it with ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... the previous night, Salvat had suddenly escaped from the detectives by bounding into the Bois de Boulogne, it had occurred to him to slip round to the Dauphine gate and there descend into the deep ditch* of the city ramparts. He remembered days of enforced idleness which he had spent there, in nooks where, for his own part, he had never met a living soul. Nowhere, indeed, could one find more secret places of retreat, hedged round by thicker bushes, or ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... exceeded the speed limit when he saw a clear road ahead. A lunch-basket with thermos flasks was packed in the car, and the party picnicked for their mid-day meal in a wood where primroses were opening their little pale-yellow flowers, and king-cups blazed in a marshy ditch. The air was fresh with spring, and cuckoos were calling from the fields ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... to go in and look at the school. "In a hedge or ditch school," said he, "which I once passed on this road, and in which I saw a crowd of idle children, I heard the schoolmaster cry out, 'Rehearse! rehearse! there's company going by; and instantly all the boys snatched up their books, and began gabbling as fast as ever they ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... aromatic contents of the packages had been poured into the wayside ditch to be sucked up by an unappreciative if porous soil. The truck itself had been confiscated. Its driver barely had escaped, to return homeward afoot across country bearing dire tidings to his employer, who was reported, upon hearing the lamentable news, literally to have ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... Nothing has been said about a combined attack of army and navy. Such a thing is not only practicable, but, if time permitted, should be adopted. Fort St. Philip can be taken with two thousand men covered by the ships, the ditch can be filled with fascines, and the wall is easily to be scaled with ladders. It can be ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... about eleven o'clock. Just as we were thinking of halting as usual, to rest and try to shoot something to eat, a sudden bend in the river brought us in sight of a substantial-looking European house with a veranda round it, splendidly situated upon a hill, and surrounded by a high stone wall with a ditch on the outer side. Right against and overshadowing the house was an enormous pine, the tope of which we had seen through a glass for the last two days, but of course without knowing that it marked the site of the mission station. ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... the Church. Philistia rejoices. Let the movers in this obscene tumult look to themselves. Have they the confidence of the people even as the Church has that confidence? Let them put it to the test. I tell you, George Holland, the desert and the ditch, whose vomit those men are who now move against us in Parliament, shall receive them once more before many months have passed. The Church on whom they hoped to prey shall witness their dispersal, never again to ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... the darkness, seeking the way, lest ye fall into the ditch; but gather together, sustain one another, put your faith in your God and wait for the first glimmer of light ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... surrounded by a stone wall about thirty feet high, with its foundation on a solid rock; but it has no ditch or glacis, and is capable of little or no defence against cannon. In the afternoon I went, accompanied by Lieutenant Thomas, and followed by the best cortege we could muster, to return the Raja's visit. He resides within the walls of ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... sorts of things to-night—it began while I lay in that ditch with the pigs rooting about me! Where is my father, can't you ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... beat him fur nothin; dey would beat him and take him to de lake and put him on a log and shev him in de lake, but he always swimmed out. When dey didn' do dat dey would beat him tel de blood run outen him and den trow him in de ditch in de field and kivver him up wid dirt, head and years and den stick a stick up at his haid. I wuz a water toter and had stood and seen um do him dat way more'n once and I stood and looked at um tel dey went 'way ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... beard with red-hot nutshells. And as to his two wives, Aristomache, his countrywoman, and Doris of Locris, he never visited them at night before everything had been well searched and examined. And as he had surrounded the place where his bed was with a broad ditch, and made a way over it with a wooden bridge, he drew that bridge over after shutting his bedchamber door. And as he did not dare to stand on the ordinary pulpits from which they usually harangued the people, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... to regain his place among his company. His horse, in backing, slipped with his hind-legs into a ditch on the side of the road, but, by a sort of miracle, the animal kept his fore-feet for some time on the top of the ditch. If he had fallen back, he must have crushed his rider. Petrarch was not afraid, for he was not aware ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Caitilin. Sight or light of her I haven't had for three days. My wife said first, that it was the fairies had taken her, and then she said it was a travelling man that had a musical instrument she went away with, and after that she said, that maybe the girl was lying dead in the butt of a ditch with her eyes wide open, and she staring broadly at the moon in the night time and the sun in the day until the crows would be ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... could be coerced into it. But in contracting himself out of the obligations to be imposed on all other ecclesiastical dignitaries, he practically renounced any claim to set the policy of the Church. Henry may have aimed at digging an impassable ditch between the Pope and the German bishops. It was an impossible agreement; for neither bishops nor lay nobles would wish to see so large an addition to the King's resources, while Henry himself could not afford to surrender the right of investiture, since it would stultify ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... a shooting trip far up the River Han I saw a large buffalo with four boys on his back, grazing by the side of a water-ditch, which lay between him and a steep bank some ten feet high. The grass being very soft, my close approach was unobserved, until a hare getting up I fired off my gun. Instantly the buffalo dashed through the ditch and up the bank, when the boys, having nothing to hold on to except one another, ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... judicial. The tariff movement we should regret deeply (and do, some of us), only I am told it was wanted in order to persuade those who were less accessible to moral argument. It's eking out the holy water with ditch water. If the Devil flees before it, even so, let us be content. How you must feel, you who have done so much to set this accursed slavery in the glare of the world, convicting it of hideousness! They should raise a statue to ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... is pretty well laid down by Dalrymple. The small Dutch fort, or intrenchment, stands rather on the eastern bight of the bay, and is composed of a few huts, surrounded by a ditch and green bank. Two guns at each corner compose its strength, and the garrison consists of about thirty Dutchmen and a few Javanese soldiers. We were cordially and hospitably received by the officers, and, after a great deal of trouble and many excuses, here procured horses to carry ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... said Sam, and showed the way, which was decidedly uncertain. At one point there was a wide ditch to cross, and Tom had his hands full ...
— The Rover Boys on the Ocean • Arthur M. Winfield
... service we dwelt in tents. We had what was called the Sibley tent, an affair of a conical shape, rather large, and capable of accommodating about twelve men, with their accoutrements. As a circumstance bearing on our ignorance of life in tents, I will say that we neglected to ditch around them, and on the very first night we slept in them there came a heavy rain, and the next morning found us lying more or less in the water, and our blankets and other stuff sopping wet. But after that, on pitching our tents one of the first things we did was to dig around them ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... off in a buggy to look after a man that was found some ten miles from here, lying in a ditch beside a yoke of oxen." Then, as he saw my look of relief, for I was glad of this temporary delay, said, with an expressive wink: "It would take a fellow a long time to go to him—if he wasn't in a hurry—hours, ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... through swamp, hedge, and ditch, with that dare-devil speed and recklessness that won for him the reputation of being the best rider, the hardest seat, and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... dry for paddles, and Dick pushed with an oar, while Ned used a pole which he had brought along for use with a harpoon. As the trail grew dryer, it became impossible to pole the canoe, and Ned took the painter and, stepping into the nearly dry ditch in front of the canoe, dragged the craft, while Billy got overboard and pushed from behind. Sometimes Ned stopped to kick something out of his path, and at last Dick ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... could detain her. She entered a narrow path which ran behind the houses and was usually deserted, and raced as fast as her feet would carry her to the hut occupied by Frau Molnar, which was close at hand. Springing across the narrow ditch which bordered the back of the yard, she hurried through the kitchen-garden behind the house and in an instant was in the only room it contained except the kitchen. On the bed lay a human form from which came a groan, and beside it sat old Frau Molnar, who wrung her hands ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... know anything technical or scientific about ditch- water," he had expressed himself in the bosom of his family. "I never analyzed it, but analyzers, I gather, consider it dull. If anything could be duller than ditch-water, I should say it was Stone Hover and its ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... I did," demanded Aintree. "Suppose I did go on the loose, just to pass the time, just because I'm sick of this damned ditch? Is it fair to wipe out all that went before, for that? I'm the youngest major in the army, I served in three campaigns, I'm a medal-of-honor man, I've got a career ahead of me, and—and I'm going to be married. If you ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... the law, the bad name that your sister will be having over the head of being in a breach of promise, and all the expenses of solicitors and lawyers. Then, after that, trying to get the money out of us, and, mind you, we will fight you to the last ditch. Won't ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... enemies. All three faced him. There was a great snarling and growling, a clashing of teeth and a flurry of bodies. The dust of the road arose in a cloud and screened the battle. But at the end of several minutes two dogs were struggling in the dirt and the third was in full flight. He leaped a ditch, went through a rail fence, and fled across a field. White Fang followed, sliding over the ground in wolf fashion and with wolf speed, swiftly and without noise, and in the centre of the field he dragged ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... degree of method into the general rout. He collected the remnant of the troops, formed them into a battalion, and retreated in tolerable order to his camp. That camp was well fortified by intrenchments and a broad ditch. Thither the fugitives hastened, and by degrees all that remained of the Moorish army was ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... leaning, the drag in my feet overcome by the pull of the level wind on my slant body. Once through the long stretch of woods I tried to cut across the fields. Here I lost my bearings, stumbled into a ditch, and for a moment got utterly confused with the black of the night, the bite of the cold, and the smothering hand of ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... demolished. The belfry tower is torn open, and one broken bell is lying on the ground at the edge of a pit some thirty feet in width, made by the explosion of an enormous German shell. A large wooden crucifix by the side of the church has been torn from the ground and lies in a ditch. ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... from Tolu, and the River Sina, as to prevent any Attempts being made this Way. The next place of Defence was Castillo Grande, which is about eight Miles up the Harbour. This Castle is a regular Square with four Bastions, strong and well built, and defended to the Land by a wet Ditch and Glacis proper, and one Face towards the Sea has a Raveline, and a double Line of Guns. This Castle can mount sixty one Guns, though there was but fifty seven in it. Opposite to this was a Horse-shoe Battery of twelve Guns, called Mancinilla; and in the Middle between these two Forts ...
— An Account of the expedition to Carthagena, with explanatory notes and observations • Sir Charles Knowles
... slowly dug his way to Twinkleheels, who had stopped struggling and was waiting glumly for help. In a few minutes more he had scrambled out of the ditch and gained the road again, through the path that Farmer Green made ...
— The Tale of Pony Twinkleheels • Arthur Scott Bailey
... he spoke a yell burst from the valley, and in an instant the whole pack were off at full speed. Rather more intent that moment upon showing off my horsemanship than anything else, I dashed spurs into Badger's sides, and turned him towards a rasping ditch before me; over we went, hurling down behind us a rotten bank of clay and small stones, showing how little safety there had been in topping instead of clearing it at a bound. Before I was well-seated again the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... years past has excited my ungratified curiosity; Newgate gaol replaced by the facade of a dingy Italian church; the dimensions of the locale considerably diminished; and a small section of the dark alleys between the prison and Farringdon Street, bounded by the Fleet-ditch uncovered; you will have a very fair impression of the ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... three miles west of Gheluvelt. It was pouring with rain as we ate our meal of cold rations; we could not even enjoy a comforting smoke, as the lighting of a match would have been certain to draw the fire of our vigilant foe. Mr. Jaffray and I both agreed that a night's lodging in a damp ditch was hardly consonant with our wishes, and therefore we set out for the hamlet of Halte, where the railway crosses the road, in hopes that we might find ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... seein' partner?" he yelped joyously. "A reg'lar engine or I'm a crocodile from the Nile! Why, this must be what they call an auxiliary craft, fitted to use canvas or hoss power, whichever fills the bill best. You c'n ditch me if this ain't what I'll call luck. ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... again. And therefore it is not his fate to have to sit in the club smoking- room after his second round and listen to the wonderful deeds of others. He can join in too. He can say with perfect truth, "I once carried the ditch at the fourth with my second," or "I remember when I drove into the bunker guarding the eighth green," or even "I did a three at the eleventh this afternoon"—bogey being five. But if the bad cricketer says, "I remember when I took a century in forty minutes off Lockwood and ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... enclosed the houses; but the ammunition being nearly expended, and the enemy close at hand, there was nothing for it but to limber up again and continue the retirement through the village. At the further side, however, and forming part of its defences, was a formidable obstacle in the shape of a ditch fully twelve feet deep, narrowing towards the bottom; across this Smyth-Windham tried to take his guns, and the leading horses had just begun to scramble up the further bank, when one of the wheelers stumbled and fell, with the result that the shafts broke ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... world! Surely it showed that she was not bad, that she could have such a moment. It showed her heart was pure; it was only her memory that was foul. It was in vain that she swept and washed all within, and was good, when all the while her memory, like a ditch from a distant morass, emptied its vile stream of recollections into her heart, poisoning all the issues ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... it, but—alas for the well being of Frejus, the harbour is filled with sand and soil brought down by the river Argens and washed in by the waves, and is now a level meadow, every portion belonging to a farmer cut off from another portion by a ditch, in which spring the rushes and croak the frogs. Augustus enlarged the port, and after the decisive battle of Actium (B.C. 31) sent thither the galleys captured from Anthony. The sea is ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... of the determined followers of Wallace; and, as the morning dawned, the sentinels on the ramparts of the town were not only surprised to see a host below, but that (by the most indefatigable labor, and a silence like death) had not merely passed the ditch, but having gained the counterscarp, had fixed their movable towers, and were at that instant overlooking the highest bastions. The mangonels and petraries, and other implements for battering walls, and the ballista, with every efficient ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... the man excitedly. "It's in a lane at the other side of the little village called Dalehurst, a mile farther up. It had been run into a ditch and left there. There's no sign of the man who was in it. I'm just riding in to report. There's ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... he must not be near the place where the parish-road turned off. He stood, and sent sight into his eyes, but nothing was to be seen through the drift save more drift behind it. Was he upon the road at all? He sought this way and that, but could find neither ditch nor dyke. He was lost! He knew well the danger of sitting down, knew on the other hand that the more exhausted he was when he succumbed, the sooner would the cold get the better of him, and that even now he might be wandering from the ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... described as son and heir of Adam of Oldediche, held lands within the manor of Baddesley Clinton by military service, and probably had only just then obtained them. Oldediche, or Woldich, now commonly called Old Ditch Lane, lies within the parish of Temple Balsall, not far from the manor ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... to believe a priori, and at first sight, all startling, sensational, even poetic tales, and accept nothing as history, which is not as dull as the ledger of a dry goods' store.' But I think that experience, both in nature and in society, are against that ditch-water philosophy. The weather, being governed by laws, ought always to be equable and normal, and yet you have whirlwinds, droughts, thunderstorms. The share-market, being governed by laws, ought to be always equable ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... and old oaken bucket, brings memories, to some of us, of refreshing droughts of pure water, and of delicious cream and butter rolls, which the moss-covered stone shelves far down the well held securely from possible taint. Back of the house ran the babbling brook and emptied into "the ditch," which was often broad and deep enough to merit a more comely name, and was the favorite resort of the young in winter for skating and sledding. But this ancestral home, with all its charms, had passed from view, like man others, ...
— Annals and Reminiscences of Jamaica Plain • Harriet Manning Whitcomb
... the lake. As no road was observed, it was resolved to go directly up the hill, and, in about an hour, after a good deal of scrambling amongst the bushes and long grass, we gained the top, where we found a neat pathway with a ditch on each side, and a hedge growing on the top of the mound, formed of the earth from the ditch; it resembled not a little an English lane. Without knowing where this might take us to, we followed it, in the hope of meeting some of the people, ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... out-buildings, had been entirely carried away. Parts of them were found, on the following morning, on Barnes Common, at the distance of a mile, while other parts were scattered around the fields. He related also, that two horses which were feeding in a shed, were driven, with their manger, into the ditch on the opposite side of the lane; and that a loaded cart was torn from the shafts and wheels, and wafted into an adjoining field. A crop of turnips were mowed down as with a scythe, and a double row of twenty or ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... might have been a grand smash there on the road, but Frank had caught the words "Run him down!" and he gave Nemo a light cut with the whip, at the same time pulling him still farther into the ditch. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... regretted most, when I found that the bird was plucked, was the loss of the wings, the feathers of which I wanted to dress artificial flies with. Three days after I had killed this, I saw another in a ditch adjoining Sir Henry Ibbetson's park, at Denton, but being in his preserve I had no opportunity of procuring it. I had never seen one since, and until I had seen the sixth edition of Bewick's "Birds," I was unable to make ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... was lying in a ditch, apparently desperately wounded. Hero allowed him to help himself from his flask, and drag a bandage from the bags on his back. Then, standing with his hind feet in the ditch and his fore feet resting on the bank above him, he gave voice until the men by the ambulance heard him, and ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... in my dream that so far as this vale went, there was on the right hand a deep ditch; that ditch to which the blind have led the blind as long as the world has been made. And, lo, on the left hand there was a quag. in which if a man fall, he will find no firm ground for his foot to stand on. The path way was not broad, and so good Christian was the more put to it. This ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress in Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... removed the deadly contrivance. Men on watch of his movements could have prepared it against his return; and, indeed, he thought he detected a pair of flitting shadows behind a row of willow bushes lining a Mexican irrigation ditch, but in the dusk he could not be sure. On running ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... the last hour, the Italian car lost its chain and went over into a ditch on a back stretch, three miles from a doctor. People around picked the men out of the wreck, and Lestrange came up to find that the driver was likely to die from a severed artery before help got there. Emily, he stopped, stopped, with victory in his hands, had the Italian lifted ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... lake and a wooded hill, they saw before them the pah of Honi Heke. Two great rows of tree trunks stuck upright formed a palisade round it. They were more than a foot thick, and twelve feet high, and they were so close that only a gun could be thrust between them. Behind these there was a ditch in which stood 250 Maoris, who could shoot through the ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... longing for his mistress. What mad rapture, could he have clasped her at the moment of tremendous desire which had been his half an hour earlier in the castle garden! Are we really only children crying for the moon? and if the moon were given to us, should we but throw it away into the nearest ditch—merely another broken toy? he thought. These moods of Eberhard Ludwig's were frequent. Like all poets, he had a vein of melancholy, a tendency to indulge himself in a half-sensuous sadness, and these dreamings of his, which had never been received with ought save uncomprehending ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... the Royal Military Canal and the coasts of Sussex and Kent. The Military Canal runs from Hythe to Rye, beside the Military Road; between it and the flat, white beaches of the Channel lie Romney Marsh, Dunge Marsh and Walland Marsh, from east to west. Walland Marsh is sectored by the Kent Ditch, which draws huge, straggling diagrams here, to preserve ancient rights of parishes and the monks of Canterbury. Dunge Marsh runs up into the apex of the triangle at Dunge Ness, and adds to itself twenty feet of shingle every year. Romney Marsh is the sixth continent ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... Wind grew high, insomuch that the Boy used all his strength to hold back the cord; but his strength failing him, he was with a furious blast snatcht up by the Kite from the ground, and presently after let fall again into a pretty deep ditch, where the poor innocent Boy was ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... adapted to enable a small number to defend themselves against a greater. The steepness of the cliffs renders it wholly inaccessible from the water which incloses it on three sides; and, to the land, it is fortified by a ditch, and a bank raised on the inside: From the top of the bank to the bottom of the ditch, is two-and-twenty feet; the ditch on the outside is fourteen feet deep, and its breadth is in proportion. The whole seemed to have been executed with great ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... house stands the church, rebuilt, with the exception of the tower, in 1898 by Sir Tatton. There is no wall surrounding the churchyard, neither is there ditch, nor bank, nor the slightest alteration ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... close to my house; owing to the house having stood for some time unoccupied, people had tended to use it as a short cut. The kindly farmer obviated this by putting up a little notice-board, to indicate that the path was private. A day or two afterwards it was removed and thrown into a ditch. I was perturbed as well as surprised by this, supposing that it showed that the notice had offended some local susceptibility; and being very anxious to begin my tenure on neighbourly terms, I consulted my genial landlord, who laughed, and said that ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... o'er ditch, o'er stark, She flang amang them a', man; The butter-box got many knocks, Their riggings paid for a' then. They got their paiks, wi sudden straiks, Which to their grief they saw, man: Wi clinkum, clankum o'er their crowns, The ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... soon exchanged for horror. At the corner of a lane the procession stopped, and, as the torches ranged themselves along the hedgerow-side, I became aware of a grave dug in the midst of the thoroughfare, and a provision of quicklime piled in the ditch. The cart was backed to the margin, the body slung off the platform and dumped into the grave with an irreverent roughness. A sharpened stake had hitherto served it for a pillow. It was now withdrawn, held in its place by several volunteers, and a fellow with a heavy mallet (the sound of ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the situation, and Carton continued thoughtfully: "All the powers of vice are fighting a last-ditch battle against me now. I think I am on the trail of the man or men higher up in this commercialised-vice business—and it is a business, big business, too. You know, I suppose, that they seem to have a ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... all the townspeople were fast asleep, she ran up the turret-steps and looked out over the field, and at the other side of the field there was a green, ferny ditch and a rose-thorny hedge, and then came the wood. And as Sabrinetta stood on her tower she saw a shaking and a twisting of the rose-thorny hedge, and then something very bright and shining wriggled out through it into the ferny ditch ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... They swept on through the frozen streets until they came to one huge building in the center. The doors of bronze had been closed, and through the windows they could see that the room had been piled high with some sort of insulating material, evidently used as a last-ditch attempt to keep out ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... will. Ditch meeting to-night. Ought to be out about now. Setting the time to use the water and assessing fatiga work. Every last man with a water right will be there, sure, and Foy's got a dozen. Max, you are to be a witness, ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... all the wisdom of the Egyptians. We do not, but we do know that the biggest thing in an arid country is the ditch. America's triumph to date in the twentieth century is the completion of the Panama Ditch. The ditch is in Idaho more valuable by far than the land, for without it the parched soil is practically worthless, being an area ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... one to five hundred? On the contrary, they are better, and more to be esteemed on that account; because, now they are admirable reading on a winter's night; whereas, written on the principle of sticking to the truth, they would have been as dull as ditch water. Generally, therefore, the dealers in anecdotage are to be viewed with admiration, as patriotic citizens, willing to sacrifice their own characters, lest their countrymen should find themselves short of amusement. I esteem them as equal to Codrus, Timoleon, William ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... save him. If he took a decent looking team, to to put on style, he had to hang on to the lines with both hands, and if he even took his eyes off the team to look at the suffering girl beside him, with his mouth, the chances were that the team would jump over a ditch, or run away, at the concussion. Riding out with girls was shorn of much of its pleasure ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... don't understand. Why won't you believe that the reason I won't tell you my trouble is that it's best you shouldn't know? You're a young girl; you don't know life; you haven't seen it as I've seen it—in the sewage, in the ditch, on the road, on the mountain and in the bog. I want you to keep faith with your old friend who doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks, but who wants your confidence. Trust me—don't condemn me. Believe me, I haven't been wanton. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the wood, or drive the bullocks, as he ought, then the abbot would have him flogged soundly till he did; which was better for him, after all, than wandering about to be hooted by the boys, and dying in a ditch at last. ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... I'm sorry to say. You see, I started at a moment's notice. Things are duller than a ditch in the City, but I'd no chance to make any arrangements for a stay. But I'll tell you what. If you're stopping on here and like to send me an invitation for a week or two, I'd come like a shot. I'll take a carriage up that road from the harbour, though, next time. Jove! I felt like a convict ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... selected for its site a long raised spur running out from the solid ground of older and higher land into the water-soaked alluvium of the Netherlands. It was the most important town of all this region before the arts of civilization began the conquest by dike and ditch of the amphibian coastal belt which now comprises one-fourth of the area and holds one-half the population of the Netherlands.[413] So ancient London marked the solid ground at the inner edge of the tidal flats and desolate marshes which lined the Thames estuary, as the Roman Camulodunum and its ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... a juggins to be trying to find it now. I'd better keep my mind on this old machine, or it will ditch me! I know what I've got to do, anyhow, even if I don't ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston
... Infantry, followed by the Second South Carolina Regiment, of which Marion was second in command, and the first battalion of Charleston militia. This column pressed forward, in the face of a heavy fire, upon the Spring Hill redoubt, succeeded in getting into the ditch, and the colors of the second regiment were planted upon the berm. But the parapet was too high to be scaled under such a fire as proceeded from the walls, and, struggling bravely but vainly, the assailants were, after suffering severe slaughter, ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... south-west. The attack was made in the following manner:—First a lino of skirmishers with men carrying scaling ladders, gabions, and fascines among them. The latter had their rifles slung on their backs, and were ordered in no case to fire but merely to run forward, fill up the ditch, and place their ladders behind. Then followed the second line in company column formation for the attack, followed by the third line to support the assault. At half-past two p.m. the attack was made by the Roumanians, and it is said that by some mistake the Russians arrived half an ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... other side of the valley was a cut in the earth, a ditch, the British first-line trench, which was unoccupied, so far as I could see. Beyond lay the old No Man's Land where grass and weeds had grown wild for two seasons, hiding the numerous shell-craters and ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... brushwood. He was no doubt amazed at the stupidity of General Howe in issuing such an order, but he attempted to carry it out with his usual courage. He did succeed in floundering over the logs with his troops, but he came to a ditch that was too wide for his horses to leap, and too deep to be ridden through. At this moment he and his men were saluted with a heavy fire from the enemy, and they were compelled to retire in confusion. In this attempt Elijah Clarke was shot through ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... green leaves of the oaks beyond the fence. Not the tangible, vapory haze of early morning, but a tinted, ethereal haze, the visible effluence of the summer, the nimbus of its power and glory. From tall cord grasses arching over the side of the road, drawing water from the ditch in which their feet were bathed and breathing it into the air with the scent of their own greenness; from the transpiration of the trees, shrubs and vines, flowers and mosses and ferns, from billions of pores in acres of leaves it came streaming into the sunlight, vanishing quickly, yet ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... evaporation, or absorbed by an adhesive soil. Hence the middle of our large, level prairies are wet, and for several weeks portions of them are covered with water. To remedy this inconvenience completely, and render all this portion of soil dry and productive, only requires a ditch or drain of two or three feet deep to be cut into the nearest ravine. In many instances, a single furrow with the plough, would drain many acres. At present, this species of inundated land offers no inconvenience ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... birthplace of Robert Eaglesfield, the founder of Queen's College, Oxford; it was now in possession of the Senhouse family. There was also the Mote Hill, overlooking the river and surrounded by a deep ditch, under the protection of which the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... was countermanded and we had to lay up there in that fearful hot sun all day. I was taken sick and had to rest for awhile but I soon got better and joined the regiment. At about 10 P.M. we were ordered down into the outer ditch of the breastworks. We were there but a short time, when we were ordered to the right to our old position in the rifle-pits, which we reached ...
— The Twenty-fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion • George P. Bissell
... them, and all but the old campaigners in every regiment suffered acutely. Belmont was reached after dark; the troops were without over-coats or blankets, and the night was bitingly cold. But they lay down anywhere, glad enough to stretch themselves upon the ground or seek the friendly shelter of a ditch. Here they lay unmurmuringly—members of the proudest aristocracy in the world, noblemen of ancient lineage, quite ready to sleep in a ditch or die, for that matter, for ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... was shot on the night of the 21st of March, 1804, in the wood or in the ditch of the castle at Vincennes, is admitted even by Government; but who really were his assassins is still unknown. Some assert that he was shot by the grenadiers of Bonaparte's Italian guard; others say, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... day drew near. Mark, before dawn, rode out to the place where he held pleas and judgment. He ordered a ditch to be dug in the earth and knotty vine-shoots and thorns to ...
— The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult • M. Joseph Bedier
... thought of the night arrival of Don Quixote and his squire at Toboso, and their vain search amongst the deserted streets for the palace of Dulcinea. At length we saw light and heard voices in a cottage at the other side of a kind of ditch. Leading the horses over, we called at the door, which was opened by an aged man, who appeared by his dress to be a baker, as indeed he proved, which accounted for his being up at so late an hour. On begging him to show us the way into the town, he led us up a very narrow alley at ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... He craned his head out of the buggy, as if to see whether he could safely drive into the ditch, and pass Mrs. Munger. He said politely, as he started, "Don't disturb yourself! ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... that old hag Moll Brown, look, see, just past! I wish the ugly sly old witch Would tumble over in the ditch; I wouldn't pick her out not very fast. I don't think she's belied, 'tis clear's the sun That she's a witch if ever there was one. Yes, I do know just hereabout of two Or three folk that have learnt what Moll can do. She did, one time, ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... will show you another kind of little blood corpuscle, known, from the fact that it is not colored, as the white corpuscle. These corpuscles are little cells of the body, which in shape and behavior are almost exactly like an ameba—a tiny "bug," seen only under the microscope, that lives in ditch-water. Under the microscope the white corpuscles look like little round disks, about one-third larger than the red corpuscles, and with a large kernel, or nucleus, in their centre. They have the same power of changing their shape, of surrounding and swallowing ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... decided to overhaul ours with a few brief excursions, just long enough to give an opportunity for having it towed home. One late afternoon we were hurrying across the mesa to supper, when our magneto flew off into the ditch, scattering screws in all directions. Fortunately, a kind of Knight Errant to our family appeared just in the nick of time to take us home and send help to the wreck. I once kept a garage in San Diego open half an hour after closing time by a Caruso sob in my voice ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... few canoes and surf-boats under a raised clay-bank binding the stream on the left. This was Tumento (Tomento), our destination; the word means 'won't go,' as the rock is supposed to say to the water. The aspect of the Ancobra becomes gloomy and menacing. The broad bed shrinks to a ditch, almost overshadowed by its sombre walls of many-hued greens; and the dead tree-trunks of the channel, ghastly white in the dull brown shade, look to the feverish imagination like the skeleton hands and fingers of monstrous spectres outspread to ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... valley to valley, cutting off a great bend of the Oregon Short Line as it traverses the Snake River desert; those bare high plains escarped with basalt bluffs that open every fifty miles or so to let a road crawl down to some little rope-ferry supported by sheep-herders, ditch contractors, miners, emigrants, ranchmen, all the wild industries of a country in the dawn ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... written on his face, to entreat her to have compassion on him, saying that he had done her no harm and never would come to see her for the future. Once a horse had bolted with one of Darya Mihailovna's maids, thrown her into a ditch and almost killed her. From that time Pigasov never spoke of that horse except as the 'good, good horse,' and he even came to regard the hill and the ditch as specially picturesque spots. Pigasov had failed in life and had adopted this whimsical craze. He came of poor parents. His father ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... along through forest and plain, like some lurking and venomous copper-snake. Cocytus would be a far better name for it. Here we are at the entrance of the first swamp, out of which the infernal scarlet ditch flows. It is any thing but a pleasant sight, that swamp, which is formed by the junction of the Tensaw, the White and Red Rivers, and at the first glance appears like a huge mirror of vivid green, apparently affording solid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... little ones played about. He had not gone twenty yards before he was stopped by the violent crying of a child; and turning toward the voice, he saw a little girl of six or seven, who had strayed from her mother, scrambling out of the ditch, and wringing her hands in an agony of pain and terror. The poor little thing had fallen into a bed of nettles, and was very much frightened, and not a little hurt. The constable caught her up in his arms, soothing her as well as he could, and hurrying along till he found some dock-leaves, sat ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... and was then suddenly and stunningly succeeded by a conviction of the truth. The whole story of the past night sprang into his mind with every detail, as by an exercise of the direct and speedy sense of sight, and he arose from the ditch and, with rueful courage, went to ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there," said Cal at last. "I move some of you fellows with two good arms rustle out and fix that ditch." He laughed. "Nothing like having a hole in you to get out ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... it. At last we came again within sound of the sea. There was moonlight, though not much; and by this I could see the three huge towers and broken battlements of Tantallon, that old chief place of the Red Douglases. The horse was picketed in the bottom of the ditch to graze, and I was led within, and forth into the court, and thence into a tumble-down stone hall. Here my conductors built a brisk fire in the midst of the pavement, for there was a chill in the night. My hands were loosed, I was set by the wall in the inner end, and (the Lowlander having ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this island was Fort Moultrie, an irregular fort, without ditch or counterscarp, with a brick scarp wall about twelve feet high, which could be scaled anywhere, and this was surmounted by an earth parapet capable of mounting about forty twenty-four and thirty-two pounder smooth-bore iron ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... white man. At first men had said: "She will die soon; the boy will then sell the hut for a song, gamble off the money, and then go the way of all who are stained with the dark and tawny blood of the savage—death in a ditch from some unknown rifle, or death by the fever in the new Reservation." But the old woman still lived on; and the boy, by his industry, sobriety, duty and devotion to his mother, put to shame the very best among the new generation of white men in the mountains. The ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... house, low and solid, its bareness unalleviated by any grace of ornament or structure, and its two long rows of windows gazed out resignedly at a tame prospect. The stretch of lawn sloped to a sunken stone wall; beyond the wall a stream ran sluggishly in a ditch-like channel; on the left the grounds were shut in by a sycamore wood, and beyond were flat meadows crossed in the distance by lines of tree-bordered roads. It was a peaceful, if not a cheering prospect. Lady Channice was fond of it. Cheerfulness was not a thing ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... dispose the day.] At the battle of Agincourt, having chosen a convenient spot on which to martial his men, the king sent privately two hundred archers into a low meadow, which was on one of his flanks, where they were so well secured by a deep ditch and a marsh, that the enemy could not come near them. Then he divided his infantry into three squadrons, or battles; the van-warde, or avant-guard, composed entirely of archers; the middle-warde, of bill-men only; and the rerewarde, of bill-men and archers mixed together; the horse-men, ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... we will, Eternal London haunts us still, The trash of Almack's or Fleet-Ditch— And scarce a pin's head difference WHICH— Mixes, though even to Greece we run, With every rill from Helicon! And if this rage for traveling lasts, If Cockneys of all sets and castes, Old maidens, aldermen, and squires, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... too used of the stream; there was no law to control selfishness, so there were disagreements and bitter quarrels over the water. Lawsuits followed and sometimes even fighting and murders. The remedy for this state of things was found to be in a company ditch, flume, or reservoir, with the use of water ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... from the rectory he had diverged from the main road by an opening that promised mystery and adventure. It was an old neglected lane, little more than a ditch, worn ten feet deep by its winter waters, and shadowed by great untrimmed hedges, densely woven together. On each side were turbid streams, and here and there a torrent of water gushed down the banks, flooding the lane. It was so deep and dark that ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... Rothay-bridge. Turn in at a gate to the right hand, which, twenty to one, you will find open, that the cattle may take an occasional promenade along the turnpike, and cool their palates with a little ditch grass, and saunter along by Millar-bridge and Foxgill on to Pelter-bridge, and, if you please, to Rydal-mere. Thus, and thus only, is seen the vale of Ambleside; and what a vale of grove, and glade, and stream, and cliff, and cottage, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... manage their matters, I don't know; but Tom gave him a lick on the head with a stick, which killed him on the spot. As the devil would have it, all this was seen by two people, a laborer working in a ditch hard by, and Scantling's son, a boy of ten years old. The end of it is, Tom was instantly pursued, and apprehended; your good uncle, Sir John, was called to take the depositions, and without any remand whatever, committed our good friend for trial. Tom's ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... and one uses up one's heart, one's body, one's beauty, little by little; one is feared like a beast of prey, scorned like a pariah, surrounded by people who always take more than they give; and one fine day one dies like a dog in a ditch, after having ruined ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... 'I never seed the ale I could not drink, the bacca I could not smoke, nor the lass I could not kiss. Well, we mun have a race home, the lot on us. I lost all th' others, an' when I was climbin' ower one of them walls built o' loose stones, I comes down into the ditch, stones and all, an' broke my arm. Not as I knawed much about it, for I fell on th' back of my head, an' was knocked stupid like. An' when I come to mysen it were mornin', an' I were lyin' on the settle i' Jesse Roantree's houseplace, an' 'Liza Roantree was settin' sewin', I ached all ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... obtained for practically the whole length of the river-hundreds of miles. Furthermore, every little tributary stream, no matter how small, provided it can muster a pool or so deep enough to submerge so large an animal, has its faithful band. I have known of a hippo quite happily occupying a ditch pool ten feet wide and fifteen feet long. There was literally not room enough for the beast to turn around; he had to go in at one end and out at the other! Each lake, too, is alive with them; and both lakes ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... and a half's march from the scene of our labours. After the second night it was decided that this was too remote, and we moved up nearer our work. Here we stayed for a week, with half of each battalion digging each night. It was a tiresome job, as the sand was so soft that a very wide ditch had to be dug and then faced with sandbags. The men were very quick about getting down, and after the first night they were practically working in safety for the remaining four or five days necessary to complete the sandbag revetting. All bags used ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... every year, in the course of the summer, flocks of young ones, known as elvers, ascend the rivers in enormous quantities, like a vast army under numberless leaders. At each tributary or affluent, be it river, brook, stream, or ditch, a proportionate detachment of the main body is given off to explore the various branches, while the central force wriggles its way up the chief channel, regardless of obstacles, with undiminished vigour. When the young elvers come to a weir, a wall, a ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... saw the car round the bend in the road just beyoud him. It came tearing along, swerved unsteadily from one side of the road to the other, then was brought to a sudden, grinding stop, narrowly missing a plunge into the roadside ditch. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... treacherous quicksand, swollen creeks, the peril of slipping mountain sides after heavy rains. Of necessity he relied upon himself; he could not wait for a neighbor to help pull the ox out of the ditch. He learned early to make his own crude farm implements at his own anvil. In short, he had to be jack-of-all-trades—blacksmith, tanner, ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... nothing of his plans except that he and she were going "abroad" and were to "have a grand time" on "the Continent." Pat's father was to come over later for a few weeks; he was down south now, helping build the "big ditch"—the Panama Canal. "Where is your father?" he ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... afternoon I left Grand Ditch Camp and started down to Chambers Lake. I had not gone far when drops of rain began to fall from time to time, and shortly after this my muscles began to twitch occasionally under electrical ticklings. At times slight muscular rigidity ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... and I have been several hours on horseback in a country so miry after the rains, that every hundred yards brings you to a ditch, of whose depth, width, colour, and contents, both my horses and their riders have ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... sight was to be seen. Grinder Queery, already a feeble man, would wheel his grindstone along the long high-road, leaving Mysy behind. He took the stone on a few hundred yards, and then, hiding it by the roadside in a ditch or behind a paling, returned for his mother. Her he led—sometimes he almost carried her—to the place where the grindstone lay, and thus by double journeys kept her with him. Every one said that Mysy's death would be a merciful release—every ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... and children, had said all sorts of things to her parents; and, as eight hundred dollars is a deal of money to poor people, one can excuse them: but Eva wept, and said she would rather spring into the castle-ditch. They represented all sorts of things to the poor girl; she heard of the service out here with us. She wept, kissed my old woman's hand, and thus came to us; and since then we have had a deal of service ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... man mounting into a bright existence, and one after another falling back into darkness and nothingness, like soldiers trying to mount an impracticable breach, and falling back crushed and mangled into the ditch before the bayonets and the rattling fire of their conquerors. Misery and guilt, look which way you will, till the heart gets sick ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... despair, made so desperate an effort to recover the bastion, that they made a wonderful slaughter of the numerous assailants who had penetrated their works, throwing headlong from the wall such as had escaped the sword, insomuch that the bastion and the ditch below were heaped with dead bodies. Rumi Khan spent the succeeding night in prayers and processions to propitiate Mahomet, and next morning renewed the assault with equal fury. But after mounting the two bastions, he was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... time without waking up. In the morning he rode out of town between his two seconds, talking of indifferent things and looking right and left with apparent detachment into the heavy morning mists, shrouding the flat green fields bordered by hedges. He leaped a ditch, and saw the forms of many mounted men moving in the low fog. "We are to fight before ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... he was a power, sort of a king in the underworld from the very first, largely because he was afraid of nothing, absolutely desperate, and willing to take any chance. He wasn't a hop-head, yet they all looked at him as sort of queer; though ready to follow him to the last ditch, yet some way they thought him off his head. And Swanson believes that his career of crime started after he reached Seattle, not before—that he hadn't grown up to crime like most of the men in his gang. He didn't know ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... the siege of Acre are well known. Although surrounded by a wall, flanked with strong towers, and having, besides, a broad-and deep ditch defended by works this little fortress did not appear likely to hold out against French valour and the skill of our corps of engineers and artillery; but the ease and rapidity with which Jaffa had been taken occasioned us to overlook in ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... my foot. As to a stocking, I didn't know such a thing by name. I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty. That's the way I spent my tenth birthday. Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... taken, nor, on account of the rocky soil, could be taken, except by assault, which would cost the enemy a greater number than they had lost in their late attempt; that they could not attack the ditch, or batter in breach, before the counterscarp should be taken, and even then they must have recourse to galleries before they could pass the fosse, which was furnished with mines and countermines; finally, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... wildest dash, what a sure judgment he has for the lie of the ground, how unerringly—and at a moment when a mistake is death—he selects his cover! How learned, too, he is in his knowledge of the countryside! There is not a dry ditch, or a water-course, or an old drain, or a hole in a bank for miles around that is not mysteriously set down in the map he carries in his graceful, clever head; and one need hardly say that all the ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... me. My wife supposes that I am pledged to this Brescian business because I am insanely patriotic. If I might join Luciano tomorrow I would shout like a boy. I would be content to serve as the lowest in the ranks, if I might be with you all under the Chief. Rome crowns him, and Brescia is my bloody ditch, and it is deserved! When I was a little younger—I am a boy still, no doubt—I had the honour to be distinguished by a handsome woman; and when I grew a little older, I discovered by chance that she had wit. The lady is the Countess Violetta d'Isorella. It is a grief ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sneered Black. "Do you think I'm fool enough to ditch the train? No, sir! Don't believe it. I'm not running my neck into a noose of that kind. A cluster of red lights has been spread along the track before the blow-out. The engineer will see the signals and pull his train up—-he has to, by law! ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... manner destroyed the impious man. For suddenly the earth, opening her mouth (as formerly on Dathan and Abiron), swallowed up this magician, and he descended alive into hell. And the earth, thus disjoined and rent asunder, closed on him again; but to this day a ditch yet remaining declareth the judgment of the divine wrath. But the holy sacrificer, being struck with sorrow, mourned with heavy mourning over the chalice that had been filled; and the chalice, with the divine sacrifice entire therein, ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... leave it all to me?" she pleaded, fighting to the last ditch for her secret and for time. "Can't you see that I'm placing a double-crosser in the ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... whew-ew-ew-ew which came too near I dived for cover. If there was no friendly wall or vehicle or tree trunk at hand the ditch beside the road was always there. And every time I dived my companion stood in the middle of the road and shook with laughter—not unkindly, but in the utmost friendliness and good humor—waiting till I rejoined him ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... been started so lately as yesterday morning. We began our day, therefore, with somewhat sanguine expectations, which, however, every subsequent half-hour's progress gradually dispelled. We tumbled out of one deep ditch into another, scrambled perseveringly through brambles and brushwood, saw places where pheasants ought to have been, and places where they had been, but never saw a bird except a jack-snipe in the distance. The only sport we had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... exactions as intolerable, and rebelled. Against them marched the royal army of iron-clad knights; and the desperate citizens, meeting these with no better defence than stout leather jerkins, led them into a trap. At the battle of Courtrai the knights charged into an unsuspected ditch, and as they fell the burghers with huge clubs beat out such brains as they could find within the helmets. It was subtlety against stupidity, the merchant's shrewdness asserting itself along new ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and so along the Tyburn-road. Saint Andrew's, Holborn, was next infected; and as this was a much more populous parish than the former, the deaths were more numerous within it. For a while, the disease was checked by Fleet Ditch; it then leaped this narrow boundary, and ascending the opposite hill, carried fearful devastation into Saint James's, Clerkenwell. At the same time, it attacked Saint Bride's; thinned the ranks of the thievish horde haunting Whitefriars, and proceeding in a westerly ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... ever kept New-market, Salisbury-plain, Hockley i' the Hole, Gadshill, and all the high places of any request: he has had his mares and his geldings, he, have been worth forty, threescore, a hundred pound a horse, would ha' sprung you over the hedge and ditch like your greyhound: he has done five hundred robberies in his time, more ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... He found the twins themselves the fourth morning, when, unable any longer to bear Mrs. Bilton's voice, they ran into the woods instead of coming in to breakfast. He seemed to find them at once, to walk unswervingly to their remote and bramble-filled ditch. ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... not push on without stopping, and trust to the animals to keep up their strength to the last?" asked Berthold. "They are both good nags and sound in wind, and can manage a pretty broad ditch when pressed at it." ...
— The Lily of Leyden • W.H.G. Kingston
... damp and mice seemed to her! After wandering for some time through the most solitary parts of the wood, she absently made her way to the meadows; there she went along until she came to a certain spot where there were some workmen making a ditch to drain the land. She knew without inquiring that the count after inspecting the work for some time had gone off. She waited for a little while to divert attention, and then she went on with a slow step dragging her parasol along ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... invitations to settle in Charleston and Pittsburg, and he had an opportunity to become the president of a college by subscribing to the doctrinal tests required, which he would not do; for "he would sooner die in a ditch than submit to human authority in matters of faith."[45] In June, 1784, he preached in the Brattle Street Church of Boston, and he anticipated becoming its minister; but his pronounced doctrinal position seems to have made that impossible. He also preached in Hingham, and some of the people there ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... to be pounded, and one of the road-makers, with his sledge-hammer in his hand, stops the horse at the last; but my Lady Rackrent was all kilt[21] and smashed, and they lifted her into a cabin hard by, and the maid was found after, where she had been thrown, in the gripe of the ditch, her cap and bonnet all full of bog water, and they say my lady can't live any way.' Thady, pray now is it true what I'm told for sartain, that Sir Condy has made over all to your son Jason?" "All," says I. "All entirely?" says she again. "All entirely," says I. "Then," says she, "that's ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... to where the road goes up by the king's summer palace. They were under great hanging beeches and limes. There was a high gray wall, and over it the blossoming fruit boughs hung. In a ditch full of long grass little kids bleated by their mothers. Away on the left went the green fields of colza, and beetroot, and trefoil, with big forest trees here and there in their midst, and, against the blue low line of the far horizon, red mill-sails, ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... Ananda, but a half-brother of Siddhartha), coming that way, saw the carcase lying on the road, and pulled it on one side; but the Bodhisattva, seeing it there, took it by the tail, and tossed it over seven fences and ditches, when the force of its fall made a great ditch. I suspect that the characters in the column have been disarranged, and that we should read {.} {.} {.} {.}, {.} {.}, {.} {.}. Buddha, that is Siddhartha, was at this time ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... staggers on, and gathers up all his courage and strength, and gets close to the dry land, but stumbles withal, and falls head-foremost in such wise, that he cast her on to the bank, but fell into the ditch up to his armpits, and therewithal as he lay there caught at the goodwife, and gat no firm hold of her clothes, but set his miry hand on her knee right ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... brew-house; and when I suddenly call you, come forth, and, without any pause or staggering, take this basket on your shoulders: that done, trudge with it in all haste, and carry it among the whitsters in Datchet-Mead, and there empty it in the muddy ditch close by ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... did not confine themselves to the conventionally noble and elevated subjects of speculation. They addressed themselves to worms and ditch water in preference to metaphysical subtleties. They agreed with Bacon that the mean and even filthy things deserve study. All this was naturally scorned by the university professors, and the universities consequently played little or no part in the advance of natural ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... garment was an old mantle which the bishop's gardener had lent him at his master's request. They stripped it from him, and throwing him into a ditch full of snow, "There is your place, poor herald of ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... to his mouth as he saw the man he was following stop abruptly and begin to climb the bank. He was too close behind to be able to turn back. All he could do was to crouch down in the ditch and "lie low." He heard Jeffreys as he gained the top of the bank sigh wearily; then he seemed to be moving as if in search of a particular spot; and then the lurker's hair stood on end as he heard the ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... the danger; but he had no time this year, he said, to complete the fences: the men who tended his sheep might easily keep them from the plantation for this season, and the next spring he purposed to dig such a ditch round the whole as should secure it for ever. He was now extremely busy, making jackets for his sheep, providing willows for his decoy, and gorse and corn for his geese: the geese, of which he had a prodigious flock, were not yet turned ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... LAMACHUS Slaves of Lamachus! Water, water in a little pot! Make it warm, get ready cloths, cerate greasy wool and bandages for his ankle. In leaping a ditch, the master has hurt himself against a stake; he has dislocated and twisted his ankle, broken his head by falling on a stone, while his Gorgon shot far away from his buckler. His mighty braggadocio plume rolled on the ground; at this sight ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... "A ditch in the swamp running into the river might drain your piece some. Have to be some dig, but you could afford to do it on a thousand-acre proposition. It's something ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... tower in the middle. Round it are the gardens, and round the gardens, again, there is another line of buildings, which have smaller towers set here and there upon them at intervals. Circling round the outermost walls is a huge, deep ditch, as big and broad as a river. This was once a moat full of water. The water from the Thames ran into it and filled it, and it formed a strong barrier of defence for the Tower, and attacking forces would have found it a difficult matter to swim across that water ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... and New Town flowed an irrigating ditch, which the connecting street crossed by means of an old wooden bridge. The ditch was this night full of swift water, which tore at the button willows on the bank and gurgled against the bridge timbers. As they crossed it the idea came into Ramon's head that if ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... formed in States east of the Rocky Mountains. Imagine an extensive inclosure on the side of a mountain, with its barren-looking soil strewn with rocks of all sizes, from a pebble to a bowlder, cut across by an irrigating ditch or a mountain brook, dotted here and there by sage bushes, and patches of oak-brush, and wild roses, and one has a picture of a Salt Lake pasture. Closely examined, it has other peculiarities. There is no half way in its growths, no shading off, so to speak, as elsewhere; not an isolated shrub, ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... but who did his duty with an intolerable mixture of pedantry and rigor*: I was seized with a nervous attack in the middle of the road, and they were obliged to lift me out of my carriage, and lay me down on the side of the ditch. This wretched commissary fancied that this was an occasion to take compassion on me, and without getting out of his carriage himself, he sent his servant to find me a glass of water. I cannot express how angry I felt ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... this time I kept up my lessons at the parsonage and made rapid progress. I surprised even my teacher, who thought me capable of doing anything. I learned to drive, and to leap a fence and ditch on horseback. I taxed every power, hoping some day to hear my father say: "Well, a girl is as good as a boy, after all." But he never said it. When the doctor came over to spend the evening with us, I would whisper in his ear: "Tell my father how fast ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... caprice commanded the bridegroom to appear in drawers at their castle, and plunge into a ditch of mud; and sometimes they were compelled to beat the waters of the ponds to hinder the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... there was a deserter who was three times faithless to his colours. Twice had he undergone the punishment due to desertion; the third time he knew he was face to face with death. So he resolved to flee by night and hide himself by day in some ditch or thicket, for he was afraid that in the daylight he ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... a spiritual gray wafer, fainted in the red wind of a summer morning as the two men leaped a ditch soft with mud. The wall was not high, the escape an easy one. Crouching, their clothes the colour of clay, they trod cautiously the trench, until opposite a wood whose trees blackened the slow dawn. Then, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... I always said that he was sure, sooner or later, to land in the family ditch. He has a right to, of course; the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... law, the bad name that your sister will be having over the head of being in a breach of promise, and all the expenses of solicitors and lawyers. Then, after that, trying to get the money out of us, and, mind you, we will fight you to the last ditch. Won't we, John? ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... inhabited by a lanerly woman, and the door being open he darted in, passing through to the yard behind, where he found himself in an enclosed place, out of which he saw no other means of escape but through a ditch full of water. The depth of it at the time he did not think of, but plunging in, he found himself up to the chin; at that moment he heard the soldiers at hand; so the thought struck him to remain where he ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... other side of the field there was a deep, dry ditch under great curtains of blackberry bushes, which in autumn bore luscious fruit. And by Katie's door, if she would sit in the sun, was a primrose bank, about which the hens stalked and clucked with their long-legged chickens or much prettier ducklings. Katie did not want for playmates. ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... hitherto have been held to comprise the following: a privately owned water supply system formerly operated under contract with the municipality effecting the taking;[640] a right of way across a neighbor's land for the enlargement of an irrigation ditch therein to enable the taker to obtain water for irrigating land that would otherwise remain valueless;[641] a right of way across a placer mining claim for the aerial bucket line of a mining corporation;[642] land, water, and water rights ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... Queen's name, how many children she had, and the mode of succession; then, when fully satisfied, led the way to show me what his father Dagara had done when wishing to know of what the centre of the earth was composed. At the back of the palace a deep ditch was cut, several yards long, the end of which was carried by a subterranean passage into the palace, where it was ended off with a cavern led into by a very small aperture. It then appeared that Dagara, ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... vigorously pursued. Led by their guide, they soon arrived at the fort. It presented a formidable aspect. In addition to the palisades, a hedge of fallen trees a rod in thickness surrounded the whole intrenchment; outside the hedge there was a ditch wide and deep. There was but one point of entrance, and that was over the long and slender trunk of a tree which had been felled across the ditch, and rested at its farther end upon a wall of logs three or four feet high. A block-house, at ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... interesting," said Monckton. "Mistress, I always like to hear the whole history of every place I stop at, especially from a sensible woman like you, that sees to the bottom of things. Do have another glass. Why, I should be as dull as ditch-water, now, if I had not ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... regions upon the Barwan. We next perceived at a distance, a cloud of dust raised by a numerous herd of cattle, and came upon a water-course, or branch of the Gwydir, called, I believe, the "Meei." As I wanted to cross the Gwydir, I crossed this and continued; met with another deep ditch or channel, four miles beyond the Meei; and, at three miles beyond that, another: none of these resembling the Gwydir I had formerly seen. I had ridden twenty-five miles, and hastened back to meet the carts, and encamped them just ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... name rather of the island of which we have spoken before—but Tinakonk. It lies on the west side of the river, and is separated from the west shore, not as he said, by a wide running branch of the river, as wide as the Eemster, near Amsterdam, but by a small creek, as wide as a large ditch, running through a meadow. It is long and covered with bushes, and inside somewhat marshy. It is about two miles long, or a little more, and a mile and a half wide. Although there are not less miles ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... and at the moment I didn't care greatly where he landed. I was vaguely conscious that he collided head-on with the row of milk-cans, but my main anxiety was to shut off my power, set the brake, point the auto into the ditch, and jump. ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... know, is open country. They look; and suddenly down the mountain-side from the big village comes a man of some sort; such a strange man, with such a wonderful head ... that all scream: "Oy, Trishka is coming! Oy, Trishka is coming!" and all run in all directions! Our elder crawled into a ditch; his wife stumbled on the door-board and screamed with all her might; she terrified her yard-dog, so that he broke away from his chain and over the hedge and into the forest; and Kuzka's father, Dorofyitch, ran into the oats, lay down there, and began to cry like a quail. 'Perhaps' ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... beautiful. "But that's not what you think of when you see her," they would tell you. "You think, 'What a good sort! She must be great fun!'" And there were some few who would add: "Katie is the kind you would expect to find doing splendid service in that last ditch." ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... place was like so much tinder. There was an easterly breeze too. You can imagine the blaze! We hadn't the faintest chance. Poor, old Iles lost his head completely, and sat down with his feet in a dry ditch and wept. There must be over two hundred acres of it. It's a dreadful eyesore, perfectly barren and useless, but for a little sour grass even a gipsy's donkey has to be hard up before he cares to eat!"—Miss St. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... early we began to steam slowly up the long ditch called the Canal, and at last to the far east we caught a gladdening glimpse of the desert—the wild, waterless Wilderness of Sur, with its waves and pyramids of sand catching the morning rays, with it shadows of mauve, rose pink, and lightest blue, with its plains and rain-sinks, bearing ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... He talks of 'Devolution,' of the concession of a kind of self-government for Ireland. He will struggle for a while against the designation Home Rule, because not so long ago he was declaring that he would die in the last ditch for the union of the three kingdoms, but he will soon be reconciled to it. It will not be very long till the former landlords, whose chief interests lie in Ireland, have ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... that the wealthy mill-owner had killed one of the employees who had gone to see him peaceably and arrange matters for the men. He had thrown him out of the office into one of the new mill excavations and left him there to die like a dog in a ditch. So the story ran all through the tenement district, and in an incredibly swift time the worst elements in Milton were surging toward Mr. Winter's house with murder in their hearts, and the means of accomplishing it in ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... sweet-smelling wild honeysuckle I saw a covey of young quails. These hedgerows of locust and cedar are broken now, but along the old road to the mill and Pohick Church and between fields the scattered trees and now and then a bordering ditch are evidences ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... deserts as individuals regardless of their race, color, religion, sex, or any other consideration which has nothing to do with the individual's merits. One of his favorite figures was that "one cannot hold another in a ditch without himself staying in the ditch." There is not a single right for which he contended for his people which if won would not directly or indirectly benefit all other people. Were they in all the States admitted to the franchise on equal ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... Then, as the furious storm continued, the very seams of the ship seemed to open like pores, to let in the sea, which was knocking and raging without for admittance, till at length the hold became like a ditch, which we rats could ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... and you know it. I just don't want her to know she's being followed. If she can't ditch her shadow, she's likely to try to talk to him and pull out all the stops convincing him that he should ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... forest which covers it, consisting chiefly of white-cedar, black-ash, and other trees that live in excessive moisture, is now decayed and death-struck by the partial draining of the swamp into the great ditch of the canal. Sometimes, indeed, our lights were reflected from pools of stagnant water which stretched far in among the trunks of the trees, beneath dense masses of dark foliage. But generally ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... formerly two outlets from the pond into Vineyard Sound, and some of the old deeds refer to the East and West rivers. There was also a ditch across the marsh, probably through the land now owned ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various
... government to seize upon, leaving the other three to support the family of the man whose labour had produced them. But what are the facts?—the landlord and the government sweep all away, and the peasant and his family starve by the ditch sides. As an illustration of this condition of things, he quotes from a southern paper an account of an inquest held on the body of a man named Boland, and on the bodies of his two daughters, who, as the verdict declared, had "died of cold ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... unusual in a prospective clergyman, had never heard of the Thirty-nine Articles. He was struck with the architecture of the colleges, and much surprised at the meanness of the houses that surrounded them. He heretically calls the Isis 'a mere moat,' the Cherwell 'a ditch.' The brilliant dare-devil from Italy despised alike the raw, limitary, reputable, priggish undergraduates and the dull, snuffling, smug-looking, fussy dons. The torpor of academic dulness, indeed, was as irksome ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... walls and our poor palisades, Rifleman, true is your heart, but be sure that your hand be as true! Sharp is the fire of assault, better aimed are your flank fusillades— Twice do we hurl them to earth from the ladders to which they had clung, Twice from the ditch where they shelter, we drive them with hand- grenades; And ever upon our topmost roof our ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... Bladud met with a single creature to show him the slightest compassion. At length, he was so fortunate as to encounter a shepherd-boy, who appeared in scarcely less distress than himself; for one of the sheep belonging to his flock had fallen into a ditch, the sides of which were so steep that he was unable to ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... when he was with his old father the sexton. Now, how he and Tom manage their matters, I don't know; but Tom gave him a lick on the head with a stick, which killed him on the spot. As the devil would have it, all this was seen by two people, a laborer working in a ditch hard by, and Scantling's son, a boy of ten years old. The end of it is, Tom was instantly pursued, and apprehended; your good uncle, Sir John, was called to take the depositions, and without any remand whatever, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... laws of princes, without making a free trial and examining of the equity of the same, then we could not be punished for doing, unwillingly and in ignorance, things unlawful prescribed by them. Whereas every soul that sinneth shall die; and when the blind leads the blind, he who is lead falls in the ditch ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... no better course for you to take than to dig a deep ditch all around the trees, say three feet wide and as many deep, and just within the outer reach of the limbs, and fill this in with half the earth removed and the other half made up of vegetable matter, ashes, road dirt, and such manure from the barn and stable as you can spare. ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... little jerks, as though his legs were beyond his control. We came then on to the high road, which was so white and clear in the moonlight that it seemed as though the whole Austrian army must instantly whisper to themselves: "Ah, there they are!" and fire. The ditch to our right, as far as I could see, was lined with soldiers, hidden by the hedge behind them, their rifles just pointing on to the white surface of the land. Our guide asked them their division and was answered in a whisper. The soldiers were ghosts: there was no one, save ourselves, alive ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... as all men lie. The truth is that the fox is utterly wearied, that he is at the end of his breath and his courage, ready to fall into the ditch, and that if the greyhound makes ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... now and Armitage sent his horse across the rough ditch at the roadside to get his bearings. The fog seemed at the point of breaking, and the mass about them shifted and drifted ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... by, (p. 423) And there they made a doleful cry; And all they cried at once then, 'Have mercy on us, ye English men!' Our men gave them some of their bread, Though they to us were now so quede.[309] Harm to them we did none, But made them again to the ditch gone: And there we kept them all abache, Because they should not see our watch: Many one said they would liefer be slain, Than turn to the city of Rouen again. They went forth with a strong murmuration, And ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... result of its geographical features. The position was of both tactical and strategic importance. In Roman times, however, its tactical value decreased when the great wall was built that stretched with its lines of mound, ditch, stone-rampart, and road, and its series of camps and forts, from near the mouth of the Tyne to Solway Firth. Henceforth the wall marked the debatable frontier, but York never lost its strategic value. It was thus used by the Romans, William I., Edward I., ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... lady nodded her head in assent. "Nurse, I once saw a robin's nest when I was in England; it was in the side of a mossy ditch, with primroses growing close beside it; it was made of green moss, and lined with white wool and hair; it was a pretty nest, with nice eggs in it, much better than your ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... is to be one of the new cards; they say it will please the city,' said Lord Eskdale. 'I suppose they will pick out of hedge and ditch everything that has ever ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... painful efforts she succeeded in forcing herself through the aperture; but her nerves were so much shaken by this unlucky circumstance, that when she had reached the platform, whence a second ladder was to conduct her to the ditch of the fortress, she declared her utter inability to descend it; and she was ultimately folded in a thick cloak, and cautiously lowered down by the joint exertions of her attendants. The Comte de Brienne and M. du Plessis then supported her ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... that the river Paglion should be turned into a new channel, so as to surround the town to the north, and fall into the harbour; that where the Paglion now runs to the westward of the city walls, there should be a deep ditch to be filled with sea-water; and that a fortress should be built to the westward of this fosse. These particulars might be executed at no very great expence; but, I apprehend, they would be ineffectual, as the town is commanded by every hill in the neighbourhood; and the exhalations ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... domain where once the cowboy reigned supreme have been turned into farms by the irrigator's ditch or by the dry-farmer's plan. The farmer in overalls is in many instances his own stockman today. On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and Texas and parts of Nevada we may find the cowboy, it is true, even today: but he is no longer the Homeric figure ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... actually knock a chip off a wall. That was the sole damage done to the Republican position; the damage to the Carlist must have been less. Two of the Miqueletes ventured stealthily down a road leading towards the point from which the nearest jets of smoke curled, following the ditch by the side, stooping and peering through the bushes. There was a volley from afar. They hesitated and stood, as if undecided whether ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... feet deep to be sunk, it has been calculated that this would only be effectual for draining a circle of about 100 yards, the water running down an incline of about 5 to 1; for it was found in the course of draining the bog, that a ditch 3 feet deep only served to drain a space of less than 5 yards on each side, and two ditches of this depth, 10 yards apart, left a portion of the Moss between them scarcely ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... hangman was to give the rope to five fellows, the most popular and devil-may-care rakes and roysterers in the whole town. Beppo was up very early that morning, and at the first streak of light had dropped himself over the wall into the town ditch, and was away for the open country and the free air of the hills; for he knew that neither at home nor in the streets would life be worth living for a week after, because of all the vengeances that would ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... air, as does one at the dentist's. "I hope that you're not afraid I shall run you into a ditch?" I asked, laughing. "I don't believe, after all, it can be any worse than steering a toboggan down a good run, or driving a four-in-hand with one's eyes shut, as I did once for a wager on a road I knew as I knew my ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... lowlands, where I have the pleasure of seeing my cattle, horses, and colts. Exuberant grass replenishes all my fields, the best representative of our wealth; in the middle of that tract I have cut a ditch eight feet wide, the banks of which nature adorns every spring with the wild salendine, and other flowering weeds, which on these luxuriant grounds shoot up to a great height. Over this ditch I have erected a bridge, capable of bearing ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... when all at once I saw before me an abrupt, narrow, deep gully into which the wheels on one side were just upon the point of going down. It flashed across me in an instant that, if I could throw the horse down into the ditch, the wheels of the wagon might, perhaps, rest equipoised on each side, and, perhaps, break the horse ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... assault. They advanced with their usual gallantry, but when they had got within thirty yards of the strong and lofty towers, a destructive fire was opened on them from a crenelated outwork, with a deep ditch in front. In vain the commanding officers looked for some part of the castle which might prove practicable; the muzzles of the enemy's muskets were alone visible through the loop-holes. As the men were falling rapidly without a prospect of success, it became necessary to draw ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... eventually gave old goody Liu a tug on the sly and plied her with minute questions as to who the girl was. The old dame was placed under the necessity of fabricating something for his benefit. "The truth is," she said, "that there stands on the north bank of the ditch in our village a small ancestral hall, in which offerings are made, but not to spirits or gods. There was in former days some official ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... was moving along rapidly when they came to a ditch which seemed to divide the rice-field in half. A short pause followed, when along came the cry of "Down!" and every man dropped, and none too soon, for the insurgents had opened up unexpectedly from ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... Cambridge—never was a prettier race seen at Newmarket—Dick must have beat hollow, but a d——d fat alderman who was inside, and felt alarmed at the velocity of the vehicle, moved to the other end of the seat: this destroyed the equilibrium—over they went, into a four-feet ditch, and Joe lost his match. However, he had the satisfaction of hearing afterwards, that the old cormorant who occasioned his loss, had nearly burst himself by ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Manila—fishermen, canoemen, day labourers, etc.—live principally in the ward of Tondo, where dwellings with thatched roofs were allowed to be constructed. In the wet season the part of this ward nearest to the city was simply a mass of pollution. The only drainage was a ditch cut around the mud-plots on which the huts were erected. Many of these huts had pools of stagnant water under them for months, hence it was there that the mortality from fever was at its maximum ratio in the dry season when evaporation commenced. Half ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... complete. How Protestant England ousted Catholic Spain from the command of the ocean, and made it Britannia's realm, was a story which he loved to tell. "The young King," Henry VIII., "like a wise man, turned his first attention to the broad ditch, as he called the British Channel, which formed the natural defence of the kingdom." It was "the secret determined policy of Spain to destroy the English fleet, pilots, masters, and sailors, by means of the Inquisition." ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... under such conditions, and while the more advanced skaters cut figures, or even essayed a game of hockey, the spectators circled round and round, looking admiringly at their exploits. At one end of the field was a slight ditch, or rather undulation in the ground, which when frozen over afforded a source of unending amusement, being as good as a switchback itself. Daring skaters went at it with a dash which brought them safely up the incline ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... they suggested motoring, and after a meal I started on what seemed a first rate car. But we had a breakdown lasting an hour, a dozen miles out of Glasgow, and then, running down Garelochside in the face of the storm, we smashed into the ditch. After making sure that the car was hopeless, I left the man at a wayside cottage and tramped the rest of the way. Hence my late arrival, ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... and orangeries, among the huge masses of fortifications, many of them seeming almost as thick as the gardens inclosed by them are broad. Pomegranate in (beautiful secicle) flower. Under a bridge over a dry ditch saw the largest prickly pear. Elkhorns for trunk, and then its leaves—but go and look and look.—(Hard rain.) We sheltered in the Botanic Garden; yet reached ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... hath tumbled himself into some corner, Some ditch, to snore away his drunkenness Into the sober headache,—Nature's moral Against excess. Let the Great Seal be sent ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... party searching in the ditch of the fort in case any treasure should have been buried there, as he had ordered it should be in event of danger, and while this was going on he walked along the coast for a few miles to visit a spot which he thought might be suitable ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... thus addressed, replied, 'Because in getting up from the ditch thou hast opened the water-course, thenceforth shalt thou be called Uddalaka as a mark of thy preceptor's favour. And because my words have been obeyed by thee, thou shalt obtain good fortune. And all the Vedas shall shine in thee ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Our last stage was from Fire Hole Basin to Madison Valley, 45 m. It was hell. Didn't see the sun but once after Feb. 1, and it stormed insessant, making short sights necessary, and with each one we would have to dig a hole to the ground and often a ditch or a tunnel through the snow to look through. The snow was soft to the bottom and ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... less a city than a fortified camp. The walls equipped with towers and pierced by a hundred gates of brass were so thick that a chariot might be driven on them. All around the wall was a large, deep ditch full of water, with its sides lined with brick. The houses of the city were constructed of three or four stories. The streets intersected at right angles. The bridge and docks of the Euphrates excited admiration; the fortified palace also, and the hanging gardens, one of the seven wonders ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... and, thinking to take it, he set a trap at the spot, tying it securely to a root and covering it over with dead leaves. On going to the place the next morning he could see nothing until his feet were on the very edge of the ditch, when with startling suddenness a big dog fox sprang up at him with a savage snarl. It was caught by a hind-leg, and had been lying concealed among the dead leaves close under the bank. Caleb, angered at ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... scent! At fault none losing heart!—but all at work! None leaving his task to another!—answering The watchful huntsman's cautions, check, or cheer. As steed his rider's rein! Away they go How close they keep together! What a pack! Nor turn, nor ditch, nor stream divides them—as They moved with one intelligence, act, will! And then the concert they keep up!—enough To make one tenant of the merry wood, To list their ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... was falling from above and sometimes rose from below. The horse was evidently exhausted, his hair had all curled up from sweat and was covered with hoar-frost, and he went at a walk. Suddenly he stumbled and sat down in a ditch or water-course. Vasili Andreevich wanted to stop, but ...
— Master and Man • Leo Tolstoy
... form of government. Its feminine dictator was no exception to the race of autocrats in that she was not an absolute stranger to the rosy byways of self-indulgence. There was a strenuous quality in her pleasuring perhaps not inconsistent in one whose daily tasks included sheep-herding, ditch-digging, varied by irrigating and shearing in their proper seasons. Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that her wash-tub bore about the same relationship to her real duties as does the crochet needle or embroidery hoop to the lives of less arduously engaged women. It ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... say much of the Y.M.C.A. They need no encomium of mine, but I am prepared to stand by them to the last ditch. They were doing, not talking, and were wise enough to use even those agents whom they knew to be imperfect, as God Himself does when He uses us. The folly of judging for all cases by one standard is common and human, but it is not God's way. This conviction ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... lending you a hand, and you now in the last ditch, with Dolliver riding on you and me all the time. It don't go. You hear me, it don't go. Dolliver couldn't cough up eleven dollars to save you. Let him get off and walk, and I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you the railway nickels for four days—that's ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... bravery of the garrison, commanded by Memnon, and the strength of the defenses, aided by the Persian fleet. But his soldiers, "protected from missiles by movable pent-houses, called tortoises, gradually filled up the deep and wide ditch round the town, so as to open a level road for his engines (rolling towers of wood) to come up close to the walls." Then the battering-rams overthrew the towers of the city wall, and made a breach in them, so ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... began to decrease—a sure indication that the country was rising—we soon made another six miles. But after this the boats could no further proceed—the inlet, in short, having become a mere ditch at low-water. The head of a large alligator was found on the bank near the upper part; where might be seen an occasional acacia mingled with the mangroves. Behind, the country was very open, consisting of plains ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... beasts who have their eyes deep in their head best see far off? A. Because the force and power by which we see is dispersed in them, and both go directly to the thing which is seen. Thus, when a man doth stand in a deep ditch or well, he doth see in the daytime the stars of the firmament; because then the power of the night and of ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... it is today, only at that time they were crude adobe structures. Surrounding these was a wall fourteen feet high, made of huge upright and horizontal saplings plastered with mud, and as a further means of protection, a wide ditch was dug on the outside. Here Luis Argueello was Comandante ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... became lazy and stupid when lesson-time arrived, was destined to pay dearly for neglecting to imitate her parents. Lagging behind the rest of the family, as in single file they moved homeward after a long night's hunting in the fallow, she chanced to scent some carrion in the ditch, turned aside to taste it, and immediately was held fast in the teeth of an iron trap. Hearing her cries of pain and terror, the mother hastened to the spot, and, for a moment, was so bewildered with disappointment and anger that she chastised the cub unmercifully, though the little creature ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... knew. And while I sewed my cheap holokus on that crazy machine, he bought land with the money—the upper Nahala lands, you know—a bit at a time, each purchase a hard-driven bargain, his face the very face of poverty. To-day the Nahala Ditch alone pays me forty ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... strand of the St. Charles, from the great cliff called the Saut au Matelot to the palace of the intendant. At this latter point began the line of works constructed by Frontenac to protect the rear of the town. They consisted of palisades, strengthened by a ditch and an embankment, and flanked at frequent intervals by square towers of stone. Passing behind the garden of the Ursulines, they extended to a windmill on a hillock called Mt. Carmel, and thence to the brink of the cliffs in front. Here there was a battery of eight guns near the present Public ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... it was pleasant to listen to the roar of the breakers on the bar, but not so cheerful was the thought of facing the high waves seaward. Therefore the plan suggested itself of sufficiently deepening a ditch that led through the marshes from New River to Bogue Sound, to let us through; thence we could sail inland the rest of the voyage without obstruction or hindrance of any kind. To this end we set about contrivances to heave the canoe over the shoals, and borrowed a shovel from a friendly ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... saves a lot of wear and tear to know what's coming. For a good many years I never did know, from one minute to another, and now I like to think that everything's cut-and-dried, and nothing unexpected can jump out at me like a tramp from a ditch." ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... week. With two stone less and a Calyx-eyed saddle-bar, he would have shown up even better. Whenever the barometer goes up two points Catawampus must be remembered. He was foaled in a ditch on the old North Road, somewhere between London and York, and having remained there or thereabouts for a month, may be considered a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... are not surprised when we find men and women naturally vulgar going into transgression. We expect that people who live in the ditch shall have the manners of the ditch; but how shocking when we find sin appended to superior education and to the refinements of social life. The accomplishments of Mary Queen of Scots make her patronage of Darnley, the profligate, the more appalling. ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... other side of the moat were two small redoubts, facing west. The fort contained ample barracks for the garrison of three hundred men who occupied it, with bomb proofs in which they could take refuge, in the event of a siege. Beyond the moat, a glacis sloped down to another ditch. ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... two o'clock in the afternoon. I had watched these beasts at their feverish exercises for nearly an hour before I perceived that they were gradually hemming me in. They seemed to be forming up, in ranks, on the garth. Only a ditch separated us—I was in the cloister-walk, a hundred-and-three gaunt, expectant, desperate cats facing me. Their famished pale eyes pierced me through and through; and two-hundred-and-two hungry eyes (four cats supported life in one apiece) is more than I can stand, though I am a married ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... were drunk, and, aided by Marigold, described a series of ghastly half-circles. At last he performed various convulsive feats of jugglery, with the result that the car, which was nosing steadily for the ditch, came to a stand-still. Then Marigold informed me in unemotional tones that the steering ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... supporters of that statute are the words of David, in regard to some politician of his own day: "Behold he travaileth with iniquity, and hath conceived mischief, and brought forth falsehood. He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made. His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate;" and then he adds, "I will praise the Lord." So also let the Christian bless and magnify HIM, who by his infinite wisdom ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... laid down by Dalrymple. The small Dutch fort, or intrenchment, stands rather on the eastern bight of the bay, and is composed of a few huts, surrounded by a ditch and green bank. Two guns at each corner compose its strength, and the garrison consists of about thirty Dutchmen and a few Javanese soldiers. We were cordially and hospitably received by the officers, and, after a great deal of trouble and many excuses, here procured ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... wire net. Every pasture was a square swamp with a ditch around, and a wire net. Yu've heard the mournful, mixed-up sound a big bunch of cattle will make? Well, seh, as yu' druv from the railroad to the Tulare frawg ranch yu' could hear 'em a mile. Springtime they'd sing like ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... a dead weight. Whenever Ranger quickened his gait or crossed a ditch she held on to the pommel to keep from falling off. Her mind harbored only sensations of misery, and a persistent thought—why did she ever leave home for the West? Her solicitude for Bo had been forgotten. Nevertheless, any marked change in the topography of the ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... very dark. Ferruccio had returned weary, muddy, with his jacket torn, and the livid mark of a stone on his forehead. He had engaged in a stone fight with his comrades; they had come to blows, as usual; and in addition he had gambled, and lost all his soldi, and left his cap in a ditch. ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... undertaking, he set to work to build a wall across the isthmus; thus keeping his soldiers at once from idleness, and his foes from forage. This great and difficult work he perfected in a space of time short beyond all expectation, making a ditch from one sea to the other, over the neck of land, three hundred furlongs long, fifteen feet broad, and as much in depth, and above it built a wonderfully high and strong wall. All which Spartacus at first slighted and despised, but when provisions began to fail, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... place. The road bent round to the right, but they kept straight on over a broad grass path for twenty yards, and there in front of them was the green. A dry ditch, ten feet wide and six feet deep, surrounded it, except in the one place where the path went forward. Two or three grass steps led down to the green, on which there was a long wooden beach for the benefit ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... irritating if none the less humorous. It is said, for instance, that in some places newly married couples were compelled to vault the wall of the churchyard, and that on certain nights the peasants were obliged to beat the castle ditch in order to rest the lord's family from the dismal croaking ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Colambre's attention was roused again, by seeing a man running, as if for his life, across a bog, near the roadside; he leaped over the ditch, and was upon the road in an instant. He seemed startled at first, at the sight of the carriage; but, looking at the postillion, Larry nodded, and he smiled ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... souls to joy! See how their coursers, than the mountain roe More fleet, the verdant carpet skim; thick clouds Snorting they breathe; their shining hoofs scarce print The grass unbruised; when emulation fired, They strain, to lead the field, top the barred gate, O'er the deep ditch exulting bound, and brush The thorny-twining hedge; the riders bend O'er their arched necks; with steady hands, by turns Indulge their speed, or moderate their rage. Where are their sorrows, disappointments, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... sometimes on his box if I have him out too soon after lunch, and has upset me twice within the last year—once last winter out of a sleigh, and once this summer, when the horses shied at a bicycle, and bolted into the ditch on one side of the chaussee (German for high road), and the bicycle was so terrified at the horses shying that it shied too into the ditch on the other side, and the carriage was smashed, and the bicycle was smashed, and we were all ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... perverting the truth or deliberately imposing upon the credulity of the public. Some—perhaps all of them, are men of sincerity and probity; but, deluded themselves, they help to delude others. Their vision is imperfect; and 'if the blind lead the blind,' we may expect to find them in the same ditch together. ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... miles from Moscow, was surrounded by a brick wall thirty feet high and eighteen feet thick at the base, with loopholed battlements. This wall formed a semicircle of about three miles and a half, the ends resting on the river. It was strengthened by thirty towers, and at its forts was a deep dry ditch. The town was largely built of wood. There were no heavy guns upon the walls, and the city, which was completely commanded by surrounding hills, was in no way defensible, but Barclay de Tolly felt ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... making detours, be careful always to keep the moon to your left, so that your shadow may be thrown on the right—a little slanting—just as you are at this moment. Moreover, when you have started, never draw bridle till you have reached the house of Don Mariano de Silva. If you meet a ditch, or brake, or ravine, cross them in a direct line, and don't attempt ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... and purred down a lane. Billie reached out a hand and grabbed at the steering wheel. "Of course, if you want to smash up in a ditch!" said Sam, righting the car with ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... heed that. Rain and tempest affect him not; the glaring heat of summer, the bitter frost of winter are alike to him. He is built up like an oak. Believe it, the man that from his boyhood has stood ankle-deep in the chill water of the ditch, patiently labouring with axe and bill; who has trudged across the furrow, hand on plough, facing sleet and mist; who has swung the sickle under the summer sun—this is the man for the trenches. This is the man whom neither the snows of the North nor the sun of the South can vanquish; ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... exposed to Iroquois incursions. The fortifications of all this family of tribes were, like their dwellings, in essential points alike. A situation was chosen favorable to defence,—the bank of a lake, the crown of a difficult hill, or a high point of land in the fork of confluent rivers. A ditch, several feet deep, was dug around the village, and the earth thrown up on the inside. Trees were then felled by an alternate process of burning and hacking the burnt part with stone hatchets, and by similar means were cut into lengths to form ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... at three in the morning. And when you had been keeping this sort of thing up two or three hours, and your little velvet-head intimated that nothing suited him like exercise and noise, what did you do? ["Go on!"] You simply went on until you dropped in the last ditch. The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... thee, beast, or in what roadside ditch Lord Tristram found thee as he fled away This morning through the Morois from a man Who called upon ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... my own opinions. The charge was not prudently chosen, since, of all men now obtaining any portion of popular regard, I am pretty well known to be precisely the one who cares least either for hedge or ditch, when he chooses to go across country. It is certainly true that I have not the least mind to pin my heart on my sleeve, for the daily daw, or nightly owl, to peck at; but the essential reason for my not telling ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... stopped at the side of a ditch, and sat down in the grass. Sam immediately rushed up, lay down at my feet, and lifted up my hand with his muzzle ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... "Now we must be very careful, for it is pitch dark and banisters are unknown in Uargla. Ah, now I know where the pathway comes from. It is a ditch which gets ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... upon one another, and the great ditches which run on the plains and elsewhere so many miles, were (not unlikely) their boundaries, and withall served for defence against the incursion of their enemies, as the Picts' Wall, Offa's Ditch, and that in China; to compare small things to great. Their religion is at large described by Csesar; their priests were the Druids. Some of their temples I pretend to have restored; as Anbury, Stonehenge, &c., as also British sepulchres. Their ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... gaily to a herdsman visible in the distance, and joyously obedient to the girl's evidently familiar voice, the young fellow came running towards us, garrocha in hand. Between him and the hedge which separated the two properties, was a deep ditch which no bull, save in a state of fury, would care to jump. But not far away a long plank lay half hidden in rich grass, and the ganadero dragged it nearer, without a question, as if he knew already what was expected of him. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... new saddle-pad on the mare, the butts of the terrets would not have worked through the worn leather, and the old pad into the mare's withers, when she was coming home at two o'clock in the morning. She would not have reared, bolted, fallen into a ditch, upset the cart, and sent Platte flying over an aloe-hedge on to Mrs. Larkyn's well-kept lawn; and this tale would never have been written. But the mare did all these things, and while Platte was rolling over and over on the turf, like a shot rabbit, the watch and guard flew from his waistcoat—as ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Lesseps, the maker of the Suez Canal, had undertaken to excavate a similar one across the Isthmus of Panama, but the work was managed with such wild extravagance that vast sums were spent and the poor investors widely ruined, while the canal remained a half-dug ditch. At a later date this affair became a great scandal, dishonest bargains in connection with it were abundantly unearthed, bribery was shown to have been common in high places, and France was shaken to its center by the startling ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... obliged to crawl on his hands and feet to avoid being observed by the sentinels. In such a situation he was hindered and wounded by briers and thorns, and at last was obliged to hide himself in a dry ditch from his pursuers. They were, indeed, misled by the servants at the Castle, who, upon their inquiring for the fugitive, declared that he had gone away on horseback. The officers however on their return to Crieff, where they were quartered, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... you should ask leave now." Graham answered, "I would not, sir, only my brother is wounded, and he is in that out-building there, which has just caught fire." Laying down his musket, Graham ran to the blazing spot, lifted up his brother, and laid him in a ditch. Then he was back at his post, and was plying his musket against the French again, before his absence was noticed, except ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... the bridge cost does not include the L5,830 spent in altering and filling up the Fleet Ditch, or the L2,167 the cost of the temporary wooden bridge. The piers, of bad Portland stone, were decorated by some columns of unequal sizes, and the line of parapet was low and curved. The approaches to the bridge were also designed by ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Buller was about to operate. It had never been systematically surveyed, and the existing maps had been constructed for agricultural rather than for campaigning purposes, and could not be trusted. The Tugela formed the ditch of a natural fortress covering Ladysmith. On its left bank rose an almost continuous ridge or rampart from which the easy open ground on the right bank could be watched for miles, and reconnaissances ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... unique; for while the toad tadpoles wriggled their way free from egg gelatine deposited in the water itself, the Redfins were literally rained down. Within a folded leaf the parents left the eggs—a leaf carefully chosen as overhanging a suitable ditch, or pit, or puddle. If all signs of weather and season failed and a sudden drought set in, sap would dry, leaf would shrivel, and the pitiful gamble for life of the little jungle frogs would be lost; the spoonful of froth would collapse bubble by bubble, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... remarkable preservation from danger. Our postillion being a little sleepy, had not sufficient care of the reins, and the horses suddenly turned off towards an inn, but missing the turn, instantly fell into a deep ditch, one horse quite down, and the other nearly so; the carriage wanted only a few inches further to go, and then it would have come upon the horses, so that a few plunges must have upset the whole concern. We sprang instantly out, and set the quiet animals free. The man was so frightened he ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... had been erected on each side of what was to be the main street of the camp. A ditching machine pantingly laboured on one side of the road and dug as much in a day as fifty men. In the ditch already made on the other side pipes had been laid ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... magnificent whip, and the accidents which happened to the kaiser, while out driving with him, were merely due to the fact that in each case the horses were too young, and not sufficiently broken in. On one occasion, the drag was upset into a ditch not far from Schlobitten, the kaiser and the count being severely bruised and shaken up; while at another time a splendid team got beyond the control of the count, smashed harnesses and pole, and dashed helter-skelter into the little town of Proeckelwitz, ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... retired in disorder, some towards Gavardo, others towards the lake, hotly followed by the French. In the pursuit towards Gavardo, Bonaparte's old friend, Junot, distinguished himself by his dashing valour. He wounded a colonel, slew six troopers, and, covered with wounds, was finally overthrown into a ditch. Such is Bonaparte's own account. It is gratifying to know that the wounds neither singly nor collectively were dangerous, and did not long repress Junot's activity. A tinge of romance seems, indeed, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... rankled there like a ceaseless warning and prophecy. When she reached home that day she went down to the spring in the centre of the village, and stood a long time looking at the bubbling water. It was indeed a priceless treasure; a long irrigating ditch led from it down into the bottom, where lay the cultivated fields,—many acres in wheat, barley, and vegetables. Alessandro himself had fields there from which they would harvest all they needed for the horses and their cow all winter, in case pasturage failed. ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... situated on the edge of an extensive tract of marsh,—lagoon would be a more descriptive word for it, perhaps,—a splashy, ditch-divided district, extending along the borders of a lake for miles. Snipe-shooting was my motive there; and dull work it was in those dark, Novembry, October days, with "the low rain falling" half the time, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... light except that of the public lamps was now showing. It fell sharply as he emerged into the open country, and then abruptly ceased. The odor of dust that has been partially moistened rose from the roadway; some dead leaves scurried in the ditch with a sound of small animals running for shelter; and he felt a heavy, tepid air upon his face, as if some large invisible person ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... heavy, steep steps slowly, three guards at his back and three in front of him. The priests would be gone from the Temple, but there might be one or two last-ditch defenders remaining, and they would be armed with the Weapons of Kor ... hand-weapons which shot dark beams that could disintegrate anything in their path. They would be dangerous. Well, there would be no temple-guards in the inner court; his own men could remain ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... government. The projects of the reclamation service now include practically all of the available waters of the Yakima valley for irrigating the lands therein. In Yakima county alone there are probably [Page 41] 260,000 acres now under ditch, and probably 50,000 more will be reclaimed this season. This is probably not more than half the lands in the county capable of irrigation. The fact that the general government is in control of these projects insures as wide and just ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... the Roman military system consisted in the use of fortified camps. Every time the army halted, if only for a single night, the legionaries intrenched themselves within a square inclosure. It was protected by a ditch, an earthen mound, and a palisade of stakes. This camp formed a little city with its streets, its four gates, a forum, and the headquarters of the general. Behind the walls of such a fortress an army was always at liberty to accept ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... had been nearly starved in a dungeon, walked out between his guards in broad daylight, when their backs were turned; how Andrew Beier and David Fritsch had stumbled against their prison door and found that the bolt was loose; how Hans Nitschmann, concealed in a ditch, heard his pursuers, a foot off, say, "This is the place, here he must be," and yet was not discovered after all. No wonder these wanderers felt that angels had screened them on their way. For the sake of their faith they had been imprisoned, beaten, thrust into filthy dungeons. For ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... moving forward in support of Major Gilbraith, and the latter being held back for a time. Major Gilbraith and Colonel Burke's troops, being unable to cross the creek, passed over the bridge that spans it by the left flank, the former's companies having previously occupied a sheltered place in a ditch parallel to and to the right of the main road. About this time the advance-guard, one of the companies of which (Penrose's) had previously held for a short time a knoll on the left of the road, moved forward and crossed ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... gone far when the moon rose, and from behind the clouds diminished the darkness a little. The first part of her journey lay along a narrow lane, with a small ditch, a rising bank, and a hedge on each side. About the middle of the lane was a farmyard, and a little way farther a cottage. Soon after passing the gate of the farmyard, she thought she heard steps behind her, seemingly soft and swift, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... and another over Belgium; and with the third he was standing by long ditches of water frozen fast, and over them glided hundreds upon hundreds of lads and maids. Outside each door stood a wee wooden shoe empty. Teig saw scores of them as he looked down the ditch of a street. ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... uttered with sudden energy, she spurred her great horse, leaped the ditch, and burst through the dead hedge into the wood, and winded out of sight among ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... knave and liar, but a genuinely honest man! Peace to him. Did he not, in spite of all, accomplish much for us? We walk smoothly over his great rough heroic life; step-over his body sunk in the ditch there. We need not spurn it, as we step on it!—Let the Hero rest. It was not to men's judgment that he appealed: nor have ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... of a mile further, he pulled up, alighted with Murphy from the gig, unharnessed the little black mare, and then overturned the gig into the ditch. ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... Luckily, I was not; but, as I crushed the letters back into my pocket, I solemnly vowed that, rather than touch a penny of that man's money, at least whilst his state of mind remained what it then was, I would perish of starvation in a ditch. Then bewildered, stunned, and utterly crushed in spirit, I hastily excused myself to Courtenay upon the plea of having received distressing news from England, and, obeying the same impulse which impels a wounded animal to rush away and hide itself and its suffering in the deepest solitudes, ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... and the soles of his feet began to get sore from the shovel, he hit on a plan: he cut the bottom out of a tin can and stuck his toe into the cylinder. And the first evening when he came home from the ditch- digging. and was struggling to remove from himself that sticky clay which is peculiar to the soil of Manitoba, he could not help saying to his wife: It's really remarkable how filthy the mud ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... in my childhood I floated a paper boat in the ditch. It was a wet day of July; I was alone and happy over my play. I floated my paper boat ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... the church-going people collecting by the church gate. The men in dark Wadmel jackets with bright buttons, and the women with red ribands bound on their caps and knitted sleeves. The women left their wooden shoes in the dry ditch by the roadside, and put on leather shoes, and waited for the Pastor's arrival. Accuracy of time was not expected, and only when the Pastor appeared did the men throng into the church on one side and the women on the other. ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... his travels to-night," he said, in a low tone. "Easy served with a bed, that lad be; six foot o' dry peat or heath, or a nook in a dry ditch. That lad hasn't slept once in a house this twenty year, and never will while ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... that I'm dealin' out to 'em, God knows! And yet, it's they that are masters of the situation, only they don't know it! There's the pity! They've no leaders, except such as waste their money and leave 'em in the ditch! The world's social schemes, Miss Carmen, don't reach such as these. They're only sops. And they've got the contempt ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... approximately a square with sides of about a hundred yards and bastions at the corners. The eastern front had not been completed, and was now left entirely open, as the northern face connected with the infantry trench. The ditch was twelve feet wide and about eight deep, and the parapet was about twelve feet high, making its crest about twenty feet above the bottom of the ditch. The berme usually left between the bottom of the parapet slope and the ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
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