"Backwater" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brightly on Belpher Castle at noon, when Maud and Reggie Byng set out on their journey, shone on the West-End of London with equal pleasantness at two o'clock. In Little Gooch Street all the children of all the small shopkeepers who support life in that backwater by selling each other vegetables and singing canaries were out and about playing curious games of their own invention. Cats washed themselves on doorsteps, preparatory to looking in for lunch at one of the numerous garbage cans which dotted the sidewalk. Waiters ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... consistency of quality. And then the poky, comfortable arrangements, the bath-chair in the coach-house, the four-post bedsteads, the hand-rail on the stairs, the sandbags for the doors, all spoke of a timid, invalid life, a dim backwater in the tide of things. There had been children there at some time, for there were broken toys, collections of dried plants, curious stones, in an attic. The little drama of the house shaped itself for me, as I ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Harry! I came up because I had to see you. You pay no attention to my letters. I never dreamed that you would stay a month in this backwater. What is wrong? What is the ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... all that, I am not proud, since pride is destruction; but take notice, it is Fate, and against his Fate no one who swims or walks or runs should say anything at all. I am well contented with Fate. With good luck, a keen eye, and the custom of considering whether a creek or a backwater has an outlet to it ere you ascend, much may ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... Mlle. Snouck Hugronje plays you forget all about self-determination, syndicalism, guild-control, proletariats, sunspots and even Mr. SMILLIE. If you are a poet, and we are all poets nowadays, you dream yourself into a punt on the Sonning backwater, wondering if the summer was ever so amazing before, nearly being shipwrecked on a sandy spit, startling moorfowl or it may be dabchicks, sending a frisson into the fritillaries, losing and regaining your punt-pole, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... before. He cursed the conventions which forbade his staying and watching over the girl back there in the house which already stood upon an island, cut off from the safe, high land by a strip of backwater that was widening and deepening every minute, and, when it rose high enough to flow into the river below, would have a current that would ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... the garden. The postern gate, too, in Houghton Street still remains, though the arch is bricked up inside. Passing it lately, I made the rough sketch which appears on next page, and which shows all that is left of this pleasant old London backwater. ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... his sentimental journey, and how he found all the creations of his childhood's imagination still so alive and kicking in a forgotten backwater of his mind that they all hopped out and took objective form—the sprites, the starlight express, the boundless world of laughter, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... constantly spoilt by Lyly's strange weakness for conceited style. Everybody speaks in antitheses, and the intolerable fancy similes, drawn from a kind of imaginary natural history, are sometimes as prominent as in Euphues itself. Lyly's theatre represents, in short, a mere backwater in the general stream of dramatic progress, though not a few allusions in other men's work show us that it attracted no small attention. With Nash alone, of the University Wits proper, was Lyly connected, and this only problematically. He was an Oxford man, and most of them were ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... by the advice of Argus Jason bade them enter a shaded backwater and let the ship ride at anchor off shore; and it was near at hand in their course and there they passed the night. And soon the dawn ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... one of those books which, for some reason or other, have failed to come down to us, as they deserved, along the current of time, but have drifted into a literary backwater where only the professional critic or the curious discoverer can find them out. "The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy;" and nowhere more blindly than in the republic of letters. If we were to inquire how it has happened that the true value of Mrs. Inchbald's ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... sweep of social life and duty, of official and political ambition-heart-hungry, for she had no child; heart-lonely, though she had scarce recognised it in the duties and excitements round her—she had floated suddenly into this backwater of a motionless life in Hamley. Its quiet had settled upon her, the shackles of her spirit had been loosed, and dropped from her; she had suddenly bathed her heart and soul in a freer atmosphere than they had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the difficulties of the subject, it is unnecessary here to dwell further on a career which belongs to the history of morbid psychology rather than of painting. After drifting from the stream of social existence into a Bohemian backwater, he found himself in the main sewer. This he thoroughly enjoyed in his own particular way, and rejected fiercely all attempts at rescue or reform. To his other old friends, such as Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, there must have been something very tragic ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... up vigorously in his chair—this would never do. He must wind up his affairs here and return to New York. The tranquil backwater had overpowered him for a time; but, again awake, he would strike out strongly... with Sidsall. Endless doubt and hope fluctuated within him. Voices rose from the Napier garden, and from a tree sounded the whirring of the first locust ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... I only feel my life unspeakably empty. No one to live for any more. (Gets up restlessly.) That is why I could not stand the life in my little backwater any longer. I hope it may be easier here to find something which will busy me and occupy my thoughts. If only I could have the good luck to get some regular ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... The backwater was snug and fair, And the gay Canoeist cavorted there. Thinks he, "I have built up everywhere A reputation for pluck and stay!" Amidst the reeds the river ran; Behind them floated a Grand Old Swan, And loudly did lament The better deeds of a better day; Ever the gray ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 28, 1891 • Various
... at the head of an army of 18,000 men. With this force he proceeded southwards bent on reducing the entire tract between the desert and the Eastern or real Euphrates. The most important city of the southern region was at the time Obolla which was situated on a canal or backwater derived from the Euphrates, not far from the modern Busrah. It was the great emporium for the Indian trade, and was known as the limes Indorum or "frontier city towards India." The Persian governor was a certain Hormuz or Hormisdas who held the post ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... the Wide World," said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all. Don't ever refer to it again, please. Now then! Here's our backwater at last, where ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... in the outside world he might safely have been termed rather rum, but here in this backwater, so full of the oddest flotsam, his waywardness was rather less than the average. He had, for instance, a diverting habit of modifying the time, and even the tune, of the hymns on Sunday, and he confessed to having kissed all the nurses and housemaids except ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... heard Cowan shout that he had found a path under his feet,—a path that was on dry land in the summer-time. We followed it, feeling carefully, and at length, when we had suffered all that we could bear, we stumbled on to a dry ridge. Here we spent another night of torture, with a second backwater facing us coated with a full inch ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... recognised what had happened I was clinging to an alder-root near the bank; thence, breathless, I lifted myself till I was safe on a tree-trunk above the pool. My rod and cap were drifting rapidly away; but, after divesting myself of half my dripping garments, I recovered the rod in a backwater below the neighbouring wood. All my line had been taken out, the gut collar had been snapped, and the fly had undoubtedly been carried ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... even to this scenery. Now and then we had to muster all our energy to get round a point, where the river broke rippling over rocks, and the maples trailed their branches in the stream, but there was generally a backwater or eddy on the side, of which we took advantage. The river was here about forty rods wide and fifteen feet deep. Occasionally one ran along the shore, examining the country, and visiting the nearest farm-houses, while the other followed the windings of the stream alone, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... when we got there, did not seem much worth reaching, being a swampy fringe at the bottom of a steep hillside, and after a few yards the path turned into a stream or backwater of the river. It was hedged with thickly pleached bushes, and covered with liquid water on the top of semi-liquid mud. Now and again for a change you had a foot of water on top of fearfully slippery harder mud, and then ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... himself in one of the big and comparatively inexpensive houses in Westminster, in that pleasant, quiet backwater which lies within the shadow of the beautiful old Abbey, away from the noisy stream of general traffic. The house had formerly been the property of another artist who had built on to it a large and well-equipped ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... on any further," said the latter. "We must get the boat into that backwater and tie her up. Though it'll be a beastly fag ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... The villas that must have covered the gentle slopes towards the Wantsum fell into decay; the fortresses were destroyed; the roads ran wild; and the sea and river began slowly to slit up the central part of the great navigable backwater. A hundred and fifty years after Hengest and Horsa, if those excellent gentlemen ever really existed, another famous landing took place in Thanet. Augustine and his companions disembarked at Ebb's Fleet, and held close by ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Shelby. Sevier had his hands full at Watauga, but he dispatched two hundred of his troops; and Isaac Shelby, with a similar force from Sullivan County crossed the mountains to McDowell's assistance. These "overmountain men" or "backwater men," as they were called east of the hills, were trained in Sevier's method of Indian warfare—the secret approach through the dark, the swift dash, and the swifter flight. "Fight strong and run away fast" was the Indian motto, as their women had often been heard to call ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... water front of Quebec. It stood in a backwater where the busy tide of seafaring traffic passed it by. But it was sufficiently adjacent to permit its clientele swift and convenient access to the docks, at once a safety valve and the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... Lynde. "Nothing can be done with village help till morning and that man can never cling there so long. He will freeze to death, for it is growing colder every minute. His only chance is to swim ashore if he can swim. The danger will be when he comes near shore; the undertow of the backwater on the quicksand will sweep him away and in his probably exhausted condition he may not be able ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... last century of an age, was a backwater in education as in literature. The great revival was to come. The fifteenth century was indeed a century of revolution in so far as under the almost placid surface of continuity and conformity, there were ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... the backwater of traffic, and was very silent. He disliked dogs, but a dog even would have been company. His gaze, travelling round the walls, rested on a picture entitled: 'Group of Dutch fishing boats at sunset'; the chef d'oeuvre of his collection. It gave him no pleasure. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... himself daily admiring the cleverness of Phyllis Ayrton when she had the punt pole in her hands. He also admired the gradual tinting of her fair face, through the becoming exertion of taking the punt up the lovely backwater or on to the placid reaches beyond. Sometimes the punt contained three or four of the party in addition to Herbert, but twice he was alone with her, and shared his admiration of her with ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... doubt about the latter assertion, I thought, as I looked up at the overhanging boughs of the great trees, with the sun coming glittering through the leaves, and listened to the song of the summer blackbirds as it mingled with the sound of the backwater near us. So not being able to say why I wanted the locks away—which, indeed, I didn't do at all—I held my peace. ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... them. That was her secret, the belief in her own power. He had faced his difficulties bravely enough, but he had not had the courage to hope; therein lay his weakness, and this girl, this princess, had shown it to him. He had allowed himself to drift into a backwater; it was time he pulled out into the stream again, and fought his way back to his rightful place, inch by inch, against whatever ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... wildness was exuberant vitality; their mistakes were magnified, their mad pranks exaggerated. If I'd been married to you, my dear, while Dick was growing up, I wouldn't have let you keep him here in this little backwater of life; he needed more room, more movement. They wouldn't have been so down ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Still within St. Andrew's parish, we here arrive at the City boundaries. The numbering of Holborn proper, included in the City, begins a door or two above the old timbered entrance, which leads to the first courtyard of Staple Inn. The courtyard is a real backwater out of the rushing traffic. The uneven cobble-stones, the whispering plane-trees, the worn red brick, and the flat sashed windows, of a bygone date all combine to make a picture of old London seldom to be found nowadays. Dr. Johnson ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... abbey of the oldest see in Wessex, and the Abbey Mill. The feet of the hills are clothed by Wittenham Wood, and above the wood stretches the weir, and round to the west, on another great loop of the river, is Long Wittenham and its lovely backwater. Even in winter, when the snow is falling like bags of flour, and the river is chinking with ice, there is plenty to see and learn, or in the floods, when the water roars through the lifted hatches and the rush of the river throbs across the misty flats, and the weeds ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... to have proceeded until Ibsen reached his twenty-first year. In this quiet backwater of a seaport village the passage of time was deliberate, and the development of hard-worked apothecaries was slow. Ibsen's nature was not in any sense precocious, and even if he had not languished ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... of firewood had been collected on the shore, for boughs of trees and drift-wood, brought down by the river, often came into the backwater, and these were always drawn ashore, however busied the men might be at the time in fishing. All through the summer every scrap of wood that came within reach had been landed, and the result was a great pile that would, they calculated, ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES:—Lord Backwater tells me that I may place implicit reliance upon your judgment and discretion. I have determined, therefore, to call upon you and to consult you in reference to the very painful event which has occurred in connection with my wedding. Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... that from your superior standpoint as a Londoner you are disposed to regard us as dwellers in a quiet backwater, unswayed by the currents of political strife, but you must not imagine that the stirring events of the past few weeks have failed to leave their mark on the life of our little town. A study of the Press—that faithful ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... the bow and maintain a sharp lookout; thine eyes are younger than mine, and more used to the lights of the river." The anchor was lifted in, and immediately the boat swung round into the path of the racing waters. "Make for the other side," ordered Drake, "and lay to in the backwater ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... itself a deep hole, and then, some twenty yards below, spread itself out in wanton joyous ripples and eddies over a broad surface some fifty yards across, and dashed away towards a little island some two hundred yards below, or rolled itself slowly back towards the bridge again, up the backwater by the side of the bank, as if longing for another merry rush through one of those narrow arches. The island below was crowned with splendid alders, willows forty feet high, which wept into the water, and two or three poplars; a rich mile of water meadow, with an ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... a moment's respite, one more chance for an extra pull with the oars. The big log, thus poised, made a backwater eddy on the surface of the river, checking the force of the current. Ross reached back for another stroke, with every ounce of ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... the river, then, or on some old backwater. She remembered glimpses of dark canals on her drive that morning—had it only been that morning? The sound of that soft, hidden water added to her feeling of isolation and remoteness from everything that had been ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... war, the archetypal language of the whole sub-race has been preserved. The Aryans went down into India, and there, at the extreme end of the Aryan world, enjoyed some of the advantages of isolation: they were in a backwater, over which the tides of the languages did not flow. By esotericizing their history, I imagine they have really kept it intact, continuous, and within human memory; as we have not done with ours. As if that which is to be preserved forever, must be preserved in ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... view her from an ordinary prosaic standpoint. Occasionally she would recall the fact that Mrs. Durward was in reality a woman of over forty, mother of a grown-up son who, according to all the usages of custom, should be settling down into the drab and placid backwater of middle age, but she realized that the description went ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... The backwater of the dam extended up-stream a half mile; then occurred a rise of four feet, down the slope of which the water whirled and tumbled, only to spread out over a broad fan of gravel shallows. These shallows did the business. When the logs had bumped through the tribulations ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... them all with a murrain of idleness. I should paralyze the work of the place if I were resident." To return—it appears that the best of men, especially of youthful men, feel the subtle charm of an invitation to laziness. The man who says, "It's a sin to be indoors to-day; let us row up to the backwater and try a smoke among the willows;" or the one who says, "Never mind mathematics to-night; come and have a talk with me," is much more pleasing than the stern moralist. Well, it happens that the most dangerous species of bad company is the species Idler. Look round ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... in with me yourself, and doss here for a few hours. You can report to your C.O. later in the day, when he arrives. This is my pied-a-terre,"—rapping on the door. "You won't find many billets like it. As you see, it stands in this little backwater, and is not included in any of the regular billeting areas of the town. The Town Major has allotted it to me permanently. Pretty decent of him, wasn't it? And Madame Vinot is a dear. Here she is! Bonjour, Madame Vinot! Avez-vous un feu—er—inflamme pour moi dans ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... stables of Augeas was another name for the sign of Capricorn through which the Sun passes at the Winter solstice (1)—the stable of course being an underground chamber—and the myth was that there, in this lowest tract and backwater of the Ecliptic all the malarious and evil influences of the sky were collected, and the Sungod came to wash them away (December was the height of the rainy season in Judaea) and cleanse the ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... time Spenser had been rowing well in toward the Kentucky shore, to avoid the swift current of the Kentucky River which rushes into the Ohio at Carrollton. A few yards below its mouth, in the quiet stretch of backwater along shore, lay the wharf-boat, little more than a landing stage. The hotel was but a hundred feet away, at the top of the steep levee. It was midnight, so everyone in the village had long been asleep. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... pack of cards on the deck before they had gone three miles and a half. Then the indomitable Sherman disembarked, a lighted candle in his hand, and led a stiff march through thicket and swamp and breast-deep backwater, where the little drummer boys carried their drums on their heads. At length, when they were come to some Indian mounds, they found a picket of three, companies of the force which had reached the flat the day before, and had been sent down to prevent ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Carl wrote short honest notes to Gertie, to his banker employer, to Bennie Rusk, whom he addressed as "Friend Ben." He found himself writing a long and spirited letter to Bone Stillman, who came out of the backwater of ineffectuality as a man who had dared. Frankly he wrote to his mother—his mammy he wistfully called her. To his father he could not write. With quick thumps of his fist he stamped the letters, then glanced at ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... them apart, though they never held together after the death of Brentano's wife in 1806, but that each projected his individuality into his literary work rather than into a common polemic ideal. The path-finding and discovery had already been done; in the quieter backwater it was possible to develop well-rounded works of real ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... he had well considered the situation he had fallen into the habit of attending a rendezvous in a backwater of the stream about a mile above Artenberg. Victoria never went out unaccompanied, and never came back unaccompanied; it was discovered afterward that the trusted old boatman could be bought off with the price of beer, and used to ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... of man for a park, where the turf was like velvet under Bourbon's feet; crossing little streams that a sudden rush of headwater from the hills had swollen to dangerous torrents, or other streams that backwater from the Great River had converted into inland lakes; the air sweet with the fragrance of the wild crab and blossoming grape; wood-thrush and oriole, meadow-lark and cardinal-bird, making the woods ring with their melodies—this ride through Upper Louisiana in ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... ceaseless work, Henry Blaine, clear-eyed and alert of brain, was seated at his desk at the stroke of nine when Suraci was ushered in—the young detective who had trailed Walter Pennold from Brooklyn to the quiet backwater where Jimmy Brunell had sought in vain for disassociation from ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... and it was high time too. He told her to keep all his letters till he sent for them. He had no importunate correspondents, his next book was as good as placed, and all he desired at the moment was to cut the painter, and drift into some quiet backwater where he could lie up till life should ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... expected Henry Walton to backwater fast, but instead, he merely eyed me with the same expression of distaste that he might have used upon finding half of a fuzzy caterpillar in his green salad. As cold as a cake of carbon dioxide snow, he said, "Can you prove ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... five feet below, and Jack bent and looked into it. Then he swung himself off the ledge, and dropped into the stream with a cry of delight. It was clear and shallow, and he stood in it barely knee-deep. He helped the woman down, his father sprang after them, and they all waded on in a shallow backwater, where the furious torrent of the main stream died away to ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... we contrived to get into a creek, or backwater, near the Major's gate. Here the men ran the boat up, and we all climbed out, stiff, battered, and terrified, but doing our best ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... rickety ferry-boat, wheezing like some asthmatic monster, discharged its load of soldiers or citizens, and ran up through the deep cut in the steep, caving river-bank. From there, over the western end of the Lancaster quarter, across the coulee under a hub-depth of muddy backwater—at the only point where the sumach-grown sides sloped gradually—it took its ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... in all the chances at a glance, and sped off across the narrow neck to the mainland, tore along the cliff round Pegane and Port a la Jument, then away past the head of Saut de Juan, and down the cliff-side to where the black shelves overhang the backwater of ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... stationary, law-abiding, state-reforming type; Cecrops, Erechtheus, Theseus, are not splendid, flashing, all-conquering figures like Achilles and Agamemnon. Athens might, it would seem, but for the coming of Homer, have lain stagnant in a backwater of conservatism, content to go on chanting her traditional Spring Songs year by year. It is a wonderful thing that this city of Athens, beloved of the gods, should have been saved from the storm and stress, sheltered from what might have broken, even shattered her, spared the ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... the Smithsons were on the platform waiting to receive us and welcome us as strangers and pilgrims in an unknown land. They have only remained here to meet us, and they proceed to Kashmir to-morrow, sleeping in a carriage in the quiet backwater of a siding, to save themselves the worry of a desperately early ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... rode over with Bess and Ben to double up with the mules. It was late afternoon and the bottom lay below the sunshine steeped in a still transparent light, where every tint had its own pure value. The air was growing cool after a noon of blistering heat and from an unseen backwater frogs had already begun ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... husband? That's the question. Where?" And he winked suggestively. "How can I tell you where he is? If I could tell you that, you don't suppose I 'd be wearing myself to a shadow with uncongenial and ill-remunerated labour, in an obscure backwater of the country, like this, do you? If I could tell you that, I could tell you the secretest secrets of the sages, and I should be making my everlasting fortune—oh, but money hand over fist—as the oracle of a general information ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... certainly be a pleasure to get back to New Chicago. Some women's husbands get good posts in half-way civilized parts of the Universe. I don't know why I should always have to be stuck in every backwater, hick town there is." ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... room to sen' doon the waters frae his hills, ye grummle an' compleen at the spate that's been foreordeen't frae the verra black mirk o' eternity. What wad ye think o' a bairn gaein' compleenin' o' you 'cause your backwater had ta'en awa' his wheelie o' rashes, whaur it was whurlin' bonnie afore ye ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... boats lay nearly level, each coxswain pulling hard with his right line, when suddenly there was a shock in the Parrett's boat, followed by a loud shout from Parson, and next moment the boat was shooting helplessly straight towards the bank, from which it was only saved by a prompt order to "Backwater all!" from Bloomfield. ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... and through fields in which stood solitary poplar-trees, formerly haunts of Corot and Daubigny. I could see the spots where they had set their easels—that slight rise with the solitary poplar for Corot, that rich river bank and shady backwater for Daubigny. Soon after I saw the first weir, and then the first hay-boat; and at every moment the river grew more serene, more gracious, it passed its arms about a flat, green-wooded island, on which there was a rookery; ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... tea-clippers, and Indiamen, and emigrant ships, and now and then the raking spars of a privateer owned by Cullerne adventurers. All these had long since sailed for their last port, and of ships nothing more imposing met the eye than the mast of Dr Ennefer's centre-board laid up for the winter in a backwater. Yet the scene was striking enough, and those who knew best said that nowhere in the town was there so fine an outlook as from the upper windows ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... cross street off one of the main avenues of traffic. As he rounded the corner he saw the black bushiness of its garden and then, barring the night sky, the skeleton of a new building. The sight gave him a disagreeable shock; anything that let more life and light into that secluded backwater was a menace. He approached, anxiously scanning it. It took the place of old rookeries, demolished in his absence, one side rising gaunt and high against Mrs. Meeker's. He leaned from the front steps and looked over the fence; the separation between the two walls ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... got a picture of a nubile waif, too freakish to fit where she'd been raised. What had her Hegira been like? In what frightful places had she found herself welcome? From her talk, it could have been an Ozark backwater. I didn't want to know what backwoods crone had taught her some mnemonic ...
— Vigorish • Gordon Randall Garrett
... believe that he has found a loop in the Gulf Stream—a genuine loop—that swings in here just outside of the breakers below? It is true! Everybody on Long Island knows that there is a warm current off the coast, but nobody imagined it was merely a sort of backwater from the Gulf Stream that formed a great circular mill-race around the cone of a subterranean volcano, and rejoined the Gulf Stream off Cape Albatross. But it is! That is why papa bought a yacht three years ago and sailed about for two years so mysteriously. Oh, ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... the Jomsborg vikings were both larger, and higher in the gunwale, than were those of Earl Hakon, but nevertheless were they boldly beset from both sides. Vagn Akason pressed the ships of Svein Hakonson so hard that Svein let his men backwater & came nigh to fleeing, whereupon Earl Eirik came up into his place & thrust himself into the battle against Vagn, and Vagn backed his ship, and the craft lay again as they had lain ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... talk in Harley Street," said Sir Richmond, "I have been trying myself over in my mind. (We can drift down this backwater.)" ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... of a lagoon of yellow water, whose main current was the thoroughfare he was seeking, and between whose houses, submerged to their first stories, a steamboat was really paddling. Other boats and rafts were adrift on its sluggish waters, and a boatman had just landed a passenger in the backwater of the lower half of the street on which he stood with ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... it drifted hopelessly out of reach, but into a curious backwater, which eddied it right under the boat hook of the bowman. In an instant it was seized, and the line made fast to a thwart. 'I've a great mind to trust to it,' said Jarvist Arnold, but caution prevailed, and they made fast a stout rope to ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... this unprecedented outbreak. I saw that my deep, wide cut had kept the flood wholly from the upper part of the meadow, which contained a very valuable bed of high-priced strawberry plants, and that the slowly moving tide which covered the lower part was little more than backwater and overflow. The wide ditches were carrying off swiftly and harmlessly the great volume that, had not such channels been provided, would have made my rich alluvial meadow little else than a stony, gravelly waste. And ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... Through her hands he could feel the commotion of her life struggle and die down till it grew almost silent. The stillness of the room seemed a backwater of the intenser stillness of the ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... setting is the Deanery of St. Paul's, that frowning and melancholy house in a backwater of London's jarring tide, where the dust collects, and sunlight has a struggle to make two ends meet, and cold penetrates like a dagger, and fog hangs like a pall, and the blight of ages clings to stone and brick, to window and woodwork, with an adhesive mournfulness which suggests the ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... from a neighbourhood where a flower show and a cricket match formed the social landmarks of the year, the feeling of exile might not be very crushing, might indeed be lost in the sense of change and adventure. But Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre of things to regard life in a backwater as anything else than stagnation, and stagnation while one is young he justly regarded as an offence against nature and reason, in keeping with the perverted mockery that sends decrepit invalids touring painfully about the world and shuts panthers up ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... and call it ennui, and it may drive you to commit peccadillos and indiscretions of various sorts. You may be attacked in a middle-class apartment house, and call it various names, and it may drive you to cafe life and affinities and alimony. You may have it wherever you are shunted into a backwater of life, and lose the sense of being borne along in the full current of progress. Be sure that it will make you abnormally sensitive to little things; irritable where once you were amiable; glum where once you went whistling about your work and your play. It is ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... same reckless administration of punishment that still characterizes these Mountain people. A tory appeared in the road one day near the home of Colonel William Campbell, of the "Backwater settlement." The Colonel at once gives him chase; after a brief absence he returns to his home, and his wife eagerly asks "What did ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 10. October 1888 • Various
... mood, or in a petulant mood, or in a fearful or foreboding mood. In truth, bile is the prolific mother of moods. The stream of life flows through the biliary duct. When that is obstructed, life is obstructed. When the golden tide sets back upon the liver, it is like backwater under a mill; it stops the driving-wheel. Bile spoils the peace of families, breaks off friendships, cuts off man from communion with his Maker, colors whole systems of theology, transforms brains into putty, and destroys the comfort of a jaundiced world. The famous Dr. Abernethy ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... politics and culture, the town to which Europeans compiling "impressions" of America devoted one of their longest chapters in the heyday of Elijah Pogram and Jefferson Brick. But the War between the States has changed all that, and Lichfield endures to-day only as a pleasant backwater. ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... and the creek, Laramie prudently said nothing. It was the worst of the journey. Two stretches were filled with backwater. Across these they cautiously waded and swam the horses. When they gained high ground adjoining the creek, Kate breathed more freely. There was a halt for reconnaissance. For this, Laramie and Hawk, after placing Kate where she would be safe whether they should come back or not, ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... game, and that the only way to outwit it would be to use the beast's own tactics. When it gathered itself for the thrust and started in to hurl the doomed vessel the full length of its mighty arms, the sloop's only safety lay in widening the space. A cushion of backwater would then receive the sloop's forefoot in place of the snarling teeth of ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of smooth backwater just in the wake of the island, they drove their canoes up by main force, and fastened them safely by the side of the Indian's, while Amyas, always the foremost, sprang boldly on shore, whispering to the Indian boy ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... edge. He spent some moments with each gang, afterwards returning to his house. For nearly an hour things went on as before, and then Mr. Coburn reappeared at his hall door, this time accompanied by his daughter. Both were dressed extraordinarily well for such a backwater of civilization, he with a gray Homburg hat and gloves, she as before in brown, but in a well-cut coat and skirt and a smart toque and motoring veil. Both were carrying dust coats. Mr. Coburn drew the door to, and they walked towards the mill and were ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... the tale began. By the time it was ended the boat was at a standstill on the little backwater below the ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... the crowd that continued to chaff us good-naturedly—"joshing" they called it. Then we managed to struggle into a sort of backwater at the side of the dais upon which an alleged string band was trying to make good, as the ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the next day we passed Carwar, about fifty miles south of Goa, and one of the most interesting ports in India. Adjoining it is a backwater, such as are often met with on the south-west coast of India, along which it is possible to sail for many miles in a native boat with great comfort and ease. Further south is Honahwar, whence the famous Falls of Gairsoppa, in Mysore, ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... 1959, the economy has been run in the Soviet style of government ownership of substantially all the means of production and government planning of all but the smallest details of economic activity. Thus, Cuba, like the former Warsaw Pact nations, has remained in the backwater of economic modernization. The economy contracted by about one-third between 1989 and 1992 as it absorbed the loss of $4 billion of annual economic aid from the former Soviet Union and much smaller amounts from Eastern Europe. The government implemented numerous ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... kill them, though the boat contained three times their own number. It is good to read how they wiped out all but those who escaped in terror by swimming! At last only fourteen of the English were left alive and they got hopelessly penned in a backwater. These men charged the army of Sepoys on the banks and made them keep their distance. They secured themselves in a tiny temple on the margin of the river and killed all who approached. At length, seeing preparations made for ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... read. Newspapers bored him and books made his head ache. And as for thinking, he had the wrong shape of forehead. The nearest he ever got to meditation was a sort of trance-like state, a kind of suspended animation in which his mind drifted sluggishly like a log in a backwater. Nutty, it is regrettable to say, went to his room after dinner for the purpose of imbibing ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... Harbour, some in the elaborate rusticity of an Adirondack camp. Even Gerty Farish, who welcomed Lily's return with tender solicitude, would soon be preparing to join the aunt with whom she spent her summers on Lake George: only Lily herself remained without plan or purpose, stranded in a backwater of the great current of pleasure. But Carry Fisher, who had insisted on transporting her to her own house, where she herself was to perch for a day or two on the way to the Brys' camp, came to the rescue with a ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... such-like feeling in his breast. Bah! All that sort of thing had vanished from men long and long ago, after the first few bitter weeks of war and of realisation of the meaning of war. War was now an affair—a sordid, ugly affair, and Maubert knew it as well as any man. Living in his backwater of a village, keeper of the principal wine-shop of the village, his zinc counter rang every night under emphatic fists, emphasising emphatic remarks about the war, and the remarks were true but devoid of romance. ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... doubt, but laborious, to say the least of it, though made tolerable by his good humour. By and by there came a call from Blister Harbour, which was forty miles to the north of us, where a man had shot off his hand—another from Red Cove, eighty miles to the south—others from Backwater Arm and Molly's Tub. And the doctor responded, afoot or with the dogs, as seemed best at the moment: myself to bear him company; for I would have it so, ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... the river. They had taken a punt, and pushed out from the hot, reeking boathouse that smelt strongly of the tar that was growing soft and viscous on its roof beneath the heat of the day, and slid down the backwater towards the river. The weeds here wanted cutting, and they wrapped themselves affectionately round the punt-pole, and dragged their green slender fingers along the bottom of the punt as if seeking to delay its passage. Then for a moment they had found a little coolness as they passed below ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... and backwaters; suppose, then, you get into one of these, or perhaps stumble on an unknown land up by the Pole and remain lying fast there, how will you extricate yourselves?' To this I would merely reply, as concerns the backwater, that we must get out of it just as surely as we got into it, and that we shall have provisions for five years. And as regards the other possibility, we should hail such an occurrence with delight, for no spot on earth could well be found of greater scientific ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... was in Kernville, a part of Johnstown, through which Stony Creek ran. Although we were a square from the creek, the backwater from the stream had flooded the streets in the morning and was up to our front porch. At 4 o'clock on Friday afternoon we were sitting on the front porch watching the flood, when we heard a roar as of a tornado ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... was an underthought that she and Comte were odd fish to be at home together in that placid backwater of the Latin Quarter. Next door to the old-fashioned house in which she rented three rooms was a cabaret, a mere wreck of a wineshop, apparently cast there by the torrent of the Boule Mich, which roared a few yards away. Its luminous sign, a foaming tankard, showed gallantly by night, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... delivered as many of their stores as they could. But it was not possible to go bargaining for narwhal ivory, as the flood made their destination inaccessible, so they turned back instead, and started to row up a little backwater called the off-creek, which in summer was too tiny to admit of the passage of even a small boat, but was swollen now to the size of a river. This waterway led straight past the unwholesome habitation of Oily Dave, which faced the main river, while the creek ran at the back door, ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... Station. Moreover, there was little of interest in the monotony of camping in lonely places for a young girl to whom her mother wished to give every opportunity of settling in life, whatever might be her own ideas respecting a vocation. Muktiarbad, though a rural backwater of Bengal, and pronounced by the gay-minded, a penal settlement, had matrimonial possibilities not to be despised by anxious parents with daughters ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... looking up from his novel. He kept reading a few pages and then looking up in a curiously methodical manner, and each time he looked up he took a few cherries out of the bag and ate them abstractedly. Other boats passed them, crossing the backwater from side to side to avoid each other, for many were now moored, and there were now white dresses and a flaw in the column of air between two trees, round which curled a thread of blue—Lady Miller's picnic party. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... head lies south, and we have been going right away from the steamer. Here, pull hard starboard, backwater port!" he cried; and as the oars dipped he bent down and watched the compass till he found the boat's head pointing north-east, when he shouted, "All ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... me that Bellini was the king of opera-writers and the emperor of composers. To pass a few hours with people who consider Bellini to have written the last note in music is as restful and refreshing as to dream away an August afternoon in a peaceful backwater, forgetting that there is a river running to the sea. After Bellini, the gentleman mentioned Beethoven, who, it seems, studied in Italy, and that is why his music is so melodious. The more accessible writers on Beethoven know as little about this studying in Italy ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... Winifred, 'went out of the house at the back, walked across a roughly paved stable-yard, and passed through a gate and entered a meadow. Then we walked along a stream about as wide as one of our Welsh brooks, but I found it to be a backwater connected with a river. For some time neither of us spoke a word. He seemed lost in thought, and my mind was busy with what I intended to say to him, for I was fully determined to get some light ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... his work was over and the unrest grew too strong to be fought, he crept down the black, creaking stairs, through the sleeping backwater of Drayton Mews, and out into the streets. He walked fast, with his head down, guiltily, like a man flying from a crime. But in the grave square where Francey Wilmot lived he slackened speed, and, under the ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... Delia!—what you want is to get out of this backwater, and back into the main stream! Even I get stale here. But in those great London meetings—there one catches on again!—one realises again—what it all means! Why not come up with me next week, even if the flat's not ready? I can't have ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cavern that no mention need be made of its interior features. The place seems excellently adapted as a habitation for primitive people. It is situated on a hill at whose foot is the bank of Blue River. Five miles away, as the road runs, is the Ohio. The backwater sometimes reaches up the tributary for more than 10 miles. The flint-bearing stratum of the Harrison County aboriginal quarries outcrops a short distance away and appears at several points within the cave. The country is extremely rugged, and good ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... so bad, though, of course, we're in a backwater here," said Lowell. "An Indian reservation gives you a queer feeling that way. The tides of civilization are racing all around, but here the ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... lads rejoiced over their mission. It was better to ride ahead than to remain with an army that was pulling itself along slowly through the mud. The fort itself was only about three miles away, and as it stood upon low, marshy ground, the backwater from the flooded Tennessee ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Londoner who lounged, intolerant and impatient, at the blacksmith's door while a horse was shod, or a cracked spoke mended, Great Keynes seemed but a poor backwater of a place, compared with the rush of the Brighton road eight miles to the east from which he had turned off, or the whirling cauldron of London City, twenty miles to the north, towards which ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... the truth, the more he thought of it, the more he shrank from the ordeal. Once he had hoped Mr. Bronson would be the one to show him the way out of the backwater of Crawberry. Hiram had not forgotten how terribly disappointed he had been when he could not find the gentleman's card in ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... She remembered that there was a shabby little house standing by itself on the bank where boats could be hired, for they had put in there once to replace an oar, having lost one down a weir in the neighborhood. The weir had not been on the main stream, but they had come upon it in exploring a backwater. It ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... bridge below the dam. They were waving encouragement. He saw men run down the steep river bank below the mill; and he knew they were going to be ready to assist him if he were fortunate enough to ride down the sluice into the shallow backwater on that side. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... why I made a little war on my own. Declared it myself, waged it myself, ended it myself. Each of those nicks is for a slave murderer—a good row of them—what? That big one is for Pedro Lopez, the king of them all, that I killed in a backwater of the Putomayo River. Now, here's something that would do for you." He took out a beautiful brown-and-silver rifle. "Well rubbered at the stock, sharply sighted, five cartridges to the clip. You can trust your life to that." He ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... they ran Speug had dropped the word Woody Island, and a day on Woody Island was a work of art. It lay a couple of miles above the town, long and narrow, formed with a division of the river into its main current and a sluggish backwater. It was covered with dense brushwood, except where here and there a patch of green turf was left bare, and the island was indented with little bays where the river rippled on clean sand and gravel. It was only a little island, but yet ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... by way of Victorine's small, tight-fenced garden of crape-myrtles, oleanders and pomegranates—where also the water was in the streets, backwater from the overflowed swamp-forests between city and lake—and had sent her to Charlie's bedside. Pleasant it would be for us to turn back with the damsel and see her, with heart as open as her arms, kiss the painted grandam, and at once proceed to make herself practically ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... room on the bank of the Adour, overlooking the Promenade des Baignots. A charwoman took care of it for me. She worked also for an old gentleman, a retired Examining Magistrate, President of the Roger-Ducos Society, which was a vague scientific backwater, in which the scholars of the neighborhood applied themselves with prodigious incompetence to the most whimsical subjects. One afternoon I stayed in my room on account of a very heavy rain. The good woman was energetically polishing the copper latch of my door. She used a paste called Tripoli, ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... because he had no particular love for the world and no great susceptibility to its temptations; but what had drawn Daniel Gray from the open sea into this quiet little backwater of a Shaker Settlement? After an adventurous early life, in which, as if youth-intoxicated, he had plunged from danger to danger, experience to experience, he suddenly found himself in a society of which he had never so much as heard, a company of celibate brothers and sisters holding all goods ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... dressed for the grave in her bridal ornaments. Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people are Cimbri, and holds that it is "more consonant to all the evidence of history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders at different periods deposited this backwater of barbarians" in the district they now inhabit. "The whole space, which in addition to the seven burghs contains twenty-four villages, is bounded by rivers, alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are the Brenta to ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... flowers, down a little narrow street on the south side of the Strand. Many people must have noticed these things, few have had the curiosity to explore further; yet it is well worth while to get down from omnibus or cab and venture into this little backwater of the Savoy. Between eleven and one, and two and four o'clock every day the garden gate is open, and the verger is in the chapel, ready to answer questions. The little graveyard garden, with its waving trees, is a veritable oasis in the desert of brick ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant |
