"Swampy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Haines's Bluff. A continuous line of fortifications surrounded the city on the crest of the hill. This hill, the slopes of which were cut by deep ravines, was difficult of ascent in any part in the face of hostile defenders. The back country was swampy bottom land, covered with a rank growth of timber, intersected with lagoons and almost impassable except by a few rude roads. The opposite side of the river ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... a maze of islands large and small, of which the most important is Hongkong on account of its fine harbor. More than half a century ago the English seized upon this island and forced the Chinese to cede it to them. Then it was little more than a barren rock with a low swampy shore on which were a few villages inhabited by poor fisher folk. The swamps have been drained, gardens planted, and villas built, until now the once barren heights vie in beauty with the grass-grown slopes of the hills at the foot of which in the shade of ...
— The Shipwreck - A Story for the Young • Joseph Spillman
... of about four or five acres, and was closely hemmed in by the forest, which in picturesque variety and grouping of trees and foliage exceeded almost everything I had yet witnessed. The margins for some distance were swampy, and covered with large tufts of a fine grass called Matupa. These tufts in many places were overrun with ferns, and exterior to them a crowded row of arborescent arums, growing to a height of fifteen or twenty feet, formed a green palisade. Around the whole stood the taller forest ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... life Otis Yeere had fled for a few months, drifting, for the sake of a little masculine society, into Simla. When his leave was over he would return to his swampy, sour-green, undermanned district, the native Assistant, the native Doctor, the native Magistrate, the steaming, sweltering Station, the ill-kempt City, and the undisguised insolence of the Municipality ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... with a pleasant wind that blew in from the sea, and the light was wonderfully clear and shadowless as before rain, so that one could see all things over-plainly, as it were. The rounded top of Ashingdon hill seemed to tower higher than its wont, and close at hand, beyond the swampy meadows to our left, and I wondered that Cnut had not chosen that for his camping ground, though maybe it would have been less well placed for reaching the ships, owing to some shoaling of water that did not suit them. ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... take the circuit of the lake," said Norman. "I have gone round it several times; and there is plenty of hard ground, though there are some swampy places which it won't ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... set the trap in a spring of water or swampy [Page 172] spot. Lay a lump of moss over the pan, suspending the bait beyond the trap. The moss will offer a natural foot-rest, and the ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... he retires to the deepest shade of the forest; preferring the dry acclivity of the hill to repose on, rather than the low swampy ground below; and never, like the Buffalo, wallowing ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... the influence of the hearty meal and the invigorating wine, his courage was renewed and he felt he could easily complete the journey. All that day he passed through lonely and miserable looking country. Swampy lands and rice fields bordered either side of the river. About five o'clock he saw two men on the bank and called out to them, asking how far it was ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... entrenching, but that his right brigade had not yet had time to march on to the field. There was no possible way of finding out anything else at once. The chance seemed favourable. Montcalm knew he had to fight or starve, as he was completely cut off by land and water, except for one bad, swampy road in the valley of the St Charles; and he ordered ...
— The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf • William Wood
... provide a framework for the negotiation of a definitive agreement on territorial differences with Guatemala International disputes: border with Guatemala in dispute; negotiations to resolve the dispute have begun Climate: tropical; very hot and humid; rainy season (May to February) Terrain: flat, swampy coastal plain; low mountains in south Natural resources: arable land potential, timber, fish Land use: arable land: 2% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 2% forest and woodland: 44% other: 52% Irrigated land: 20 km2 (1989 est.) Environment: frequent ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that fee must go higher yet. Once last year, in company with Wisdom, he had been as far as the upper bog, and had wanted to go to the top. But Wisdom had dissuaded him. Now, even in the darkness the ground seemed familiar, and he tramped on up the swampy steep till presently he found himself near the sound of rushing water at the foot of the ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... country it ought to succeed. It has shown much adaptation for the volcanic soils of the Western mountain region, where it has been tried. On stiff clays it grows too slowly to be entirely satisfactory. It ought not to be sown on soils wet or swampy ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... stretch his neck out of joint, and she'll turn the heads of all the flowers. Wherever she goes, I can go back afterward and see the things she's seen, walk the path she's walked, hear the grasses whispering over all she's said; and if there's a place too swampy for her bits of feet; Holy Mother! Maybe—maybe she'd be putting the beautiful arms of her around me neck and letting me ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... hours, and the sun had passed the meridian, when I emerged from the forest into a wild, swampy flat,—"wild meadow," the guides call it,—through which the stream wound, and around which was a growth of tall larches backed by pines. Where the brook seemed to reenter the wood on the opposite side, stood two immense pines, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... quoted, that while there remained one acre of swamp land uncleared of South Carolina, I would raise my voice against restricting the importation of negroes. I am as thoroughly convinced as that gentleman is, that the nature of our climate, and the flat swampy situation of our country, obliges us to cultivate our land with negroes, and that without them South Carolina would soon be a ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... swampy woods, marshes, morasses, and the borders of rivers. Their usual time for seeking their food is early in the morning and during the twilight of the evening. They subsist principally upon insects and worms; for these they search among the decayed leaves, and probe the mud and ooze with their ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous
... mounds extends for half a mile eastward from Rich Fountain, along the valley of Brush Creek. They are fully 100 in number, and it is said there were formerly many more which are now leveled by cultivation. The ground is low, in some places swampy, so that water or mud surrounds many of them after ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... they advanced inland without rest, save at the breakfast hour, and again at mid-day to dine. Towards evening they observed that the country through which they were passing had changed much in character and aspect. The low and swampy region had given place to hillocks and undulating ground, all covered with the beautiful virgin forest with its palms and creepers and noble fruit-trees and rich vegetation, conspicuous among which magnificent ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... it lonely enough after my company had left; besides which, I clean lost my way, and was forced at last to seek the river and guide myself by that. Heavy work it was; for the river's bank was swampy and often impassable with bushes and woods, so that I had to go miles out of my way to circumvent them, leading my horse by the hand. At last, when I hardly knew where I was, night fell; and worn-out with weariness and hunger, I made for ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... October they reached Tanganyika, and rested, for they were tired, and several were sick, including Livingstone, who had been ill with his bowel disorder. The march went on slowly, and with few incidents. As the season advanced, rain, mist, swollen streams, and swampy ground became familiar. At the end of the year they were approaching the river Chambeze. Christmas had its thanksgiving: "I thank the good Lord for the good gift of his Son, ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... clump of silver birches bent over with the strain of last year's snow; and all along, near by the water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-oak, ash, and even chestnut flourishing still, in defiance of blight. Nor have I ever seen such sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thickets, in which elder and hazels and every conceivable bush and shrub and giant grass and cane make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink and the water-snake, and the imagination that would fain explore ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... week's shooting in the district, under the guidance of an old friend, Fundi Sangoro, Musa's "head gamekeeper," who assured me that the sable antelope and blanc boc, specimens of which I had not yet seen, inhabited some low swampy place called N'yama, or "Meat," not far distant, on the left bank of the Wale nullah. My companion unfortunately got fever here, and was prevented from going out, and I did little better; for although I waded up ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... refuge from the noise of battle and the troubles of a war-weary world, as one might suppose. It was surrounded by swamps everywhere. And it had been raining, of course. It always seems to have been raining in France during this war. There were duck boards over the swampy ground, and a single mis- step might send one prone in the ooze up ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... Carcajou again, Stefan was waiting for them with a strong team of horses able easily to negotiate the tote-road. This highway, in many places, had been repaired. Fallen trees were cut across and pulled to one side, swampy bits were corduroyed, big holes had been filled in. Indeed, the traffic had become important, all of a sudden, towards the Roaring Falls. Lumber had been hauled there, and many tools, and kegs of nails, and a gang of men ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... led them through parts less swampy, and, therefore, less densely tangled over than those nearer the "North Sea." "All the way was through woods very cool and pleasant," says the narrative, "by reason of those goodly and high trees, that grow there so thick." They were mounting by slow degrees ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... surely is the tramp of horse And jolt of cannon downward from the hill Toward our right here, by the swampy lakes That face Davout? Thus, as I sketched, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... but one or two occasions when we were fortunate enough to secure timber or some corrugated iron to roof our dug-outs. Normally we had only our mackintosh sheets. Rain turned the thick dust to a brown morass, and the little mule carts struggling past the swampy curve of Geoghegan's Bluff could hardly clamber up the Gully Ravine. It ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... illustrated by the following facts: in the Rig Veda wolf and lion are the most formidable beasts; the tiger is unknown and the elephant seldom alluded to; while in the Atharvan the tiger has taken the lion's place and the elephant is a more familiar figure. Now the tiger has his domicile in the swampy land about Benares, to which point is come the Atharvan Aryan, but not the Rig Vedic people. Here too, in the Atharvan, the panther is first mentioned, and for the first time silver and iron are certainly referred to. In the Rig Veda the metals are bronze and gold, silver and ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Wilkinson, and principally intended for the neglected and forlorn children of brick-makers and the most abject poor." At the present day Gipsies generally locate in the neighbourhood of brick-yards and low, swampy marshes, or by the side of rivers or canals. It was begun on a small scale, but increased till the number of scholars amounted ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... face,-beautiful as daybreak or as the laughing of a child. She sat in the Hither Isles, well walled between the This and Now, upon a low and silver throne, and leaned upon its armposts, sadly looking upward toward the sun. Now the Hither Isles are flat and cold and swampy, with drear-drab light and all manner of slimy, creeping things, and piles of dirt and clouds of flying dust and sordid scraping ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... of green and brown seaweed, the old Speranza. Her steps were there, and by a slight leap I could catch them underneath and go up hand-over-hand, till I got foothold; this I did at ten the same night when the sea-water had mostly drained back from the land, leaving everything very swampy, however; she there with me, and soon following me upon the ship. I found most things cracked into tiny fragments, twisted, disfigured out of likeness, the house-walls themselves displaced a little at the nip, the bow of the cedar skiff smashed in to her middle against the ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... great east-west waterway of the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, which carried them around the northern end of the Appalachian barrier into the heart of the continent, planted them on the low, swampy, often navigable watershed of the Mississippi, and started them on another river voyage of nearly two thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Here were the conditions and temptation for almost unlimited expansion; hence French Canada reached to the head of Lake Superior, and French ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... as in the region of Tomales Bay or even in the vicinity of Stanford, Santa Rosa, San Jose, or Agnews, it caused greater loss of life and property on account of the crowded population. Many buildings were wrecked, especially those poorly constructed on land reclaimed from swampy soil or ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... He'll be bogged if he runs that way," for the way led to a piece of swampy land that, after the recent rains, was a veritable bog which was dangerous for cattle at least; and more than one man had ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton
... at Lisbon, Burton set out for Brazil, while his wife returned to England "to pay and pack." She rejoined him some weeks later at Rio Janeiro, and they reached Santos on 9th October 1865. They found it a plashy, swampy place, prolific in mangroves and true ferns, with here and there a cultivated patch. Settlers, however, became attached to it. Sandflies and mosquitoes abounded, and the former used to make Burton "come out all over lumps." Of the other vermin, including ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the opener spaces great old oaks, short and big-headed, stretched out their huge shadow-filled arms in true oak-fashion. The ground was uneven, and the path led up and down over hollow and hillock, now crossing a swampy bottom, now climbing the ridge of a rocky eminence. It was a lovely forenoon, with grey-blue sky and white clouds. The sun shone plentifully into the wood, for the leaves were thin. They hung like clouds of gold and royal purple above my head, layer over layer, with the blue ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... and encamped for the night, on a low point, at the foot of an isolated rock, about one hundred and fifty feet high. This rock appeared to me remarkable on account of its situation, reposing in the midst of a low and swampy ground, as if it had been dropped from the clouds, and seeming to have no connection with the neighboring mountains. On a cornice or shelving projection about thirty feet from its base, the natives of the adjacent villages ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... this purpose, and looking in perceived that two half-dollar pieces had been given—but both of them were bad. I was told also that the absolute foundation of the edifice is bad—that the ground, which is near the river and swampy, would not bear the weight intended to be ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... and between barren hills, passing a small lake and plain with the considerable town of Yuen-nan-hsien ten li to the right, I continued in a narrow valley and over mountains in the same uncultivated condition to Hungay, situated in a swampy valley. Having crossed this valley, another rough climb brings the traveler to the top of the next pass, Ting-chi-ling, whence the road descends, and leads by a well-cultivated valley to Chao-chow. After an easy thirty li we reached Hsiakwan,[AD] one of the largest commercial cities ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... that I wasnt scared. Id been more afraid of bein scared than anything else. Then the Major got up an started on with everybody else taggin along with him. It was to foggy to see what was happenin on each side. We went down a hill. It got swampy an we struck some duck boards. Somebody must have been over before us an put them down. If they could get around as easy as that it beat me what they were makin all ...
— "Same old Bill, eh Mable!" • Edward Streeter
... (for the cottage was small) we took our leave, giving the pair good wishes for the continuance of a happy married life. And when we got to our house we found waiting in the kitchen Mag Trawl, who had that day brought her fish from Swampy Arm—a dull girl, slatternly, shiftless: the mother of ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... straight on to the hill-side and all round about were moorlands and huge stones, and swampy hollows; never a house nor a sign of life wherever you might look, for their nearest neighbours were the "ferlies" in the glen below, and the "will-o'-the-wisps" in the long ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... pronounce it a hopeless rebel. Sir Hugh Low tells me that he clothed all the trees round Government House at Pahang with Vanda teres, planting its near relative, V. Hookeri, more exquisite still, if that were possible, in a swampy hollow. His servants might gather a basket of these flowers daily in the season. So the memory of the first President for Pahang will be kept green. A plant rarely seen is V. limbata from the island of Timor—dusky ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... cold, Her lehua bloom, fog-soaked, droops pensive; The thorn-fringe set ahout swampy Ai-po is A feather that flaunts in spite of the pinching frost. 5 Her herbage is pelted, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... on the Clare Mountains for field-days with the stretcher-squads. Coming back one day, I spotted two herons wading among some yellow-ochre sedges in a swampy field. I determined there and then to come back and stalk them. The following Saturday I set out with a fellow we called "Cherry Blossom," because he never cleaned his boots. I took a pair of field-glasses, and "Cherry" had a bag of pastries, which we bought on the ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... building material in ancient Erinn. Planks and beams, with rough blocks of wood or stone, were most likely reserved for the dwelling-place of chieftains. Such were the material used also for the royal residence in Thorney Island, a swampy morass in the Thames, secured by its insular position, where the early English kings administered justice; and such, probably, were the material of the original Palais de Justice, where the kings of Gaul entrenched themselves in a pal-lis, ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... small island, a stream of languidly flowing water extending between us and the main west shore. This, so far as my eyes could distinguish, did not differ in appearance from our present abiding place, being composed of low, swampy land, thickly covered with a heavy growth of cane, and exhibiting no sign of human habitation. The sole break to this dull monotony of outline was a narrow fringe of trees situated farther back, where doubtless firmer soil gave spread ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... point the timber was quite heavy; there was considerable small growth, and under foot it was swampy. It was impossible to maintain a good line. In such an advance the naturally courageous will press forward, and the naturally timid will hang back, and the officers and file closers have their hands full to urge ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... occupied by the armies was low and swampy, a character which it possessed in ancient times; the marshes on the southern side being supposed to be the same in which Marius concealed himself from his enemies during his proscription. [20] Its natural humidity was greatly increased, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... came for us at last, and as we drove over the prairie at a moderate rate, delays having become things of the past, we were for the next hour almost merry. This transient joy was soon dispelled by our driver, who, without any warning, turned off the road through some swampy ground. Pulling up suddenly before an apparently unbroken line of trees, he craned his neck first one way and then the other in search of an opening, unheeding the expostulations in French and English with which he was assailed, until, finding what he sought, and ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... down, and glimmer among the feathers in their dusky hair. Can it be that the thronged street of a city will ever pass into this twilight solitude,—over those soft heaps of the decaying tree-trunks, and through the swampy places, green with water-moss, and penetrate that hopeless entanglement of great trees, which have been uprooted and tossed together by a whirlwind? It has been a wilderness from the creation. Must it ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with the blue grass seed, uncurls in the swardy soil. Farther than either of these have come the lilies that the Chinese coolies cultivate in adjacent mud holes for their foodful bulbs. The seegoo establishes itself very readily in swampy borders, and the white blossom spikes among the arrow-pointed leaves are quite as acceptable to the eye as ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... of New Zealand, always grows in swampy ground. The leaves or blades when full grown are cut and laid out to dry, forming the common building material with which most ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... cradle and its precious contents were carried by four men; but this the poor little Lassla, as Helen shortens his lengthy name, resented so much, that he began to scream so loud that she was forced to dismount and carry him in her arms, along a road rendered swampy by much rain. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... an officer in a dug-out, who addressed him in French, which he did not understand. But the sight of Stumm's plan worked wonders. After that he was fairly bundled down communication trenches and then over swampy fields to a farm among trees. There he found staff officers, who looked at him and looked at his map, and then put him on a horse and hurried him eastwards. At last he came to a big ruined house, and was taken into a room which seemed to be full ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... from the Tigris of this and other canals evidently silted up, and thus enormous volumes of water, usually carried off by them in times of flood, helped to swell this river till, bursting its banks, it inundated the whole country. The result remains to-day—a vast tract of swampy land, barren and almost useless, except to a ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... alignment and to the right of the dragoons were Rouvrais' Volunteer Chasseurs, numbering seven hundred and fifty men; still further on to the right and two hundred yards in advance of Rouvrais, was Framais, comanding the Grenadier Volunteers, and two hundred men besides, his right resting upon the swampy wood that bordered the river, thus completely closing in the city on the land side. The frigate, La Truite, and two galleys, lay within cannon shot of the town, and with the aid of the armed store ship, La Bricole, and the frigate, La Chimere, effectually ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... position had become more and more untenable. We were on swampy ground and the water was constantly oozing in from the bottom of the trench, so that we sometimes had to stand nearly knee-deep and were forced to bail the water out with our caps. It is difficult to imagine a more deplorable ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler
... creek have led him astray? He must have crossed the rising ground separating two watersheds—that sloping towards his own lake and towards some other. There flowed the little stream noiselessly, sucked into the swampy cypress grove: of course it got out somewhere at the other side; but as to following it any farther into the dismal tangled recesses, with only a chance of emergence in a right direction, ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... which broke the full shock of the fall. His rifle flew far out of his hands. He rebounded, clutching at the bushes; but he could not check himself. Rolling over and over, his eyes and mouth choked with dust and leaves, he bumped on down the slope, and brought up at last, dazed but conscious, in a swampy hole under the roots of ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... distant from us. The whole country about Hamburgh is level, except the right bank below it of the noble river on which it stands, the Elbe. The house where I was domiciled stood on nearly the highest point of this bank, which gradually sloped down into a swampy hollow, nearly level with the river. It then rose again gently until the swell was crowned with the beautiful town of Altona, and immediately beyond appeared the ramparts and tall spires of the noble ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... an admirer of nature, and sweet flowers? Would you, most worthy friend, like to see some of the bright gems which spring, whilst dallying over the sequestered, airy heights and swampy marshes of our woods drops along our path? Follow, then, sketch book and pencil in hand, the fairy footsteps of one of the most amiable women which old England ever sent to our climes, accompany the Countess of Dalhousie on a botanizing tour through Sillery woods; you have her note ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... occasional visit of a gunboat had driven off the few settlers. The river gradually became narrower and more tortuous as we approached its head waters. The banks are generally low, with a few sandy elevations, thickly wooded or swampy. Occasionally we passed a small opening, or savanna, on which were sometimes feeding a herd of wild cattle and deer; at the latter we had several potshots, all wide. Alligators, as immovable as the logs on which they rested, could be counted by hundreds, ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... wilderness, the settled portions of the Commonwealth had begun to feel overpopulated. Twenty-five years before, the Secretary of the Colony had reported to the Home Government, that "in this mountainous, rocky and swampy province" most of the arable land was taken up, and the remainder ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... us was uncultivated and unhealthy. The lands were low and swampy, and mostly covered with a heavy growth of yellow pines. The few remaining inhabitants were mostly women, negresses and children; now and then a disabled specimen of poor white trash, or a farmer too infirm to be of service in the rebel army, was to be met with. All were alike destitute ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... offers, instead of flourishing verdure, only an incumbered space pierced by aged trees, loaded with parasitic plants, lichens, agarics—impure fruits of corruption. In the low parts is water, dead and stagnant because undirected; or swampy soil neither solid nor liquid, hence unapproachable and useless to the habitants both of land and of water. Here are swamps covered with rank aquatic plants nourishing only venomous insects and haunted by unclean animals. Between these low infectious ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Glenelg, and to my chagrin found that it was so much swollen by the late rains as to be utterly impassable. To attempt to construct a bridge over it would have been useless for the adjacent ground was now so swampy the horses were bogged before we got them near it. I wandered up its banks as far as I could before nightfall, but could not succeed in finding any place in our vicinity at which we might hope to effect our passage. Just as it got dark ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... short time 5,000 negroes were set to work erecting batteries upon the York River at Yorktown and Gloucester Point, and upon a line of works extending from Warwick upon the James River to Ship Point on the York, through a line of wooded and swampy country intersected by streams emptying themselves into one or ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... weren't some who, travelled on the game. The swagman loafer, or "bummer," times himself, especially in bad weather, to arrive at the shed just about sundown; he is then sure of "tea," shelter for the night, breakfast, and some tucker from the cook to take him on along the track. Brummy and Swampy were sundowners. ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... with sweet-scented, pink- purple flowers. I usually find it and the fringed polygala in bloom at the same time; the lady's-slipper is a little later. The purple fringed-orchis, one of the most showy and striking of all our orchids, blooms in midsummer in swampy meadows and in marshy, grassy openings in the woods, shooting up a tapering column or cylinder of pink-purple fringed flowers, that one may see at quite a distance, and the perfume of which is too rank for a close room. This flower ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... unhealthy, on account of the low, swampy nature of its grounds. The Sanitary Reform, dating from about thirty years ago, had a great effect on the condition of the place. Before the drainage the annual mortality was twenty-seven in the thousand; since the drainage twenty in the thousand, which is below that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... ragged uplands, woody and moorish, with the long yellow maize-stalks of last year's crop rotting in the swampy glens. For the 'petite culture,' whatever be its advantages, gives no capital or power of combined action for draining wet lands; and the valleys of Gascony and Bearn in the south, as well as great sheets of ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... knowledge of which is which, you should be careful how near you approach them. The Water Moccasin is found quite abundantly in the east from the Carolinas southward and along the Mississippi states as far north as Illinois. It likes swamps and is found abundantly in many southern swampy sections. This snake is often known as the "Cotton Mouth" Snake. It is vicious and pugnacious and will fight snakes of any size. The prey of this serpent consists of birds, frogs, other snakes, fish and small animals. The Copperhead derives its name from the copperish tint ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... we talked much of love, though we were very much in love. We kissed; sometimes greatly daring we walked hand in hand; once I took her in my arms and carried her over a swampy place beyond the Killing Wood, and held her closely to me; that was a great event between us; but we were shy of one another, shy even of very intimate words; and a thousand daring and beautiful things I dreamt of saying to her went unsaid. I do not remember ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... a hill. There is no habitation within this day's walk. The traveller, as usual, must sleep in the forest; the path is not so good the following day. The hills over which it lies are rocky, steep and rugged; and the spaces betwixt them swampy and mostly knee-deep in water. After eight hours' walk you find two or three Indian huts, surrounded by the forest; and in little more than half an hour from these you come to ten or twelve others, where you pass the ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... palm of Para. It grows in swampy lands, and produces a small fruit thinly coated with clotted flesh of which the inhabitants of Para manufacture a beverage called assai. The ripe fruits are soaked in warm water and kneaded until the fleshy pulp is detached. This, when strained, is of a thick, creamy consistence, and, when ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... his rent by fifty per cent, was a broad hint which most men would have taken; and it did keep Andy ruefully quiet for a season or two. Then, however, having again saved up a trifle, he could not resist the temptation to drain the swampy corner of the farthest river-field, which was as kind a bit of land as you could wish, only for the water lying on it, and in which he afterward raised himself a remarkably fine crop of white oats. The sight of them 'done his heart good,' he said, exultantly, nothing recking that it was the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and pot-herbs. Above all, the noting of the appearance of the first roses should not be omitted; nor of the Arethusa, one of the delicatest, gracefullest, and in every manner sweetest of the whole race of flowers. For a fortnight past I have found it in the swampy meadows, growing up to its chin in heaps of wet moss. Its hue is a delicate pink, of various depths of shade, and somewhat in the form of a Grecian helmet. To describe it is a feat beyond my power. Also the visit of two friends, who may fitly enough be mentioned among flowers, ought to ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the afternoon with Hinde at the Nuzha Gardens, the Kew of Alexandria. On getting beyond the town we came to a broad, well-made road, bordered on both sides with orange trees, and extending behind these the eternal palm and fig trees. This passed Lake Hadra with its swampy edges full of long reeds and rushes, its waters a dirty green, beloved by noisy frogs, with an abundance of bird life, among which we saw two king fishers, and several times big lizards darted across the road ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... where the Ticonderoga was lying, the levee—an embankment about six feet high, built to prevent the water from overflowing—ran back into the woods about half a mile, then, making a bend like a horse-shoe, came back to the river again, inclosing perhaps a dozen acres of low, swampy land; and it was in this swamp that the cattle were. They proved to be very wild; but, after a considerable run, Frank succeeded in bringing down one, and the steward and seaman finally killed another. The question now was, how to get the meat on board the vessel. While they were debating on ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon
... shadowy depressions in the wide expanse of foliage marked deep clefts between ridges where dark, cool streams bounded on to meet the river. Lower, where the land was level, in open spaces could be seen a broad trail, yellow in the sunlight, winding along with the curves of the water-course. On a swampy meadow, blue in the distance, a herd of buffalo browsed. Beyond the river, high over the green island, Fort Henry lay peaceful and solitary, the only token of the works of man in all that ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... after this sad event, Miss Tinne ascended the river to Heiligenkreuz, an Austrian missionary station. There she remained until mid-September, making a short excursion into the interior; crossing rivers, penetrating into swampy forests, and visiting villages inhabited by a quite naked population, feeding upon bats, snakes, termites, and ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... situated in a plain. A little beyond, near Brienz, the river expands into the lake of Brienz, where it becomes navigable. Near the west end of that lake it receives its first important affluent, the Lutschine (left), and then runs across the swampy plain of the Bodoli, between Interlaken (left) and Unterseen (right), before again expanding in order to form the Lake of Thun. Near the west end of that lake it receives on the left the Kander, which has just before been joined by the Simme; on flowing out ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a swampy tract below, and rising again sharply to the hill opposite. Half-way along that hill, through a narrow gap, I, standing on higher ground, could catch a glimpse of the grey ocean beyond, sending its white horses in on the land, and moaning ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... whose guns were inconveniently active, and the Americans believed they must be silenced. The redoubts had been built on two small hills on the American right, in a difficult region where rocky cuts alternated with swampy depressions. These two hills were called "Number Nine" and "Number Ten"; "Number Ten" was also called "Rock Redoubt." These redoubts were about three hundred yards in front of the British garrison, and Washington decided after ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... we have some anxiety. There has been and is a bad typhoid fever among the Pitcairners: want of cleanliness, no sewerage, or very bad draining, crowded rooms, no ventilation, the large drain choked up, a dry season, so that the swampy ground near the settlement has been dry, these are secondary causes. For two months it has been going on. I never anticipated such a ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a few ranges of hills, otherwise the land here might be deemed low. But to the southward, and more particularly to the east, in the Straits of Macassar, it is very low. The shore in these latter places is extremely moist and swampy, but the interior is said to ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... in sight of each other, that of the League was entering the gulf near its northern shore, while that of the Turk was about fifteen miles within its jaws, his vast crescent-shaped line stretching almost from the broad swampy shallows which lie beneath the Acarnanian mountains to the margin of the rich lowlands of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... place for making salt, and to examine the country further, Captain Clark set out with five men, and pursuing a course S. 60'0 W., over a dividing ridge through thick pine timber, much of which bad fallen, passed the beads of two small brooks. In the neighborhood of these the land was swampy and overflowed, and they waded knee-deep till they came to an open ridgy prairie, covered with the plant known on our frontier by the name of sacacommis (bearberry). Here is a creek about sixty yards wide and running toward Point Adams; they passed it on a small raft. At ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... we need hardly remind our readers, has only been rescued from subsidence and collapse at an immense cost by a lavish use of the resources of modern engineering. The building itself is not without merits, but its site is inconspicuous and the swampy nature of the soil is a constant menace to its durability. The scheme which we venture with all humility to suggest is that it should be removed and re-erected, in the same spirit though in the architectural language of our ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... Mobile are covered over with a kind of shell that abounds in the neighbourhood: this binds with the fine sand, and makes the cleanest, best road possible, and is besides, I believe, very durable. Since the swampy ways have been replaced by good roads of this material, the health of the city has never been attacked by fever, which was frequent before. The cholera is unknown here, although its ravages in the south-western country were, and ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... there—isn't that smoke?" He was pointing toward the low, swampy region in the southwestern part of the island. Jeremy watched intently, but there was nothing to disturb the morning calm of ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... and tender, with a faint green filming the sodden pasture field, and a rose-pink veil covering the maples, and blue-grey catkins tinting the dark alders, spring had come to the lonely little clearing in the backwoods. From the swampy meadow along the brook's edge, across the road from the cabin and the straw-littered barn-yard, came toward evening that music which is the distinctive note of the northern spring—the thrilling, mellow, inexpressibly wistful fluting ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... new difficulty faced her. As far as she could see stretched a low, swampy marsh of wet land. The mud and slime did not look very inviting, but the thought of her little blind sister came to her again, and she bravely plunged into the mire. The dirty, dripping mud clung to her dress and made her feet so heavy that ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... must be there," insisted Nellie, starting on a run over the swampy grounds toward ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope
... fishes in preparation for the table will remember that inside of them there is a long slender bladder filled with air. This bladder assists in making the fish light, hence making it easier for it to support itself in the water. In certain swampy regions these lungfish swim freely in the water of the marshes. When the dry season comes, however, the water evaporates, draining the marshes completely. This would prove the death of most fishes. The lungfish have ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... to the path through the patch of big trees, for the ground is rather swampy there and ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... last they took the bandage from off mine eyes, and I saw I was in their encampment, in the innermost recesses of a swampy tangled wood. There, in a sort of better-most cabin, lay a young man, dying—wounded, as I afterwards learned, in an attack upon the Lord ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... boundary between Brazil and Peru), is one of the most formidable and least known portions of the South American continent. It abounds with obstacles to exploration of the most overwhelming kind. Low, swampy, with a heavy rainfall, it is inundated annually, like most of the Amazon basin, and at time of high water the rivers know no limits. Lying, as it does, so near the equator, the heat is intense and constant, oppressive even to the native. The forest-growth—and it is forest wherever ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... light-headed to-day; but let me attempt to describe as briefly as I can my adventure. We set out from Colombo in the early morning of Jan. 26th. For about two-thirds of our journey the road lies along the coast, stretching through swampy rice-fields and interminable cocoanut avenues until Ratnapoora is reached. So far the scenery does not greatly differ from that of Colombo. But it was after we left Ratnapoora that I first realised the true wonders of this land. Our road rose almost continuously by narrow tracks, which in some places, ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the Salado the country is low and swampy, with tosca-rock appearing at long intervals at the surface. On the banks, however, of the Tapalguen (sixty miles south of the Salado) there is a large extent of tosca-rock, some highly compact and even semi-crystalline, overlying pale Pampean mud with the usual concretions. Thirty miles ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... mias, hides in the swampy jungles, and very rarely comes to the ground. The natives regard them as a sort of sacred object, and have a great horror of killing them. Indeed, a person who kills a man-ape, they regard as a murderer; and so when Wallace announced to his attendants that he wanted ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... live among Batletli, a tribe having a click in their language, and who were found by Sebituane to possess large herds of the great horned cattle. They seem allied to the Hottentot family. Mr. Oswell, in trying to cross the river, got his horse bogged in the swampy bank. Two Bakwains and I managed to get over by wading beside a fishing-weir. The people were friendly, and informed us that this water came out of the Ngami. This news gladdened all our hearts, for we now felt certain of reaching our goal. We ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... of all his pieces, if we may judge from what he has already published, and promises to publish, concerning the same. He once had the temerity to dabble in poetry;[197] but he never could raise his head above the mists which infest the swampy ground at the foot of Parnassus. Still he loves 'the divine art' enthusiastically; and affects, forsooth, to have a taste in matters of engraving and painting! Converse with him about Guercino and Albert Durer, Berghem and Woollett, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... weather. Those that prosper on south exposures are equipped to resist late and early frosts as well as very hot sunshine. The moisture needs of different trees are as remarkable as their likes and dislikes for warmth and cold. Some trees attain large size in a swampy country. Trees of the same kind will become stunted in sections where dry ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... Pine Road. Willow Lane still stood there. The old houses were more dilapidated than ever, and there were more now than there used to be. Doctor Blair's horse and buggy stood before one of them. Willow Lane was on low, swampy ground, and was the abode of fevers and diseases of ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul. Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... one prolonged series of changes in the level of land and water, and in their respective limits. These changes have usually been very gradual, but they have always entailed changes (in climate, etc. ) of the greatest significance in the evolution of life. What was the swampy soil of England in the Carboniferous period is now sometimes thousands of feet beneath us; and what was the floor of a deep ocean over much of Europe and Asia at another time is now to be found on the slopes of lofty Alps, or 20,000 feet above ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... Coming up to the swampy spot the old bull gave a grunt of satisfaction, and, going down on one knee, plunged his short thick horns into the mud, tore it up, and cast it aside. Having repeated this several times he plunged his head in, and brought it forth saturated ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... when they rapidly passed round the headland, and soon entered the bay-like recess of water, which, sweeping round in a large wood-fringed circle, opened upon the view immediately beyond. After skirting along the sometimes bold and rocky, and sometimes low and swampy, thickly-wooded shore, with a sharp lookout for whatever might come within range of the eye, but without stopping for any special examination till they had reached the most secluded part of the cove, the hunter suspended his oar, and signified his intention of landing. Accordingly, running ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... hills into marshy regions which to their skilled eyes betokened another creek, flowing like its parallel sister into the Ohio. All these creeks overflowed widely in the heavy spring rains, and they judged that the swampy territory had been left by ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler |
