"Decayed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a mere bush, only two or three, now grown into great branches, yet survive and bear all the other branches; so with the species which lived during long-past geological periods, very few now have living and modified descendants. From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these lost branches of various {130} sizes may represent those whole orders, families, and genera which have now no living representatives, and which are known to us only from having been found in a fossil state. As we here and there see a thin straggling ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... raised against his fleshless thigh, Hands stretched aloft till joints had lost their use, And clinched so close, as if in firm resolve, The nails had grown quite through the festering palms,[5] His tattered robes, as if worn out by age, Hanging like moss from trees decayed and dead, While birds were nesting in his tangled hair. And thus disguised the subtle Mara stood, And when the master roused him from his sleep His tempter cried in seeming ecstasy: "O! happy wakening! joy succeeding grief! Peace ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... Excavate all the decayed wood with a chisel or gouge or whatever cutting tool may work well and fill the cavity with Portland cement in such a way as to exclude moisture. This will prolong the life and productiveness of the trees for many years ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... palace was served at six-thirty. He arrived at six-forty-five and encountered Mrs. Summerstone. She was a stout, elderly, decayed gentlewoman, a daughter of the great Porter- Rickington family that had shaken the entire Pacific Coast with its financial crash in the middle seventies. Despite her stoutness, she suffered from what she called ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Portuensian Gate, he was soon in sight of the palace where for generations had dwelt the heads of the Anician family. It lay on a gentle slope above the river, at the foot of the Janiculan Hill; around it spread public porticoes, much decayed, and what had once been ornamental gardens, now the pasture of goats. As Basil had expected, he was kept waiting without the doors until the porter had received orders regarding him. Permitted at length to enter, he passed by a number of slaves who ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... place, they found that Johnny had descended between a double wall,—a way, no doubt, well known to him, and thence had endeavored to let himself down the wall by the ivy which grew enormously strong there; but the decayed state of the stones had caused the hold of the ivy to give way, and Johnny had been precipitated, probably from a considerable height. He still held quantities of leaves and ivy twigs ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... heart, alone, and find no new discouragements in loving hearts about her. It was easier to hope, and pray, and love on, all uncared for, yet with constancy and patience, in the tranquil sanctuary of such remembrances: although it mouldered, rusted, and decayed about her: than in a new scene, let its gaiety be what it would. She welcomed back her old enchanted dream of life, and longed for the old dark door to close upon ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the pageant developed into a masque; that is, a dramatic entertainment accompanied by poetry and music. Hundreds of such masques were written and acted before Shakespeare's day; the taste for them survived long after the Elizabethan drama had decayed; and a few of them, such as The Sad Shepherd of Ben Jonson and the Comus of Milton, may still be ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... they all went to his church every Sabbath while they were young and, well, and not yet under sentence of death. I do not think they did. For when I was in his church there was only a handful of old and decayed-looking people in it. The chief part of the congregation seemed to me to be a charity school. And I gathered from all that a lesson—several lessons, and this among the rest—that crowded passages do not always wait upon the best pastors; and this also, that a waft of death soon ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... discovered in one apartment, 50 feet square, 100 sick and dying emigrants lying on straw; and among them, in their midst, the bodies of two who had died four or five days before, but who had been left for that time without burial! They found in the course of their inquiry that decayed vegetables, bad flour, and putrid meat, were specially purchased and provided for the use of the strangers! Such as had strength to escape from these slaughter-houses fled from them as from a plague, and roamed through the city, exciting ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... since by Dr. Mitchell, who now resides in Indiana county, Pennsylvania. A slave boy ran away in cold weather, and during his concealment had his legs frozen; he returned, or was retaken. After some time the flesh decayed and sloughed—of course was offensive—he was carried out to a field and left there without bed, or shelter, deserted to die. His only companions were the house dogs which he called to him. After ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Lord of the Manor, procured an additional charter from Henry the Third, reviving some decayed privileges and granting others; among the last was that of the Whitsuntide fair, to begin on the eve of Holy Thursday, and to continue four days. At the alteration of the style, in 1752, it was prudently changed to the Thursday in Whitsun week; that ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... weapon ready for instant use, he advanced a pace or two, touching the sailor as a command for him to remain motionless; but the chivalrous fellow would not obey, and was close behind him, when he stooped down and placed his hand on a piece of decayed limb that had fallen into ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... to run upon them. Here and there, along the slopes, the rude old plough of the Georgics, dragged by great gray oxen, turns up the rich loam, that "needs only to be tickled to laugh out in flowers and grain." In the olive-orchards, the farmers are carefully pruning away the decayed branches and loosening the soil about their old roots. Here and there, the smoke of distant bonfires, burning heaps of useless stubble, shows against the dreamy purple hills like the pillar of cloud that led the Israelites. One smells the sharp odor of these fires everywhere, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... kings, of heroes and conquerors, from the era of their decline and fall to their ultimate extinction. Some 'Old Mortality' might find as congenial employment in this field of sepulchral research as did the original in clearing up the decayed and moss-grown tombs of the Covenanters. The genealogist makes it his business rather to flatter the great by blazoning the antiquity of their pedigrees, than to teach the world a moral lesson on the instability of earthly grandeur, by chronicling ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... back into Broadway again and slopped onward and away, begging, crying, losing track of his thoughts, one after another, as a mind decayed and disjointed is wont ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... "This will make up for lost time, amigos! Christo! there may be some ounces on board. But who's left in the boat, Gomez?" This was addressed to a bow-legged, beetle-browed individual, with a hare-lip, which kept his face in a perpetual and skeleton-like grin, who hissed out from between his decayed ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... passed the frontier, he found "a Province distressed with Warre; the people heartlesse, and rather repining against their Governours, then revengefull against the Enemies, the bravery of that Gentrie which was left, and the Industry of the Merchant quite decayed; the Husbandman labouring only to live, without desire to be rich to another's use; the Townes (whatsoever concerned not the strength of them) ruinous; And to conclude, the people here growing poore with lesse taxes, then they flourish ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... religion. In times of peace they were centres of a true, emotional religiosity. In times of stress, a "messianic" element tended to become prominent: the world is bad and degenerating; morality and a just social order have decayed, but the coming of a savior is close; the saviour will bring a new, fair order and destroy those who are wicked. Tsou Yen's philosophy seemed to allow them to calculate when this new order would start; later secret ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... our eyrie, amid the varied shadows of a most lustrous moonlight, our eyes fell upon the distant wood which surrounded Haddon Hall; its massive walls, its mouldering tapestries, its stately terrace, its quaint rooms and closets, its protected though decayed records of the olden time, its minstrel gallery—were again present to our minds; and it was a natural and most pleasing contrast—that of the deserted and half-ruined house, with the mansion happily inhabited, filled with so many art-treasures, and presided over by one of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... westward of this church-yard stands the most celebrated Hospital of George Herriot, Jeweller to James the Sixth, for the bringing up of 130 poor boys, children of decayed merchants and tradesmen of this city. The building exceeds any thing of the kind in Europe. Sutton's Hospital, called the Charter-House at London, is a noble foundation; but the house neither of that, Christ-Church, nor anything of the kind at Rome or Venice, ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... &c.] Taliacotius was an Italian surgeon, that found out a way to repair lost and decayed noses. This Taliacotius was chief surgeon to the Great Duke of Tuscany, and wrote a treatise, De Curtis Membris, [Of Cut-off Parts] which he dedicates to his great master wherein he not only declares the models of his wonderful operations ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... a coral rock; the soil is coral sand, with which the decayed vegetables have but in a few places intermixed, so as to form any thing like mould. From this a very strong presumption may be drawn, that these little spots of land are not of very ancient date, nor the remains of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... broth resulted. Some of the bones and particularly the hoofs were maggoty, but, as Hubbard said, the maggots seemed to make the broth the richer, and we drank it all. It tasted good. For some time we sat gnawing the gristle and scraps of decayed flesh that clung to the bones, and we were honestly ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... way to the forest, White Cloud. It will be a long walk for you. We need dry moss and decayed wood for tinder. Some cold morning we shall wake and find no red coals in the ashes. Then we shall need some pieces of the driest of wood ...
— Two Indian Children of Long Ago • Frances Taylor
... pensively beside the pile, groaning continually. But when Lucifer arrived, proclaiming light over the earth, after whom saffron-vested Morn is diffused over the sea, then the pyre grew languid, and the flame decayed; and the Winds departed again, to return home through the Thracian sea; but it (the sea) groaned indeed, raging with ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... about each one of them! How eagerly we found our way to them in the hot haying and harvesting days!—the small, cold, never-changing spring in the barn-hill meadow under the beech tree, upon whose now decayed bowl half-obliterated initials of farm boys and hired men of thirty, fifty, and nearly seventy years ago may still be seen; the spring in the old meadow near the barn where the cattle used to drink in winter and where, with the haymakers, I used to drink so eagerly in summer; ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... of this three-acre plot, a tree had decayed and fallen several years before, and a young apple tree had been planted to take its place. This tree was now about five inches in diameter, and forked about five to six feet from the ground. In the crotch of this small tree, a foot dangling on either side, sat ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... were approaching to that state, still it was called the new town, although its appearance little entitles it to that appellation; but the ancient inhabitants lived in excavations in the rocks, the remains of which are very distinct. At the bottom of the hill, they entered several, not much decayed by time. At a hundred yards, however, from the base of the hill, and now used as a burying-ground, there is a subterranean house, of large dimensions, and probably the residence of the great personage. Dr. Oudney and Clapperton entered this excavation, and found three extensive galleries, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... us preserve our liberty as a remnant of Joseph; yea, let us remember the words of Jacob, before his death, for behold, he saw that a part of the remnant of the coat of Joseph was preserved and had not decayed. And he said—Even as this remnant of garment of my son hath been preserved, so shall a remnant of the seed of my son be preserved by the hand of God, and be taken unto himself, while the remainder of the ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... confounds this imperial patriotism with Cosmopolitanism, this resolution of a great people with Jingoism. Now what is Cosmopolitanism? It is an attitude of mind purely negative; it is a characteristic of protected nationalities, and of decayed races. It passes easily into political indifference, political apathy. It is the negation of patriotism; but it offers no constructive ideal in its stead. Imperialism is active, is constructive.[6] It is the passion of Marathon and Trafalgar, it is the patriotism of a de Montfort ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... says Dante? "There was such a moan there as there would be if all the sick who, between July and September, are in the hospitals of Valdichiana, and of the Tuscan swamps, and of Sardinia, were in one pit together; and such a stench was issuing forth as is wont to issue from decayed limbs." ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... cumbrous chests and cabinets, and antique high-backed chairs. But the most noticeable object was a large state-bed, with a heavy square canopy, covered, with the richest damask, woven with gold, and hung with curtains of the same stuff, though now decayed and tarnished. A chill crept over Amabel as she ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... natives and ourselves time to reach the steps which led to safety. But where the conical explosive bullets of the twentieth century were of no avail, the poisoned arrows of the natives, dipped in the juice of strophanthus and steeped afterwards in decayed carrion, could succeed. Such arrows were of little avail to the hunter who attacked the beast, because their action in that torpid circulation was slow, and before its powers failed it could certainly overtake and slay its assailant. But now, as the two monsters ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thoroughly cleansed from all earthy or extraneous matter. Such is the friction caused by the concussion of the fall, the rolling and rubbing of the apples together, and the pouring of the water, that decayed sections of the fruit are ground off and the rotten pulp passes away with other impurities. From this tank the apples are hoisted upon an endless chain elevator, with buckets in the form of a rake-head with iron teeth, permitting drainage and escape of water, to an upper story of ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... in former times rice was abundantly grown by the aid of those prodigious artificial works for irrigation which still form one of the wonders of the island. Many of the tanks, though partially in ruins, cover an area from ten to fifteen miles in circumference. They are now generally broken and decayed; the waters which would fertilise a province are allowed to waste themselves in the sands, and hundreds of square miles capable of furnishing food for all the inhabitants of Ceylon are abandoned to solitude and malaria, whilst rice for ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... reasserted de Saussure's conclusions, and by some simple calculations showed very clearly that it was wholly untenable. One of the most striking of the arguments he brought forward was the fact that the humus of the soil itself consisted of the decayed vegetable matter of preceding plants. This being so, how, he asked, could it be the original source of the carbon of plants? To reason thus was simply to reason in a circle. He pointed out, further, that the comparative insolubility ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... came here when I did." He gave a short mirthless laugh. "I doubt if my satisfaction is inspired by any moral scruple," he added hastily, as the other nodded. "Say, can you understand how I feel when I say I believe all moral scruple has somehow decayed, rotted, died in me? I don't mean that I don't want to be decent. I do; but that's because decency appeals to me from some sort of artistic feelings which have survived the wreck I made of life years ago. No, moral scruples were killed stone dead when I was chasing ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... he nearly always had some holding in the common field or a right on the common pasture. With enclosure his holding or right had generally disappeared, and he deteriorated socially. It was very unfortunate, too, that when enclosure was most active domestic industries, such as weaving, decayed, and deprived the labourer and his family of a badly needed addition ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... forth from Jenne. It is true he had asked in grief and love, still he had asked. Partly because of the bitterness of it all, partly because of his long fast, he had not been able to eat his mid-day meal of beans and bread—he felt ready to faint, and his sight was troubled. He sank down on the decayed threshold of a small, closed door, at the entrance to the little lane called della Corte. A long peal of thunder sounded ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... seldom follow it. And so you think I had better employ a professional companion—a decayed gentlewoman—than save this young girl from going out as a governess and beginning to ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... less than one brace of immensely long pistols, and a yataghan (or cutlass), with a dagger or two of various shapes and sizes; most of these arms were inlaid with silver, and highly burnished, so that they contrasted shiningly with the decayed grandeur of the garments to which they were attached (this carefulness of his arms is a point of honour with the Osmanlee, who never allows his bright yataghan to suffer from his own adversity); then the long drooping mustachios, and the ample folds of the once white turbans, that lowered over the ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... reassuringly, rising to his feet. "Any little noise sounds loud in the woods at night. It was only a squirrel, or a decayed branch giving way. I 'll prove it to you." He raised his voice and called "Hello, there!" The result was vaguely disconcerting. "I forgot our friend Echo," he said apologetically. With some idea of restoring her composure by his own unconcern, he began to move in the direction from which ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... dull town of the middle ages, much decayed from its ancient importance when capital of the country dismembered from Cornouaille, in the sixth century, by Comorre the Breton Bluebeard. It is situated on an eminence, commanding an extensive view of the barren monotonous surrounding ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... guano found on the headlands and off-shore islands were used from the remotest times. Different guano beds were assigned to the several provinces, and the breeding places of the birds were protected by law.[1291] Ashes and decayed wood were employed for the same purpose, or plants were dug into the soil, while human manure was in Mexico a ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... through Narni and Spoleto to Ancona and Perugia, Foligno has gained considerably in commercial and military status. It is the point of intersection for three lines; the Italian government has made it a great cavalry depot, and there are signs of reviving traffic in its decayed streets. Whether the presence of a large garrison has already modified the population, or whether we may ascribe something to the absence of Roman municipal institutions in the far past, and to the savagery of the mediaeval period, it is difficult to ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... who had dispersed on the first sight of Ulysses, she rebuked them for their fear, and said: "This man is no Cyclop, nor monster of sea or land, that you should fear him; but he seems manly, staid, and discreet, and though decayed in his outward appearance, yet he has the mind's riches, wit and fortitude, in abundance. Show him the cisterns where he may wash him from the sea-weeds and foam that hang about him, and let him have garments that fit him out of those which we have brought with ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... make a call upon her in the course of the morning, and Mr. Kingsland is thinking in what cravat he shall adorn himself when he goes to do the same thing in the afternoon. For Mr. Kingsland has arrived at home, where he and his old father keep a bachelor sort of household in a decayed old house at one extremity of Crocus. They have a respectable name, folks say, but not wealth to set it off; and the household is small. The same little boy who rubs down Mr. Kingsland's horse waits ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... honour loses its purity, you may be sure that the principle of religion is already decayed or dead. Now the principle of honour being (so to speak) of human origin, depends greatly for existence upon the opinions of men; and when we are emancipated from all great regard for those opinions, it almost ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... year apart. On the field of 1861 the dead had been buried with the least expenditure of labor. I should say the bodies had been laid close together, and a thin coat of earth thrown over them. As the bodies decayed, the crust fell in exposing in part the skeletons. Some of our men extracted teeth from the grinning skulls as they lay thus exposed to view. On the field of 1862 from one mound a hand stuck out. The flesh instead of rotting off had dried down, ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... Perpendicular building of two aisles, the wider divided into nave and chancel merely by a granite step in the flooring; he saw it consecrated, and returned to his home and died. And the church steadily decayed. He had mixed his mortar with sea-sand. The stonework oozed brine, the plaster fell piece-meal; the blown sand penetrated like water; the foundations sank a foot on the south side, and the whole structure took a list to leeward. ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... cleared the log, just grazing it with their hind feet as they went over, sending a shower of dust and decayed ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin
... him,—The event which will take you finally from among them, perhaps after forty or fifty years of intercourse with them, will leave no more impression on their affections, than the cutting down of a decayed old tree in the neighborhood ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... familiar demon in the shape of a serpent. He experienced, however, frequent visitations of trance or ecstasy, sometimes lasting for a long period; and it may have been in one of these that he was inspired by the idea of asking the Emperor for a decayed city in Campania, there to establish a philosophic commonwealth as nearly upon the model of Plato's Republic as the degeneracy ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... Parliament, as well as the body of the people, will be deluded no longer. Besides, it sometimes happens for a cause to be exhausted and worn out, as that of the Whigs in general, seems at present to be: the nation has had enough of it. It is as vain to hope restoring that decayed interest, as for a man of sixty to talk of entering on a new scene of life, that is only proper for youth and vigour. New circumstances and new men must arise, as well as new occasions, which are not like to happen in our time. So that the Dissenters have no game ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... manner to any stranger who had entered the gates of the garden about her prison-house. Her madness was an hereditary disease transmitted to her from her mother, who had died mad. She, my mother, had been, or had appeared sane up to the hour of my birth, but from that hour her intellect had decayed, and she had become ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... strewn with vast boulders of rock, which had evidently fallen from the cliff as it had been eaten back by waters toiling through countless bygone ages. Many of these masses of rock lie at some distance from the foot of the falls, and on the partially decayed surfaces of some of them vegetation had evidently been flourishing for an indefinite period of time. Huge masses of rocks and boulders, as you look down the river, seem almost to block up its route towards the western sea, and indeed so completely seem to fill up the pass, that one seemed ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... the reign of Christianity, into a different channel. Instead of hecatombs of fat oxen sacrificed by the tribes of a wealthy city to their tutelar deity the emperor complains that he found only a single goose, provided at the expense of a priest, the pale and solitary in habitant of this decayed temple. The altar was deserted, the oracle had been reduced to silence, and the holy ground was profaned by the introduction of Christian and funereal rites. After Babylas (a bishop of Antioch, who died in prison in the persecution of Decius) had rested near a century in his grave, his body, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Anti-Slavery meetings. The district schoolhouse, which was the only public building in the village that was open for such gatherings, called for frequent repairs on account of damages done by mobs. Broken windows and doors were often in evidence, and stains from mud-balls, decayed vegetables, and antiquated eggs, which nobody took the trouble to remove, were ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... of the countryside was unpicturesquely decayed. The branch of the Walshinghams, Lady Ella's cousins, who lived near Pringle, was poor, proud and ignoble. And extremely unpopular. The rich people of the country were self-made and inclined to nonconformity, the working-people ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... end of the Fair Ground, in Winesburg, there is a half decayed old grand-stand. It has never been painted and the boards are all warped out of shape. The Fair Ground stands on top of a low hill rising out of the valley of Wine Creek and from the grand-stand one can see at night, over a cornfield, ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... is a decayed town on the spurs of the Pyrenees, not very far from Toulouse, and still nearer to Bagneres-de-Luchon. It was the site of a bishopric until the Revolution, and has a cathedral which is visited by a certain number of tourists. In the spring of 1883 an Englishman arrived at this old-world ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... with wagons, there being but little undecayed timber or down timber. In the ancient days, however, great giants had been uprooted, lifting considerable earth with the upturned roots. As time went on the roots decayed, making mounds two, three, or four feet high and leaving a corresponding hollow into which one would plunge; for the whole was covered by a dense, short evergreen growth that completely hid from view the unevenness of the ground. Over these hillocks and hollows and over great roots on ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... a small, low building which seemed to lean against it for support. This immense, squared-off building was outlined against the sky. Its unplastered side walls were as bare as prison walls, except for rows of roughly jutting stones which suggested jaws full of decayed teeth ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... time, I will now conclude with Master Stow, O that London had a Park near adjoining to it, stored with such Deer (as doubtless it hath, though not easily known) for some build Alms houses, free schools, causies and Bridges in needful and necessary places, others repair ruinated and decayed churches, relieving Hospitals in a bountiful manner, and are weekly benefactors to Prisons and those performed by such agents faithfully, that the true bestowers are not publicly noted, howsoever they ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... applied to the Downy Woodpecker and others. It is a common breeding bird and usually begins nesting early in April, and two broods are frequently reared in a season. For its nesting place it usually selects the decayed trunk of a tree or stub, ranging all the way from two to sixty feet above the ground. The entrance may be a knot hole, a small opening, or a small round hole with a larger cavity at the end of it. Often the old excavation of the Downy Woodpecker is made use of. Chicken ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... went by, and so rapid was the progress of the fever that Mr. Middleton trembled lest of him it had been decreed: "He shall be childless." To Fanny the thought of death was familiar. For her it had no terrors, and as her outward strength decayed, her faith in the Eternal grew stronger and brighter, yet she could not die without an assurance that again in the better world she would meet the father she so much loved. For her mother she had no fears, for during many years she had been a ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... were among us there was peace; War entered not the village, nor the call of war. Now our homes are as those that have no roofs. As a nest decayed, as a cave forsaken, As a ship that lieth broken on the beach, Is the house where we were born. Out in the desert did we bury our gold, We buried it where no man robbed us, for his arm was strong. Now are the jars empty, gold did not avail To save our young men, to keep them ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... A rather decayed-looking gentleman, wearing a frock-coat shiny at the elbows, and a fuzzy plug-hat, was tapping his cane against one of ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... by column upon column of wishy-washy twaddle in the morning papers, that Henley Regatta has actually taken place. The effete parasites of a decayed aristocracy who direct this gathering endeavour year after year to make the world believe that theirs is the only meeting at which honour has the least chance of bursting into flower. I have my own opinions on this point. Really, these tenth transmitters of foolish faces become more and more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... would not exchange it for worlds. It is my firm belief, that every evil under the sun is of the nature of chastisement, and appointed of the infinitely good Being for our benefit. When you see a youth, who, but lately, was the picture of bloom and manly beauty, now utterly withered and decayed; his body bent; his teeth dropping out; his nose consumed; with foetid breath, ichorous eyes, and his whole appearance most putrid, ghastly, and loathsome, you are filled with pity and with horror; you can hardly believe there is a God, or hardly refrain from charging him ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... Leopold. I was presented to the little Princess Victoria,—I hope they will change her name,—the heir apparent to the Crown as things now stand. How strange that so large and fine a family as that of his late Majesty should have died off and decayed into old age with so few descendants! Prince George of Cumberland is, they say, a fine boy about nine years old—a bit of a pickle, swears and romps like a brat that has been bred in a barrack yard. This little lady is educated with much care, and watched so closely by the Duchess ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... surroundings, and marshy localities not only breed malaria and fevers, but are a prolific cause of colds, coughs, and consumption. Care should be taken not to locate a dwelling where the natural currents of air, or high winds, will be likely to bring the poison of decayed vegetable matter from low lands. Certain brooks, boggy land, ponds, foggy localities, too much shade, all these are favorable to the development of disease. Then the walls of a building should be so constructed as to admit air between the exterior ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... purchase, on fair terms, after some months' bargaining; [23d October, 1733, order given,—16th March, 1734, purchase completed (Preuss, i. 75).]—and set his best Architect, one Kemeter, to work, in concert with the Crown-Prince, to new-build and enlarge the decayed Schloss of Reinsberg into such a Mansion as the young Royal Highness ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... spheres sublime Pealed their first notes to sound the march of time, Thy joyous youth began:—but not to fade.— When all the sister planets have decayed; When wrapt in flames the realms of ether glow, And Heaven's last thunder shakes the world below; Thou, undismay'd, shalt o'er the ruins smile, And light thy ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... wait, till, down the eastern sky, Muses, like Maenads in a throng, Sweep my decayed traditions by, In ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... soul, which is in very truth, as they do think the god himself, he must needs fight with the person in whom Too-Keela-Keela doth then dwell, and for this reason: If the holder of the soul can defend himself in fight, then it is clear that his strength is not one whit decayed, nor is his vigor feailing; nor yet has his assailant been able to take his soul from him. But if the Korong in open fight do sleay the person in whom Too-Keela-Keela dwells, he becometh at once a Too-Keela-Keela himself—that ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... gentleman: he would neither allow Cosmo to eat with the labourers—to which Cosmo himself had no objection, nor would hear of his sleeping anywhere but in the best bedroom they had in the house. Also, from respect to the heir of a decayed family and valueless inheritance, he modified even his own habits so far as almost to cease swearing in his presence. Appreciating this genuine kindness, Cosmo in his turn tried to be agreeable to those around him, and in their short evenings, for, being weary, they retired ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... his experience with boys had been along quite a different line. He evidently fancied that they were only made to prove a thorn in the flesh of every circus owner, stealing under the canvas of the big round-top, annoying the animals, and throwing decayed vegetables at the clown when he was trying his best to amuse ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... conviction that evil at large is none of your business until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of this sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and your reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with a certain interest again. The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating thing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... bull and surely, from his size, the father of the herd. Berselius considered the beast to be of great age. One tusk was decayed badly and the other was chipped and broken, and on the skin of the side were several of those circular sores one almost always finds on the body of a rhinoceros, "dundos," as the natives call them; old scars and wounds told their tale of old battles ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... open end of the tent; half a cocoa-nut, filled with soft water, was placed outside, and a bag containing some bits of toasted bread, was attached to a post. This species of monument is called Toupapow. Whence could that singular method of raising the dead above the ground until the flesh was decayed by putrefaction have been derived! It is quite impossible to find out. Cook could only ascertain that the cemeteries called Morai, are places where the natives observe certain religious customs, and that they always betrayed some ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... McCoy house, a small frame affair with a picket fence separating it from Turner's Pike, stood with its back door facing the Wheeling Railroad. The section hands on the railroad remembered their former fellow workman, Mike McCoy, and wanted to be good to his widow. They sometimes dumped half decayed railroad ties over the fence into a potato patch back of the house. At night, when heavily loaded coal trains rumbled past, the brakemen heaved large chunks of coal over the fence. The widow awoke whenever a train passed. When one of the brakemen threw a chunk of coal he shouted and his voice ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... of the country. Its diameter at the base, is said to be one hundred yards, its perpendicular height about eighty feet, and the diameter at its summit, forty-five feet. Trees, of all sizes and of various kinds, are growing on its sides; and fallen [36] and decayed timber, is interspersed among them; a single white oak rises out of a concavity in the centre of ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... for his wife and children, kneeled down, laid his head on the block, prayed during a few minutes, and gave the signal to the executioner. His head was fixed on the top of the Tolbooth, where the head of Montrose had formerly decayed. [350] ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that college, where he was very useful in training up the youth in solid learning; and with the learned principal Boyd of Trochridge, the worthy Mr. Blair, and other pious members of that society, his pains were singularly blessed in reviving decayed serious piety among the youth, in that declining and corrupted time, a little after the imposition of prelacy upon the church. Here by a recommendation of the general assembly not long after our reformation from popery, the regents were only to continue ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... blinded by rough boards, and empty from top to bottom. It was of the later Renaissance in style, and we imagined it built in the Republic's declining years by some ruinous noble, whose extravagance forbade his posterity to live in it, for it had that peculiarly forlorn air which belongs to a thing decayed without being worn out. We entered its coolness and dampness, and wandered up the wide marble staircase, past the vacant niches of departed statuary, and came on the third floor to a grand portal which was closed against us by a barrier of lumber. But ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... ten thousand blessings—thou cook of fat beef and dainty greens!—thou manufacturer of warm Shetland hose, and comfortable surtouts!—thou old housewife darning thy decayed stockings with thy ancient spectacles on thy aged nose!—lead me, hand me in thy clutching palsied fist, up those heights, and through those thickets, hitherto inaccessible, and impervious to my anxious, weary feet:—not those Parnassian crags, bleak and barren, where the hungry worshippers ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... middle of October, there sailed into Port Royal three privateers, Captains Prince, Harrison and Ludbury, who six weeks before had ascended the river San Juan in Nicaragua with 170 men and again plundered the unfortunate city of Granada. The town had rapidly decayed, however, under the repeated assaults of the buccaneers, and the plunderers secured only L20 or L30 per man. Modyford reproved the captains for acting without commissions, but "not deeming it prudent to ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... develop the qualities for which we first admired him—clearness of vision and a marvellous technical execution. So extraordinary is this later execution that, by comparison, the earlier seems timid and weak. His naturalism has expanded and strengthened: mine has decayed and almost ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... races gradually died out, and their strongholds fell into ruins. And time which had demolished the castles on the heights above, began her work of destruction on the little church below; its roof decayed and ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... beheld. How things, my dear friend, are changed from their original character and destination! "But the old round tower," say you!—To "the old round tower" then let us go. The stair-case is narrow, dark, and decayed. I reached the first floor, or circular room, and noticed the construction of the window seats—all of rough, solid, and massive stone. I ascended to the second floor; which, if I remember rightly, was strewn with a portion of the third floor—that had ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... worn or decayed it is needful to try various lighting. This can be done in the open air, by shading the part by the hands placed around it as a sort of tube, the head blocking out the light over the tube. Then quickly raise a hand alternately, ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... could not see a quarter of a mile before us, but yet went rapidly forward to the W.N.W., when, after about six hours, we came to a high, bold land, and a great number of islands of reddish granite, wild and barren in the extreme. We here found the ice in a very decayed state, and in many places the holes and fissures were difficult if not dangerous to pass. At the expiration of eight hours, our impediments in this respect had increased to such a degree as to stop our farther progress. Dunn, the old man, and myself therefore walked ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... from the Cowgate with a motley assortment of pallbearers. There was a good-tempered Irish laborer from a near-by brewery; a decayed gentleman, unsteady of gait and blear-eyed, in greasy frock-coat and broken hat; a flashily dressed bartender who found the task distasteful; a stout, bent-backed fagot-carrier; a drunken fisherman from New Haven, suddenly sobered by ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... imagination, as it was when Augustus had done with it. To begin with, the sea has retreated several miles from the city, which is no longer within sight of it, while all that is left of Classis, which is also now out of sight of the sea, is a single decayed and deserted church, S. Apollinare in Classe. Strabo, however, who wrote his Geography a few years after Augustus had chosen Ravenna for his port upon the Adriatic, has left us a description both of it and the ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... in the usual way, I add to it about a pint of warm water and a teaspoonful of glycerine, and stir it well. Then dipping a soft sponge into the solution, I wash over the backs of the books. If the leather is much perished or decayed, it will unduly absorb the size, and a second touch over may be necessary. The glycerine will have the effect of preventing the glue from drying too hard or stiffening the leather. When dry, the books may be rubbed over with a chamois leather. The above process, ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... a small town at the extremity of the Genoese territories, where we changed horses. Then entering the principalities of Massa and Carrara, belonging to the duke of Modena, we passed Lavenza, which seems to be a decayed fort with a small garrison, and dined at Massa, which is an agreeable little town, where the old dutchess of Modena resides. Notwithstanding all the expedition we could make, it was dark before we passed the Cerchio, which is an inconsiderable stream in the neighbourhood ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... about Upper Crossleys over which the cloud hung; and I wondered if the district had been one of those—growing rare nowadays—which had flourished under the protection of the "big house" and had decayed with the decay of the latter. It had been a common enough happening in the old days, and I felt disposed ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... Festival of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, where and when the people were wont to offer to an image there, and to the same the said abbot in his sermons would exhort them and encourage them. But now the oblations be decayed, the abbot, espying the image then to have a cote of silver plate and gilt, hath taken away of his own authority the said image, and the plate turned to his own use; and left his preaching there, saying it is no manner of profit to any ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Before I had found the wood I chanced upon another patch of delicious wild strawberries, and took an appetizer of them out of hand. Presently I picked up a yellow birch stick the size of my arm. The wood was decayed, but the bark was perfect. I broke it in two, punched out the rotten wood, and had the bark intact. The fatty or resinous substance in this bark preserves it, and makes it excellent kindling. With some seasoned twigs and a scrap of paper ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... far more than mere beauty—the grandeur of desolation, the grandeur of the Unknown. As we passed through the massive iron gates of the lodge, I looked upon countless acres of withered, undulating grass; upon a few rank sedges; upon a score or so of decayed trees; upon a house—huge, bare, grey and massive; upon bleak walls; upon vacant, eye-like windows; upon crude, scenic inhospitality, the very magnitude of which overpowered me. I have said it was cold; but there hung over the estate ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... many hard gales together? D— my limbs! I thought you had been more of an honest heart: I looked upon you as my foremast, and Tom Pipes as my mizen: now he is carried away, if so be as you go too, my standing rigging being decayed, d'ye see, the first squall will bring me by the board. D— ye, if in case I have given offence, can't you speak above-board? and ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... St. Andrews, when it had lost its archiepiscopal pre-eminence, gradually decayed: One of its streets is now lost; and in those that remain, there is silence and solitude of inactive indigence and ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... a quarter of an inch, with a pale yellow pulp, which is the part eaten. The taste resembles, according to the description of those who like the fruit, that of a very rich custard, and, according to those who have never succeeded in overcoming their antipathy to the smell, that of a mixture of decayed eggs and garlic. This fruit cannot be eaten in large quantities with impunity by Europeans, being of a very heating nature. With me it never agreed; nor do I remember a single instance of its agreeing with my countrymen, when eaten freely. Half a one is as ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... they divided themselves into three parties: one took to the north, another to the south, and the third went four miles east, more into the interior; but, except one or two decayed huts, they met with nothing. Being returned to the salt lake without finding fresh water, they dug a pit near the side of it, and obtained wherewith to relieve their thirst. The lake had fallen a foot, which showed it to have a communication with the ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... appear, Captain Davidson, having remained two hours, deemed further delay inexpedient, and bore up to keep the advantage of the fair wind. The outline of this island is rugged; the hummock on its northern extremity appeared to me to resemble a decayed martello tower more than ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... his sins to myself and they were awful. Once every night I play the Tune of Time in which the wickedness of the dead man is spread out like dry rot in a green field. This man kept his genius so long stagnant that it decayed on his hands, and then into his pestilential music he poured his poison, and would have made the world sick. Oh, for delivery from the crushing transgressions of another! His name? Ah, but that is my secret! I ate his sin, and truth, my son, is ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Langhorne's Country Justice. The Deserted Village was in point of fact an imaginative idyll,—the supreme idyll of English poetry; but Goldsmith insisted that it was a realistic record of actual conditions. Yet he could never have observed such an English village, either in its depopulated and decayed state (as Macaulay has remarked), or in its rosy prosperity and unsullied virtue; his economic history and theory were misleading. Like Macpherson, but through self-delusion rather than intent, he was engaged in an effort to deceive by giving sentimental doctrines a basis of apparent actuality. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... a good courage, Miss Ruston," said he. "And we'll agree to stand by you. Any time, in the middle of the night, that we hear the crash and fall of decayed old timbers, we'll come to the rescue and pull you out. We don't have much excitement here. The wreck will have the advantage of advertising you thoroughly. Then you can build a tight little bungalow on the spot and settle down to ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... sepulture, corruptions seem peculiar unto parts; and some speak of snakes out of the spinal marrow. But while we suppose common worms in graves, 'tis not easy to find any there; few in churchyards above a foot deep, fewer or none in churches though in fresh-decayed bodies. Teeth, bones, and hair, give the most lasting defiance to corruption. In an hydropical body, ten years buried in the churchyard, we met with a fat con- cretion, where the nitre of the earth, and the salt and lixivious liquor ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... afternoon he laid down his pen and wandered out of doors. He loved the increasing heat of the Venetian summer, the bruised peach-tints of worn house-fronts, the enamelling of sunlight on dark green canals, the smell of half-decayed fruits and flowers thickening the languid air. What visions he could build, if he dared, of being tucked away with Susy in the attic of some tumble-down palace, above a jade-green waterway, with a terrace overhanging a scrap of neglected garden—and cheques from the publishers dropping in at convenient ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... scorn titles which did not distinguish practical offices. A nation bowing to them has gone to pith, for him; he had to shake himself, that he might not similarly stick; he had to do it often. Objects elevated even by a decayed world have their magnetism for us unless we nerve the mind to wakeful repulsion. He protested he had reason to think the earl was humanizing, though he might be killing a woman in the process. 'Could she wish for better?' he asked, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... England in the years 1642-45. It is not a historical novel, nor a romance, nor an adventure story; it is the story of a brave man and a noble woman as set forth in the letters of a prosperous family of Yorkshire gentry. James Blount, the hero, comes by his father's side of a race of decayed northern gentry, and by his mother's side from the yeomanry. Entering the King's army as a private trooper, he wins a commission; but he never wins social recognition from his brother officers, and he is left much alone. He meets Arundel Carewe and loves her. The moment when ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... Skepsey with his blunt titles for a couple of the foremost maladies assailing the poor lady's decayed constitution: not to be mentioned, Skepsey's thought, in relation to ladies; whose organs and functions we, who pay them a proper homage by restricting them to the sphere so worthily occupied by their mothers up to the very oldest date, respectfully curtain; their accepted masters are ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... came divers Indians bearing litters, the which, at Altlamatzin's word, Sir Richard and I entered and so, Pluto trotting beside us, were borne up from terrace to terrace unto the town. And I saw this had once been a goodly city though its glory was departed, its noble buildings decayed or ruinated and cheek by jowl with primitive dwellings of clay. And these greater houses were of a noble simplicity, flat-roofed and builded of a red, porous stone, in some cases coated with white cement, whiles here and there, towering ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... decayed leaves, wash in several waters until no grit remains. Boil in water to nearly cover until tender, drain, rinse in cold water, drain again, chop very fine; reheat in butter, season with salt and pepper and pack ...
— Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus • Rufus Estes
... teeth brushed and the mouth clean. Have decayed teeth repaired at once. Decayed teeth drop out and they cause abscesses, which may destroy the jaw bone or cause brain fever. Old snags give the stomach the germs of rotting, ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... testify. The professors are highly endowed with accomplishments and scientific knowledge in the several branches to which they are respectively appointed; and the funds able to render relief to the indigent and decayed artists, their ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... danger connected with meats is that they may become tainted, or begin to spoil, or decay, before they are used. Unfortunately, the ingenious cook has invented a great many ways of smothering, or disguising, the well-marked bad taste of decayed, or spoiled, meat by spices, onions, and savory herbs. So, as a general thing, the safest plan, especially when traveling or living away from home, is to avoid as far as possible hashes, stews, and other "made" dishes containing meat. This is one of ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... extremely well to the speculator. The garden produces European as well as Brazilian vegetables, in great perfection: Fruit-trees also thrive very well.[58] In the cuts for the fishponds I observed below the sand, a rich black earth, full of decayed vegetables, which probably renders this apparently sandy land, so fertile. The ponds were half covered with the white water-lily, and some other aquatic plants of the country. The whole island abounds in gay shrubs and gaudy flowers[59], where the humming-bird, here called the beja flor ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... weather-worn; and probably these were but the successors of other stones that had quite crumbled away, or been buried by the accumulation of dead men's dust above them. In the centre of the churchyard stood an old yew-tree, with immense trunk, which was all decayed within, so that it is a wonder how the tree retains any life,—which, nevertheless, it does. It was called "the old Yew of Eastham," ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and went cautiously in. It proved a passage, level for some distance, then sloping gently up. He advanced carefully, feeling his way as he went. At length he was stopped by a door—a small door, studded with iron. But the wood was in places so much decayed that some of the bolts had dropped out, and he felt sure of being able to open it. He returned, therefore, to fetch Lina and his mattock. Arrived at the cleft, his strong miner arms bore him swiftly up along the rope and through the hole into the dungeon. ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald |
