"Rotting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... place her rifle on the dead leaves, she drew the flat packet from her cartridge sack at the same time and slid it deftly under a rotting log. Then, calm but very pale, she stood upright ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... as soon as his wife was taken from it to the church, and the next day he had the windows blocked. No one but he has entered the room during all these years, the key has never left his person. It must be the ruin of a room by now. You can imagine it, the dust gathering, the curtains rotting, in the darkness and at times the old man sitting there with his head running on days long since dead. But you know Mr. Mardale, he ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... beggary and ruin. Such was your representation—such, in some measure, was your case. The vent of ten millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by the operation of an injudicious tax and rotting in the warehouses of the company, would have prevented all this distress, and all that series of desperate measures which you thought yourselves obliged to take in consequence of it. America would have furnished that ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... as I tell you, old girl," his harsh voice had softened again. "There won't be any row. Honestly I'd like to have old Lawrence here for a bit, I'm not rotting now. He had almost four years of it—almost as long as I had. I'll guarantee it put a mark on him. It scarred us all. It'll amuse me to dine him and Val together, and make them talk shop, our own old shop, and see what the war's done for each of us: three retired veterans, that's what ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... isolation, and four months' darkness every year. Even in Mesopotamia a long-suffering nation insisted at last that adequate arrangements must be made to nurse and evacuate the sick and wounded. But at the Poles a man must make up his mind that he may be rotting of scurvy (as Evans was) or living for ten months on half-rations of seal and full rations of ptomaine poisoning (as Campbell and his men were) but no help can reach him from the outside world for a year, if then. There ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... though somewhat dark and damp, had its pleasant and cheerful associations; but the wood beyond was weird and dismal, with its dense shade, its fallen trees rotting in dark gullies, its depth of decaying leaves, into which your feet sank down and down, until in alarm you doubted whether there were really any footing beneath, or if it would be possible ever to extricate yourself again. These two woods touched ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... whereof each blackened bough Bore up to heaven as if in protest mute Its clustering load of ghastly charnel fruit,[12] The swaddled forms of all the village dead— Maid, lusty warrior, and toothless hag, The infant and the conjurer with his bag, Peacefully rotting in their airy bed. As on a battle plain she saw them lie, Fouling the fairness of the moonlit sky; And heavily there flapped above her head, Some floating drapery or tress of hair, Loading with pestilential breath the air That fanned her temples, or the reeking wing Of unclean bird obscenely ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... in his stirrups and gazed about him over the rotting buildings of the play-city, the scrawny acres that ended in the hard black line of the lake, the vast blocks of open land to the south, which would go to make some new subdivision of the sprawling city. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... what once had been a wharf. He advanced over this cautiously, and as he did so the clouds disappeared, and in the full light of the moon he saw a bayou broadening into a river, and made fast to the decayed and rotting wharf an ocean-going tug. It was from her deck that the man, in lighting his pipe, had shown his face. At the thought of a warm engine-room and the company of his fellow creatures, David's heart leaped ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... Talleyrand had said it as bishop, Louis had served it in the capacity of deacon. In 1817, in the side-alleys of this same Champ de Mars, two great cylinders of wood might have been seen lying in the rain, rotting amid the grass, painted blue, with traces of eagles and bees, from which the gilding was falling. These were the columns which two years before had upheld the Emperor's platform in the Champ de Mai. They were blackened here and there with ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... whose sakes I would have converted the mould of the burying-ground into fertile fields, and spared them the cost of a useless coffin, which, instead of rotting in the ground, would have been so much more wood to warm them in winter, and cook the food for their hungry, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... rid of all their bad potatoes to the mass of the people. In many cases they were rotting so fast that the purchaser had to bury them. It was found that they produced illness when ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... where many of our best had died. The Tower Bridge of Loos stood grim and gaunt above the sterile fields. Through the rain and the mist loomed the long black ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, where many poor bodies lay in the rotting leaves. The ruins of Haisnes and Hulluch were jagged against the sky-line. And here, on New—Year's eve, I saw no sign of human life and heard no sound of it, but stared at the broad desolation and listened to the ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... happiness in me, that is drying up, little by little, in this hateful existence. I'll be dead if this goes on—and"—she stirred in the bed and flung out her arms—"I want passion, and love, and adventure—I yearn for them. Why should I stay here and rot?—I am rotting!" she cried, comforting herself with the sound of her breaking voice. "But if I tell Casimir all this when he comes this afternoon, and he says, 'Go'—as he certainly will—that's another thing I loathe about ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... still visible, a picturesque ruin. The storms of winter had long since unroofed the house, and decay had eaten into the logs. All the fastenings were untouched, but the seasons rioted in the place, as if in mockery at the attempt to exclude them. The palisades were rotting, as were the piles, and it was evident that a few more recurrences of winter, a few more gales and tempests, would sweep all into the lake, and blot the building from the face of that magnificent solitude. The graves could not be found. Either the ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... and whoever else they could find to throw to the lions, crocodiles or whatever. Even this became old hat, and they turned increasingly to more extreme sadism. Children were hung up by their heels and animals turned loose to pull them down. Men were tied face to face with rotting corpses and so remained until death. Animals were taught ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... way, and hungry for her surcease, she darted down the familiar ways until at last her feet struck the dull solidity of the rotting pier. And then it was but a few more panting steps—and good mother East River took Liz to her bosom, soothed her muddily taut quickly, and settled in five minutes the problem that keeps lights burning o' nights in thousands of pastorates ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... opposed to Home Rule, which in his opinion would lead to endless trouble and confusion, and would, bring distress on the district, and not prosperity. The hill was covered with mushrooms, which were rotting unregarded. Mine host confessed that he did not know the edible from the poisonous fungi, and said that the peasants of Donegal were in the same case. "There are tons of these things on the mountains, but no one gathers them. They would be ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... bramble-choked path he slouched, shouldering his wood-axe as a precaution. Passing around the rear of his house, he peered over the messed tangle of sweetbrier which supported the remains of a rotting fence, and he saw, down in the road below, a young girl and a collie ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... little alcove in a rotting mass of brick and plaster. Beneath it extended a stone seat whereon the wayfarer might kneel or sit; above, in the niche, protected by a wire grating, stood a doll painted with a blue cloak and a golden ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... like to know more of that race, now extinct, whose seines lie rotting in the garrets of their children, who openly professed the trade of fishermen, and even fed their townsmen creditably, not skulking through the meadows to a rainy afternoon sport. Dim visions we still get of miraculous draughts of fishes, and heaps uncountable by the river-side, from the tales ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... country-side, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year. Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed. The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation—sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... Crystal-blue streaks and ripples over the lake. A macaw on a gilded perch screams; they have forgotten to take out his dinner. The windows shake. Boom! Boom! It is the rumbling of Prussian cannon beyond Pecq. Roses bloom at Malmaison. Roses! Roses! Swimming above their leaves, rotting beneath them. Fallen flowers strew the unraked walks. Fallen flowers for a fallen Emperor! The General in charge of him draws back and watches. Snatches of music—snarling, sneering music of bagpipes. They say ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... no idea, for instance, how many good things there may be under one rotting log. Even if you do not get a mouse or a chipmunk, you are sure of a fringe of greenstuff which, from lack of sunlight, has grown white and juicy, and almost as sure of some mushrooms or other fungi, most of which are ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... always in his element when fisticuffs were in request. An appeal had come from Algiers. The Moors there had endured for seven years the embargo of the Spaniards; they had seen their fregatas rotting before their eyes, and never dared to mend them; they had viewed many a rich prize sail by, and never so much as ventured a mile out to sea to look her over: for there were keen eyes and straight shots in the Penon which commanded ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... from being kept too damp, or too warm, or too much manured; for these do not produce the reproductive individual or flower, and the case may be wholly different. Nor do I allude to fruit not ripening from want of heat, or rotting from too much moisture. But many exotic plants, with their ovules and pollen appearing perfectly sound, will not set any seed. The sterility in many cases, as I know from my own observation, is simply due to the absence ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... pendulum of the seasons swung in its mighty arc, from death back to life. Life out of death, eternity rising from out dissolution. There was the lesson. Angele was not the symbol, but the PROOF of immortality. The seed dying, rotting and corrupting in the earth; rising again in life unconquerable, and in immaculate purity,—Angele dying as she gave birth to her little daughter, life springing from her death,—the pure, unconquerable, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... first four or five miles the walking was very difficult, although the grade was tolerably steep. The ground was soft, there were tangled forests of sea-weed, old rotting ships, rusty anchors, human skeletons, and a multitude of things to impede the pedestrian. The floundering sharks bit our legs as we toiled past them, and we were constantly slipping down upon the flat fish strewn about like orange-peel on a sidewalk. ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... in the body. It is well to remember that there are various forms of burning or combustion. Rapid combustion is exemplified in stoves and furnaces, where the carbon of coal or wood rapidly and violently unites with oxygen. Slow combustion takes place in the rotting of wood, the rusting of iron and steel and the union of oxygen with organic matter in animal bodies. Both processes are the same, varying only in ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... fact that both officers carried small pocket electric lamps, operated by dry batteries, they would have had difficulty in making their way through the halls and up the stairs, for there were many holes, caused by rotting boards. As it was they moved along with some speed, until they came to the ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis
... with half-closed eyes, and sometimes for a few moments with them shut altogether. At times they fell over boulders and into thickets of rotting branches that lay around fallen trees, but, though their senses had almost deserted them, they were certainly going down. The pines grew taller and thicker; withered twigs and needles crackled beneath their feet; though in places they plunged downward amidst a rush of slipping gravel. Still, half-dazed ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... of Multnomah,—the chiefs of the blood royal who had ruled the Willamettes for many generations. The giant bones of warriors rested beside the more delicate skeletons of their women, or the skeletons, slenderer still, of little children of the ancient race. The warrior's bow lay beside him with rotting string; the child's playthings were still clasped in fleshless fingers; beside the squaw's skull the ear-pendants of hiagua shells lay where they had fallen from ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... animals can be used: but man! I know little that he is good for, but to bury, and so fatten the soil. Emperors, as being highest, should be best, and yet, what are they? Whether they have been fools or madmen, the Tiber has still run blood, and the air been poisoned by the rotting carcasses of their victims. Claudius was a good man, I grant; but the gods, I believe, envied us our felicity, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... conceive no reason for the lad's behaviour. 'I had always bread for him,' he said; 'he ran away to annoy me. He loved to annoy me. He had no gratitude.' But at heart he was swelling with pride over his travelled offspring, and he produced a letter out of his pocket, where, as he said, it was rotting, a mere lump of paper rags, and waved it gloriously in the air. 'This comes from America,' he cried, 'six thousand leagues away!' And the wine-shop audience looked upon it with a ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... $200 each." There was room for the wail of a federalist paper: "Our coasts unnavigable to ourselves, though free to the enemy and the money-making neutral; our harbors blockaded; our shipping destroyed or rotting at the docks; silence and stillness in our cities; the grass growing upon the public wharves."[195] In the district of Maine, "the long stagnation of foreign, and embarrassment of domestic trade, have extended the sad effects from the seaboard ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... upon those whom he supposed were rotting within the precincts of his Inquisition. His power of speech seemed to have deserted him, and he shook all over like ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... days when three million pilgrims visited Rome in a year. But would you believe it? within thirty miles of this city I have seen enough timber lying rotting on the ground, to half warm the Eternal City? The country people, in the commune where I lived one summer, had the privilege of gathering wood in the forest that crowns the range of mountains backing ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... laughs to see the luminous white drops Fall back in flakes of fire. . . . Gold was the dream That cheered that desperate enterprise. And now? . . . Victory waited on the arms of Spain, Fallen was the lovely city by the lake, The sunny Venice of the western world; There many corpses, rotting in the wind, Poked up stiff limbs, but in the leprous rags No jewel caught the sun, no tawny chain Gleamed, as the prying halberds raked them o'er. Pillage that ran red-handed through the streets Came railing home at evening ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... inundated in the valleys; the water was subsiding; here and there corpses lay in the mud. Old trenches everywhere; thousands of rudely heaped graves, marked by two crossed sticks; miles on miles of rusty barbed-wire defenses, with dead cows or horses entangled in them, slowly rotting, haunted by ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... are rapidly growing in size while the oranges and the apples are shrinking and rotting. The fittest survives." ("A lot he knows about the theory of the survival of the fittest!" I jeered in my heart. "He hasn't even heard the name of Herbert Spencer.") "Peanuts are peanuts, that's all there's ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... appeal to be given work the men at one internment camp here said, "We are simply rotting away." And others say, "The people outside do not understand." Loss, heartache, privation, stagnation, friction, stupid and malicious gossip, mental and moral deterioration—"rotting away." This disintegration of personality, the gradual rotting of the man's selfhood, is ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... there I sat against a shed and went to sleep. I woke very stiff. It was darker than before; the moon was gone. I could just see the river. I stumbled on, to get through the town before dawn. It was all black shapes-houses and sheds, and the smell of the river, the smell of rotting hay, apples, tar, mud, fish; and here and there on a wharf a lantern. I stumbled over casks and ropes and boxes; I saw I should never get clear—the dawn had begun already on the other side. Some men came from a house ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is Dimmock o' Dune, he was here yester-night, But he 's rotting to-day on Glen Arragh; 'Twas the hand o' MacPherson that gave him the blow, And the vultures shall feast on his marrow. But it's heigho for a brave old song And a glass while we are able; Here 's a health ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the good fisherman and his wife, and set out to walk the hundred leagues to the house of the Witch of the Sands. His path lay along a desolate and lonely shore, on whose rocky beaches the wooden bones of old wrecks lay rotting, half buried in stones and weed. Just as the third day's sun was sinking in the shining waters, the sailor ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... rebels, was carefully instructed merely to see if Columbus and his shipmates were still alive, and then to come back and report. The Roldan rebel took his caravel to Don Christopher's Cove, rowed out in a small trailer until within shouting distance of the two rotting hulks on the beach, and yelled out that Governor Ovando was very sorry to learn from Mendez that the Admiral and his party were in trouble, and regretted that he had no ship large enough to send to their rescue. And ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... little rills of foul, discolored water trickled into the open gutters at intervals from the kitchens and cesspools of the adjoining houses; every hole and crevice in the uneven pavement was filled with rotting organic matter washed down from the higher levels by the frequent rains, and when the sea-breeze died away at night the whole atmosphere of the city seemed to be pervaded by a sickly, indescribable odor of corruption and decay. I had expected, ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... least allowed to demur to your wholesale denunciation of the great cities of the earth, which you say "have become loathsome centers of fornication and covetousness, the smoke of their sin going up into the face of Heaven, like the furnace of Sodom, and the pollution of it rotting and raging through the bones and souls of the peasant people round them, as if they were each a volcano, whose ashes brake out in blains upon man and beast."[127] Surely, Sir, your righteous indignation at evil has caused you to overcharge your language. No one can have lived in a great ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... allowance of rice. The establishment was not restored until the Government of Domingo Moriones (1877-80). A vapour bath-house and residence were built, but the hospital was left unfinished, and it was rotting away from neglect when ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... useful as either of these, protecting in a way the food as it comes into the body, and making it palatable and agreeable to the appetite. But consider farther, whether its power of preserving dead bodies from rotting a long time be not a divine property, and opposite to death; since it preserves part, and will not suffer that which is mortal wholly to be destroyed. But as the soul, which is our diviner part, connects the limbs of animals, and ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... poor and dull and sleepy and squalid it seemed! The one main street ended at the hillside at his left and stretched away to the north, between two rows of the usual village stores, unrelieved by a tree or a touch of beauty. An unpaved street, drab-colored, miserable, rotting wooden buildings, with the inevitable battlements-the same, only ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... traverses a fair and prosperous district, as unlike the monotonous scenery over the border as the proverbial dock and daisy. Here are no squalid hovels and roofless sheds where half-starved cattle share the misery of their owners; no rotting crops and naked pastures; but snug homestead, flower gardens, and neat wooden fences encircling fields of golden grain and rich green meadow land. To travel in Southern Finland after Northern Russia is like leaving the most hideous parts of the ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... green beetle revelling among the leaves; and the gay red and light beetles being the habitees of flower cups. Upon the first table of the series (1) are some curious varieties. Here are the remarkable burying-beetle, that deposits its eggs in the rotting flesh of small dead animals, and then, with the assistance of some kindred beetles buries the body, leaving its progeny to enjoy the carrion when they quicken; the sacred scarabaeus of the Egyptians, and the British variety of the same ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... end and June was at hand, and still the ice pack, firm and unbroken, refused to loose its bands. Slowly—imperceptibly to the watchers on board the Maid of the North—it was drifting to the southward on the bosom of the Arctic current. But the sun, constantly gaining more power, was rotting the ice, and it was inevitable that sooner or later the pack must fall to pieces and release the schooner and its occupants from their bondage. Then would come another danger. If the wind blew strong ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... regard for their cathedrals, for they put them into cramped areas and allowed merchants to encircle them with ugly shops and offices. In Southwark, he had seen the church where Shakespeare prayed, hidden behind a hideous railway bridge, with its pavement fouled by rotting cabbage leaves and the stinking debris of a vegetable market. And here, now, was St. Paul's surrounded by dingy, desolating houses, as if an effort were being made to conceal ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... awaited them when they found what Eden really was—a handful of rotting log cabins set in a swamp. The wharves and public buildings existed only on the agent's map with which he had so cruelly cheated them. There were only a few wan men alive there—the rest had succumbed to the sickly hot vapor that rose from the swamp and ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... not a stone at all, Gral discovered. He placed the gnarled thing in sunlight and crouched to survey it. This thing-that-slew was but a length of rotting root, frozen at the end with clay and encrusted ice. And already the ice ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... little patience with those who urged half measures. When John Dickinson of Pennsylvania said the country was not ripe for independence, Witherspoon broke in upon the speaker exclaiming, "Not ripe, Sir! In my judgment we are not only ripe, but rotting. Almost every colony has dropped from its parent stem and your own province needs no more sunshine to mature it." He further declared that he would rather be hanged than desert his country's cause. One of his sons was killed ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... gigantic proportions, are given to rotting in the lower portions of the trunk, and chambers eight feet in diameter are not uncommon. In the course of a canoe voyage down the Ohio, in the summer of 1894, I frequently saw such cavities, with the openings stopped by pickets or rails, utilized by small bottom farmers as hog-pens, chicken-coops, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... vegetation finally disappeared. The so-called stancias, filthier, if possible, than those south of Verkhoyansk, were now never less than two hundred miles apart. There were also povarnias every eighty miles or so, but these were often mere shapeless heaps of timber rotting in the snow. Throughout the whole distance there was no track of any kind and the sledges were steered like ships at sea, our course being shaped by compass and an occasional rest-house or povarnia, and these were easily passed unnoticed on a dark night, or after a heavy snow-fall had ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... enormous developments of the thorax and head. They are all large bodied and stout limbed, and by their great strength abundantly justify their generic name, Dynastes, which is from the Greek and signifies powerful. The larvae of these beetles inhabit and feed upon decaying trees and other rotting vegetable matter, and correspond in size with the mature insects. Most of them inhabit tropical regions, where they perform a valuable service in hastening the destruction of dead ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... cutting off a straggler from the peccary herd and killing it before its cries could bring the other numerous members of the band to its rescue. Spurred on by some subtle sense of intuition she had eaten hurriedly and then made for her home where the cub had been left curled upon the rotting ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... said; but in the next paragraph he railed against the social prejudices of the age and the luke-warm character of contemporary love. In another century, he prophesied, the artificial barriers imposed by a narrow and fast-rotting civilization would be swept away by the mighty wave of passion which, pent up in the bosoms of strong men through a score of generations, was about to inundate the world. Under the impulse of this idea, the closing portions of ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... very much wiser than when we had entered it, we paced once more up the drive in the shade of the big trees and were greeted again by the malarious smell of rotting leaves. Entering the Red House, Gatton and I proceeded first to that incredible oasis in the desert of empty rooms and my companion made a detailed examination of everything in the place, even sounding the walls, examining the fittings of the door, and finally proceeding through the hall ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... their signal in the shadows a little upstream, and jumped out upon the old and rotting landing. A street ran straight before them, up a steep hill and into the heart of the town, and they took it, guided by a burst of still distant laughter and hoarse shouts. Toiling up the evil sidewalk, they looked about ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... unscoured^, unswept^, unwiped^, unwashed, unstrained, unpurified^; squalid; lutose^, slammocky^, slummocky^, sozzly^. nasty, coarse, foul, offensive, abominable, beastly, reeky, reechy^; fetid &c 401. [of rotting living matter] decayed, moldy, musty, mildewed, rusty, moth-eaten, mucid^, rancid, weak, bad, gone bad, etercoral^, lentiginous^, touched, fusty, effete, reasty^, rotten, corrupt, tainted, high, flyblown, maggoty; putrid, putrefactive, putrescent, putrefied; saprogenic, saprogenous^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the memory it evoked.... Gray, gray, gray.... Gray hills, gray boulders, gray barren trees, a gray mist sluggishly rising from the ground, and a gray drizzle of rain, falling, so slowly.... And gray rotting leaves beneath his feet.... A little wind that moaned among the boulders, and the cawing of unseen, horrible birds.... Neither was there direction, nor time, nor space.... Everything gray like the grayness of old women's ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... matter settled, the three children set off on their way clown the narrow spiral staircase, at the bottom of which Alan, who led the way, stopped in order to assist the girls over some rotten boards. The whole passage required careful walking, to avoid dangerous holes, and thin, dry-rotting boards. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... when an opportunity offered at last to meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones. They were all there. The supernatural being had not been touched after he fell. And the village was deserted, the huts gaped black, rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures. A calamity had come to it, sure enough. The people had vanished. Mad terror had scattered them, men, women, and children, through the bush, and they had never returned. What became of the hens I don't know either. I should think the ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... flourishing above the decorations of the elegant architecture, and on the roof, as high as that of the Tuileries. The balustrade of the upper balconies was eaten away. Through a magnificent colonnade I could see a second court on one side, where were the offices; the door was rotting. An old coachman was there cleaning an old carriage. The indifferent air of this servant allowed me to assume that the handsome stables, where of old so many horses had whinnied, now sheltered two at most. The handsome facade of the house seemed to me gloomy, like that of a mansion belonging to ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... must not be in such a proportion to the moisture as to dissolve the latter, and this is generally the case when the rotting of wood is prevented or stopped by the free access of air. What is commonly called dry rot, however, is not I believe a true process of putrefaction. It is supposed to depend on a peculiar kind of vegetation, which, by feeding on the wood, ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... a voice like a bird. In those days before father's return, she used to fill old John Poindexter's house with melody. I, who, as a boy, was studious, rather than artistic, thought she sang too much for a girl whose father was rotting away in a Southern prison. But when about to rebuke her, I remembered Edward Kissam, and was silent. For it was his love which made her glad, and to him I wished every happiness, for he was good, and honest, and kind to me. She was eighteen then, and beautiful, or so I was bound ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... it was a shocking sight After the field was won; For many thousand bodies here Lay rotting in the sun: But things like that, you know, must be After a ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the condition of the soil. The color while growing may be either a light or dark green, which changes to a yellowish cast as the plant matures and ripens. The ground leaves are of a lighter color and ripen earlier than the rest—sometimes turning yellow, and during damp weather rotting and dropping from the stalk. Some varieties of the plant, like Latakia, bear small but thick leaves, which after cutting are very thin and fine in texture; while others, like Connecticut seed leaf and Havana, bear leaves of a medium thickness, which are also fine and silky after curing. ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... thousand pounds for the loss of time it has occasioned me. Imagine it—I had contracts with countless members of The Lords—and the war came. Then I was sent to the front by The Sphere—and here I am, every day costing me dear, rotting away in this horrible place. The time I have wasted here has already ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... that he was compelled to pull up short in the street, and to vow, with a horrible oath, that he would see all his partners roasting in the warmest place that he could think of, before he'd move one inch to save their souls from rotting. So, instead of proceeding homeward, he turned back again, with a view to make this statement; but before he could reach the Banking-house, a wiser thought entered his head, and induced him to retrace his steps. "He would go," he said, "to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... ratified the Peace of Amiens, Toussaint had delivered himself up to Leclerc: France had her troops strongly posted in Tuscany and Parma, and could, if necessary, forcibly end the remaining scruples felt at Madrid; while the United States, with a feeble army and a rotting navy, were controlled by the most peaceable and Franco-phil of their presidents, Thomas Jefferson. The First Consul accordingly ordered an expedition to be prepared, as if for the reinforcement of Leclerc in St. Domingo, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... I'd like," said the farmer, "but I'm afraid to mention it; however, out it must; for after all I can't let it be rotting in my breast, come what may. I mean, senor, that I'd like your worship to give me three hundred or six hundred ducats as a help to my bachelor's portion, to help him in setting up house; for they must, in short, live by themselves, without being ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... water; it had not capsized, and, except such things as had floated from her, everything was found on board exactly as it had been placed when they sailed. The boat itself was uninjured. Roberts possessed himself of her, and decked her; but she proved not seaworthy, and her shattered planks now lie rotting on the shore of one of the Ionian islands, on which she was wrecked.)—who but will regard as a prophecy the last stanza ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... been a source of annoyance. The planks keep rotting, and have to be replaced continually. In the spring, when the ice breaks, it has to be watched day and night to prevent its being knocked to pieces by drifting ice floes; and when the spring rains cause a rise in the river, large portions of the ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... hair and nails of dead people to grow? A. Because the flesh rotting, withering and falling away, that which was hidden about the root of the hair doth now appear as growing. Some say that it grows indeed, because carcasses are dissolved in the beginning to many excrements and superfluities by putrefaction. These going out at ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... river-bottom. Overhead the sky appeared to hang flat and low as if seen through a thin brown veil, and the ancient warehouses, sloping toward the river, rose like sombre prisons out of the murky air. It was still before the introduction of modern machinery into the factories, and as I approached the rotting wooden steps which led into the largest building, loose leaves of tobacco, scattered in the unloading, rustled with a sharp, crackling noise ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... and East and West Farleigh shortly after the storm, and listened to the grumbling of the hoppers and saw the hops rotting on the ground. At the hothouses of Barham Court, thirty thousand panes of glass had been broken by the hail, while peaches, plums, pears, apples, rhubarb, cabbages, mangolds, everything, had been pounded to pieces and ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... of the Boston Tea-party reached London on January 19, 1774, and was public property on the 21st. Other news little less unpleasant soon followed. At Charleston tea was only landed to lie rotting in damp cellars, not an ounce of it to be bought or sold. In Philadelphia a proclamation of December 27, 1773, announced that "THE TEA-SHIP being arrived, every Inhabitant who wishes to preserve the Liberty of America ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... conflicts, for they changed sides without scruple, and the comrade of yesterday was the foeman of to-day, and again the comrade of the morrow. The only moral salt which kept the carcass of their villainy from rotting was a military code of honour, embodying the freemasonry of the soldier's trade and having as one of its articles the duel with all the forms—an improvement at any rate upon assassination. A stronger contrast there ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... fresh and green from the rotting roots Of primal forests the young growth shoots; From the death of the old the new proceeds, And the life of truth from the rot of creeds On the ladder of God, which upward leads, The steps of progress are human needs. For His judgments still are a mighty deep, And ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... he had. Books of practice, heaps of papers, and opened letters, were scattered over the table, without any attempt at order or arrangement; the furniture of the room was old and ricketty; the doors of the bookcase were rotting in their hinges; the dust flew out from the carpet in little clouds at every step; the blinds were yellow with age and dirt; the state of everything in the room showed, with a clearness not to be mistaken, that ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... manner too particular to be without special meaning, the small profit of intellectual labour and the weariness of a continual toil which was so little rewarded. His plaint of the long night's work, the burning of the midnight oil, the hunt through dusty and rotting manuscripts, seems touched with a tone of bitterness unusual in the student's murmurs over a lot which after all brings him as much pleasure as weariness. The ambitious lad was already, it is evident, longing for more ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... up at him, and her eyes were black with hate. "Well, I do, Paul. I would like to kill one man on earth—a useless, vicious weakling, too feeble to deserve a fine death—a rotting carrion spoiling God's world and encumbering my path! I would kill him if I could—and ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... illustration that I may suggest for a moment. Decay is another characteristic and signature of death. And your best self, in some of you, is rotting to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... corner and now, ahead of them, they saw what must be the end of this last and deepest of all the tunnels. This end showed as a glare of light. Real light, not the soft gleam of the rotting wood walls which was already paling feebly in comparison. The glare ahead of them, indeed, had something of the texture of electric light. Neither Jim nor Dennis could repress a sudden start; it was like coming abruptly onto a man-made ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... silence, using a little-travelled woods-road, scarce more than two deep, grass-grown ruts, full of rotting stumps. Suddenly a couple of children playing under some wayside bushes leaped up and ran ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... dust-covered, noisy athletic club comes along. Brutal shouts stream from bars for coachmen. Yet fine bells mix with them. On the fairgrounds where athletes wrestle, Everything is dark and indistinct. A barrel organ howls and scullery maids sing. A man is smashing a rotting woman. ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... tariff schedule, that miles and miles of empty freight cars, shall daily, throughout the land, roll past hundreds of thousands of farms, where countless tons of heavy freight, in the way of fresh vegetables, lie rotting for the want of a market. A monopoly, that never neglects an opportunity for fleecing the public. A monopoly, so unscrupulous, that for the pork trust, it will haul a hog across the continent for ninety cents; while for indifferent service, it dares to charge the people, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... the ponies eat the flour; poured bags of corn on the ground when they wanted the bag, and in every way showed their contempt for the government, whose policy they believed to be the result of cowardice. Thousands of dollars' worth of agricultural machinery lay "rotting in the sun" while the noble red aristocrat played poker in the shade; his original contempt for labor intensified by his power to extract a living from laborers, through their fear ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... of many abandoned undertakings lie rotting unburied up and down the country and their ghosts haunt ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... was nothing much the matter with the men on either side, taken in the main, who hated one another on that far-pushed frontier. Even the insufferable incompetents who held the rotting reins of control were such because circumstance had blinded them. There was not a man among the highly placed ones even who would have deliberately placed his own importance or his own opinion in the scale against India's welfare. There was not ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... left, along the enclosing wall, to a spot strewn with fragments of stone, and woodwork, and ironwork, bristling too with briars and brambles. It was the site of the old mansion, still black with traces of the fire which had destroyed the building. Underneath the briars lay rotting timbers and fire-split masonry. The spot was like a little ravined, hillocky wilderness of sterile rocks, draped with rude vegetation, clinging creepers that twined and twisted through every crevice like green serpents. The young folks ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... had been one of the wildest luxuriance ever known in the valley of the Wabash; for it was in that beautiful valley that our friend Hobert had settled. The woods cast their leaves early, and the drifts lay rotting knee-deep in places. Then came the long, hot, soaking rains, with hotter sunshine between. Chills and fever prevailed, and half the people of the neighborhood were shivering and burning at once. It was a healthy region, everybody said, but the weather had been unusually ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... lovely, and the calm of the spiritual evenings of the Adriatic descend upon eternal perfume and the songs of birds. Symbol of pain or joy there is none, and the august silence is undisturbed by tears. From rotting hangings in Venice rats run, and that idle wave of palace-stairs laps in listless leisure the fallen glories of Veronese. As it is with painters so it is with poets, and wolf cubs tear the pages of the last Divine Comedy in the world. Rome is his great agony, her shameful history ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... describe Ruth's island: the mountain at one end, with the ever-recurring scarves of mist drifting across the lava-scarred face; the jungle at the foot of it; the dazzling border of white sand; the sprawling store of the trader and the rotting wharf, sundrily patched with drift-wood; the native huts on the sandy floor of the palm groves; the scattered sandalwood and ebony; the screaming parakeets in the plantains; the fishing proas; the mission with its ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... and if Mr. Hone's jury had said guilty, instead of not guilty, if he had been tried by a country instead of a London special jury, he might have gone quickly to gaol, abandoned and ruined, before any of the above gentry would have stirred one inch to have saved him from rotting there. ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... heights where the British squares received the shock of the French Cavalry, we found an English officer's cocked hat, much injured apparently by a cannon shot, with its oilskin rotting away, and showing by its texture, shape, and quality that it had been manufactured by a fashionable hatter, and most probably graced the wearer's head in Bond Street and St. James's. Wherever we went we ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... concerned, I'm just another Ihelian private first class for awhile, not a space-neurotic Earthman! And our girls ... well, I think—I think they'd prefer anything to the living death in store for them—the rotting away of their lives in some infested alien jungle. Anyway, somebody's got to be judge. So let's get this ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... could stay at home and cut their grain while the rebels were in force, but who fled before the advance of Union troops, and deserted their homes; while the fields of standing grain, with the golden kernels ripe and almost rotting on the stalks, and the cheerless-looking houses, tenanted only by women and children, told as plainly of the poor Unionists, driven from home and family by the 'Border Guard' who so bravely 'defended ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... be broad and oblong, ovate and obtuse, or lanceolate and acute. (See fig. 13.) The function of the ligule is probably to facilitate the shedding of water which may run down the leaf, and thus lessen the danger of rotting of the stem which is sure to follow, if the water were to find its way into the interior of the sheath. Sometimes, in addition to the ligule, other appendages may be present in grass leaves as in Oryza sativa. Such outgrowths are called ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... for years, who had shared, without deserving, his honours, who had spied on him and carped at him day by day and hour by hour! Petitot to succeed him! To be all and own all, and sun himself in the popular eye, and say "Geneva, it is I!" While he, Blondel, lay rotting and forgotten, stark, beneath snow and rain, winter ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... crouched under a pent of turves and ling, and stank very vilely. The floor was of beaten clay, like the walls; for furniture it had a table and bench. Sooty cobwebs dripped from the joists, and great spiders ran nimbly over them; there were no beds, but on a heap of rotting skins in one corner two rats were busy, and in another were some dry leaves and bracken. There was no chimney either, though there was a peat fire smouldering in what you must call the hearth. The place was dense with the fog of it; it was some time, therefore, before Prosper could leave ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... trail or followed. He came across plenty of tracks, but most of them were old ones. He recognized the spoor of deer, bear, and innumerable rabbits. Toward noon fresh caribou tracks crossed their path. The slot pointed south. Over a soft and rotting trail Morse swung ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine |
