"Cistern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ball upon the roof of the house, and catching it as it came down; but by and by it did not come down—it bounded into the tin eave-trough and rolled slowly along till it came to the big pipe that led to the cistern, and into this it dropped, and went whirring down, and stopped ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... behavior, is popularity and falsehood; is the limping of a king deformity, though it set the fashion of limping. The grandest thoughts are colorless as water; they savor not of Milton, Socrates, or Menu; seem not drawn from any private cistern, but rain-drops out of the pure sky. Whim and conceit are tare and tret. It matters little whether a man whine with Coleridge, or boast with Ben Jonson, or sneer with Byron, or grumble with Carlyle, if every thought is one-sided ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... which was affixed by a strong chain an iron cup. An inscription in monkish Latin was engraved over the basin, requesting the traveller to pause and drink, and importing that what that water was to the body, faith was to the soul; near the cistern was a rude seat, formed by the trunk of a tree. The door of the well-house was of iron, and secured by a chain and lock; perhaps the pump was so contrived that only a certain quantum of the sanctified beverage could be drawn up at a time, without application ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tradition that the mother of Jesus was buried here. Just outside the church is a cavern that is claimed by some to be the place of Christ's agony, and by others, who may have given the matter more thought, it is supposed to be an old cistern, or place for storing olive oil or grain. Perhaps I would do well to mention here that tradition has been in operation a long time, and the stories she has woven are numerous indeed, but often no confidence can be placed in them. I desire to speak of things of this kind in such a way as ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... least, not by me. Well, the above-mentioned persons are nearly all that have entered into the hallowed shade of our avenue; except, indeed, a certain sinner who came to bargain for the grass in our orchard, and another who came with a new cistern. For it is one of the drawbacks upon our Eden that it contains no water fit either to drink or to bathe in; so that the showers have become, in good truth, a godsend. I wonder why Providence does not cause a clear, cold fountain to bubble ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... opening upon the leads, three iron girders, three beams, six buttresses, no circling, unless you count the walls, no walls unless you count the ceiling and in its embarrassment presented him with the gurgly cistern that supplied the bath water. Here he lived, absolutely happy, and unaware that Mrs. Failing had poked him up here on purpose, to prevent him from growing too bumptious. Here he worked and sang and practised ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... statements grew dry and juiceless in their formal exactness, and that prescribed form could not insure the animating Spirit without which it was as useless as the phylacteries of the Pharisees. He concluded that truth was deeper and fresher than any definitions of it, as the fountain excels the cistern; and that life was sovereign over form, though ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... brother, and the ablest as well as best, is persecuted by his brothers," who, "in a fit of jealousy, on account of his wife, the aurora, and the riches she brings with her from the realm of darkness, the cistern or well [into which he has been lowered], detain their brother in the well,"[93] and he compares this form of the myth with that which it assumes in the following Hindoo tradition. "Three brothers, Ekata (i.e. the first), Dwita (i.e. the second) and Trita ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... stones was heightened by the quantity of large and small pieces of granite which were piled on the top of it, and which had been collected by the anchorites, in case of an incursion, to roll and hurl down on the invading robbers. A cistern had been dug out of the rocky soil of the plateau which the wall enclosed, and care was taken to keep it constantly filled ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... there were others made, far more magnificent and costly, for the temple itself. There was a silver cistern or tank, large enough to hold three thousand gallons of wine. This tank was to be used by the inhabitants of Delphi in their great festivals. There was also a smaller cistern, or immense goblet, as it might, perhaps, more properly be called, ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... tract of low-lying fertile land, especially suitable to the production of cacao (Berendt); chi is edge or border. It is therefore a name referring to a locality, "on the border of the c[h]een of the Itzas." C[h]een also means well or cistern, and another derivation is "at the mouth of the well," as chi can also be rendered "mouth;" either of these is appropriate to the features of the locality, as it is a fertile low-lying tract with two large natural reservoirs ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... his second visit to the cave. He took with him several tools, a short axe, a screw-driver and a hammer. He forced open some of the packing-cases which were piled near the cistern. They were filled with steel bars of various sizes, steel wrought into various shapes and odd-looking coils of copper wire. Gorman knew little of engineering or mechanics. He was merely puzzled by what he saw. It seemed to him that ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... a beautiful Gothic edifice, built about a small court-yard, in which a score of the green-jerkined guardsmen were lounging. In a corner stood a wooden cistern for the collection of rain-water from the roof-spouts. Ulick drew a pannikin of water and offered it to Constans that he might bathe his face, which was badly puffed and marked. How reviving, the touch of the cool, ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... wondrous cost and care." A grove of a hundred oaks would not have furnished all the wood sold in little morsels as remnants of the true cross; and the tears of Mary, if collected together, would have filled a cistern. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... window that looked directly towards her sashes, and had the satisfaction to see her leaning there, and looking on a fountain, that stood in the midst of the garden, and cast a thousand little streams into the air, that made a melancholy noise in falling into a large alabaster cistern beneath: oh how my heart danced at the dear sight to all the tunes of love! I had not power to stir or speak, or to remove my eyes, but languished on the window where I leant half dead with joy and transport; for she appeared more charming ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... be loosed or the golden bowl be broken or the pitcher be broken at the fountain or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was and the spirit to God who ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... to the "carburettor", a little vessel having a small nozzle projecting upwards in its centre. The petrol trickles from the tank into the carburettor, and is kept at a constant level by means of a float which acts in a very similar way to the ballcock of a water cistern. ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... more commonplace in my life! See, here's a line half blotted out. Oh, I suppose she was crying then—some of her tears, idle tears—Hark, there is Barnes Newcome's eloquence still plapping on like water from a cistern—and our thoughts, where have they wandered? far away from the lecture—as far away as Clive's almost. And now the fountain ceases to trickle; the mouth from which issued that cool and limpid flux ceases to smile; the figure is seen to bow and retire; ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at Tiptree Hall, in England, we observed a large cistern, in which all the manure necessary for the highest culture of 170 acres of land, is liquified, and from which it is pumped out by a steam engine, over the farm. All the water, which supplies the cistern, ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... pleasure-boat with all its tackling, able conveniently to hold eight Europeans. When it was finished, the queen was so delighted, that she ran with it in her lap to the king, who ordered it to be put into a cistern full of water, with me in it, by way of trial, where I could not manage my two sculls, or little oars, for want of room. But the queen had before contrived another project. She ordered the joiner to make a wooden trough of three hundred ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... they tried to obtain water from wells in this fashion, but the water could never be raised higher than 34 feet. Let us see why water could rise 34 feet and no more. If an empty pipe is placed in a cistern of water, the water in the pipe does not rise above the level of the water in the cistern. If, however, the pressure in the tube is removed, the water in the tube will rise to a height of 34 feet approximately. If now the air pressure in the tube ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... huge tidal wave from the ocean of infinite delight had broken at last upon the shore of the finite, and withdrawn again into the deeps, leaving every cistern brimming, every fountain overflowing, the two entranced souls opened their bodily eyes, looked at each other, rose, and stood hand in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... little more than two feet in width; the remains of its Forum and market, its barracks and houses, its open shops and colonnades, the bases of the pillars yet in position; its baths, with pipes, cistern, and flues; and a vaulted chamber which was thought, on its being first excavated, to lead to underground stables, for a local tradition held that such were in existence, and would be found, with a troop of ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... bound from Constantinople, by classic seas whose every wave throbs with a deathless memory, to the Grecian Islands and the Levant. Those were golden days and balmy nights! In and out of harbour all the time—old friends everywhere—sleeping in some cool temple or ruined cistern during the heat of the day—feasting and song after sundown, under great stars set in a velvet sky! Thence we turned and coasted up the Adriatic, its shores swimming in an atmosphere of amber, rose, and aquamarine; we lay in wide landlocked ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... voice sounded like he was talkin' out of a cistern, and I grew sick at my stomach I was so scared. But both Mitch and me forgot the wedding for the time and turned our heads. And pretty soon we saw Doc Lyon kind of rolling a pistol over in his hand. We could see it. It glittered in the light; ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... name of shelter, what one pays rent for, must be kept clearly in mind. Two or three decades since it was a tight roof, thinly plastered walls, and a chimney with "thimble-holes for stoves," possibly a furnace with small tin flues, a well or cistern, or perhaps one faucet delivering a small stream of water. To-day even in the suburbs there is furnished light, heat, abundant water, care of halls and sidewalks. The elevator-boy takes the place of "buttons," the engineer and ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... in spelling were few, the principal one arising from an old habit of thought connecting the words sister and cistern, which had survived Aunt M'riar's frequent attempts at correction. When he exhibited his Identical Notes to the Powers for their sanction and approval, this was pointed out to him, and an allegation that he was acting up to previous instructions disallowed nem. con. He endeavoured to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... true that, admirer of his uncle as he was, he had never imagined himself reaping any laurels from the credit of his sermons; it was equally true however that he had not told a single person of the hidden cistern whence he drew his large discourse. But what could it matter to any man, so long as a good sermon was preached, where it came from? He did not occupy the pulpit in virtue of his personality, but of his ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... be reasonable; you must give the cistern a chance to refill and replace that which ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... and P——, tired with their angling, came in. After demolishing nearly a dozen eggs amongst us, and two capital salmon-trout, which our fast friend, the Anglo-Norwegian, had filched from a large cistern, where they are placed during the winter, for the benefit of his master's table; and after imbibing cauldrons of coffee—so delicious was its flavour—we showed and expressed great anxiety to pay Bruin the compliments of the season, and as strangers ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... all pass in to prayer. As the concourse increases the shoes of the Faithful gather in heaps along the inner edge of the porch: only the newer shoes are permitted to lie, sole against sole, close to their owners, each of whom after washing in the shaded cistern takes his place in the hindmost line ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... we live, and through the endless ages of eternity; and if we have Him in our hearts, we shall live as long as there is anything more to pass from God to us. Until the fountain has poured its whole fulness into the cistern, the cistern will never be broken. He who becomes partaker of the Divine nature can never die. So as Christ taught us the great argument for immortality is the present relation between God and us, and the fact that He is the God of Abraham points ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... SISTER OR CISTERN BLOCK. A turned cylindrical block having two sheave-holes, one above the other. It fits in between the first pair of top-mast shrouds on each side, and is secured by seizings below the cat-harpings. The topsail-lift ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... furtively rapped on the wall to catch the hollow echo within. Then again you opened a door, expecting to step into the wilderness of a garden, and found yourself in a set of little rooms running off on a tangent, one after the other, and ending in a windowless closet and an open cistern. But the Agency gloried in its irregularities, and defied criticism. The original idea of its architect—if there was any—had vanished; but his work remained a not unpleasing variety to summer visitors accustomed to city houses, all built ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... was rectangular, as far as it could be seen. Inside, it was built like a small circular cistern, smoothly cemented, and contracting above in a dome, that opened by a square hole to the well-shaft above. Like the stones in the outer chamber, the cement was coated with scales of dried mud. The shaft was now certainly ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... to dally with it myself, having been brought up on cistern water, but I find in traveling that I entertain a more kindly feeling for you strange foreign people when I carry a medium-sized headlight. Come along, now. Don't compel me ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... fu' go to de 'ouse neider," he replied deliberately, after washing down the scant repast with a long draught from the tin bucket which he had replenished at the cistern before entering. He swallowed the water regardless of the "wiggles" whose presence ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... late. Basiliscus' party had already broken up; Basiliscus and his family had taken refuge in a church, from whence Zeno enticed him, on the promise of shedding no blood, which he did not: but instead, put him, his wife and children, in a dry cistern, walled ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... by a fortress; four miles further on, we came to a small group of trees, in the middle of which was a stone terrace, five feet in height, upon which was a life-size statue of a horse carved in stone. By the side of this a well was dug out; a kind of cistern, built of large blocks of red sandstone, with steps leading up to ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... i the sound of s; as sincerely, centrick, century, circular, cistern, city, siccity: before a, o, and u, it sounds like k, as calm, concavity, copper, incorporate, ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... fears, aspirations, love and hate, pity and aversion; the strange and most delicate processes which, happening without cessation, in plants and animals and men, maintain that balanced equilibrium which we call life; and, when the silver cord is being loosed and the bowl broken at the cistern, the awful changes which herald the approach of death; not only the growing grass in midsummer meadows, not only the coming of autumn "in dyed garments, travelling in the glory of his apparel," but also the opening buds, the pleasant scents, the tender colours which stir our hearts ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... please people, or avoid displeasing them,—are all taught us by our own hearts. Good manners are the fine flower of civilization. And everybody can have them. I always say that one of the best-bred men of my acquaintance is Mr. Jarvis, the mason. I have known him come up out of a cistern to speak to me, dressed in overalls and a flannel shirt; and his bow and his manner and the politeness of his address would have done credit to any ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... determined. On the other hand there must be annoying occasions when he starts out to strangle somebody and finds that he's pulling him out of the cistern." ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... of violence was to break open a sugar storehouse. They mixed a barrel of sugar with one of rum, killed a hog, poured in his blood, added gunpowder, and drank the compound—to make them brave. Then with barrels of rum and sugar they changed a whole cistern of water into punch, stirring it with their sharpened hoes, dipping it out with huge sugar-boiler ladles, and ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... some degree a mass of blancmange turned out of a mould. Four round lunettes of stone, wearily worked by hands now cold, stand four-square to all the winds that blow. In the middle is a great round tower, with a cistern on the top, and underneath an arched cavern which you are pleased to learn is bomb-proof. As you cross the drawbridge, you feel bound to admit that the prospect is not inviting. It seems as if you were going to prison instead of to visit, at his marine residence, one of the most courtly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... luxury indulge in a cup of coffee after dinner. The salon, with its greasy and worn-out furniture, every bit of which is catalogued, is as familiar as our own studies. We know the exact geography even of the larder and the cistern. We catch the odour of the damp, close office, where Madame Vauquer lurks like a human spider. She is the animating genius of the place, and we know the exact outline of her figure, and every article of her dress. The minuteness of her portrait brings out the horrors of the terrible process ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... contained about 300 houses, which were handsomely and strongly built of stone and lime, their roofs being double covered with hollow tyles, much like those used in England, only that they are less at one end than at the other. Almost every house had a cistern or well in a garden behind, in which likewise there were vines with ripe grapes, forming pleasant arbours or shady walks; and in every garden there grew some tobacco, then hardly known, but now commonly used in England, with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... name Arundel House is not known. It seems probable that the house was originally a Tudor structure, as some unmistakable Tudor mullions were found built up in an old wall; yet the greater part of it dated from the Stuart period. A large ornamental cistern which stood in the scullery bore date 1703. The back view of the house, with its irregular dark-brick buildings and additions, here and there covered with creepers, was very picturesque. Tradition says that Henry Hallam, the ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... with such conveniences as I had, and to aid in grafting, I should have been told to make a long narrow box, put a wire screen bottom on it, make a cover for it, fasten a wire at each end, put my scion wood in and let it down deep in a cistern, and let it hang two or three inches over the water for scion keeping. When grafting I should have been told to carry my Merribrooke melter around in an empty pail to keep the wind from blowing it out and to be able to better ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... inches broad, were inserted in the ground one above the other from a depth of from ten to twelve feet, and the last cylinder, reaching the level of the ground, was provided with a narrow neck, through which the rainwater or infiltrations from the river flowed into this novel cistern. Many examples of these are found in one and the same chamber,* thus giving the soul an opportunity of finding water in one or other of them. The tombs at Uruk, arranged closely together with coterminous walls, and gradually ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... in well-preserved specimens distinctly resembles a lyre. These mosquitoes are essentially domestic insects, for they are very rarely found except in houses or in their immediate vicinity. Once they enter a room they will scarcely leave it except to lay their eggs in a near-by cistern, water-pot, or some other ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... hath gone into the wilderness and suffered thirst with beasts of prey, disliked only to sit at the cistern with ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... default of memorials. The University had also its own. On Mount Sainte-Genevieve a sort of Job of the Middle Ages, for the space of thirty years, chanted the seven penitential psalms on a dunghill at the bottom of a cistern, beginning anew when he had finished, singing loudest at night, magna voce per umbras, and to-day, the antiquary fancies that he hears his voice as he enters the Rue du Puits-qui-parle—the street ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... once too large and too close together, the buttresses are only half semi-circles. The apses project with three sides. The northern side of the church and the roof are modern, for the building suffered severely in 1784 from fire.[320] The church stands on a platform, built over a small cistern, the roof of which is supported by four columns crowned by beautiful capitals. Hence the Turkish name of the mosque, Bodroum, signifying a subterranean hollow. Gyllius[321] is mistaken in associating this church ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... 20th all preliminary arrangements were complete, and everything ready for a final departure from the island. The thermometer stood on an average at 8 degrees below zero, and the water in the cistern was completely frozen. It was determined, therefore, for the colony to embark on the following day, and take up their residence in ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... "I can remember when I was two. I had a kitten fell down the cistern and papa said it hurt ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... streets, to do away with telegraph poles and aerial lines of wire. Many systems have been devised. The general type includes tubes called ducts in sets, called conduits, bedded in concrete or otherwise protected. Every two or three hundred feet the sets lead into a cistern-like cavity called a manhole. The insulated wires or cables, generally sheathed with a lead alloy are introduced into the tubes through the man-holes. A rope is first fed through the tube. To do this short rods which screw together are generally employed. One by one they are introduced, ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... the Meadows, Sandy gaed roond aboot the beast, chucklin' awa' till himsel' juist like watter dreepin' intil a tume cistern; but he keepit oot o' the reach o' the cabby's kornals. I expeckit to see him get roond the linders wi' ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... conceived to be the delinquent, and discharged the contents of their buckets accordingly, without any apparent diminution of the intestine war which was raging in the chimney. A fresh supply from a cistern on the roof, similarly applied, produced no better effects, and Agamemnon, in an agony of doubt, rushed up-stairs to ascertain the cause of non-abatement. Accidentally popping his head into the drawing-room, what was his horror at beholding the beautiful Brussels carpet, so lately "redolent of brilliant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... helped her mother with the work. When she had finished Mrs. Comstock told her to go to Sintons' and wash her Indian relics, so that she would be ready to accompany Wesley to town in the afternoon. Elnora hurried down the road and was soon at the cistern with a tub busily washing arrow points, stone axes, ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... ornaments and preparing for the prose of every-day life; and yet she did so in a cheerful, lightsome mood. The sunny eaves dropped a profusion of gems from the melting snow. There was a tinkle of water in the pipes leading to the cistern. From the cackle in the barn-yard it appeared that the hens had resolved on unwonted industry, and were receiving applause from the oft-crowing chanticleers. The horses, led out to drink, were in exuberant spirits, and ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... speaks to us the word of life through the messenger's lips. Does, therefore, the messenger represent Christ? Does the channel which conveys the waters of the Fountain represent the Fountain itself? Suppose, when we went to draw water at a cistern, that all at once the Leaden Spout should become animated, and open its mouth and say to us, See, I am Vicarious for the Fountain. Whatever respect you show to the Fountain, show some part of it to me. Should we not answer the Spout, and say, Spout, you were ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the child, in simpler words, Of you his finny flocks and herds; Now, an old man, I bid you rise To the fine sight behind the eyes, And, lo, you float and flash again In the dark cistern of my brain. But o'er your visioned flames I brood With other mien, in other mood; You are no longer there to please, But to stir argument, and tease 190 My thought with all the ghostly shapes From which no moody man escapes. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the Reef, there was certainly this difficulty to contend with. As the governor caused his brother, the surveyor-general, to lay out a town on the Reef, it was early deemed necessary to make some provision against this evil. A suitable place was selected, and a cistern was blown out of the rock, into which all the water that fell on the roof of Colony House was led. This reservoir, when full, contained many thousand gallons; and when once full, it was found that the rains were sufficient to prevent its being very ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... through the buildings, Rose also took good heed of the supplies the place afforded. There were flour, and beef, and pork, and many other of the common articles of food, as well as water in a cistern, that caught it as it flowed from the roof of the dwelling. Water was also to be found in casks—nothing like a spring or a well existing among those islets. All these things Rose noted, putting them aside in her memory for ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... too evident. Half a score of men and boys, some of them the hired help of Mr. Appleby, were filling pails from a cistern, and at a pump, and dashing the water on the blazing hay. They could not get near enough to make the water effective, and what little they did dash on was almost at once turned to steam by the heat. Then, too, the stack was so large in diameter at the ...
— Tom Fairfield's Pluck and Luck • Allen Chapman
... burners, which are defended from the action of the excessive heat produced by their united flames, by means of a superabundant supply of oil, which is thrown up from the cistern below by a clock-work movement, and constantly overflows the wicks. A very tall chimney is necessary in order to supply fresh currents of air to each wick with sufficient rapidity to support the combustion. The carbonization ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... hollowed, and among the tools within I found a leaky wooden bucket which, by daubing it with mud from the brink of the stream, I contrived to make passably watertight. A score of times I must have travelled to and fro between the hut and the stream before I had the cistern filled. Then I fell-to upon the foul walls within, slushing and brooming them. Bats dropped from the roof and flew blundering against me: I drove them forth from the window. The mud floor became a quag: I seized a spade and shovelled it clean, mud and slime and worse filth together. ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... and its territory was added to that of Capua by Sulla. In the imperial period, however, we find it once more a municipium. Caiatia has remains of Cyclopean walls, and under the Piazza del Mercato is a large Roman cistern, which still provides a good water supply. The episcopal see was founded in A.D. 966. The place is frequently confused with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... ghost story short, without adding another chapter, Mr. Aveling, on looking into the dark chasm by the meagre light of the lowered candle, beheld, to his amazement, the reflection of his own face in the water of a large cistern underneath the staircase, the house having formerly been supplied from the "large brewery" a short distance off. The unearthly noise was no doubt caused by air in the pipes, through which the water rushed when suddenly turned on by the brewers, who were working late at night. ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... summit stands, Immense and far uplifted above the lower lands, It lacks but little, truly, that with the heavenly sphere Around the earth revolving, its towers would interfere. And they who dwell within it must seek the Milky Way; There is no nearer cistern which win their thirst allay: Their horses there go browsing, and crop the stars that pass, As other beasts the blossoms that open ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... nearly done the bells, and we have had gas alight the last three days. The balcony is finished, the bath and lavatory are closed up and waiting for the varnishers. Charles has finished the roof, and the scaffolding is removed. But though two plumbers have tried all their skill, the ball-cock in the cistern won't work, and when the water has been turned on an hour it overflows. The gutters and pipes to roof are not up, and the night before last a heavy flood of rain washed a quantity of muddy water into the back entrance, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... morbid to write thus, but I have not been either morbid or depressed. It has been an easy life, the life of the last few months, without effort or dissatisfaction, but without zest. It is a mental tiredness, I suppose. I have written myself out, and the cistern must fill again. Yet I have had no feeling of fatigue. It would have been almost better to have had something to bear; but I am richer than I need be, Maud and the children have been in perfect health and happiness, I have been well and strong. I ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... combination and arrangement, substantially as described, of the weighted cistern, B, car, A, and straps, C, for the purpose ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... with a broad belt of the precious metal—solid, massive, and magnificently wrought; but the implements and vessels of the temple were of the yellow treasure. Huge vases stood upon the floor filled with the produce of their land—offerings to the sun; perfume-censers, water-cruses, cistern-pipes, reservoirs, all were of the rich, ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... house from such pipes. The soilpipe should terminate at its lower end in a properly ventilating disconnecting trap, so that a current of air would be constantly maintained through the pipe. 8. No rainwater pipe and no overflow or waste pipe from any cistern or rainwater tank, or from any sink (other than a slop sink for urine), or from any bath or lavatory, should pass directly to the soilpipe; but every such pipe should be disconnected therefrom by passing through the wall to the outside of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... fifty yards in diameter and as many yards deep. Its bottom was covered with fine, loose sand, a strange circumstance in a country composed of tufa and volcanic rock. Legend had it that the Pit was an old Hopi tank, or water-hole—a huge cistern where that prehistoric tribe conserved the rain. Bits of broken pottery and scattered beads bore out this theory, and round the tank lay the low, crumbling mounds of what ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... had an axe, with room to wield it, how I should have burst open that huge cistern, and drank fiercely of its contents! But I had no axe, no weapon of any kind; and without one the thick oaken staves were as impenetrable to me as if they had been solid iron. Even had I succeeded in reaching ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... so sure. In removing the stopper which divided it from the outside world, the larva has expended its final store of liquid. The cistern is dry, and in default of a living root there is no means of replenishing it. My suspicions are well founded. For three days the prisoner struggles desperately, but cannot ascend by so much as an inch. It is impossible ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... brier bushes. Archaeologists call them the aqueducts of Seranus, the Roman camp of Holderlock, or vestiges of Theodoric, according to their fantasy. The only thing about these ruins which could be considered remarkable is a stairway to a cistern cut in the rock. Inside of this spiral staircase, instead of concentric circles which twist around with each complete turn, the involutions become wider as they proceed, in such a way that the bottom of the pit is three times ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... nearly eight months. There are grand sea-views from the ramparts. The town consists of tall, dingy houses, and narrow, steep, and in most cases dirty streets. The promenade of Bonifacio is the small covered terrace before the church of Santa Maria. Here also is the public cistern. ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... glove, with all its interior stone exposed to the sunlight, which yet seems sunlight in a prison, and silence over all—that is Mola. The ruins of the fortress are near the gate on the highest point of the crag. Within is a barren spot—a cistern, old foundations, and some broken walls. Look over the battlement westward, and you will see a precipice that one thinks only birds could assail; and, observing how isolated is the crag on all sides, you will understand what ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... bed and fell asleep. The sun looked bright the morning after to every eye in the village but to Le Fevre's and his afflicted son's; the hand of death prest heavy upon his eyelids; and hardly could the wheel at the cistern turn round its circle, when my uncle Toby, who had rose up an hour before his wonted time, entered the Lieutenant's room, and without preface or apology, sat himself down upon the chair by the bedside, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... spite of his words of almost impassioned tenderness and onwillingness for me to harm and strain myself by approachin' the political pole—still how he had let me wrestle with weighty hop-poles and draw water out of a deep well with a cistern pole ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... from his cloudy cistern, pours On the parch'd earth enriching showers; The grove, the garden, and the field ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... soldiers restless sought the god in bed, But most for thirst they mourned and most complain; For Juda's tyrant had strong poison shed, Poison that breeds more woe and deadly pain, Than Acheron or Stygian waters bring, In every fountain, cistern, well ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... almost a minute elapsed before he discovered to the left an open archway which indicated that the tunnel here turned at an angle. But how should he cross to this doorway? The coping which separated the cistern from the canal in the centre of the tunnel was too narrow and the water poured over it noisily. He was about to attempt swimming when he noticed that he was standing upon a plank, evidently placed here to be used ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... barometer takes less mercury than a cistern barometer. To the open end of the barometer tube attach a piece of strong rubber tubing 4 in. long and to this a piece of glass tubing 3 in. long. Fill the tube thus formed with mercury to within 3 in. from the top. Holding the short glass tube open end up, turn the long tube closed ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... meat; But hold it for a favour seldom known, If he be deign'd the honour to sit down. Soon as the tarts appear, Sir Crape withdraw, Those dainties are not for a spiritual maw. Observe your distance, and be sure to stand Hard by the cistern, with your cap in hand: There for diversion you may pick your teeth, Till the kind voider comes for your relief, For meer board wages, such their freedom sell, Slaves to an hour, and vassals to a bell: And if th' employments ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... The shouts of mirth and revelry borne upon the midnight air, are only the prelude to tears and sighs and mourning. Behind thee is the blackness of despair, before thee the everlasting sunshine. Away, away! tarry not to sip water from the broken cistern, for the living fountain gushes forth, clear as crystal; and the invitation is for all: "Ho, every one that thirsteth" (Isa. 55: 1; ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... come its destruction; Yea, its destruction shall be as when one dashes an earthen vessel in pieces, shattering it ruthlessly, So that not a potsherd is found among the pieces With which to take up fire from the hearth or to draw water from a cistern." ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... Ravenna have a cistern than a vine Since I could sell my water there much better ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... lighted by the dormer windows in the roof. A broad hall ran through the house from front to rear, opening upon a wide back porch which was also much out of repair. Beneath this porch Mr. Elmer discovered a brick cistern half full of dirty water, which he knew must be very foul, as the gutters along the roof were so rotten and broken that they could not have furnished a fresh supply ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... from the orchestra pit, and the curtains parted on "Salome." The setting for "Salome" is an imaginative creation of the scene painter's art. The high steps to the palace door to the right, the cover of the cistern, backed by ironic roses in the center, and beyond the deep night sky and the moonlight on the distant roofs. Two cedars cut the sky, black and mournful. Against this background "Salome" moves like a tigress, the costumes of the court glow with a dun, barbaric ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... is the same objectionable person. Because he closed my carriage door outside sir Thornley Stoker's one sleety day during the cold snap of February ninetythree when even the grid of the wastepipe and the ballstop in my bath cistern were frozen. Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, in my honour. I had it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the information that it was ablossom of the homegrown ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... in the illustration has a large sheet of zinc, measuring (before cutting) eight feet by three feet, and he has cut out square pieces (all of the same size) from the four corners and now proposes to fold up the sides, solder the edges, and make a cistern. But the point that puzzles him is this: Has he cut out those square pieces of the correct size in order that the cistern may hold the greatest possible quantity of water? You see, if you cut them very small you get a very shallow cistern; if you cut them large you get a tall and ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... not freeze, and never need banking. No rat can enter, for they always work close to the wall, and coming to the projecting flat stone at the bottom, they give it up. On one side of the cellar, under the kitchen, make a large rain-water cistern, with a pump in the kitchen and a faucet in the cellar, and the whole arrangement is perfect. If the farm be large, you will need some of the good, but cheap houses described in the following part of this article, where your men will live and board themselves, which ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... door. As he did so, he heard a quick, light step upon the stairs, and a young and very dark man, dressed in a weaver's blouse and carrying a tin pail which he had evidently just filled with water from the cistern, came up. ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... Dr. Hamlin of Constantinople, in Lowell, Mass., the tiles came from Marseilles, the stone from the sandstone quarries of Ras Beirut, the stone pavement partly from Italy and partly from Mt. Lebanon, and the eighty iron bedsteads from Birmingham, England. The cistern, which holds about 20,000 gallons, was built at the expense of a Massachusetts lady, and the portico by a lady of New York. The melodeon was given by ladies in Georgetown, D.C., and the organ is the gift of a benevolent lady ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... was comin' through and runnin' the white folks both ways. Law chile—you don't know nothin'! We used to hide in the cistern. One time when the Yankees come in a rush my brother and me hide in the ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... mules were led up and down a steep narrow ledge. A perpendicular boring, shaped like a well, connects the lowest chamber with those above, and there can be no doubt that the nethermost part served the purpose of a well or cistern. By means of a hanging rope a man could easily pull himself up to the higher stages and let himself down in the same manner. In the event of a surprise the rope would, of course, be pulled up. Woe to those who exposed their heads in this cylindrical passage to ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... willow moss, and floating plants like duckweed. Even if you do not know these by name they are probably common in your neighbourhood. Fill the tank with clean water. That taken from a spring or well is better than cistern water. After two or three days, when the plants seem to be well rooted, put in your fish. You may keep your aquarium in a light place, but always keep it out of the sun in summer and away from the heat of a stove or radiator ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... in depth, by which descent was made into a chamber of inverted pyramidal shape. This chamber approximated 6 by 9 feet in horizontal dimensions and was some 4 or 5 feet deep. At the bottom of this cistern the human remains and most of the relics were deposited. The shaft was filled in with earth and the pavings described. The total depth, computed from the figures given, is about 18 feet, a most remarkable achievement for a barbarous ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... details to give respecting the tragical death of Kleber. The house of Elfy Bey, which Bonaparte occupied at Cairo, and in which Kleber lived after his departure; had a terrace leading from a salon to an old ruined cistern, from which, down a few steps, there was an entrance into the garden. The terrace commanded a view of the grand square of El Beguyeh, which was to the right on coming out of the salon, while the garden was on the left. This terrace was Bonaparte's favourite promenade, especially in the ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... upon its tripod and a rough zero established, and it was left awhile to adjust itself to conditions before a reading was attempted. It was a great gratification to get it to the top uninjured. The boiling-point apparatus was put together and its candle lighted under the ice which filled its little cistern. The three-inch, three-circle aneroid was read at once at thirteen and two-tenths inches, its mendacious altitude scale confidently pointing at twenty-three thousand three hundred feet. Half an hour later it had dropped to ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... (which wasn't his name, though he was never known by any other), or that he had kith or kin or chick or child. Perhaps the attraction of this mystery, combined with your father's having a damp compartment, to himself, behind a leaky cistern, at the Dust-Bin,—a sort of a cellar compartment, with a sink in it, and a smell, and a plate-rack, and a bottle-rack, and three windows that didn't match each other or anything else, and no daylight,—caused ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... painful duty of turning over to you the administration of these United States and the key to the front door of the White House has been assigned to me. You will find the key hanging inside the storm-door, and the cistern-pole up stairs in the haymow of the barn. I have made a great many suggestions to the outgoing administration relative to the transfer of the Indian bureau from the department of the Interior to that of the sweet by-and-by. The Indian, I may say, has been a great source ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... captain, that's my advice," says he. "They very desperate, dangerous men. They drink water, then cut throat. Make ear deaf and say cistern all empty. They think you die, and they wait, ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... or (in the famous old Tichborne trial phrase) would you be surprised to learn, that all you have read of Vailima - or Subpriorsford, as I call it - is entirely false, and we have no ice-machine, and no electric light, and no water supply but the cistern of the heavens, and but one public room, and scarce a bedroom apiece? But, of course, it is well known that I have made enormous sums by my evanescent literature, and you will smile at my false humility. The point, however, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... took, Blake could not remember. She stopped and whispered to him to go softly, as they came to a stairway, as steep and dark as a cistern. Blake, at the top, could smell opium smoke, and once or twice he thought he heard voices. The woman stopped him, with outstretched arms, at the stair head, and together they ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... is laded into a wooden vat, half filled with water. The sordes or dirt falls to the bottom; the oil swims a-top; and being skimmed off, is barrelled up in small oblong casks. What remains in the vat, is thrown into a large stone cistern with water, and after being often stirred, and standing twelve or fourteen days, yields a coarser oil used for lamps and manufactures. After these processes, they extract an oil still more coarse and fetid from the refuse of the whole. Sometimes, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... of one of the buildings tells a story of cruelty that surpasses anything else done by these heartless, sanguinary pirates, not excepting the practice of cutting wings from living birds and leaving them to die of hemorrhage. In this dry cistern the living birds were kept by hundreds to slowly starve to death. In this way the fatty tissue lying next to the skin was used up, and the skin was left quite free from grease, so that it required little or ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... structure, with its outlying towers, was thus appropriately named. In the days of its glory it was half palace, half fortress; indeed, a city in itself, capable of accommodating quite an army, and containing within its walls an immense cistern as a water supply, besides armories, storehouses, foundry, and every appliance of a large citadel. A considerable portion of the far-reaching walls is still extant. Under good generalship, and properly manned, the place must have been nearly impregnable ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... state. The former evidently required cleaning; with the powder he was satisfied. Though no leaden pipes were procurable, as bamboo canes serve every purpose for which the former are used in other countries, a leaden cistern and some pigs of lead which had been sent with the muskets were found, and the three troopers who had accompanied the major and his companion were set to work to cast bullets and clean up the arms; while the major, after twice making the circuit of the house, advised that ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... fig and pomegranate trees; the former were covered with ripe fruit, and as we had tasted nothing this day but dry flour, we made a hearty dinner of the figs. There is no spring either in the castle or town of Szalkhat, but every house has a deep cistern lined with stone; there is ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... yesterday to wear to her pa's funeral, but I guess she's sent it back by this time. An', Billy—Billy, wait a minute; you be sure to tell 'em we are goin' to the show." Mrs. Wiggs vigorously brushed her hair with the clothes-brush as she spoke. Australia had thrown the hair-brush down the cistern the summer before. ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... platform is formed of stucco—say forty feet square—surrounded by a wall two feet high, so as to form a tank. Below this is a sunken cistern—say eight feet square—into which the drainage would be conducted from the upper platform. In this cistern a force-pump is fitted, and the cistern is half filled with a solution ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... Figure 20, above, is part of another fine unpublished etching, "Windsor, from Salt Hill." Of the published etchings, the finest are the Ben Arthur, Aesacus, Cephalus, and Stone Pines, with the Girl washing at a Cistern; the three latter are the more generally instructive. Hindhead Hill, Isis, Jason, and Morpeth, ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin |
