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Dunghill

noun
1.
A foul or degraded condition.
2.
A heap of dung or refuse.  Synonyms: midden, muckheap, muckhill.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Dunghill" Quotes from Famous Books



... stones, and turf, where the wealthy might perhaps shelter a starved cow or sorely galled horse. But almost every hut was fenced in front by a huge black stack of turf on one side of the door, while on the other the family dunghill ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... Suckers. I could wish, that after my trees haue fully possessed the soile of mine Orchard, that euery seuen yeeres at least, the soile were bespread with dung halfe a foot thicke at least. Puddle water out of the dunghill powred on plentifully, will not onely moisten but fatten especially in Iune and Iuly. If it be thicke and fat, and applied euery yeere, your Orchard shall need none other foiling. Your ground may lye so low at the Riuer side, that the floud standing ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson

... made of rye,—of butter and beer. Nobody has a right to complain who has at his disposal a competent supply of good brown bread and butter; but to our unpractised palates, the rye-meal, and sour leaven, were not very inviting. Still we set to work, and aided by a cat, and a fine bold fellow of a dunghill cock, both of whom took post beside us, and insisted on sharing our meal, we made a pretty considerable inroad into the good woman's vivres, whose butter and beer were both of them excellent. This, with a rest of half an hour, made us feel up to our work; so ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... and gracefulness of the marble nymph which he admires, are derived from a creature who sells the use of her charms indifferently to sculpture or to love. Fine poetry, like other arts called fine, springs from "strange places," as the flower in the fable said, when it bloomed on the dunghill; nor is Burns more to be blamed than was Raphael, who painted Madonnas, and Magdalens with dishevelled hair and lifted eyes, from a loose lady, whom the pope, "Holy at Rome—here Antichrist," charitably prescribed ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... back to the house all the new cattle and other stock had been put away, and the men were ready to return home. That night before setting the new chickens at liberty, Bob caught and killed the two remaining Dunghill roosters. ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson

... brilliant colours," said she, "and see how much finer they are than your poor feathers." "I am not denying," replied the Crane, "that yours are far gayer than mine; but when it comes to flying I can soar into the clouds, whereas you are confined to the earth like any dunghill cock." ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop

... arrived at the very summit of his wicked cruelty, he returned to Lanerk, and at the very place where he had bound Mr. Cargil, one of his drunken companions and he falling at odds, while he was easing himself on a dunghill, his comrade coming out with a sword, ran him through the body till the blood and dirt, with Eglon's, came out. His last words were, "God damn my soul eternally, for I am gone." Mischief shall hunt the violent man, till he be ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... and they, I dare say, can tell more of him than is yet known. My own notion is, that Thomson was a much coarser man than his friends are willing to acknowledge[349]. His Seasons are indeed full of elegant and pious sentiments: but a rank soil, nay a dunghill, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... pheasants crow upon your perch: But when we fire your coats about your ears, And take your ships before your walled towns, We make a dunghill of your rotten bones, And cram our chickens with ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley

... with his Princely companion, who keep alwaies six and thirty Game-Cocks at nurse by the Master of the Pit; never goes away from thence, before he hath got, by his ordinary dunghill Cock that runs about the streets, and without false spurs too, half a score Crown-pieces, and as much more as will pay his reckoning in his pocket. But if they both begin to appear with their Shake-bags, then ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh

... chance, than let it return to God—wasted. O! it is a distressing thing to see children die. God gives the most beautiful and precious thing that earth can have, and we just take it and cast it away; we toss our pearls upon the dunghill and leave them. A dying child is to me one of the most dreadful sights in the world. A dying man, a man dying on the field of battle—that is a small sight; he has taken his chance; he is doing his duty; he has had his excitement; he has had his glory, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises, and pompous arrogances, and of the stuff builds himself an immortality to startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He squirms on his dunghill, and like a child lost in the dark among goblins, calls to the gods that he is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is destined to be as free as they—monuments of egotism reared by the epiphenomena; dreams and the dust of dreams, that vanish when ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... compares the Ideas that arise from Words, with the Ideas that arise from the Objects themselves; and why this Operation of the Mind is attended with so much Pleasure, we have before considered. For this Reason therefore, the Description of a Dunghill is pleasing to the Imagination, if the Image be represented to our Minds by suitable Expressions; tho' perhaps, this may be more properly called the Pleasure of the Understanding than of the Fancy, because we are not so much delighted with the Image ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... finds this bosh and abracadabra, all right for him. Only I have no more regard for his little crowings on his own little dunghill. Myself, I am not so sure that I am one of the one-and-onlies. I like the wide world of centuries and vast ages—mammoth worlds beyond our day, and mankind so wonderful in his distances, his history ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence

... them in common, he proceeded: "The resemblance is great, and it has given his strut additional pomposity. The resemblance is great, it is striking—Hyperion to a satyr; Thersites to Hercules; mud to marble; dunghill to diamond; a singed cat to a Bengal tiger; a whining puppy to a roaring lion. Shade of the mighty Davis, forgive the almost profanation of ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

... the divine permission, and all his efforts are weak, unless by our sloth we give him power over us. He draws a parallel between Adam sinning in paradise by his free will, and Job victorious by patience on his dunghill under his sufferings, of which he gives a lively description, showing them to have been far more grievous than all the calamities under which we so easily lose ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... then of course that dunghill cock of mine in there, that used to belong to the old woman, had to come within an inch of ruining me, beginning to scratch and claw around where this (looking under cloak) was buried. Enough said. It just got me so worked up I took a club and annihilated ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius

... is left for us to do, but to crow? And the best and greatest of us all, is he who crows the loudest and the longest on this little dunghill that we call ...
— Clocks - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome

... increases and decreases in an inverse ratio with the amount of food. This strange doctrine has apparently arisen from individual animals when supplied with an inordinate quantity of food, and from plants of many kinds when grown on excessively rich soil, as on a dunghill, becoming sterile; but to this latter point I shall have occasion presently to return. With hardly an exception, our domesticated animals, which have long been habituated to a regular and copious supply of food, without the labour of searching for it, are ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... through the village amid general laughter. In some districts of Bavaria, Thringen, and elsewhere, the man who threshes the last sheaf is said to have the Old Woman or the Old Corn-woman; he is tied up in straw, carried or carted about the village, and set down at last on the dunghill, or taken to the threshing-floor of a neighbouring farmer who has not finished his threshing. In Poland the man who gives the last stroke at threshing is called Baba (Old Woman); he is wrapt in corn and wheeled through the village. Sometimes in Lithuania ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... next-worldliness. I hope I need not say that I do not believe this theory. If I did, I could not be a Christian, I think, nor a philosopher either. At least, if I thought that human civilisation had sprung from such a dunghill as that, I should, in honour to my race, say nothing about ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley

... lazaret of bile, But very rarely executes its function, For the first passion stays there such a while, That all the rest creep in and form a junction, Like knots of vipers on a dunghill's soil—[168] Rage, fear, hate, jealousy, revenge, compunction— So that all mischiefs spring up from this entrail, Like Earthquakes from the hidden ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... acquaintance with the historical relations, manners, and customs belonging to Daniel's time. Under this head writers have specified the custom of giving new names to those taken into the king's service (1:7); the threat that the houses of the magi should be made a dunghill (2:5); the different forms of capital punishment in use among the Chaldeans and Medo-Persians; the dress of Daniel's companions (3:21); the presence of women at the royal banquet (5:2), etc. See Davidson's Introduction, p. 920, who sums up the argument thus: "It is improbable ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... good, but not good from evil; so neither is a sweet scent perceived by the nose when a disagreeable one is present in it. I have heard from the angels, that they distinguish in the extremes what is lascivious from what is not, as any one distinguishes the fire of a dunghill or of burnt horn by its bad smell, from the fire of spices or of burnt cinnamon by its sweet smell; and that this arises from their distinction of the internal delights which enter into ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... wide mothe, as he calls it, and gave me the letter; but with a strut, rather than a bow; and then sidled off like one of widow Sorlings's dunghill cocks, exulting after a great feat performed. And all the time that I was holding up the billet to the light, to try to get at its contents without breaking the seal, [for, dispatched in a hurry, it had no cover,] there ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... ignoble family rather than a royal one." It was appropriate that that family, upon whom was a second time to be fulfilled the declaration in Ps. cxiii. 7, 8: "He raiseth up the poor out of the dust; He lifteth up the needy out of the dunghill, that He may set him with princes, with the princes of His people,"—in which, the second time, the transition should take place from the low condition to the royal dignity, should not be mentioned according to its royal, but according to its rustic character. This explanation ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... single light; And his reflection, too, supplies the night. Perhaps a thousand other worlds, that lie Remote from us, and latent in the sky, 80 Are lighten'd by his beams, and kindly nursed; Of which our earthly dunghill is the worst. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... game 'un, I know," said Master John. "What d'ye think—if he did'nt 'pitch into' our 'dunghill' the other day, and laid him dead at a blow. I owe him one!—Come along." I followed in his footsteps, and soon beheld Chanticleer crowing with all the ostentation of a victor at the hens he had so ruthlessly widowed. ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour

... collie. [cats—generally] feline, puss, pussy; grimalkin^; gib cat, tom cat. [wild mammals] fox, Reynard, vixen, stag, deer, hart, buck, doe, roe; caribou, coyote, elk, moose, musk ox, sambar^. [birds] bird; poultry, fowl, cock, hen, chicken, chanticleer, partlet^, rooster, dunghill cock, barn door fowl; feathered tribes, feathered songster; singing bird, dicky bird; canary, warbler; finch; aberdevine^, cushat^, cygnet, ringdove^, siskin, swan, wood pigeon. [undesirable animals] vermin, varmint [U.S.], pest. Adj. animal, zoological equine, bovine, vaccine, canine, feline, fishy; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... reclaiming the child carried away by the Fairies was to take the Fairy's changeling and place it on the top of a dunghill, and then to chant certain invocatory lines beseeching the Fairies ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... the devil, who, four weeks ago, had come to miller Kierski at midnight—the man who lived at Latalice, north of Gradewitz, and was always swearing and drinking—and had almost wrung his neck off. He had been left on the dunghill behind his barn, where he lay quite stiff and blue in the face; and if St. Peter's cock had not flown on to the roof of the mill and crowed three times, [Pg 41] so that the devil thought it was the miller's ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig

... verdict, and after it the congratulations of the court and bar, with whom Scarlett is, from his superciliousness, no great favourite. Owen Feltham, in his Resolves, well says, that "arrogance is a weed that ever grows upon a dunghill."{4} The contrast between Scarlett and his great opponent, Mr. ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... heads but their beards too. Their heads however were decorated with more showy ornaments, for I observed that most of them had, just above one ear, stuck a feather, which appeared to have been taken from the tail of the common dunghill cock; so that these gentlemen are not without poultry for their table. They were armed with spears, and long sticks or poles, like the quarter-staff; but we did not see any bows and arrows among them: Possibly they might have them on board, and think proper to keep them out of sight. On my part, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... the dunghill, the other on the roof. Both were conceited; but which of the two effected most? Tell us your opinion; but we shall ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... so! Thou dost know and feel The things they do to thee and thine. The heel That scratched thy neck in passing—whose? Canst say? Yes, yes, 'twas his, and this is his fete-day. Oh, thou that wert of humankind—couched so— A beast of burden on this dunghill! oh! Bray to them, Mule! Oh, Bullock! bellow then! Since they have made thee blind, grope in thy den! Do something, Outcast One, that wast so grand! Who knows if thou putt'st forth thy poor maimed hand, There may be venging weapon within reach! Feel with both hands—with both ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... 'Know,' says the man, 'though proud in place, All courtiers are of reptile race. Like you, they take that dreadful form, Bask in the sun, and fly the storm; With malice hiss, with envy gloat, And for convenience change their coat; 30 With new-got lustre rear their head, Though on a dunghill born and bred.' Sudden the god a lion stands; He shakes his mane, he spurns the sands; Now a fierce lynx, with fiery glare, A wolf, an ass, a fox, a bear. 'Had I ne'er lived at Court,' he cries, 'Such transformation ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville

... on the dunghill," said Owen Fitzgerald; "but for heaven's sake do not let him interrupt me. And, Donnellan, you will altogether lose the day if you stay any longer." Whereupon the captain, seeing that in very truth he was not wanted, did take himself off, casting as he went one farewell look on ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... stopping abruptly as he saw me,—"well, considering the peacock Harley brought so bright a plume to his own nest, we must admire the generosity which spared this gay dunghill feather to mine!" ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... measure for infinity. He that hath no more of this world but a grave; he that hath his grave but lent him till a better man or another man must be buried in the same grave; he that hath no grave but a dunghill, he that hath no more earth but that which he carries, but that which he is, he that hath not that earth which he is, but even in that is another's slave, hath as much proportion to God, as if all David's worthies, and all the world's monarchs, and ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne

... a petition was presented to the Pope, which to his honor he rejected, praying him to order Wycliffe's body to be taken out of consecrated ground and buried in a dunghill. But forty years after, by a decree of the Council of Constance, the old reformer's bones were dug up and burned, and the ashes flung into the little river Swift which "runneth hard by his church at Lutterworth." And so, in the often-quoted words of old Fuller, "as the Swift bear ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... before the authorities, and commanded to perform the Kotow. The Sikhs obeyed, but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked upon the head, and his body thrown on a dunghill."—Times.] ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... he be of you that renounceth not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. 34 Salt therefore is good: but if even the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be seasoned? 35 It is fit neither for the land nor for the dunghill: men cast it out. He that hath ears to hear, let ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman

... nature, which is better pleased with being at the head of the lowest class than at the bottom of the highest. Permit me to say, though the idea may be somewhat coarse, I had rather stand on the summit of a dunghill than at the bottom of a hill in Paradise. I have always thought it signifies little into what rank of life I am thrown, provided I make a great figure therein, and should be as well satisfied with exerting ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding

... Thy loving-kindness is infinite toward me, and Thy favour manifest, seeing Thou hast so willed I should lie on a dunghill, like Job and Lazarus, whom Thou didst love so well. And Thou hast given me to know how filthy straw is a soft and sweet pillow to the just man. And Thou, dear Son of God, who didst descend into Hell, bless Thou ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... to libraries, public or private, men who do not understand their value will be the last to furnish the means of procuring them. Besides, our rage for gain absorbs all other considerations; science is a secondary object, and a man who has grown suddenly from a dunghill, by a fortunate throw of the die, avoids a man of learning as you would a tiger. There are exceptions to this remark, and some men of taste, here and there scattered over our country, adorn the sciences and the ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder

... whom in the old days Ulysses had reared with his own hand. But ere the dog grew to his full, Ulysses had sailed to Troy. And while he was strong, men used him in the chase, hunting wild goats and roe-deer and hares. But now he lay on a dunghill, and vermin swarmed upon him. Well he knew his master, and, although he could not come near to him, he wagged his ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church

... administrations thought that "in this way they would purge France."[3239] To the wretched "bought by the communes," add others of the same stamp, procured by the rich as substitutes for their sons.[3240] Thus do they pick over the social dunghill and obtain at a discount the natural and predestined inmates of houses of correction, poor-houses and hospitals, with an utter disregard of quality, even physical, "the halt, the maimed and the blind," the deformed and the defective, "some too old, and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... stricken fancy, we represented to them that it was not surprising if the butcher had perceived some heat in searching amidst entrails which were decaying; neither was it extraordinary that some vapor had proceeded from them; since such will issue from a dunghill that is stirred up; as for this pretended red blood, it still might be seen on the butcher's hands that it was only a ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... pleaded that he had come over by an invitation from the government, and generously furnished him with supplies for his journey: but as bigoted zeal still increased, his wife's body, which had been interred at Oxford, was afterwards dug up by public orders, and buried in a dunghill.[**] The bones of Bucer and Fagius, two foreign reformers, were about the same time committed to the flames at Cambridge.[***] John Alasco was first silenced, then ordered to depart the kingdom with his congregation. The greater part of the foreign Protestants followed him; and the nation ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume

... finished, they put out the light, and each one looked out for a suitable and comfortable sleeping-place. The donkey lay down on the dunghill, the dog behind the door, the cat on the hearth near the warm ashes, and the cock set himself on the hen-roost; and, as they were all tired with their long journey, they soon went to sleep. Soon after midnight, ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)

... of sadism or masochism are even utilized to revive a sexual appetite weakened by abuse. Individuals who have become impotent often try to excite themselves by observing the coitus of others. In fact a leaven of corruption and ignominy ferments on the dunghill of venal and artificial excitation ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... rainbow; while you have not a bit of color on your wings." "True," replied the Crane; "but I soar to the heights of heaven and lift up my voice to the stars, while you walk below, like a cock, among the birds of the dunghill." ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop

... life of the peasant. His cottage is not attractive; a low thatched building, perhaps without a floor. The barn is close against it, and the family is not averse to seeking the warmth of the cattle and of the dunghill. The windows are without glass, and pigs and chickens wander in and out at the open door. But the house belongs to the peasant, and is his home. He dares not improve it for fear of increased taxes. He cares not much to do so. It keeps him warm at night and dry when it rains; ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... penalty {due} to the holy character of the place. Accordingly, while he was watching over the gold, forgetful of food, he was starved to death; on which a Vulture, standing over him, is reported to have said: "O Dog, you justly meet your death, who, begotten at a cross-road, and bred up on a dunghill, have ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus

... you not hear of Betty Pringle's pig? It was not very little nor yet very big; The pig sat down upon a dunghill. And there poor piggy ...
— Harry's Ladder to Learning - Horn-Book, Picture-Book, Nursery Songs, Nursery Tales, - Harry's Simple Stories, Country Walks • Anonymous

... lost his savour, wherewith shall it be seasoned? It is neither fit for the land, nor yet for the dunghill; but men ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... presented then. Amidst universal decay of all that held men together, here was a new uniting principle; everywhere else dissolution was at work; here was again crystallising. A flower was opening its petals though it grew on a dunghill. What was it that drew slaves and patricians, the Pharisee of Tarsus, rude Lycaonians, the 'barbarous' people of Melita, the Areopagite of Athens, the citizens of Rome into one loving family? How came Lydia and her slave girl, Onesimus and his master, the praetorian guard ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... Mrs. Blake. 'Out of my house, my young gamecock! Get out and crow on your own dunghill, if you can ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit

... ridiculous Chicken have taken a wing from that one, a topknot from this. I say that in such Cocks nothing remains of the true Cock. They are Cocks of shreds and patches, idle bric-a-brac, fit to figure in a catalogue, not in a barnyard with its decent dunghill and its dog. I say that those befrizzled, beruffled, bedeviled Cocks were never stroked and cherished by Nature's maternal hand. I say that it's all Aviculture, and Aviculture is flapdoodle! And I say that those preposterous parrots, without style, ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand

... wonderful in the Old Testament. Think of the depths out of which we have come, and the heights to which we are raised. "He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill to set them among princes and to make them inherit the throne of glory." [Footnote: 1 Sam. ii. 8.] Think of the sinner lifted out of all his bondage and ruin to be the Bride of the Lamb! There is nothing higher that God can give than this. This will be our glorious ...
— The One Great Reality • Louisa Clayton

... punster of Abdera, thy whimsical fancy, surviving the wreck of dynasties, and too light to sink in the billows of oblivion, is now become the popular thought, the fashionable dress of heretofore moping wisdom: crow, an thou wilt, jolly old chanticleer, but remember thee thou crowest on a dunghill; man is not a mere merry-andrew. Neither is he exclusively "a weeping animal," lugubrious Heraclite, no better definer than thy laughter-loving foe: that man weeps, or ought to weep, the world within him and the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... be sure, you looked and talked so like a real ghost; and then the cock crowed so natural. I wonder how you could teach him to crow so exact, in the very nick of time; but, I suppose, he's game — An't he game, Mr Gwynn?' 'Dunghill, madam.' — 'Well, dunghill, or not dunghill, he has got such a clear counter-tenor, that I wish I had such another at Brambleton-hall, to wake the maids of a morning. Do you know where I could find one of his brood?' 'Probably in the work-house at St ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... perished They may please admiring eyes, The old be thrown on the dunghill, To receive your floral prize; They adorn the porch and window, And brighten the wayside bed, But we waken some summer morning To ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant

... and pounding the bones, for the purpose of extracting some nourishment from them by boiling, we regretted our inability to relieve them, but little thought that we should ourselves be afterwards driven to the necessity of eagerly collecting these same bones a second time from the dunghill. ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin

... otherwise be, though Volsung bade full sore That he go in some ship of the merchants with his life alone in his hand; With such love he loved his kindred, and the people of his land. But at last he said: "So be it; for in vain I war with fate, Who can raise up a king from the dunghill and make the feeble great. We will go, a band of friends, and be merry whatever shall come, And the Gods, mine own forefathers, shall ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris

... he came to lose so considerable a principality as had been left him by his father; he answered, that his father had indeed left him the inheritance, but not the fortune which had preserved both himself and that.—However, fortune did him no great injury in replacing him on the dunghill, from which she ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... notorious and terrible murder here in Kerry. An old man and his son, so poor that they lay naked in their beds, were taken out and shot by a party of Moonlighters for breaking a boycott. They were left for dead, and their bodies thrown upon a dunghill. The boy, however, was still alive when they were found, and it was thought he might recover. The magistrates questioned him as to his knowledge of the murderers. The boy's mother stood behind the magistrate, and when the question was ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert

... which men wrestle with their eyes, over in five seconds, but which breaks one of their two backs, and is good for three-score years and ten, one trial enough—settles the whole matter—just as when two feathered songsters of the barnyard, game and dunghill, come together. After a jump or two, and a few sharp kicks, there is an end to it; and it is 'After you, monsieur' with the beaten party in all the social relations for all ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... as Mr. S.C. Robertson did not know that it was unnecessary to go to England for the blood of their national horse, even though we smuggled it through Kentucky or any other of our States. Again, it would be impossible to produce any type of a horse from the English thoroughbred, except a dunghill, and Mr. Robertson would not have his ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various

... group. The scene in such comedies, usually the home of a peasant or a member of the bourgeoisie, is pictured with uncompromising realism. Holberg insisted that his audiences should see everything that he saw. If a Danish peasant actually lay at times in a drunken stupor on a dunghill, he saw no reason why Jeppe should not appear on the stage in an equally disgusting condition. If a peasant girl in life was not averse to simpering vulgarity, why should Lisbed talk any more circumspectly to Erasmus Montanus? Holberg, however, had none ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg

... they are on the caballe with him, and are all his confident privado'es. The old nobility cannot but repute them selfes slighted when they sie thesse great offices of State conferred upon [muschroomes][623] upstarts. But this is a part of the absolute power of kings to raise men from the dunghill and make ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder

... He is not a man to wrestle with an enemy of my strength without a strong interest in it. It was Cerizet; he's the infamous calumniator, from whose hands I wrenched the lease of your house near the Madeleine,—Cerizet, whom in kindness, I went to seek on his dunghill that I might give him the chance of honorable employment; that is the wretch, to whom a benefit is only an encouragement to treachery. Tiens! if I were to tell you what that man is I should turn you sick with disgust; in the sphere of infamy he has ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... and the eyelids' quick gleam— The intelligent sight, are no more; But the worms of the soil, as they wriggle and coil, Come hither their dwellings to bore. No lineament here is left to declare If monarch or chief art thou; Alexander the Brave, as the portionless slave That on dunghill expires, is as low. Thou delver of death, in my ear let thy breath Who tenants my hand, unfold; That my voice may not die without a reply, Though the ear it addresses is cold. Say, wert thou a ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... idiot, or lunatic, you know. Well, it was the same with these vilest of the vile. They saw that I was a fool whom God had taken hold of, to break his heart first, and then to craze his brain, and then to fling him on a dunghill to die like a dog. They believe in God, those people. They're the only ones who do, it seems to me. And they wouldn't interfere when they saw what He was doing to me. But I tell you I wasn't drunk. ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... goodness. If gentlemen would regard the virtues of their ancestors, the founders of their quality—that gallant courage and solid wisdom, that noble courtesy, which advanced their families and severed them from the vulgar—this degenerate wantonness and forbidness of language would return to the dunghill, or rather, which God grant, be quite banished from the world, the vulgar ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow

... history is more important than formal literary history showing how in a literary way Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob. Any man of any time who has ever written with vigor has been immeasurably nearer to the dunghill on which he sank his talons while crowing ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... it can change his shape! How base is pride from his own dunghill put! How I have rais'd thee, Sol. I list not tell, Out of the ocean of adversity, To sit in height of honour's glorious heaven, To be the eyesore[43] of aspiring eyes: To give the day her life from thy bright looks, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... his dog, as follows:—"No Dutch painter ever exhibited an image less imposing, or less calculated to inspire awe and terror, or any other of Burke's symptoms or sources of the sublime (unless, indeed, it be a stink), than the celebrated dog of Ulysses lying upon a dunghill, covered with vermin and in the agonies of death; yet, when in such circumstances, on hearing the voice of his old master, who had been absent twenty years, he pricks his ears, wags his tail, and expires, what heart is not at once melted, elevated, and expanded with all ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... dimensions are smaller. Over this excavation they form the roof of wood which the sea throws ashore. This roof is covered first with grass, and then with earth, so that the outward appearance is like a dunghill. In the middle of the roof, toward each end, is left a square opening, by which the light is admitted; one of these openings being for this purpose only, and the other being also used to go in and out by, with the help of a ladder, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr

... bed murthered him the same yeare, the last day of May, crying out, 'Alas, alas, slay me not, I am a Priest.' And so lyke a butcher he lyved, and like a butcher he dyed, and lay 7 monethes and more unburyed, and at last, like a carion, buryed in a dunghill. An. 1546, Maij ult. Ex historia impressa."—(Foxe, edit. 1576, p. 1235.) Sir David Lyndesay thus alludes to the Cardinal's fate, in his poem entitled "The Tragedie of the umquhyle maist reverend Father David, be the mercy of God, Cardinal, ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... vnsauorie and displeasant, and therefore if thou wouldest with aduisement looke vppon their backes, thou wouldest then hate, contemne, and abhorre theyr lothsome filthinesse and shame, abounding in stinke and noysome sauoure aboue any dunghill, which no stomacke ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna

... in the shape of an old woman, had wheedled him out of his bell, had not deceived him. For the underground people dare not lie, but must ever keep their word—a breach of it being followed by their sudden change into the shape of toads, snakes, dunghill beetles, wolves, and apes, forms in which they wander about, objects of fear and aversion, for a long course of years before they are freed. They have, therefore, naturally a great dread of lying. John Schlagenteufel gave close attention and made trial of his new shepherd's ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various

... at home! Now comes the story of the farm among 25 The cherry orchards, and how April snowed White blossoms on her as she ran. Why, fool, They've rubbed the chalk-mark out, how tall you were, Twisted your starling's neck, broken his cage, Made a dunghill of your garden! ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... minded only his hens, and the hens, who were solely employed in scratching a neighbouring dunghill, did not show in any manner that they took the least pleasure in hearing ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball

... army. And is it no evil that one man in every fifty should be bred to the trade of slaughter; should live only by destroying and by exposing himself to be destroyed; should fight without enthusiasm and conquer without glory; be sent to a hospital when wounded, and rot on a dunghill when old? Such, over more than two-thirds of Europe, is the fate of soldiers. It was something that the citizen of Milan or Florence fought, not merely in the vague and rhetorical sense in which the words are often used, but in sober truth, for his parents, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... original ways of execution in both painting and engraving, which in the confusion of London I had very much lost and obliterated from my mind. But whatever becomes of my labours, I would rather that they should be preserved in your greenhouse (not, as you mistakenly call it, dunghill) than in the cold gallery of fashion. The sun may yet shine, and then they will be brought ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... way amid the pele-mele of jumbled stones, we did at last, and to our great joy, catch sight of a bit of wall. This was Maubert; a square, straggling congeries of buildings approached from behind, and of no inviting aspect. A dunghill stood in front of the house, and hens, pigs, and the friendliest dogs in the world disported themselves where the flower- garden ought to have been. At first the place seemed altogether deserted. We knocked, shouted, ran hither and thither in vain. ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... great measure, to possess himself of the authority which he longed after. Then was there war waged by him with all the petty, but perpetual nuisances, which infest a Scottish town of the old stamp—then was the hereditary dunghill, which had reeked before the window of the cottage for fourscore years, transported behind the house—then was the broken wheelbarrow, or unserviceable cart, removed out of the footpath—the old hat, or blue petticoat, taken ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... catch any fish. Afterwards we sent the yawl another way to see for water. Before night the pinnace brought on board several sorts of fruits that they found in the woods, such as I never saw before. One of my men killed a stately land-fowl, as big as the largest dunghill cock; it was of a sky-colour, only in the middle of the wings was a white spot, about which were some reddish spots; on the crown it had a large bunch of long feathers, which appeared very pretty; his bill was like pigeon's; he ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton

... my heart to chide, And did thy wealth on earth abide? Dids't fix thy hope on mouldering dust, The arm of flesh dids't make thy trust? Raise up thy thoughts above the skye That dunghill ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... for the sovereignty of the dunghill, and one of them having got the better of the other, he that was vanquished crept into a hole, and hid himself for some time; but the victor flew up to an eminent place, clapt his wings, and crowed out victory. An Eagle, ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various

... occasionally in the conversation; whilst two or three walk up and down the verandah, in solemn consultation as to the best mode of hedging, having unhappily backed a colt for the Margaux Cup that turns out to be a dunghill. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor

... gazed on the hazy image of the recumbent cross, and thinking of his soul, which, like the pond, was tanned and stained by a bed of dead leaves and a dunghill of sins, he pitied the Saviour whom he was about to invite to bathe Himself there, for it would no longer be the Martyr of Golgotha to whom at all events death came on a hill, His head high, by daylight, in ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... (Antoine) had the reputation through the whole county of a specialist in dirty jobs. Every time a pit, a dunghill, or a cesspool required to be cleared away, or a dirt-hole to be cleansed out he was the person employed ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... for any sorrowful heart ever to say, 'I am solitary as well as sad.' He will always come and sit down by us, and if it be that, like poor Job upon his dunghill, we are not able to bear the word of consolation, yet He will wait there till we are ready to take it. He is there all the same, though silent, and will be near all of us, if only we do not drive Him away. 'He will ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... you, The menacing arrogant one that strode and advanced with his senseless scorn, bearing the murderous knife, The wide-swelling one, the braggart that would yesterday do so much, To-day a carrion dead and damn'd, the despised of all the earth, An offal rank, to the dunghill maggots spurn'd.) ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... if instilled by men educated in the schools of Italy and France, in the age which produced the foul novels of Cinthio and Bandello, and compelled Rabelais in order to escape the rack and stake, to hide the light of his great wisdom, not beneath a bushel, but beneath a dunghill; the age in which the Romish Church had made marriage a legalized tyranny, and the laity, by a natural and pardonable revulsion, had exalted adultery into a virtue and a science? That all love was lust; that all women had their price; that profligacy, though an ecclesiastical ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... is it, then, my good man?' interrogated the sexton, as one in authority, and standing on his own dunghill. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... whiten Fez, but only turns its gray to tarnished silver. Overhead in a tower window a single light twinkles: women's voices rise and fall on the roofs. In a rich man's doorway slaves are sleeping, huddled on the tiles. A cock crows from somebody's dunghill, a skeleton dog ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... greeting with a kiss as it flitted across the face of his mistress, but which now exasperated him. "Yet I'm not really angry," he assured himself, "when I see how she longs to run away and scratch from maggots in that dunghill of cacophony. I'm disappointed; not for myself, but for her; disappointed to find that, after living for more than six months in daily contact with myself, she has not been capable of improving her mind even to the point ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... altars, slain his prophets, and sought after Elijah's life. And in a use of lamentation deduced from the foresaid doctrine, he showed, that all ranks in the land had reason to mourn over their breach of covenant, in regard that some of all ranks, from the throne to the dunghill, in church and state, are, or have been guilty of dealing falsely in God's covenant, in all and every one of these diverse ways, and of declining from it: and in regard that there has been so much ignominy and contempt cast upon these sacred covenants, not ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery

... of silk stockings, five fine Aubusson tapestries. The plundered mistress of the house was driven out, to live on the charity of her friends. Her aunt, aged ninety-four years, was thrown upon a dunghill, where she died gazing on the peasants whom she had cared for and treated with kindness for years, as they divided among themselves her house-linen, her furniture, her plate, her porcelains, the very doors and windows of ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... covered with extensive ecclesiastic and seigniorial domains, the misery is the same. At Clermont-Ferrand,[5143] "there are many streets that can for blackness, dirt and scents only be represented by narrow channels cut in a dunghill." In the inns of the largest bourgs, "closeness, misery, dirtiness and darkness." That of Pradelles is "one of the worst in France." That of Aubenas, says Young, "would be a purgatory for one of my pigs." The senses, in short, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... there were more people than sheaves of grain. The Doctor believed that more sheaves are grown than there are people, but still more people than stacks of grain. "But a stack of grain yields hardly a bushel, and a man cannot live a whole year on that." Even a dunghill invited him to deep reflection. "God has as much to clear away as to create. If He were not continually carrying things off, men would have filled the world with rubbish long ago." And if God often punishes those who fear Him worse ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... winter, and after clearing the land in the spring is left to go to seed. It requires a good hot dry soil; but although the crop is often of great value, it so much exhausts the land as to be hazardous culture in many light soils where the dunghill is not handy. ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... to restrain my comrades, and when they were burning the hayricks, throwing the meal on the dunghill, and wrecking the property of the farmer, I cut the cords with which they had bound the poor fellow to his chair ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne

... Author and that of a common friend. The latter is observed to adhere close in prosperity, but on the decline of fortune to drop suddenly off; whereas the generous author, just on the contrary, finds his hero on the dunghill, from thence, by gradual steps, raises him to a throne, and then immediately withdraws, expecting not so much as thanks for his pains; in imitation of which example I have placed Lord Peter in a noble house, given him a title to wear and money to ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift

... saying disdainfully unto him, that by God's help he had kept his Lent well, and accomplished his fast with a worthy sacrifice by murdering the King his master! and he reproached him for the shame he had done the King in casting his head into the pond and letting the body be buried in a dunghill; and at the end of the letter he bade Abeniaf give him his corn which he had left in his granaries at Valencia. Abeniaf returned for answer that his granaries had all been plundered, and that the city now "belonged to the King of the Almoravides;" ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various

... of it moving mountains. That's it, sonny. I've observed lots of things going round in the old 'bus. Most folks believe in nothing. What's the good of 'em? Move mountains? They're paralytic in front of a dunghill. I know what I'm talking about, bless yer. Now you come along believing in yer 'igh-born parents. I larfed, knowing as who yer parents were. But you believed, and I had to let you believe. And you believed in your princes and princesses, and your being born to great things. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke



Words linked to "Dunghill" :   pile, cumulation, cumulus, unsanitariness, muckhill, heap, muckheap, agglomerate, midden, mound



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