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noun
Sewer  n.  A drain or passage to carry off water and filth under ground; a subterraneous channel, particularly in cities.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sewer" Quotes from Famous Books



... buy her an ice-cream, and you can always raise a headache on garden-party or picnic nights. The class of economists mentioned seem unable to realize that a man, young or old, is worth his salt, if he works honestly, whether he be a sewer-digger or a clerk who spends half ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen

... like to tell you, but perhaps I had better. I have only just found out that a sewer-trap quite close to his shop gives out a most offensive affluvia, especially in this hot weather. The air must be full of germs. I hardly know whet her we ought to eat even this loaf. ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing

... Manhattan!" Jack cried. "Sounds like action! We're off in a heathen land, surrounded by enemies, and not likely to get anything like a fighting chance, but I'm for doing something right now. I'm not going to lie still here and be poisoned, like a rat in a sewer!" ...
— Boy Scouts on Motorcycles - With the Flying Squadron • G. Harvey Ralphson

... the footways. . . . I noticed just in front of me one large bunch which had slipped off a neighbouring mound and was almost bathing in the gutter. I picked it up. Underneath, it was soiled with mud; the greasy, fetid sewer water had left black stains upon the flowers. And then, gazing at these exquisite daughters of our gardens and our woods, astray amidst all the filth of the city, I began to ponder. On what woman's bosom would ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... leisurely, a squad of brooms. The street is dripping, every sewer opening clucks and gurgles with the falling water. There is something unbelievably humorous in the way that roaring Niagara of water dashes madly down the silent street. There is a note of irony in it, too, for the depressed enthusiasts who have been sitting all evening in a restaurant over ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... Polydor. The king became seruitor to his sonne.] Upon the daie of coronation, king Henrie the father serued his sonne at the table as sewer, bringing vp the bores head with trumpets before it, according to the maner. Whervpon (according to the old adage, Immutant mores homines cm dantur honores) [Sidenote: Honours change manners.] the yoong man conceiuing a pride in his heart, beheld the standers-by with a more ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (5 of 12) - Henrie the Second • Raphael Holinshed

... was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders; the forlorn figure of an old man, who seemed to have crept out of some subterranean sewer, and was stooping along the kennel, and poking the wet rubbish with a stick, in quest of rusty nails; a merchant or two, at the door of the post-office, together with an editor and a miscellaneous politician, awaiting a dilatory mail; ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... chateau in which the German Crown Prince is said to have been staying when a British shell crashed through the roof and made him move on the double quick. This town like our own was intersected by a canal which was used both as a sewer and source of water supply for washing purposes. The streets in this town are dirty and ill kept; the stores uninteresting, and the houses squalid; it ran into the next town of Estaires by the continuation of the ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith

... "boss" is away as well as when he is at home. And the man, who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets "laid off," nor has to go on a strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks shall be granted; ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter

... life, and were more easily imposed upon. To be sure, even they would find out in time the deficiencies of his establishment, and report them at home; but meanwhile he hoped to fill his pockets for two or three seasons under cover of The Sewer's puffs, and then, when business fell off, to impose on his landlord with some plausible story, and obtain a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... ingenious men in the Metropolis, he acquired some reputation for his wit and poetry. About this time being taken notice of at court for his ingenuity, he was made Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, and Sewer in ordinary to King Charles I. who always esteemed him to the last, one of the most celebrated wits about his court[2]. He was much esteemed and respected by the poets of his time, especially by Ben Johnson. Sir John Suckling, who had a great kindness for him, could not let him pass ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber

... heart from what I had grown into from childhood, on which had been lavished all the raptures of my hopes and all the tears of my hatred.... It is difficult to change gods. I did not believe you then, because I did not want to believe, I plunged for the last time into that sewer.... But the seed remained and grew up. Seriously, tell me seriously, didn't you read all my letter from America, perhaps you ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... the same system is pursued with regard to churches and societies. At every one of the six sessions of the Councilmen which we attended, resolutions were introduced to give away the people's money to wealthy organizations. A church, for example, is assessed $1000 for the construction of a sewer, which enhances the value of the church property by at least the amount of the assessment. Straightway, a member from that neighborhood proposes to console the stricken church with a 'donation' of $1000, to enable it to pay the assessment; and ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... be a leading drain, other necessary drains may be opened into it. In purchasing land for building on, you should expressly reserve a right to make an opening into any sewer or watercourse on the vendor's land ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... very pretty," said Anne. "I'll get my sewing and we'll have a little thimble party of two. You are a beautiful sewer, ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... a black rat, as black as jet, shark-jawed, star-eyed, elfin-eared, snake-tailed, lean, long-legged, and graceful—a very greyhound among the rats. He was there, in that dancing-floor of the winds by the estuary, because no common or sewer rats were there. They were anathema to him, and they were worse—death in many horrible forms. He had been there all the summer, all the autumn, and all the—— No, by whiskers! he was not going to remain there all the winter. He had his limit, and he hated cold; and here, down by ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... every sort of city rubbish, accumulated during the long closed months. Polotzk had no underground communication with the sea, save such as water naturally makes for itself. The poor old Dvina was hard-worked, serving both as drinking-fountain and sewer, as a bridge in winter, a highway in summer, and a playground at all times. So it served us right if we had to wait weeks and weeks in thawing time for our streets to be cleared; and we deserved all the sprains and bruises we suffered from clambering ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... inaccessible from its swamps, and with a wretched village called Marly upon the slope of one of its hills. This closeness, without drain or the means of having any, was the sole merit of the valley. The King was overjoyed at his discovery. It was a great work, that of draining this sewer of all the environs, which threw there their garbage, and of bringing soil thither! The hermitage was made. At first, it was only for sleeping in three nights, from Wednesday to Saturday, two or three times a-year, with a dozen at the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... hold with surface-drainage, and the sun-for-garbage cure, Till you've been a periwinkle shrinking coyly up a sewer. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... there was a German spy in the aforesaid sewers, and that he was depositing bombs there with the intention of blowing up the city. Three hundred Guards at once volunteered their services, stalked the poor workman, and blew him to pieces the next time he popped his head out of a sewer-trap. The mistake was afterwards deplored, but people argued (wrote Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles, who sent the story to The Morning Post) that it was far better that a hundred innocent Frenchmen should suffer than that ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

... bestridden horses that had been peacefully pasturing, and ridden them bare-back around the fields, in a kind of Buffalo Bill style, you know. I got "nabbed" occasionally, and then I was candidly told that if I continued "ta dew sich a dangerous thing ony more, ah sud be sewer to catch it." ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End

... heat and intense dryness. It is not, as that was at Andersonville, poisoned with the excretions of thousands of sick and dying men, filled with disgusting vermin, and loading the air with the germs of death. The difference is as that between a brick-kiln and a sewer. Should the fates ever decide that I shall be flung out upon sands to perish, I beg that the hottest place in the Sahara may be selected, rather than such a spot as the interior of the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... house, he was suddenly accosted by a little old man, arrayed in green, and mounted upon a white palfrey. After mutual salutation, the old man gave Sir Godfrey to understand, that he resided under his habitation, and that he had great reason to complain of the direction of a drain, or common sewer, which emptied itself directly into his chamber of dais, [A] Sir Godfrey Macculloch was a good deal startled at this extraordinary complaint; but, guessing the nature of the being he had to deal with, he assured the old man, with great ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... be sure! Up the long street, and down the long street nothing was to be seen but large mud puddles, while the gutter ran like a little river, and gushed with a loud sound into the sewer mouth. ...
— Funny Big Socks - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow

... nothing can satisfy the thirst of this gulf, not even should you plunge therein the germs of the entire world. Alas! then, my poor boy —his fortune, his generative hopes, his eternal future, his entire self, more than himself, have been engulfed in this sewer, like a grain of corn in the jaws of a bull. By this means become an old orphan I, who speak, shall have no greater joy than to see burning, this demon, nourished with blood and gold. This Arachne who has drawn out and sucked more marriages, more families in the seed, more ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac

... existence in vain! Though more honourable than he, it is indeed evident that silk and satins only serve to swathe this rotten trunk of mine, and choice wines and rich meats only to gorge the filthy drain and miry sewer of this body of mine! Wealth! and splendour! ye are no more than contaminated ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... Maillard had generously allowed them not only the tar and feathers (which constituted his "system"), but some bread and abundance of water. The latter was pumped on them daily. At length, one escaping through a sewer, gave ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... that flood of foulness? Was he, who had done nothing, to smirch his own little daughter's life; to smirch his dead brother, their dead mother—himself, his own valuable, important future? And all for a sewer rat! Let him hang, let the fellow hang if he must! And that was not certain. Appeal! Petition! He might—he should be saved! To have got thus far, and then, by his own action, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... movement, nothing but a double line of dull, flat-faced houses, a double stretch of wet flagstones which gleamed in the lamplight, and a double rush of water in the gutters which swirled and gurgled towards the sewer gratings. The door which faced them was blotched and discoloured, and a faint light in the fan pane above, it served to show the dust and the grime which covered it. Above in one of the bedroom windows, there was a ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... lights alone fell on the red dresses of the women at the ghats, and on the shaven, shiny heads of hundreds of amphibious boys who were swimming and aquatically romping in the canal, which is at once the sewer and the ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)

... like it. They like to catch 'em in their teeth. I don't. But that's not saying that I'm no good. You know the old gag of the lion and the little mousie, and how the mouse came along and chewed the lion out of the net. Well, that's me. I'm no lion going 'round seeking whom I may devour.' I'm just a sewer rat. But I can tell you all," he cried, slapping the table with his hand, "that, if it hadn't been for little mousie, every one of you lions would have been shot against a stone wall. And if I can't prove it, you can take a shot at me. I've been ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis

... through, like pursuer and pursued, the busy streets cleared themselves in a twinkling; and we rode through lanes of faces yellow in the lamplight, or in the darker places like blurs of scrabbled whiteness. So I leaned forward and let the beast take his chance of uneven causeway and open sewer. I expected nothing less than a broken neck, and for at least half a mile, as we flew upward to the castle, I think that the certainty of naught worse than a broken arm would positively have pleasured me. At least, I would very willingly have compounded ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... its day, and in greater or less degree, the end designed by it. Having done that, it has sunk into the general mass of stale and loathed calumnies. It is the very cast-off slough of a polluted and shameless press. Incapable of further mischief, it lies in the sewer, lifeless and despised. It is not now, Sir, in the power of the honorable member to give it dignity or decency, by attempting to elevate it, and to introduce it into the Senate. He cannot change it from what ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... horseman he had been, the deviltry of him, the lust of life he had had, the greatness of his possessions and how he had foregone all this beauty to be hammered into the defilement of the trenches like a rat, cornered in a sewer. ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... execution. Since that date much discussion has taken place, and some little action; meanwhile the sanitary requirements of the city are growing more urgent, and the pressure created from this cause will enforce some decision before long. Whether the new waterway is to be practically an open sewer or a ship canal remains yet to be seen, but it is tolerably certain that its dimensions and volume of water must approximate to the latter, if the large populations of other towns are to be satisfied. In fact the actual necessities are so great as regards sectional area of canal and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various

... palatable to the active and the efficient by the lavish use of poetry and hyperbole. For instance, we learn: "He who makes the canvas is as useful as he that paints the picture. He who cleanses the sewer and prevents disease is as useful as the physician who cures the malady after it has been contracted."[1055] To learn painting or medicine requires at least ten years' study; sewer-cleaning requires no study. The offer of equal rewards for an hour's work at painting, at amputating in a hospital, ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... a side street where a number of men were at work digging a long and deep ditch in which to lay a new sewer. ...
— The Woggle-Bug Book • L. Frank Baum

... whir of wheels, the wheeze of brakes, the tremor of machinery, the rumble of cab, the clatter of hoof-beat, the cry of child and hackman, the haunting murmur of millions like the moan of the sea borne on breezes winged with the odours of saloon and kitchen, stable and sewer—the crash of a storm of brute forces on the senses, tearing the nerves, crushing the spirit, bruising the soul, and strangling the memory of a ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... as he felt better. But Cadman, although he very soon came round, abstained from every token of gratitude. Falling with his mouth wide open in surprise, he had filled it with gravel of inferior taste, as a tidy sewer pipe ran out just there, and at every ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... is in good shape for about thirty feet, then you'll find a fall. Clean all the rock and dirt out until you break through into the storm sewer, then come back. And you better be alone. If you tip the cops both you and the old stew go out ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison

... above, and one would have got out of the balcone, but it was not open; the other went up to fetch down his children, that were in bed; so all got clear out of the house. And no sooner so, but the house fell down indeed, from top to bottom. It seems my Lord Southampton's canaille—[sewer]—did come too near their foundation, and so weakened the house, and down it came; which, in every respect, is a most extraordinary passage. By and by into his closet and did our business with him. But I did not speed as I expected in a business ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... the canal. But it quickly struck a sewer whose odor was more than the workers could endure. It was abandoned, and a tunnel begun eastward, the most difficult part of it being to make an opening in the thick foundation wall. The hope of liberty, however, will bear man up through the most exhausting labors, and this fatiguing ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... rwe ryftyly {er}-on o re erue kake[gh], & bry{n}ge[gh] butt{er} wyth-al, & by e bred sette[gh] 636 Mete; messe[gh] of mylke he merkke[gh] bytwene, Sye{n} potage & polment i{n} plater honest; As sewer i{n} a god assyse he serued hem fayre, Wyth sadde semblau{n}t & swete of ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various

... writes:—'How can it be suffered that all manner of filth should still be thrown even into this street [High Street] continually? How long shall the capital city of Scotland, yea, and the chief street of it, stink worse than a common sewer?' Wesley's Journal, iii. 52. Baretti (Journey from London to Genoa, ii.255) says that this was the universal practice in Madrid in 1760. He was driven out of that town earlier than he had intended to leave it by the dreadful stench. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... gambier (used for chewing with the betel or areca nut), tea (little used by the natives) and earth-nut and coco-nut oil. There are no Municipal rates and taxes, the tidal river acting as a self cleansing street and sewer at the same time; neither are there any demands from a ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher

... his blackness ceased, or does thy light indeed, The sheen of the filthy countenance, no more in thee abound? O tomb, thou art neither kitchen-stove nor sewer-pool for me! How comes it then that mire and coal at once in ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous

... the center line of the road near the ditch line and at least 4 feet deep so as to keep the ground water level well down. They must be carefully laid to line and grade. A good outlet must be provided and the last few joints of pipe should be bell-and-spigot sewer pipe with the joints filled with cement mortar. The opening of the tile should be covered with a coarse screen to prevent animals ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg

... refuse to take offence, as long as by not taking offence you can wriggle yourself forward in the band of journalistic reptiles. You will be revenged on me, in that case, some day; you will lie in wait for me with a dirty bludgeon, and steal on me out of a sewer. If you do, permit me to assure you that I don't care. But if you are already in a rage, if you are about tearing up this epistle, and are starting to assault me personally, or at least to answer ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... me, who may her sewer be? And who cupbearer, too?" "My own right hand her sewer is; ...
— Hymns, Songs, and Fables, for Young People • Eliza Lee Follen

... herself in every way. Her clothes, of her own making, were now as neat as they had been before untidy. Her leisure time during the summer's herding had not been misemployed, and she was fast acquiring the reputation of being the best reader, writer, and sewer in the school; and no small pride did she feel in her acquirements. In short, as Mrs Stirling declared, "she had become a decent, purpose-like lass, and Lilias Elder should have the credit of it." Of the last fact Elsie was as well persuaded as Nancy was; and her gratitude ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson

... home to dinner after all. The water had got into the basement at the store, he telephoned, one of the flood-gates in a sewer having leaked, and they were moving some of the departments to an upper floor. I had expected to have him in the house that evening, and now I was left ...
— The Case of Jennie Brice • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... 1908, thirteen prisoners in the jail at Easton, Pennsylvania, were taken ill with typhoid fever. They had not been near any sick persons and their food and water were found to be pure. All those sick were in cells in one end of the prison. About twenty feet from this end a sewer had been uncovered two weeks before and left open. This sewer carried the waste from the hospital where several patients were sick with the fever. Flies fed on the waste in the sewer and then with the germs sticking to their feet flew into the cells of the prisoners and walked over their cups, ...
— Health Lessons - Book 1 • Alvin Davison

... cannot possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a Verdurin!" he cried, tossing up his head and arrogantly straightening his body. "God knows that I have honestly attempted to pull Odette out of that sewer, and to teach her to breathe a nobler and a purer air. But human patience has its limits, and mine is at an end," he concluded, as though this sacred mission to tear Odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasms dated from longer ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... with watercourses. No river crosses them, for the Rother curves close under Rye Hill, though these marshes were made by its ancient mouth, when it was the River Limine and ran into the Channel at Old Romney. There are a few big watercourses—the New Sewer, the Yokes Sewer, the White Kemp Sewer—there are a few white roads, and a great many marsh villages—Brenzett, Ivychurch, Fairfield, Snargate, Snave—each little more than a church with a farmhouse or two. Here and there little deserted chapels lie out on the marsh, officeless ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith

... most moral, he is only preparing to mortify the unsuspecting reader by putting a pitiful hoax upon him. This is a most unaccountable anomaly. It is as if the eagle were to build its eyry in a common sewer, or the owl were seen soaring to the mid-day sun. Such a sight might make one laugh, but one would not wish or expect it to occur ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... well that fish do not usually bite at a piece of string without bait or hook; but he thought that for once in a way, and for him, they might make an exception to their rule; and in his inexhaustible confidence, he carried it so far as to fish in the street with a whip through the grating of a sewer. He would draw up the whip from time to time excitedly, pretending that the cord of it was more heavy, and that he had caught a treasure, as in a story that ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... of a mind that's a sewer; Well, 'e knows what it is, for I'll lay 'e's bin there. And you'd make a 'orse into cat'smeat on skewer. My eye, but just ain't you a nice-spoken pair! I ain't goin' to foller you two like a shadder, Your 'eads is a darned ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various

... give to her at Christmas. He even walked for an hour after each lunch, to get the smell of grease out of his clothes, lest she suspect.... A patient, quiet, anxious, courteous, little aging man, in a lunch-room that was noisy as a subway, nasty as a sewer excavation. ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis

... geflossen ist, das ist nicht war wesen, und hat kein wesen anders dan in dem volkomen, sunder es ist ein zufal oder ein glast und ein schin, der nicht wesen ist oder nicht wesen hat anders, dan in dem sewer, da der glast us flusset, als in der sunnen oder ...
— Memories • Max Muller

... elapsed, until Sir Lukin received a printed sheet in the superscription of a former military comrade, who had marked a paragraph. It was one of those journals, now barely credible, dedicated to the putrid of the upper circle, wherein initials raised sewer-lamps, and Asmodeus lifted a roof, leering hideously. Thousands detested it, and fattened their crops on it. Domesticated beasts of superior habits to the common will indulge themselves with a luxurious roll in carrion, for a revival ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... beyond this, there are all the offensive, aggressive uses of the ballot. We want a sewer here, a bridge there, a lamp-post or a hydrant yonder. A woman's nose will scent a defective drain where ten men pass it by, but votes get these things looked after. We want a new schoolhouse, or more brains or ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... provide for a hearing or review of assessments, generally deprive a complaining owner of property without due process of law.[603] In contrast, when an attempt is made to cast upon particular property a certain proportion of the construction cost of a sewer not calculated by any mathematical formula, the taxpayer has a right ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... forty acres in extent, and contain a large piece of ornamental water, on the shore of which is a pavilion, or summer-house, with frescoes by Eastlake, Maclise, Landseer, Dyce, and others, illustrating Milton's "Comus." The channel of the Tyburn, now a sewer, passes under the palace. The Marble Arch, at the north-east corner of Hyde Park, was first designed to face the palace, where ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... provisions they could secure. The greater part of these miserable creatures are in a most deplorable condition from hunger and the poisonous atmosphere of their hiding places. On Friday, at the angle of the Rue Vavin and the outer Boulevard, the scavengers found five bodies in the sewer, one that of an officer, and all mutilated by rats. The bodies were brought out by means of ropes, and after search for papers and documents, were interred in ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy

... fiery lecherous look, fastening on him with all the wild fury of her forty-five years, with the cynicism of the sham saint who has thrown away her mask, and who, after long fasting, continence and privation, finds at length the means of glutting herself, and wallows more than any other in the sewer of obscenities ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France

... in the Powers of Darkness, Lawford, as firmly as I believe he and they are powerless—in the long run. They—what shall we say?—have surrendered their intrinsicality. You can just go through evil, as you can go through a sewer, and come out on the other side too. A loathsome process too. But there—we are not speaking of any such monstrosities, and even if we were, you and I with God's help would just tire them out. And that ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare

... made a fool of yourself, and that we hain't made no fool of you. Of course we couldn't help laughin' to see you actin' so redickerlous, Tom, and all about a little piece of cheese, too. A feller would er thought, Tom, that you'd been dumped in a sewer, to see you carry on; but when you get one er them crazy notions in your head, why, there's no doin' anything with you, but to let you ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey

... of Norfolk's. This Edward Hall was then a squire, a little above the condition of a groom, in the Duchess's service. His parents dwelled still on the farm which was called Neot's End, because it was in the angle of the great dyke called St Neot's and the little sewer where St Radigund's land had ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford

... down on that bottom we've found as good clay for pottery, sewer-pipes, and paving-brick as exists anywhere. Back there where you saw that bluff along the river—looks as if it's sliding down into the water—remember it? Well, there's probably the only place in the ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... miserably on in that sunken sewer. He dropped a lucky one through a barn the same afternoon and lobbed a few wides over during the next night, but again nothing out of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various

... both knights and ladies, were glad at their coming. The servants of the three kings were not idle, and started to raise the high-seats. Hunolt and Sindolt had work enow, for they were the sewer and the butler, and they arranged the chairs; to Ortwin, for that he helped them, Gunther gave thanks. As for Rumult, the chief cook, I ween he knew how to order his underlings. Ha! what meats they made ready against the feast, in their huge ...
— The Fall of the Niebelungs • Unknown

... which he took home to fill up in the evening. He used to run out just before midnight to post them in the nearest pillar-box. And that was all that ever came of it. In his own words: he might just as well have dropped them all properly addressed and stamped into the sewer grating. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... wife isn't half the woman she was since you took her into the valley. You don't look any better for it, either. No, sir, believe me, beauty's all very well, but it's not good to live with—And, by the way, have you had your well looked at lately? That valley is just a beautiful sewer for the drainage of the hills; a very market-town for all the germs and ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne

... again! I could start this next week with a couple o' pals; But yer gondoler's 'ardly my form, and I never wos nuts on canals. WAGGLES says they're not like the Grand Junction, as creeps sewer-like through our parks; Well, WAGGLES may sniff; I'm not sure, up to now, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various

... defend Your marches, I was prick'd with some reproof, As one that let foul wrong stagnate and be, By having look'd too much thro' alien eyes, And wrought too long with delegated hands, Not used mine own: but now behold me come To cleanse this common sewer of all my realm, With Edyrn and with others: have ye look'd At Edyrn? have ye seen how nobly changed? This work of his is great and wonderful. His very face with change of heart is changed, The ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... from large towns, the appearance of a stranger, down to a comparatively recent period, excited a similar commotion amongst the villagers, and the word would pass from door to door, "Dost knaw'im?" "Naya." "Is 'e straunger?" "Ey, for sewer." "Then paus' 'im— 'Eave a duck [stone] at 'im— Fettle 'im!" And the "straunger" would straightway find the "ducks" flying about his head, and be glad to make his escape from the village ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... the purgatory of heat and dust, of baking, blistering pavements, of cracked and powdered fields, of dead, stifling night air, from which every tonic and antiseptic quality seems eliminated, leaving a residuum of sultry malaria and all-diffusing privy and sewer gases, that lasts from the first of July to near the middle of September! But when October is reached, the memory of these things is afar off, and the glory of the days is a ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... throbbing horse beneath him, the birds and beasts round him, and this gallant girl swaying and rejoicing too beside him! What a contrast was all this to that terrible afternoon, only a few hours away—of suspense and skulking like a rat in a sewer; in a dark, close passage underground breathing death and silence round him! An escape with the fresh air in the face and the glorious galloping music of hoofs is another matter to an escape contrived by holding the breath and fearing to move in a mean hiding-hole. And as all ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... left the whole of it at his death for the purpose of erecting a chapel called St. Agnes, which soon after became the church of St. Eustace. He further directed that, by way of expiation, his body should be thrown into the sewer which drained the offal from the market, and covered with a large stone; this sewer up to the end of the last century ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... Jonathan is going to turn it into a colossal mill-sewer. So make hay while the sun shines, or rather when the rain falls, and see ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... cleared his conscience, Ned committed the cash to his vest pocket, and presented the purse with its remaining contents to the rats in a neighbouring sewer. ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... enunciation with which he had in former times swayed the multitude at those meetings of protest against society, he explained to this half-dozen men and the quiet sewer, who stopped her machine to listen, the greatness of universal work, which every day laboured on the earth, to subdue it and force it ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... the tan-yard, where not hides, but nets are barked; skips on board of a brig in the quay-pool; and a poor collier's 'prentice dies, and goes to his own place. What harm has he done? Is it his sin that, ill-fed and well-beaten daily, he has been left to sleep on board, just opposite the sewer's mouth, in a berth some four feet long by two feet high ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... taking him by the nape of the neck and dropping him down the sewer, but I turned to Mr. Thompson and talked cutlery. I told him I had a line of No. 1 goods at low prices, every blade warranted, and put up in extra nice style ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher

... mind is not just made for it. It takes a thinker, that it does. And I Did not get into it so easy, either. I read a lot of books before I saw The greatness of Philosophy. Now I wonder How I got on without it. Why, to-day I could not clean a sewer in peace of mind If I did not know that, when I got home, I could ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke

... byles; Where the cholera, the cyclone, and the crow Come and go; Where the merchant deals in indigo and tea, Hides and ghi; Where the Babu drops inflammatory hints In his prints; Stands a City—Charnock chose it—packed away Near a Bay— By the Sewage rendered fetid, by the sewer Made impure, By the Sunderbunds unwholesome, by the swamp Moist and damp; And the City and the Viceroy, as we ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... all such-like sent down the sewer. The rats may have them if they are disposed. Give wheaten or oatmeal porridge, bread or Saltcoats biscuits, with good buttermilk, and the poor creature, half dead with poisonous "drops," begins ere ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... weren't meant to know this. It would not have done to show you the way out of the trap. Why—the Parliament Committee at Lincoln ordered the Snow-sewer sluice to be pulled up to-day, to drown the king's lands, and get rid of his tenants. It will be as good as a battle ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau

... woman who did not speak of the sail between Glasgow and Greenock as desperately tedious, and by all means to be avoided. Then in warm summer weather the Clyde is nearly as filthy as the Thames; and sailing over a sewer, even through fine scenery, has its disadvantages. So we resolve to go with our friend by railway to Greenock, and thus come upon the Clyde where it has almost opened into the sea. Quite opened into the sea, we might say: ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... latter is the instinctual "animal Soul" and is the hotbed of those passions, which, as just shown, are lulled instead of being killed, and locked up in their breasts by some imprudent enthusiasts. Do they still hope to turn thereby the muddy stream of the animal sewer into the crystalline waters of life? And where, on what neutral ground can they be imprisoned so as not to affect man? The fierce passions of love and lust are still alive and they are allowed to still remain in the place of their birth—that same animal soul; for both the higher and the lower ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky

... replied. "The luck that feller Kresnick got it is something you wouldn't believe at all. He could fall down a sewer manhole and come up in a dress suit and a clean shave already. He cleans me out last night two hundred dollars and the commission on that ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass

... thought. What has it brought him but trouble? Lemme give you something to chew on. New York's the biggest city of the biggest, freest country on God's green footstool. You little sewer rats pull wires and think you run it. Get wise, you poor locoed gink. You run it about as much as that fly on the wheel of yore taxi drives the engine. Durand's the whole works by his way of it, but when some one calls his bluff see ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine

... brook had been, a new line of sewer was laid, and my wife suggested "Sewerside," but after punishing her with a kiss for her bad pun, ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell

... Do you know what Madame Campan used to tell us?—'My dears, as long as a man is a minister, adore him; when he falls, help to drag him in the gutter. Powerful, he is a sort of god; fallen, he is lower than Marat in the sewer, because he is living, and Marat is dead. Life is a series of combinations, and you must study them and understand them if you want to keep ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac

... seem to be an animal," Mrs. Wood went on, "no matter how ugly and repulsive it is, but what has some lovable qualities. I have just been reading about some sewer rats, Louise Michel's rats." ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders

... sewer of a Ramgunga! Findlayson, this is two months before anything could have been expected, and the left bank is littered up with stuff still. Two ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling

... an experienced sewer, but she brought to her work an enthusiasm that stood loyally beside her aunt's experience, and soon some of the curtains ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill

... services to the rebellion are acknowledged by the gift of a splendid mansion situated in New York, in the social sewer of American society. The donors, are the shavers from Wall Street, individuals who coin money from the blood and from the misfortunes of the people, and who by high rents mercilessly crush the poor; who sacrifice nothing for the sacred ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... Bicetre and approach Saint-Cloud. They arrive from thirty, forty, and sixty leagues off, from Champagne, from Lorraine, from the whole circuit of country devastated by the hailstorm. All hover around Paris and are there engulfed as in a sewer, the unfortunate along with criminals, some to find work, others to beg and to rove about under the injurious prompting of hunger and the rumors of the public thoroughfares. During the last days of April,[1205] the clerks at the tollhouses note the entrance of "a frightful number of poorly ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... yet in her first youth and adroit and robust of her person; nor was there aught that pertaineth unto a woman, such as works of broidery in silk and the like, but she did it better than any other of her sex. Moreover, said he, there was no sewer, or in other words, no serving-man, alive who served better or more deftly at a nobleman's table than did she, for that she was very well bred and exceeding wise and discreet. He after went on to extol her as knowing better how to ride ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... avers that it has just been sold to a gentleman. But they have another. By this time the farmer wishes he had bought the horse. When any coin slips from between our fingers, and rolls down through a grating into the sewer, we are always sure that it was a sovereign, and not a half-penny. Yes, and the fish which drops back from the line into the river is always the biggest take—or mistake—of the day. And this horse was a bargain, and the three in disguise say so, and wish they had ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland

... on, melancholy settled upon the flat children. The parents noted it, and wondered if there could be sewer gas in the apartments. One over-anxious mother called in a physician, who gave the poor little child some medicine which made it quite ill. No one suspected the truth, though the children were often heard to say that it was evident that there was to be no Christmas ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various

... Count of Longueville; and of Weira, wife of Turolf de Pont Audomere. The brother of these three sisters was another Herfastus, Abbot of St. Evrau; who was the father of Osbernus de Crepon, Steward of the Household, and Sewer to the Conqueror. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various

... store, the hotel, a motion-picture theater, a town hall, the bank, and the electric-light-and-power plant, and with the profits from these enterprises, Port Agnew had paved streets, sidewalks lined with handsome electroliers, and a sewer system. It was an admirable little sawmill town, and if the expenses of maintaining it exceeded the income, The Laird met the deficit and assumed all the worry, for he wanted his people to be happy and prosperous beyond ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... dwelling upon those four squares, over and over, until she felt as if each side were as long as the Green Mountains. She calculated again and again how little time she would have to play with Jane—only about an hour, for she must allow a half-hour for tea. She was not a swift sewer when she sewed fine and even stitches, and she knew she could not finish those squares before four o'clock. One hour!—and she and Jane wanted to play dolls, and make wreaths out of oak-leaves, and go down in the lane after thimbleberries, ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins

... with her, and then he had, during a few days, such a revolt from his slavery, that he extricated himself from the sewer, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... conditions, such as lack of drainage, open cess-pools, sewer gas, decaying vegetable matter, etc., may favor the contraction of the disease, but cannot cause it unless the specific germ, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague

... something else. You have to, you know, or you would go all to pieces.... All the same, it is astonishing what human creatures can get used to! I believe they could make themselves comfortable at the bottom of a sewer. It really disgusts a man, for I was just the same myself. You mustn't suppose that I was like this chap here, always staring at a death's head. Like everybody else, I thought the whole thing was idiotic; but life is like that, as far ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... capricious as you are, you would be better pleased (hiding it carefully from that grave side of you which bestows devout little books and carbolic acid upon the indigent) that your protegee should be a witch than a serving-maid, a maker of philters rather than a knitter of stockings and sewer of shirts. ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... sowl!" said he, "as there's plague in y'r body, and hell in the slide of y'r feet, like the trail of the red spider. And out o' that come ye, Heldon, for I know y're there. Out of that, ye beast! . . . But how can ye go back—you that's rolled in that sewer—to the loveliest woman that ever trod the neck o' the world! Damned y' are in every joint o' y'r frame, and damned is y'r sowl, I say, for bringing sorrow to her; and I hate you as much for that, as I could worship her was she not your wife and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... pavement about 14 ft. long, 12 ft. wide and 14 ft. deep. Evidently, the fine sand had gradually settled into the voids caused by the loss of material at the face, and the settlement broke the brick sewer over the heading. The sewer was temporarily repaired, and the hole in the street was filled before morning. A tight bulkhead was built across the heading, and work was abandoned at that point. The north drift was advanced ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace and Francis Mason

... forethought, But spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught, Of the weight by day and the watch by night, And much wrong now that used to be right, So, thanking him, declined the hunting— 290 Was conduct ever more affronting? With all the ceremony settled— With the towel ready, and the sewer Polishing up his oldest ewer, And the jennet pitched upon, a piebald, 295 Black-barred, cream-coated, and pink eye-balled— No wonder if the Duke was nettled! And when she persisted nevertheless— Well, I suppose here's the ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... another stair no more than in time to escape a ragged rabble, headed by Shovel, who, finding their quarry gone, turned on their leader viciously, and had gloomy views of life till his cap was kicked down a sewer, which made the ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie

... undoubtedly the cause of much disease and many deaths. A basement beneath the house is advantageous, but the greatest of care should be given to construct it in accord with sanitary laws. It should be thoroughly drained that there may be no source of dampness, but should not be connected with a sewer or a cesspool. It should have walls so made as to be impervious to air and water. An ordinary brick or stone wall is inefficient unless well covered with good Portland cement polished smooth. The floors should likewise be covered ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... wife, "a chronicler of small-beer," with a perfectly negative expression. One might guess she did no harm, and fear she did no good,—that she saved the hire of an upper servant,—that she was an inveterate sewer and cleaner, and would leave the world in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

... sewer trenches cost a little more, for they were as deep as those for the water, and a little wider. Eight hundred feet of main sewer, a three-hundred-foot branch to the house, and short branches from barns, pens, and ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... authority there or anywhere else, hasn't a farthing to his name, nor a regiment of soldiers; he is not fighting, he is not intending to fight, he means to make no further resistance; in truth, there is but one thing that he is intending to do—give the whole thing up, pitch his crown into the sewer, and run away to Scotland. There are the ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain

... I know where he was," Alvyn Karffard said. "On Imhotep, silver is a monetary metal. On Agni, they use silver for sewer-pipe. Agni is a hot-star planet, class B-3 sun. And on Agni they are tough, and they have good weapons. That could be where the ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper

... Pilgrim glided through a thickly settled district, reminding us of the Monongahela. Sewer-pipe and vitrified-brick works, and iron and steel plants, abound on the narrow bottoms. The factories and mills themselves generally wear a prosperous look; but the dependent towns vary in appearance, from clusters of shabby, down-at-the-heel cabins, to lines ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... been put up, sustained by posts, at nearly each of these, to protect its goods from sun and snow. Before going two hundred yards we come to a little stone bridge, about five feet wide, and with no parapet, over a sewer, in front of which is an open space like a small square. But look! Do you see that man squatting down there on a mat? Is he not picturesque with his long white flowing robe, his large pointed straw hat and his black face? As he lies there with outstretched hands, dried ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... massacres; and so zealous are they to do the honours of the place, that I might, but for disinclination on my part, pass half my time in visiting the spots where they were perpetrated. It was but to-day I was requested to go and examine a kind of sewer, lately described by Louvet, in the Convention, where the blood of those who suffered at the Guillotine was daily carried in buckets, by ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... the patronage of Ludwig I. were laid out and built up without any reference to this first necessity of all thoroughfares. Even the Theresien Strasse has not long rejoiced in a "canal;" and the sewer was laid in that finest part of the Gabelsberger Strasse which runs past the Pinakothek and the Polytechnic School as late as the summer of 1873, while the upper end of the same street, which is notoriously unhealthy, is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various

... breadth of back: it was the renegade's trick to appear pointedly unaware of your existence unless it suited his purpose to turn at you with a devouring glare before he let loose a torrent of foamy, abusive jargon that came like a gush from a sewer. Now he emitted only a sulky grunt; the second engineer at the head of the bridge-ladder, kneading with damp palms a dirty sweat-rag, unabashed, continued the tale of his complaints. The sailors had a good time ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... several of his companions, succeeded in escaping to the hills in the neighbourhood of Powerscourt; but, exhausted and bewildered, they were again taken, and returned to their dungeons. Two years later, the heir of Tyrconnell was more fortunate. In Christmas week, 1592, he again escaped, through a sewer of the Castle, with Henry and Art O'Neil, sons of John the Proud. In the street they found O'Hagan, the confidential agent of Tyrone, waiting to guide them to the fastness of Glenmalure. Through the deep snows of the Dublin and Wicklow highlands the prisoners and their guide plodded their ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... the end, a narrow house, with tall old-fashioned windows curtained with amber satin. It was a small, dark house, and exhaled occasional odours of garlic and main sewer: but the staircase was a gem in old oak, and the furniture in the triple telescopic drawing rooms, dwindling to a closet at the end, was genuine ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... there was more water, which probably came from a leaky sewer; it was not enough to form a stream, but just kept the ground thoroughly saturated. There was a continued though hardly perceptible flow of earth through every crevice in the timbering during the six or eight weeks between the ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace, Francis Mason and S. H. Woodard

... venture upon him," said the adjutator; "so give me a napkin that I may look like a sewer, and fetch up the food which I directed ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... will that my carver, when he cometh to the ewerye boorde, doe there washe together with the Sewer, and that done be armed (videlt.) with an armeinge towell cast about his necke, and putt under his girdle on both sides, and one napkyn on his lefte shoulder, and an other on the same arme; and thence beinge broughte by my Gentleman Usher to my table, with two curteseyes thereto, the one ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... of cold water over him, and cried out, "Thieves! thieves!" in such a manner that the hunchback was forced to run away; but in his fear he failed to clear the chain stretched across the bottom of the road and fell into the common sewer, which the sheriff had not then replaced by a sluice to discharge the mud into the Loire. In this bath the mechanician expected every moment to breathe his last, and cursed the fair Tascherette, for her husband's name being Taschereau, she was so called by way of a little ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... April rainfall would turn the dry ditch into an open sewer—a vast trough of muddy water—in which draggled women would paddle for submerged household gods. Many would prefer to tramp back to the town at night and sleep in their own shrapnel-riddled homes. But the majority stayed, of choice or of necessity, incubating sickness in that fetid ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... in the street said it was a dog; a coach-dog running and jumping at the heads of the fire-horses. In falling you struck your head against the iron grating of a sewer inlet." ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... communicate with the Seine?" he asked himself. "No, we are too far off it. Why this opening, then?... Ah, I have it! It is a drain, a sewer, it ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... that his princedom lay Close on the borders of a territory, Wherein were bandit earls, and caitiff knights, Assassins, and all flyers from the hand Of Justice, and whatever loathes a law: And therefore, till the King himself should please To cleanse this common sewer of all his realm, He craved a fair permission to depart, And there defend his marches; and the King Mused for a little on his plea, but, last, Allowing it, the Prince and Enid rode, And fifty knights rode with them, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... the room, and a greenish sofa across another. The mantelpiece was of white marble with gray spots; on one side of it stood an Alaskan "grass basket" full of photographs, and on the other an inverted section of a sewer-pipe painted with daisies and full of gilded cat-tails tied with a blue ribbon. Near the piano straddled a huge easel of imitation brass up-holding the crayon picture of Ida's baby sister enlarged from a photograph. Across ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... to make room for fresh occupants; here, at the time of the autumn massacre, are flung the backward grubs; here, lastly, lies a good part of the crowd killed by the first touch of winter. During the rack and ruin of November and December, this sewer becomes crammed with ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... this, but we imply it, and we often find that the mere utterance of the one word, "toy gardening," has a magical effect to suggest all the rest and to overwhelm with contrition the bad taste and frivolity of many a misguided attempt at adornment. At that word of exorcism joints of cerulean sewer-pipe crested with scarlet geraniums, rows of whited cobbles along the walk or drive like a cannibal's skulls around his hut, purple paint-kegs of petunias on the scanty door-steps, crimson wash-kettles of verbenas, ant-hill rockeries, and well-sweeps and curbs ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable

... come of this, had it not been that treachery was at work. There was a scoundrel, who was brother of the priest of one of the parishes near the wall, and both were in favour of the enemy. The priest's residence was near a sewer, which communicated with the moat outside the walls. The entrance was closed by an iron grating. Were this removed, troops could enter, by the sewer, into ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty

... could be cemented down From growing under pavements of a town; The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame. Is water wood to serve a brook the same? How else dispose of an immortal force No longer needed? Staunch it at its source With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone In fetid darkness still to live and run— And all for nothing it had ever done Except forget to go in fear perhaps. No one would know except for ancient maps That such a brook ran water. But I wonder If, from its being kept forever under, These thoughts may not have risen ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... to offer him a suck of a piece of licorice I had. Then I saw that he had stopped and was hunched above the grating of a sewer. I could but think that his spirits had reached such an ebb that nothing save the contemplation of the foulest depths might salve his misery. But I was mistaken! His hand moved above the grating. Something flashed. Then I swelled my ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche

... agreed Van Emmon, handing over the dish of chopped meat. The girl carefully folded the contents into the now spongelike omelet as he went on: "By the way, a neighbor of mine told me, just before I left, that he was having trouble with a broken sewer. ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... and drainage, the great object to be attained in house drainage is to prevent the sewer gas from passing from the main sewer into the house drain. It was the custom to place a flap at the junction of the house drain with the sewer; but this flap is useless for preventing sewer gas from passing up the house drain. The plan was therefore adopted of placing a water ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various

... was that day overseer and stood before the Queen bareheaded, Sir Richard Newel was carver and the Earl of Suffolk's brother cup-bearer, Sir John Stewart, Sewer, the Lord Clifford (instead of the Earl of Warwick) Pantler, the Lord Willoby (instead of the Earl of Arundel) chief Butler, the Lord Gray Caterer, Naperer, the Lord Audley (in the stead of the Earl ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.

... Contaminated. For a time this seemed to end the danger, as the waste was soaked up by the soil, and eaten by its hungry bacteria and drunk up again by the roots of plants. But when ten or a dozen houses began to combine and run their drain-pipes together into a large drain called a sewer, then this could not open upon the surface of the ground, but had to be run into some stream, or brook, in order to be carried away. As cities and towns, which had been obliged to give up their wells, were beginning to collect the water from these ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... I have never been so far tempted from the straight path as to set foot within one,' the Puritan answered, 'nor have I ever been in that great sewer which is called London. I trust, however, that I with others of the faithful may find our way thither with our tucks at our sides ere this business is finished, when we shall not be content, I'll warrant, with shutting ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... a circle, which, "beginning at the northern gate of the King's Park, thence running northways, is bounded on the left by the King's garden-wall, and the gutter, or kennel, in a line wherewith it crosses the High Street to the Watergate, and passing through the sewer, is bounded by the walls of the Tennis Court and Physic Gardens, etc. It then follows the wall of the churchyard, joins the north west wall of St Ann's Yards, and going east to the clackmill-house, turns southward to the turnstile in the King's Park wall, and includes the whole King's Park within ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott

... pearls and false hair as Queen Venus, and jousting in this costume with every knight between Venice and Styria, all for her honour and glory; pulls the gallant in a basket up to her window, and then lets him drop down into the moat which is no better than a sewer; this grotesque and tragically resented end of Ulrich's first love service speaks volumes on the point. The stones in Nostradamus' "Lives of the Troubadours," the incidents in Gottfried's "Tristan und Isolde," nay, the adventures even in our expunged English "Morte d'Arthur," ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee

... always tell polluted water by its appearance, smell or taste. Unless from a sewer or drain, it may look clear and sparkling, with no smell and have a pleasant taste, so, water that is not known to be pure ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss

... after this event, he left the house for the first time, in his repaired cabriolet, when, as he drove down the rue de Bourgogne and was close to the sewer opposite to the Chamber of Deputies, the axle-tree broke in two, and the baron was driving so rapidly that the breakage would have caused the two wheels to come together with force enough to break his head, had it ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... of strong plank doors opening outward, and secured by heavy, oaken bars, slipped across them at the middle. The muggy dog-day had been very oppressive, even out of doors; but here in the corridor, it was intolerable. To breathe in the horrible concoction of smells, was like drinking from a sewer; the lungs, even as they involuntarily took it in, strove spasmodically to close their passages against it. It was impossible for one unaccustomed to such an atmosphere, to breathe, save by gasps. Bement stopped at one of the doors, and as he was raising ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy

... mixed up everything on the plate all together—made a sort of salad of it, in fact—and ate it with a spoon. A more disagreeable dish I have never tasted since the days when I used to do Willie Evans's "dags," by walking twice through a sewer, and was subsequently, on returning home, promptly put to bed, and made ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome

... such defiance of the elements, such security against cold and heat, against fire, flood and tempest! such economy! such immunity from all the ills that domestic life is heir to, from intractable servants to sewer-gas! ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner

... last, there is a rift within the lute; or would it better be called a leak in the sewer? Comstockery has not quite the standing that it once had. When it was made generally known that a postoffice official had said that any discussion of sex was obscene, there followed such a rattling fire of reprobation and condemnation even from many startled conventionalists, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... of a crowd tightening about a street corner she edged her way in. The iron plug to a corner sewer had been removed, a policeman and the shirt-sleeved figure of a man prone on the ground, red-faced and ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... and the south curb line of 31st Street. The borings, as a rule, were taken at intervals of approximately 100 ft., some deviation in these intervals being made in order to prevent injury to water, gas, and sewer connections, and, if the elevation of the surface of the rock, as determined by one of these borings, corresponded fairly well with the borings on either side of it, no intermediate borings were taken. When a discrepancy appeared, ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Site of the Terminal Station. Paper No. 1157 • George C. Clarke

... were sometimes braced with boards and cross pieces of wood, such as is often used when a sewer is dug through the streets, and again wicker-work, or jute bagging, might be used ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young

... over Ponte S. Angelo I was wont to look over the parapet at the opening of the sewer that carried off the dregs of that portion of the city where I was residing. One day I looked for it, and looked in vain. The Tiber had swelled and was overflowing its banks, and for a week or fortnight there could be no question, not a sewer in the vast city would be free to ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... as may be imagined from a consideration of the smallness of the houses, the compactness of the city, particularly the parts occupied by the people, and especially of the primitive system of sanitation, which was content to use the front street as a main sewer. There were, of course, no drains; at most there was a gutter along the middle of a street, or at each side of the roadway. It was the traditional practice to dump house and workshop refuse into the streets. Some of it was carried ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson

... an instance of humanity and presence of mind occurred at a place called Noyon, in France, which well deserves to be commemorated. Four men, who were employed in cleansing a sewer, were so affected by the foetid vapours, that they were unable to ascend. The lateness of the hour (for it was eleven at night) rendered it difficult to procure assistance, and the delay must have been fatal, had not a young girl, a servant in the family, at the hazard of her ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various

... you will not refuse it now! It is yours, yours alone. If you do not take it, I will throw it in the sewer. You will not refuse ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant

... to extricate himself. This meant that he turned away volumes of business which would have brought large returns, but he would not have his office fouled by this stream of corruption any more than he would seek health in a sewer. When these degenerate concerns were admitted to his office, they came as penitents seeking reformation. His regular clients were the corporations who had come to take his view, that a big business must be laid on broad and deep foundations of integrity all-around; that all compromises with blackmailing ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... Henriot falling on the roof of a building in a narrow street adjoining, was not killed; but he had scarcely recovered himself before he was recognized by some soldiers in quest of him: he then crawled into a sewer, close to the spot where he had fallen; when a soldier thrusting his bayonet into the sewer, put out one of his eyes, and forced ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... Sewer gas and emanations from sewage and filth will not communicate typhoid fever directly, but the latter afford nutriment for the growth of the germ, and after becoming infected, may eventually come in contact with drinking water or food, and so prove dangerous. ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various

... and lively in its hue, Which withers on the stalk from whence it grew, And dies uncropp'd; whilst he, admired, caress'd, Beloved, and everywhere a welcome guest, With brutes of rank and fortune plays the whore, For their unnatural lust a common sewer. Dine with Apicius—at his sumptuous board Find all, the world of dainties can afford— 350 And yet (so much distemper'd spirits pall The sickly appetite) amidst them all Apicius finds no joy, but, whilst he carves For every guest, the landlord sits and starves. The forest haunch, fine, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... the moment when the older inhabitants were at church, and by means of another flute which he began to play, all the boys in the town above the age of fourteen, to the number of a hundred and thirty, assembled round him; he led them to the neighbouring mountain, named Kopfelberg, under which is a sewer for the town, and where criminals are executed; these boys disappeared and were ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... these niggers, he'd know you'd be going to do away with his bread and cheese, as you may say. No, sirree, I ain't a fighting man; rubber's my line, but I want to get hold of that bit of syle—make sewer of it, as you may say; and if I'd got that job to do I should get another boatful of men if you could. Don't know of a British ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn

... love letter from the pains you take with it. Would you like me to come and help you with it?" the sewer ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine

... she will be glad to, and such a head sewer as you are can copy it most exact. Here she are now! Child, Mis' Pratt have been so complimenting of your looks and clothes that I'm sorter set up with ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess

... its low ceilings and dank airs. If one had the secret in his possession, he could go down through the mysterious trap door in the workshop of William Spantz, armourer to the Crown; or he might come up through a hidden aperture in the walls of the great government sewer, which ran directly parallel with and far below the walls of the quaint old building. One could take his choice of direction in approaching this hole in the huge sewer: he could come up from the river, half a mile ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon



Words linked to "Sewer" :   sewerage, drainpipe, sewer rat, needleworker, sewing-machine operator, cloaca, sewer water, sewage system, ill luck, tucker, toilet, bad luck, drain, gutter



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