"Pitchy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reached the entrance of a cave. Not a word was spoken. Their instructions had been precise—for Lambert, who was born and had spent his earliest years there, knew every spot of the ground. They took their shoes off, and walking upon the hard sand which formed the ground, entered the pitchy darkness. Lambert going first, and knowing that a sound would be fatal—for they would have little chance in that narrow passage—he turned every angle as accurately as if it had been daylight, and the ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... which they were, or the fierce pains not feel; Yet to their Generals Voyce they soon obeyd Innumerable. As when the potent Rod Of Amrams Son in Egypts evill day Wav'd round the Coast, up call'd a pitchy cloud 340 Of Locusts, warping on the Eastern Wind, That ore the Realm of impious Pharoah hung Like Night, and darken'd all the Land of Nile: So numberless were those bad Angels seen Hovering on wing under the Cope of Hell 'Twixt upper, nether, and surrounding Fires; Till, as ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... it was before I was awakened again, this time not by the noise of the storm, but by a curious movement of my bedstead. I had once felt the slight shock of an earthquake, and it seemed to me that this must be something of the kind. Certainly my bed moved under me. I sat up. The room was pitchy dark. In a moment I felt another movement, but this time it did not seem to me to resemble an earthquake shock. Such motion, I think, is generally in horizontal directions, while that which I felt was more like the movement of a ship upon the water. ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... hailstones and thunder and lightning. The wind was instantly lulled, and after the first burst of the storm a deathlike silence succeeded to the crackling of the flames. A deluge of rain descended, and in an instant every spark of the conflagration was extinguished, and the pitchy darkness of the night was unbroken ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... only specimen that reached my ears of the old, rough water-wit for which the Thames used to be so celebrated. Passing directly along the line of the sunken Tunnel, we landed in Wapping, which I should have presupposed to be the most tarry and pitchy spot on earth, swarming with old salts, and full of warm, bustling, coarse, homely, and cheerful life. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a cold and torpid neighborhood, mean, shabby, and unpicturesque, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... one of these balsam firs; there's always a dry spot under them. See here!" And he showed him the sheltered circle beneath the tree. "You can always get twigs for kindling from their inner branches," he added, "or you can hew into one of these dead trees and get some pitchy splinters. There's material for everything you want if you know where to find it. Shelter, food, fire are all here for us as they were for the Indians. A ranger who needs a roof all the time ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... foreseen the Storm's impending rage, When to the Clouds the Waves ambitious rise, 10 And seem with Heaven a doubtful war to wage, Whilst total darkness overspreads the skies; Save when the lightnings darting wingd Fate Quick bursting from the pitchy clouds between In forkd Terror, and destructive state[2:2] 15 Shall shew with double gloom ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... white nightcap and nightshirt were discernible in almost pitchy darkness), they saw him strut back from the window to slip downstairs and surprise them. Mr Pinsent paused only to insert his feet into a pair of loose slippers, and again, as he unbolted the back door, to snatch a lantern off its hook. Yet by the time he ran out upon ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... in the darkness gives hopes that men will be at hand. Here there was not any human society. The fire crouched on its ashes. It was on a little circular eminence of mossed rock; black sticks, and brushwood, and dry fern, and split logs, pitchy to the touch, lay about; in the centre of them the fire coiled sullenly among its ashes, with a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Instantly a cone of black mephitis shot forth, a loathsome, bituminous stream of putrefaction that reeked of the grave and the cesspool, of the utmost reaches of decay before the dust accepts the disintegrated atoms. The first touch of seething, pitchy destruction brought screams of sudden agony from the guinea pigs, but the screams were cut short as the little animals fell in shocking, instant decay. The very cage which imprisoned them shriveled and retreated ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... Denmark and Pomerania, a so-called mud-peat (Schlammtorf, also Baggertorf and Streichtorf,) is "fished up" from the bottoms of ponds, as a black mud or paste, which, on drying, becomes hard and dense like the pitchy-peat. ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... a terrible night. It was pitchy dark: not a star, nor one glimpse of the pale moon could be distinguished. The wind howled among the rocks, and cast the spray up with violence against the cliffs, which, however, in front of the gorge, gave way to a low sandy beach, forming the usual scene of the wreckers' operations. A current ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... with longing on them as they speed With golden gates, that only shut on him; And shapes sometimes from hell's abysses freed Flap darkly by him, with enormous sweep Of wings that roughen wide the pitchy deep. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... next night the water gained so much on the pumps that Captain Hawkes resolved to head the brig in for the land in the hopes of making some sheltering port. Whereabouts he was he could not exactly tell. Again and again the well was sounded. The night was pitchy dark, the wind blew harder than ever, and the foam-topped seas raged round the hapless brig. The men laboured at the pumps, the captain and mate working as hard as the rest, for they all knew that their lives depended on ...
— The History of Little Peter, the Ship Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... the upper edge of the field above the house into a smooth, brown path among the dark spruces. The hot sun brought out the fragrance of the pitchy bark, and the shade was pleasant as we climbed the hill. William stopped once or twice to show me a great wasps'-nest close by, or some fishhawks'-nests below in a bit of swamp. He picked a few sprigs of late-blooming linnaea as we came out upon an open ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... wet and pitchy dark. Only by the help of the lightning I had stumbled and plunged home to bed, when at about eleven a perfect storm of rifle-fire suddenly swept along the ridges at our end of the town. Rushing out I ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... where he lay. He knew that it was growing cold in the gorge, and the shelter of the cabin was acceptable. He saw a little strip of wan twilight through a crack in the window, but it soon faded and pitchy darkness filled the ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... the silken platform and capture prince and princess, table, gold dishes and all, when hark! A shrill whistle sounded, the old man's hand, with the hat in it, was paralysed in the air, so that he could not move it backwards or forwards, and in an instant every light went out, and all was pitchy darkness. ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... and the silence is more impressive than all words. Instead of pagan attempts at a likeness of God, we have next painted, with equal descriptive accuracy, poetic force, and theological truth, the pitchy blackness which hides Him. In the gloom of its depths He makes His "secret place" His "tent." It is "darkness of waters," that is, darkness from which streams out the thunder-rain; it is "thick clouds of the ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... our spirits sank again, for with the daylight all evidence of our security vanished away. We could no longer see the firm rock on which we lay, while we were stunned with the violence of the tempest that raged around us. The night grew pitchy dark as it advanced, so that we could not see our hands when we held them up before our eyes, and were obliged to feel each other occasionally to make sure that we were safe, for the storm at last became ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... was only Helwyse, careering through pitchy darkness, on a viewless sea, with a plausible voice at his ear insinuating villanous thoughts with an air of ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... or the Galician Village (for the two words are Spanish, and have that signification), it a place containing, I should think, about four thousand inhabitants. It was pitchy dark when we landed, but rockets soon began to fly about in all directions, illuming the air far and wide. As we passed along the dirty unpaved street which leads to the Largo, or square in which the inn is situated, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... all dimensions: but for thee Sorrow had never been,—All-noxious thing, Of vilest nature! Other sorts of evils Are kindly circumscribed, and have their bounds. The fierce volcano, from his burning entrails That belches molten stone and globes of fire, Involved in pitchy clouds of smoke and stench, Mars the adjacent fields for some leagues round, And there it stops. The big-swoln inundation, 610 Of mischief more diffusive, raving loud, Buries whole tracts of country, threatening more; But that too has its shore it cannot pass. More dreadful far than ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... They groped into the pitchy hall, somewhere in which a Die-Hard was on picket, and down the passage to the smoking-room. Dickson blinked in the light of a very feeble lamp and Heritage saw that his hands were cumbered with packages. He deposited them on a sofa and made ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... he seemed to be dying, and gathered in the room were many sympathizing friends and neighbors. Without, 'twas pitchy dark. The rain fell in torrents and the wind, which had increased in violence since the setting of the sun, howled mournfully about the windows, as if waiting to bear the soul company in its upward flight. Many times had Walter attempted to speak. At last ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... the pitchy darkness of a village street, where the greater part of the population were gone to bed, when he passed through Engelberg towards the hotel, where Phebe must be awaiting his return anxiously. In carrying out his project it would be well for him to have as little as possible to do with ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... and the men lay in the mud without fires. At three in the morning (August 20th) the word was passed to march. Such pitchy darkness covered the face of the plain that Smith ordered every man to touch his front file as he marched. Now and then a flash of lightning lighted the narrow ravine; occasionally a straggling moonbeam pierced the clouds and shed an uncertain ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... sonnet to the princess, who regarded him wide-eyed. The troll came back from a tunnel after he finished, and said curtly: "This way." Cappen took the girl's hand and followed her into a pitchy, ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... man opened the door,—a passage black as Erebus. "Give me your hand, General." Jasper was led through the pitchy gloom for a few yards; then the guide found a gas-cock, and the place broke suddenly into light: a dirty narrow staircase on one side; facing it a sort of lobby, in which an open door showed a long sanded parlour, like that in public ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... known as pitchy copper-ore (Ger. Kupferpecherz), and of some importance as an ore of copper, is usually classed as a variety of chrysocolla containing much admixed limonite. It is dark brown to black in colour, with a dull to glassy or resinous lustre, and resembles pitch in appearance. In ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Radicofani, Brandilancia examined the huge state-bedstead, and with a little exertion trundled it forward. Behind its tapestry hangings a secret door, suspected only by a crack in the wainscotting, opened beneath his prying fingers, and revealed a spiral staircase leading downward into pitchy darkness. Comprehending Malespini's admonition, he hastily appropriated the candles, and, drawing the bedstead into its place behind him, descended the dizzily circling steps. Eighty-seven he counted, twisting round and round within the turret, and then he paused, for he ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... her in that pitchy blackness, except when the lightning flashes came. Then she was like a ghostly wraith, with drenched clothes clinging to her until she seemed scarcely dressed, her wet hair streaming and her wide, staring eyes looking straight ahead. After the lightning flashes, when the world was darkest, ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... keep near the walls! Huggins, regard your own behoof, For lo! the blazing rocking roof Down, down, in thunder falls! An awful pause succeeds the stroke, And o'er the ruins volumed smoke, Rolling around its pitchy shroud, Concealed them from th' astonished crowd. At length the mist awhile was cleared, When, lo! amid the wreck upreared, Gradually a moving head appeared, And Eagle firemen knew 'T was Joseph Muggins, name revered, The foreman of their crew. Loud shouted all in signs of woe, "A ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... very blackness of darkness would appall me by its dense gloom. All at once, while gazing at a frightful creation of my distempered mind, I seemed struck with sudden blindness. I knew a candle was burning in the room but I could not see it, all was so pitchy dark. I lost the sense of feeling, too, for I endeavored to grasp my arm in one hand, but consciousness was gone. I put my hand to my side, my head, but felt nothing, and still I knew my limbs and frame were there. And then the scene would change! ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... his position there. At eleven o'clock, Dalbrque climbed a bank, scrambled over a wire fence, hid his bicycle under the branches and moved away. It seemed impossible to follow him in the pitchy darkness, on a mossy soil that muffled the sound of footsteps. Rnine did not make the attempt; but, at daybreak, he came with his chauffeur and hunted through the park all the morning. Though the park, which covered the side of a hill and was bounded below by the river, ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... those lifeless cliffs. Silence and darkness suit well together in solitude at noonday, and settled on huge objects make them sublime. And they were huge; all ranged together, and stretching away to a great distance, with the pitchy water, still as if frozen, covering ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... girl went home; but she was quite covered with pitch, and the cock by the well-side, as soon as he saw her, cried: "Cock-a-doodle-doo! Your pitchy girl's come back to you." But the pitch stuck fast to her, and could not be got off as long as ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... courtesan or a community was going to die or get a new Constitution, or do something that was important on the other side of the world, and the paper was to be held open till the latest possible minute in order to catch the telegram. It was a pitchy black night, as stifling as a June night can be, and the loo, the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and pretending that the rain was on its heels. Now and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... bank for the night, and each with his pack proceeded to push his way through the thick willows and alders and over the rocks. It was so dark we could not see each other. Falling down constantly and struggling to our feet again, we stumbled on through the pitchy blackness and down-pouring rain, until suddenly we discerned the glowing light of our campfire and came upon Hubbard frying bacon. George and I were too tired to eat; we were glad to lie down in our wet clothes on the bed of spruce boughs ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... proceeded (having first with her art made the night itself more dark, and involved her head in a pitchy cloud), to explore the field, and examine one by one the bodies of the unburied dead. As she approached, the wolves fled before her, and the birds of prey, unwillingly sheathing their talons, abandoned their repast, while the Thessalian witch, searching ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... rivers seethe and rack, Like foaming cataracts, their bounding track; A devastating flood sweeps o'er the land, Tartarean darkness swathes the sable strand! O'er wolds and hills, o'er ocean's chafing waves The wild tornado's bluster wierdly raves; The white-heat bolt of every thundering roar The pitchy zenith coruscating o'er; The vast expanse of heaven pours forth its ire 'Mid swarthy fogs ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... work of a single instant. The Scheldt yawned to its lowest depth, and then cast its waters across the dykes, deep into the forts, and far over the land. The earth shook as with the throb of a volcano. A wild glare lighted up the scene for one moment, and was then succeeded by pitchy darkness. Houses were toppled down miles away, and not a living thing, even in remote places, could keep its feet. The air was filled with a rain of plough-shares, grave-stones, and marble balls, intermixed with the heads, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... them with a force equal, or, perhaps, superior to their own. Moreau was compelled to fight two battles, in both of which he was defeated; and nothing but a violent storm saved the wreck of his army. This, and the pitchy darkness of the night, prevented the Austrian cavalry from acting, and enabled him to get his broken columns on the safe side of the Rhine. The archduke Charles ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... to left, a fire of pine roots was crackling. The room was filled with their pitchy, wholesome perfume, with the dancing light of their blaze and with the warmth made ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... quaver of earnestness in it that needed no daylight to enforce. The pitchy night made a bobbing blur of him as he rode his quick-stepping little ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... were heard outside. Jack Ryan stopped short in the middle of his story, and all rushed out of the barn. The night was pitchy dark. Squalls of wind and rain swept along the beach. Two or three fishermen, their backs against a rock, the better to resist the wind, were shouting at ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... indeed rugged as well as winding, and so pitchy dark that the youth could not have advanced at all without stumbling, unless his host had held him all the way. At last a glimmer of light was seen in the distance. It seemed to increase suddenly, and in a few moments the two emerged ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... anything further, Field slipped out by the way he had come. Once in the road, he glanced back at the house, but the whole place seemed to be in pitchy darkness. There was nothing for it now but to make his way to the nearest police station, and get all the assistance possible. There was no trouble at the station across the Common, the mere mention of ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... a sensation unparalleled of its kind. Men read with horror the stories of the mines, of children employed underground for twelve or fourteen hours a day, crouching in low passages, monotonously opening and shutting the trap-doors as the trollies passed to and fro. Alone each child sat in pitchy darkness, unable to stir for more than a few paces, unable to sleep for fear of punishment with the strap in case of neglect, and often surrounded with vermin. Women were employed crawling on hands and knees ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... before we reached the river; we had been much delayed by repeated falls into deep holes, and over hidden stones; thus I was well satisfied to find myself once more at home after having crossed the river, in pitchy darkness, in a similar manner as before. Every person in the village had had a good view of the stalk; therefore, as two giraffes had been seen to fall, the Arabs were waiting on the bank in ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... Max slowly lowered Dale to the ground. The soldier was close by, but none else was within some yards. They were beyond the circle of bright light cast by the fire, and a few yards would take them into darkness, which was pitchy to anyone coming from the vicinity of the fire. The chance of escape was good, and Max, the time for resolute action at hand, felt his heart bound with fresh hope ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... and started back with half a scream, as a pale, anxious visage with sad dark eyes seemed to approach her. It took a moment or two for her to discover that she had seen only the reflection of her own anxious, excited face, the pitchy blackness without having converted the window into a sort of ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... remarkable meteoric phenomenon that has occurred in Canada since the country became inhabited by civilized man, was first seen in October, 1785, and again in July, 1814. At noonday a pitchy darkness, of a dismal and sinister character, completely obscured the light of the sun, continuing for about ten minutes at a time, and being frequently repeated during the afternoon. In the interval ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... morning I was aroused out of an uneasy slumber by the ceasing of all motion about me. The appalling truth flashed upon me instantly—we were captives in a snow-drift! 'All hands to the rescue!' Every man sprang to obey. Out into the wild night, the pitchy darkness, the billowy snow, the driving storm, every soul leaped, with the consciousness that a moment lost now might bring destruction to us all. Shovels, hands, boards—anything, everything that could displace snow, was brought ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Carley went up to her room. And she was in such a softened mood, so happy and excited and yet disturbed in mind, that the coldness and the darkness did not matter in the least. She undressed in pitchy blackness, stumbling over chair and bed, feeling for what she needed. And in her mood this unusual proceeding was fun. When ready for bed she opened the door to take a peep out. Through the dense blackness the waterfall showed dimly opaque. Carley felt a soft mist wet her face. The low roar ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... to favor them, let this prison yard rise up and say that no such crimes in liberty's name have ever been committed, on this continent, at least. Up stairs, in Castle Thunder, there are two or three large rooms, barred and dimly lit, and two or three series of condemned cells, pent-up and pitchy, where, by a refinement of cruelty, the ceiling has been built low so that no man can stand upright. Here fifteen or twenty were crowded together, and, in the burning atmosphere, they stripped themselves stark naked, so that when in the morning the cell-doors were opened, they came forth ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... equally impenetrable barrier, and Sam needed all his knowledge of the forest to enable him to work his way southward at night through such woods as those. The little party of wanderers sometimes found themselves apparently walled in in the pitchy darkness, with no possible way out but Sam's instinct, as he called it, which was simply his ability to remember the things he had learned, and to put two facts together to find out a third, always extricated them. Once they found themselves ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... companions, Mecisteus, son of Echius, and noble Alastor, supporting, bore to the hollow ships, deeply groaning. In the meantime Idomeneus ceased not his mighty valour; but always burned either to cover some of the Trojans with pitchy night,[429] or himself to fall with a crash, repelling destruction from the Greeks. Then the hero Alcathous, the beloved son of AEsyetas (and he was the son-in-law of Anchises, for he had married Hippodamia, ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... the intense darkness, made for the verandah. Here he paused for a moment, glancing upward to the sky, which he found to be obscured by a dense canopy of heavy black cloud, portending rain, which sufficiently accounted for the pitchy darkness. His eyes at length becoming accustomed to the obscurity, he looked round for the guard; and he eventually discovered the various members faithfully occupying their posts, but, one and all, ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... tomb, and one with it, The night wherein we press; Their thousand pitchy pyres have lit Your ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... before the light went. Now, in the pitchy darkness of the drenching rain, as he crouched at the foot of the wall he could hear the hoarse murmur of many voices behind it, as it seemed ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... vessel, unseen in the dark. The echo of the gun from hill to hill. Wild voices from shore and sea. The snorting of the steamer, the rattling of the chain through the hawse-hole; and on deck, and under the quarter, strange gleams of red light amid pitchy darkness, from engines, galley fires, lanthorns; and black folk and white ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... things had been made much less formidable than at Aurelia's first introduction. The sitting-room was arranged as it was when Mr. Greaves read prayers, with a very faint light from a shrouded lamp behind the window curtain. To new comers it seemed pitchy darkness, but to Aurelia and Dr. Godfrey it was a welcome change, allowing them at least to perceive the forms of one another, and of the furniture. From a blacker gulf, being the doorway to the inner room, came Mr. Belamour's courteous voice of greeting to his kinswomen, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... skirmish was kept up for some miles. Hobson was close in rear, and Judah's men were approaching Buffington. Morgan reached the river near the ford about eight o'clock in the evening. The night was pitchy dark, and his information was that a small earthwork built to command the ford was occupied by a permanent garrison. He concluded to wait for daylight. The work had in fact been abandoned on the preceding day, but at daybreak in the morning he was attacked. Hobson's ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... low, being 1.2 to 1.23, and when freshly mined it may contain as high as 50 per cent of moisture. Its appearance varies from a light brown, showing a distinctly woody structure, in the poorer varieties, to a black, with a pitchy luster resembling hard coal, in the best varieties. It is non-caking and burns with a bright but slightly smoky flame with moderate heat. It is easily broken, will not stand much handling in transportation, and if exposed to the ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... age of cruelty. The shows of gladiators, the sanguinary combats of wild beasts, the not unfrequent spectacle of savage tortures and capital punishments, the occasional sight of innocent martyrs burning to death in their shirts of pitchy fire, must have hardened and imbruted the public sensibility. The immense prevalence of slavery tended still more inevitably to the general corruption. "Lust," as usual, was "hard by hate." One hears with ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... flamed, thundered, roared in the cavern, bringing down enormous fragments from the vaults. The cavern was lighted for an instant by this discharge, and then immediately returned to pitchy darkness rendered thicker by the smoke. To this succeeded a profound silence, broken only by the steps of the third brigade, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... be regarded as in some occult manner, which as yet has baffled detection, influencing the perfection of sporidia[P] In Rhytisma, found on the leaves of maple and willow, black pitchy spots at first appear, which contain within them a golden pulp, in which very slender corpuscles are mixed with an abundant mucilage. These corpuscles are the spermatia, which in Rhytisma acerinum are linear and short, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... another wrench, which pitched 'Lina headlong against the window, and the steep, shelving bank was reached, but in endeavoring to climb it the carriage was upset, and 'Lina found herself in pitchy darkness. Perfectly sobered now, Caesar extricated her as soon as possible. The carriage was broken and there was no alternative save for 'Lina to walk the remaining distance home. It was not far, for the scene of the ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... passage. After a great deal of danger and difficulty, we succeeded in returning on the true bridle-path, and arrived about ten at night in a small village, through which we had passed three hours before. The gloom and pitchy darkness of an American forest at night, cannot be conceived by the inhabitants of an open country, and the traversing a narrow path interspersed with stumps and logs is both fatiguing and dangerous. Our horse ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... now a liquid Paradise: its great pellucid braes and hillocks shone with the sparkle and the hues of all the jewels in an emperor's crown. Imagine—after three days of inky sea, and pitchy sky, and Death's deep jaws snapping and barely missing—ten thousand great slopes of emerald, aquamarine, amethyst and topaz, liquid, alive, and dancing jocundly beneath a gorgeous sun: and you will have a faint idea of what met the eyes and hearts of the rescued looking out of ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... tingled at thought of him, and so I resolutely turned my meditations elsewhere, and again in a little while I seemed to think of nothing, but lay and bathed in the silence, and indulged my eyes with the good red light of the torch, inhaling its pitchy scent. I was conscious, yet for a time I had no thought: I was like something half animal, half vegetable, which feeds, yet has no mouth, nor sees, nor hears, nor has sense, but only lives. I seemed hung in space, as one feels ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the Anglo-Saxon name Pimm, from pen, or pin, a sharp rock,—"ab acumine foliorum," or perhaps as a contraction of picinus—pitchy. It furnishes from its leaves an extract, and the volatile oil. Wool is saturated with the latter, and dried, being then made into blankets, jackets, spencers, and stockings, for the use of rheumatic sufferers. There are establishments in Germany where ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... a racking headache in pitchy darkness; and with the twilight of returning consciousness there grew in him an awful fear that he had been coffined and buried alive. For he lay at full length in a bed which yet was unlike any bed of his acquaintance, being so narrow that he ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... withdrawn, and if the poison is fresh, paralysis and death very quickly follow, the skin round the wound turning yellow and mortifying within an hour or two. This deadly poison is obtained, I believe, by boiling down a particular root, the arrow-heads being dipped in the black, pitchy-looking essence which remains. I am glad to say, however, that owing to the establishment of several Mission Stations amongst them, the Wa Kamba are quickly becoming the most civilised natives in the country; and the missionaries have adopted ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... twice he lost his balance, but happily he was only a foot or two from the ground and water below—though, had it been twenty it would have been all the same. Half-a-dozen such brooks and bridges had to be passed, till at length, emerging from the pitchy shade upon an open space, he saw two twinkling lights, which told him that ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... the wind blew fiercely among the somber mountains. A second engine had been added to the train, and the speed of the train was slackened. The engineer in front stared at the slippery rails, but he could see only a few yards. The pitchy darkness closed in ahead, hiding everything, even the peaks and ridges. The heart of that engineer, and he was a brave man, as brave as any soldier on the battlefield, had sunk very low. Railroads were little past their infancy then and this was the first to cross the mountains. He ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... which some remain lying astretch, burns on, but no longer blazes. There is no one to tend it with the pitchy pine-knots. Inside the tents also, the lights are extinguished—all except one. This, the rude skin sheiling which shelters the mestizo and mulatto. The two half-bloods, of different strain, are yet awake, and sitting up. They are also ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... on deck, completing their buttoning and belting as they went, and found that something very like a storm was brewing. As yet the breeze was moderate, and the sea not very high, but the night was pitchy dark, and a hot oppressive atmosphere boded no improvement in ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... stream Of eddied Xanthus, progeny of Jove, 520 They laid him on the bank, and on his face Pour'd water; he, reviving, upward gazed, And seated on his hams black blood disgorged Coagulate, but soon relapsing, fell Supine, his eyes with pitchy darkness veil'd, 525 And all his powers still torpid by the blow. Then, seeing Hector borne away, the Greeks Rush'd fiercer on, all mindful of the fight, And far before the rest, Ajax the swift, The Oilean Chief, with pointed ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... The pitchy gloom without makes the heart dilate on entering the room filled with the glow and warmth of the evening fire. The ruddy blaze diffuses an artificial summer and sunshine through the room, and lights up each countenance in a kindlier welcome. Where ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... the heart, when he fancied she must strike; but she went clear. All this time, it was crack, crack, crack, from the crater, rumbling sounds and heavy explosions; the last attended by flames, and smoke of a pitchy darkness. A dozen times the Sea Lion had very narrow escapes when nearest to the danger, stones of a weight to pass through her decks and bottom falling even on the ice outside of her; but that hand which had so benevolently stayed various other evils, was stretched forth to save, and ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... dark expressed but faintly the pitchy obscurity that encompassed the vehicle. The roadside trees were scarcely distinguishable as deeper masses of shadow; I knew them only by the peculiar sodden odor that from time to time sluggishly flowed in at the open window as we rolled ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... general's voice they soon obey'd Innumerable. As when the potent rod Of Amram's son, in Egypt's evil day, Wav'd round the coast, up call'd a pitchy cloud Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind, That o'er the realm of impious Pharaoh hung Like night, and darken'd all the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... prostrate trunks before my return could be accomplished. At no time during my period of exile did I experience so much mental suffering from the cravings of hunger as when, exhausted with this long clay of fruitless search, I resigned myself to a couch of pine foliage in the pitchy darkness of a thicket of small trees. Naturally timid in the night, I fully realized the exposure of my condition. I peered upward through the darkness, but all was blackness and gloom. The wind sighed mournfully through the pines. The forest seemed ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... evening of sudden mildness following a dry October gale. The colonel had miscalculated the temperature by one log—only one, he declared, but that had proved a pitchy one, and the chimney bellowed with flame. From end to end the room was alight with it, as if the stored-up energies of a whole pine-tree had been sacrificed in the ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... a really satisfactory fire, one that would endure the rain, she must cut fuel from some of the logs Ben had hewn down and dragged to the cave. She lighted a short piece of pitchy wood, intending to locate the heavy camp axe. Then, putting on her heavy coat—the same garment of lustrous fur which Ben had sent her back for the day of her ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... gloomy shadow of the night, Longing to view Orion's drizzling look, Leaps from th' antartic world unto the sky, And dims the welkin with her [28] pitchy breath, Faustus, begin thine incantations, And try if devils will obey thy hest, Seeing thou hast pray'd and sacrific'd to them. Within this circle is Jehovah's name, Forward and backward anagrammatiz'd, Th' abbreviated ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... let us go." The night was pitchy dark, although the fog had rolled away; for the moon had not yet risen, and no light came from the few feeble stars that were out. Over swamp and tangle, across bare marsh, and through dense wood they went, lightly as a pair of fawns, ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... under the heavy train, threatening each moment to hurl us down the precipitous mountain into the black, rocky bed of the Cheat, hundreds of feet below; have dashed at speed round steep grades hewn in the solid rock, where the sharp, jagged peaks rose a thousand feet beneath us; and I have raced in pitchy nights on the western rivers in tinder-box boats, that seemed shaking to pieces away from their red-hot furnaces; but I do not recall any piece of travel that gave the same sense of the instability of railroad affairs as that ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... pair of "sneakers" he had placed beside his bed. He let himself out into the corral, being careful to keep close to the wall of the house until he reached the high board fence. Here, too, he had to feel his way because of the pitchy blackness of the night; and if the rattling wind prevented him from hearing any footsteps that might be behind him, it also covered the slight sound of his own progress down the fence to the shed. But he did not ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... go up the hill and scare ourselves, As reckless as the best of them to-night, By setting fire to all the brush we piled With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow. Oh, let's not wait for rain to make it safe. The pile is ours: we dragged it bough on bough Down dark converging paths between the pines. Let's not care what we do with it to-night. Divide ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... that the town, desolate as it was, was still under guard, and they redoubled their precautions. However dangerous it might be, they must go on. The moon would rise before long, and they must make the most of the pitchy ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... Then in the pitchy gloom hard by I heard that which brought me to my feet—an evil scuffling, a close and desperate struggling—a man's hoarse laugh and a woman's pitiful pleading and sobbing. I had lost my staff, but I yet grasped ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... he at last muttered, fixing his eye upon the further bank of the river, a dark mass of hill and forest that rose in dim relief against the clouded sky, overshadowing the whole stream, which lay like a pitchy abyss betwixt it and the travellers,—"right, Peter! thee eyes is as good as thee nose—thee is determined the poor ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... the old man suddenly stood still. It was pitchy dark under the overhanging trees, and only a faint gleam from a large bow window showed her the length of the garden-path that they ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... right hand, carelessly placed under his pillow, closed on the handle of his pistol. Falkner quietly slipped into the passage. The light of the candle faintly illuminated the floor and opposite wall, but left it on either side in pitchy obscurity. ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... form, and one that increased the sublimity of the scene, by adding a slight feeling of uneasiness to the admiration with which we had contemplated it so far. A cloud of pitchy darkness rose in the south, and crossed the plain, shedding deepest night in its track, and shooting its fires downward on the earth as it came onwards. It passed right over our heads, enveloping ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... were far outnumbered by the Burgundians, and it was only by dint of their desperate courage and by reason of the pitchy darkness and of the locality with its unknown roughness that the former inflicted the damage ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... scorching air, as though from a deep furnace, and perceives his own chariot to be on fire. And neither is he able now to bear the ashes and the emitted embers; and on every side he is involved in a heated smoke. Covered with a pitchy darkness, he knows not whither he is going, nor where he is, and is hurried away at the pleasure of the winged steeds. They believe that it was then that the nations of the thiopians contracted their black hue, the blood being attracted. into the surface of the body. ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... was something distinctly eerie in the absolute darkness in which he found himself. He stretched out a hand and felt for the nearest wall like a blind man, groped his way to the door and opened it. But the other room was also in pitchy blackness. ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... the markets of a great city. The appearance of one of these towering river transports as she comes sailing down the turbid stream of the great Father of Waters, laden to the water's edge with brown bales of cotton, and emitting from her lofty, red crowned smoke-stacks dense clouds of pitchy black smoke, is most wonderful. Unlike ocean-steamers, the river-steamer carries her load upon her deck. Built to penetrate far towards the head-waters of rivers and bayous that in summer become mere shallow ditches, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot |
