"Ditch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... described as son and heir of Adam of Oldediche, held lands within the manor of Baddesley Clinton by military service, and probably had only just then obtained them. Oldediche, or Woldich, now commonly called Old Ditch Lane, lies within the parish of Temple Balsall, not far from the manor ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... had different names, and human history might have been considered to begin only a few hundred years before. Even this had not happened. The link with the past remained. There was a narrow, cobbled path on Manhattan, with sewage oozing down the ditch in its center, which was still Fifth Avenue. It ran roughly along the same directions as old Broadway, not because there was no one who could read the yellowed old maps but because surveying was ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry
... certainly not with Rikli." And as the little girl's shrieks grew louder she began to think something serious was the matter, and the two ladies started away in the direction of the sound. Poor Rikli was indeed in a wretched plight. She was standing in a ditch, covered quite to her neck in the muddy water, and holding up her arms above her head, in an effort to protect it from the many little green frogs that were sporting about her. Aunty reached her first, and, taking the little girl by the arm, she quickly rescued ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... indeed, honest Dick, but the slaves are somewhat proud; and besides, it's a good sport in a part to see them never speak in their walk, but at the end of the stage; just as though, in walking with a fellow, we should never speak but at a stile, a gate, or a ditch, where a man can go no further. I was once at a comedy in Cambridge, and there I saw a parasite make faces and mouths of ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... a bit upset, too, at sight of her tears But I dare vow that was put on. Fancy Boney caring a curse what a woman feels. She had learnt her speech by heart, but that did not help her: Regnaud had to finish it for her, the ditch that overturned her being where she was made to say that she no longer preserved any hope of having children, and that she was pleased to show her attachment by enabling him to obtain them by another woman. She was led off fainting. A turning of the tables, considering ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... knew that they would fight to the last ditch for their hero should he come to claim the crown. Yet how would they fight—to which side would they cleave, were he to attempt to frustrate the design of the Regent to seize ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to carry them through troubles, but this irate old man only annoyed her. She had not been well herself since that long night's work in the rain, when half of the passenger train had toppled into the ditch, and her patience was correspondingly short-lived. The doctor who attended Mr. Hyden noticed the weary look about her eyes, and offered ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... these methods, the far-sighted and the near-sighted. Bacon fell into the ditch, and Freud is obsessed by the vision of a world only seen through the delicate anastomosis of the nerves of sex. Yet also they both have their rightness, they both help us to realise the Divine Mystery of the Soul, towards which no telescope ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... arranged in double layers about 2 feet apart. The so-called bricks are not in the least like our bricks, being 6 inches long, 12 inches wide and 11/2 inch thick. The Wall was 20 feet high, with towers and bastions at intervals about 50 feet high. At first there was no moat or ditch, and it will be understood that in order to protect the City from an attack of barbarians—Picts or Scots—it was enough to close the gates and to man the towers. The invaders had ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... life, generally alone, and at different stages the ghosts of past moods would flood her mind with a whole scene or train of thought merely at the sight of three trees from a particular angle, or at the sound of the pheasant clucking in the ditch. But to-night the circumstances were strong enough to oust all other scenes; and she looked at the field and the trees with an involuntary intensity as if they had no such ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... wretched substitutes from the bottom of the heap of rags, which she turned up for that purpose; together with a girl's cloak, quite worn out and very old; and the crushed remains of a bonnet that had probably been picked up from some ditch or dunghill. In this dainty raiment, she instructed Florence to dress herself; and as such preparation seemed a prelude to her release, the child complied ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the 20th of February, 1437, after some of the conspirators, selected for that purpose, had knocked to pieces the locks of the doors of the king's apartment, carried away the bars which fastened the gates, and provided planks with which the ditch surrounding the monastery was to be crossed, Sir Robert Graham left his hiding-place in the mountains and entered the convent gardens, with about ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... roads in the country hadn't been rough and frozen so hard that they hammered on the solid, unresisting tires and spokes until, almost within sight of the farm, one wheel dismally collapsed. As the wheel broke, the trailer slid off the road into a ditch, so that it was necessary to send on to the farm for the plow horses to haul out the car, the trailer and the trees. The horses finished hauling the trees to that part of the farm where holes had been dug for them. I had told my tenant to dig large holes and large holes he had certainly ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... to Main's is metalled for about four and a half miles; there are fences and fields on both sides, either laid down in English grass or sown with grain; the fences are chiefly low ditch and bank planted with gorse, rarely with quick, the scarcity of which detracts from the resemblance to English scenery which would otherwise prevail. The copy, however, is slatternly compared with the original; the scarcity of timber, the high price of labour, and ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... ahead. It was an impressive spectacle. The westering sun shone on the tower that had been made to look like some old-time type English masonry, famous in history, with its portcullis, drawbridge, and surrounding watery ditch known as ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... considered, by most people, as unsafe and the people were going round it. Public opinion, at the beginning of the strike, was about equally divided between the men and the company. Now and then a reckless striker or sympathizer would blow up a building, dope a locomotive or ditch a train, and the stock of the strikers would go down in the estimation of the public. Burlington stock was falling rapidly—the property ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... There were no cars running across country, and indeed not even sidewalks, since it was an unfrequented part of the town with no residences for many blocks until one reached the little, tumbledown section in the Hollow. Here and there were heavy drifts, and now and then an unexpected ditch in the path gave Carol a tumble into the snow, but, laughing and breathless, she was pulled out again and ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... to give us a gay winter, and, Heaven knows, we have been dull as ditch water. The theater has been refitted. And there is talk of racing again ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... in the ditch, trying to loosen a clump of sod. He had stepped on a piece of glass, and received an ugly gash on the bottom of his foot, so that he could hardly step on it. Imagine the torture of having to stand and push the spade into the soil with an ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... by the raft-race. The ditch that ran beside the railroad embankment widened in one place to forty feet. Half a dozen logs were here floating. The keeper of the great seal had brought with him a hammer and a handful of nails, and seeing on his way several strips of board, he had picked them ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... native boy, who has been with them all day in the bush. Some of the old cows go steadily enough in the right direction, but others, and especially the young heifers, are continually bunting one another, and trying to push their next neighbours into the ditch. Several, tempted by a pleasant field of barley, have leapt over a broken rail, and are eating and trampling down all before them. But soon they are perceived by the dusky herdsman, who incontinently shrieks like one possessed by demons, and rushing ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... and hot, the Union lines reach the strong defences of Peachtree Creek. Here Confederate Gilmer's engineering skill has prepared ditch and fraise, abattis and chevaux-de-frise, with yawning graves for the ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... a season brief, The lice among your feathers, Stiff-winged and aimless-eyed, With song dead you shall fall; Refuse of some clotted ditch, Seeking no more berries; Why with lyric numbers now ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... his car and set forth again in a storm. The car skidded and turned turtle in a ditch. By some chance neither of them was more than bruised and muddied. The hamper of food was spilled and broken and they had hours to wait by the roadside while a wrecking crew came from the nearest city to right ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... hand on each side of the battlement where you now stand; lean through it and look down. Hold fast and fear nothing.' Dorothy did as she was desired, and thus supported gazed upon the moat below, where it lay a mere ditch at the foot of the ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... in the ditch when he was dyin', dying in sight of his home. Mine was the only hand that wiped away his tears. I can see only ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... James's palace across the canal, into the Birdcage walk, from thence into Great George street, then turning down Long ditch, (the Gate house previously to be taken down,) proceed to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... not. She was caked with mud and dirt from head to foot, an appalling figure in the lamplight. The rain dripped from her hair, her sinister clothing, her whole person. She looked as if she must have hidden in a wet ditch. I gazed horror-struck at my speckless matting and pale Oriental rugs. I had never allowed a child or dog in the house for fear of the matting, except of course my poor Lindo, who had died a few months previously, and whom I had taught to wipe ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... vain one in the light of all history. Militarism and the clans are by no means in the last ditch in Japan, and they will no more surrender their power than would the Russian bureaucracy. The only argument which is convincing in such a case is the last one which is ever used; and the mere mention of it by so-called socialists is sufficient to cause ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... very glad to hear so much gold was near them as would pay nine kings' ransoms. They took their small spades and dug little holes in the Camp of Rink, which is a great old circle of stonework, surrounded by a deep ditch, on the top of a hill above the house. But Jean was not a very good digger, and even Randal grew tired. They thought they would wait till they grew bigger, and ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... they soon arrived at the fort. It presented a formidable aspect. In addition to the palisades, a hedge of fallen trees a rod in thickness surrounded the whole intrenchment; outside the hedge there was a ditch wide and deep. There was but one point of entrance, and that was over the long and slender trunk of a tree which had been felled across the ditch, and rested at its farther end upon a wall of logs ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... had never heard of the Thirty-nine Articles. He was struck with the architecture of the colleges, and much surprised at the meanness of the houses that surrounded them. He heretically calls the Isis 'a mere moat,' the Cherwell 'a ditch.' The brilliant dare-devil from Italy despised alike the raw, limitary, reputable, priggish undergraduates and the dull, snuffling, smug-looking, fussy dons. The torpor of academic dulness, indeed, was as irksome ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... trestle, and for an instant he saw the intake of an irrigating canal, and finally, after a last tunnel, the eastbound steamed out of the canyon into a broad, mountain-locked plateau. Everywhere, watered by the brimming ditch, stretched fields of vivid alfalfa or ripe grain. Where the harvesting was over, herds of fine horses and cattle or great flocks of sheep were turned in to browse on the stubble. At rare intervals a sage-grown ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... morning. And, when you had been keeping this sort of thing up two or three hours, and your little velvet head intimated that nothing suited him like exercise and noise, what did you do? You simply went on until you dropped in the last ditch. The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... check their career, the republican leaders thought it would be best for them to give up their useless efforts there, go home, get into their respective legislatures, embody whatever of resistance they could be formed into, and if ineffectual, to perish there as in the last ditch. All, therefore, retired, leaving Mr. Gallatin alone in the House of Representatives, and myself in the Senate, where I then presided as Vice-President. Remaining at our posts, and bidding defiance to the brow-beatings and insults by which they endeavored to drive ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... enemy, who were already engaged in skirmishing, which lasted a long while before they were at the great game. The king had great numbers of lanzknechts, the which would fain have done a bold deed in crossing a ditch to go after the Swiss; but these latter let seven or eight ranks cross, and then thrust you them back in such sort that all that had crossed got hurled into the ditch. The said lanzknechts were mighty frightened; and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Duke of Beaufort. The architectural magnificence of this noble residence is of a much later period than that of Gwenwyn, whose palace, at the time we speak of, was a low, long-roofed edifice of red stone, whence the castle derived its name; while a ditch and palisade were, in addition to the commanding ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Ursulines, or with the Jesuits; redoubts were raised, loop-holes bored and patrols established. At Ville-Marie no fewer precautions were taken; the governor surrounded a mill which he had erected in 1658, by a palisade, a ditch, and four bastions well entrenched. It stood on a height of the St. Louis Hill, and, called at first the Mill on the Hill, it became later the citadel of Montreal. Anxiety still prevailed everywhere, but God, ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... on, having the field to himself,—"we left Order back there in the ages you call dark, and Progress will trumpet the world into the ditch." ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... said Monckton. "Mistress, I always like to hear the whole history of every place I stop at, especially from a sensible woman like you, that sees to the bottom of things. Do have another glass. Why, I should be as dull as ditch-water, now, if ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... a steady downpour, it sang its mournful song through poplar and shrub. Soon the grey tiled roof of the cottage poured its libation into spouting gutters, and every rut of the road became a miniature ditch. But, with dogged persistency, the five watchers stuck ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... Church followed Melanchthon, and that in consequence between Rome and Anglicanism, between high Church and low Church, there was no real intellectual difference on the point. I wished to fill up a ditch, the work of man. In this Volume again, I express my desire to build up a system of theology out of the Anglican divines, and imply that my dissertation was a tentative Inquiry. I speak in the Preface of "offering suggestions ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... beings but diminutive. He directed them to pull the canoe along the nae, or farther side of the Puunui stream. By this course the canoe was brought down as far as Kaalaa, near Waikahalulu, where, when daylight came, they left their burden and returned to Waolani. The canoe was left in the ditch, where it remained for many generations, and was called Kawa-a-Kekupua (Kekupua's canoe), in honor of the servant of ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... hollow way. There, as there will be no room for retiring, we shall come to close quarters." Almost quicker than the word, Claudius leaped into the hollow way. Taurea, bold in words more than in reality, said, "Never be the ass in the ditch;" an expression which from this circumstance became a common proverb among rustics. Claudius having rode up and down the way to a considerable distance, and again come up into the plain without meeting his ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... dispersed; his spirit gone, his form withered and decayed; stretched out as a dead log; family ties broken—all his friends who once loved him, clad in white cerements, now no longer delighting to behold him, remove him to lie in some hollow ditch tomb." The prince hearing the name of Death, his heart constrained by painful thoughts, he asked, "Is this the only dead man, or does the world contain like instances?" Replying thus he said, "All, everywhere, the same; he ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... soldiers of a few weeks seemed but impatient to take the odds, and to make light of impossibilities. A slightly rising ground, raked by a murderous fire, to within a little distance of the battery; a ditch holding three feet of water; a straight lift of parapet, thirty feet high; an impregnable position, held by a desperate ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... was now some yards ahead of his master, and had reached a ditch full of water, and about ten feet wide. With the intention of clearing it, he made a spring, when a loud cry burst from Servadac. "Ben Zoof, you idiot! What are you about? You ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... was shot on the night of the 21st of March, 1804, in the wood or in the ditch of the castle at Vincennes, is admitted even by Government; but who really were his assassins is still unknown. Some assert that he was shot by the grenadiers of Bonaparte's Italian guard; others say, by a detachment of the Gendarmes d'Elite; and others again, that the men ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... that level all inequalities in the surface and crush the clods. Flocks of crows wheel in the air above the scene, or stalk at a safe distance on the ploughed ground. Blackbirds, which have now returned from the South, sing in chorus on the adjacent ditch-banks, mingling their harsh notes with the lively songs of myriads of bobolinks, while high overhead whistles the plover. The newly-sprung grass paints the road-side a lush green, the leaves are budding on weed and spray, and over all there hang the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... hastily into his accoutrements. "Come up to the top av the Fort an' we'll pershue our invistigations into M'Grath's shtable." The relieved Guard strolled round the main bastion on its way to the swimming-bath, and Learoyd grew almost talkative. Ortheris looked into the Fort ditch and across the plain. "Ho! it's weary waitin' for Ma-ary!" he hummed; "but I'd like to kill some more bloomin' Paythans before my time's up. War! Bloody war! North, East, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... thick and 350 feet high, on which were 250 towers, or, according to some writers, 316. The top of the wall was wide enough to allow six chariots to drive abreast. The materials for building the wall were dug from a vast ditch or moat, which was also walled up with brickwork and then filled with water from the River Euphrates. This moat was just outside of the walls, and surrounded the city as another ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... one dying like a poisoned rat in a ditch is a powerful one. The same writer, in hunting down an unworthy man, with his cutting criticism, says, that he did it not on account of his power, but to put down what might prove noisome if not settled, ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... a substantial place of defence, according to Greek tactics. Its deep foss is cut in the solid rock, and furnished with subterranean magazines for the storage of provisions. The three piles of solid masonry on which the drawbridge rested, still stand in the centre of this ditch. The oblique grand entrance to the foss descends by a flight of well-cut steps. The rock itself over which the fort was raised is honeycombed with excavated passages for infantry and cavalry, of different width ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... panaderia doorway came a girl and a boy. They walked along by the "zanja," or irrigation ditch, that here bordered the road. The fern-leaved pepper trees beside the zanja were dotted with clusters of ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... by anyone dissatisfied with a judgment pronounced in my name. It can always be said: "What does Lord Elgin know of India? He has never been out of Calcutta. He is acquainted only with Bengal civilians and other dwellers in (what is irreverently styled) 'the ditch.'" Indeed, I fear that I am exposed to the same reproach in your circle. I see no remedy for this evil, if I am to ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... mysterious cause of this action, had contented themselves with calling it "that attack," as if they were talking of the accident that happened to the horse "Coco," who had broken his leg a short time before in a ditch, and whom they had ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... long ago you rode me; Master, you were careful of me then; Never was there anyone bestrode me Equal to my master among men. When we flew the hedge and ditch together— 'Good lass!'—how it made me prick my ear! Horn and hound, bright steel and polished leather, Long ago—if you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... it, and one glorious day of late April in its twelfth return he had wandered northward along to a little wood a couple of miles from the town. It was full of unnamed flowers and voices and mysteries. Every tree and thicket had a voice—a long ditch full of water had many that called to him. "Peep-peep-peep," they seemed to say in invitation for him to come and see. He crawled again and again to the ditch and watched and waited. The loud whistle would ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... lowlands, where I have the pleasure of seeing my cattle, horses, and colts. Exuberant grass replenishes all my fields, the best representative of our wealth; in the middle of that tract I have cut a ditch eight feet wide, the banks of which nature adorns every spring with the wild salendine, and other flowering weeds, which on these luxuriant grounds shoot up to a great height. Over this ditch I have erected a bridge, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... pace a little but we kept our position. Uncle Eb was leaning over the dasher his white locks flying. He had something up his sleeve, as they say, and was not yet ready to use it. Then Dean began to shear over to cut us off—a nasty trick of the low horseman. I saw Uncle Eb glance at the ditch ahead. I knew what was coming and took a firm hold of the seat. The ditch was a bit rough, but Uncle Eb had no lack of courage. He turned the horse's head, let up on the reins and whistled. I have never felt such a thrill as then. Our horse leaped into the deep ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... gentleman addressed as Luke Sturgis. "And show me the man as ain't cur'ous" he said, with a wink, "and I'll show you the man as is good at a plough and inwalable at a ditch, and wery near worth his weight in gold at gapping a hedge, and mucking up a horse-midden, and catching them nasty moles wot ruin the county worse nor ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... to this, as well as to every other species of gambling, is, the success of the few. As young men, who crowd to the army in search of rank and renown, never look into the ditch that holds their slaughtered companions, but have their eye constantly fixed on the commander-in-chief; and as each of them belongs to the same profession, and is sure to be conscious that he has equal merit, every one dreams ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... pommel of my saddle, mechanically winding the lines about my wrist, and clung with the tenacity of sin clutching the world. Some soldiers looked wonderingly from the wayside, but did not heed my shriek of "stop him, for God's sake!" A ditch crossed the lane,—deep and wide,—and I felt that my moment had come: with a spring that seemed to break thew and sinew, the blue roan cleared it, pitching upon his knees, but recovered directly and darted onward again. I knew that I should fall ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... that will then come to me will behold me (yield up my life)! When the Sun on his car of great speed and unto which are yoked seven steeds, will proceed towards the direction occupied by Vaisravana, verily, even then, will I yield up my life like a dear friend dismissing a dear friend! Let a ditch be dug here around my quarters ye kings! Thus pierced with hundreds of arrows will I pay my adorations to the Sun. As regards yourselves, abandoning enmity, cease ye from the fight, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of the law, the bad name that your sister will be having over the head of being in a breach of promise, and all the expenses of solicitors and lawyers. Then, after that, trying to get the money out of us, and, mind you, we will fight you to the last ditch. ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... very distinguished man in the city, who has, besides, a wife and children, had said all sorts of things to her parents; and, as eight hundred dollars is a deal of money to poor people, one can excuse them: but Eva wept, and said she would rather spring into the castle-ditch. They represented all sorts of things to the poor girl; she heard of the service out here with us. She wept, kissed my old woman's hand, and thus came to us; and since then we have had a deal of service from Eva, and ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... miles northeast of Detroit. This spot of ground was, in the year 1776, owned and occupied by a Mr. Tucker. The other works, properly intrenchments, being walls or banks of earth regularly thrown up, with a deep ditch on the outside, were on the Huron River, east of the Sandusky, about six or eight miles from Lake Erie. Outside of the gateway of each of these two intrenchments, which lay within a mile of each other, were a number of large flat mounds in which, the Indian pilot ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... better put on your lights?" Grace suggested uneasily. "We might run into a ditch or something. Betty, I'm ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge - or, The Hermit of Moonlight Falls • Laura Lee Hope
... my companion. "So was I. I just felt as though I had about reached the last ditch. I haven't any money to pay into lodges and it don't seems if a man could ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... height the eagle describes the appearance of the world lying stretched out beneath: at first it rises like a huge mountain out of the sea; then the ocean appears as a girdle encircling the land, and finally but as a ditch a gardener digs to irrigate his land. When they have risen so high that the earth is scarcely visible, Etana cries to the eagle to stop; so he does, but his strength is exhausted, and bird and man fall ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of September we set out for Rheims. There it was said the Germans would meet with strong resistance, for the French intended to die to the last man before giving up that city. But this proved all fudge, as is usual with these "last ditch" promises, the garrison decamping immediately at the approach of a few Uhlans. So far as I could learn, but a single casualty happened; this occurred to an Uhlan, wounded by a shot which it was reported was fired from a house after the town was taken; so, to punish ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... common hedges. What reason can there be assigned For this perverseness in the mind? Brutes find out where their talents lie: A bear will not attempt to fly; A foundered horse will oft debate Before he tries a five-barred gate; A dog by instinct turns aside, Who sees the ditch too deep and wide;— But man we find the only creature, Who, led by folly, combats nature; Who, when she loudly cries, Forbear, With obstinacy fixes there; And, where his genius least inclines, Absurdly bends ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... midday, I came into the world at Frankfort-on-Maine. Our house was situated in a street called the Stag-Ditch. Formerly the street had been a ditch, in which stags were kept. On the second floor of the dwelling was a room called the garden-room, because there they had endeavoured to supply the want of a garden by means of a few plants placed before a window. As I grew older, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... it was late autumn in England. Leaves drifted down from the trees beneath the breath of a strong, damp wind, and ran or floated along the road till they vanished into a ditch, or caught against a pile of stones that had been laid ready for its repair. He knew the road well enough; he even knew the elm tree beneath which he seemed to stand on the crest of a hill. It was that which ran from Mr. Champers-Haswell's splendid house, The Court, to the ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... Duke of Reichstadt's regiment Caught sight of him as he was riding homeward. You know the deep ditch bordering the road? His Highness wished to leap it, but his horse Shied, swerved, and backed. The Duke sat firm, And brought him to it again, and—over! Then The men, to applaud him, shouted. And ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... of fern and brushwood, while broken fences come dancing up between, and then shrink down again behind rising knolls covered with a sudden growth of gorse and heather. A pit yawns into a pond; the pond squeezes itself longways into a thin ditch, which turns off sharply at a corner, and leaves a dreamy-looking cow occupying its place. Then a gate flies out of a thicket; a man leaning over with folded arms grows out of the gate, which spins round into a lodge, and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... sometimes adventure. And a trench, even as a road, has its beginnings somewhere. In the heart of a very strange country you find them suddenly. A trench may begin in the ruins of a house, may run up out of a ditch; may be cut into a rise of ground sheltered under a hill, and is built in many ways by many men. As to who is the best builder of trenches there can be little doubt, and any British soldier would probably admit that ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... suffered acutely. Belmont was reached after dark; the troops were without over-coats or blankets, and the night was bitingly cold. But they lay down anywhere, glad enough to stretch themselves upon the ground or seek the friendly shelter of a ditch. Here they lay unmurmuringly—members of the proudest aristocracy in the world, noblemen of ancient lineage, quite ready to sleep in a ditch or die, for that matter, for ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... said that the two men were struggling when the shot was fired. Again, both father and son agreed as to the place where the man escaped into the road. At that point, however, as it happens, there is a broadish ditch, moist at the bottom. As there were no indications of bootmarks about this ditch, I was absolutely sure not only that the Cunninghams had again lied, but that there had never been any unknown man upon ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... moving about in all directions constantly, like water in a boiling pot, and in this way keep it fresh and pure and clean. If it were not for this, the air would become foul and damp and stagnant, like the water in a ditch or marshy pool. So the Sun God, as our ancestors in the Far East used to call him thousands of years ago, not only gives us our food to eat, but keeps the air fit for ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... these men retreated as far as the ditch, from which each took a concealed musket; the result was that our seven travelers were outnumbered in weapons. Aramis received a ball which passed through his shoulder, and Mousqueton another ball which lodged in the fleshy part ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... better course for you to take than to dig a deep ditch all around the trees, say three feet wide and as many deep, and just within the outer reach of the limbs, and fill this in with half the earth removed and the other half made up of vegetable matter, ashes, road dirt, and such manure from the barn ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... Ditch meeting to-night. Ought to be out about now. Setting the time to use the water and assessing fatiga work. Every last man with a water right will be there, sure, and Foy's got a dozen. Max, you are to be a witness, remember, and ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... from greatness. There are still some traces of the ancient bed of the Zwijn amongst the fields near Coolkerke, a village a short distance to the north of Bruges—a broad ditch with broken banks, and large pools of slimy water lying desolate and forlorn in a wilderness of tangled bushes. These are now the only remains of the highway by which the 'deep-laden argosies' used to enter ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... place where another grassy lane crossed at right angles the one down which he had been riding. It was a lonely spot, but yet was a thoroughfare from which the roads diverged to one or two large villages, and led in one direction ultimately to the market-town. Close to the ditch opposite the road down which Amos had come was a white finger- post, informing those who were capable of deciphering its bleared inscriptions whither they were going or might go. Amos hesitated; he had never been on this exact spot before, and he therefore ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... others came in, an' got him away. Then he'd carry tales to his father, and one day old Westall beat Jim within an inch of 'is life, with a strap end, because of a lie George told 'im. The poor chap lay in a ditch under Disley Wood all day, because he was that knocked about he couldn't walk, and at night he crawled home on his hands and knees. He's shown me the place many a time! Then he told his father, and next morning ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has been sapped and weakened by events. You must buy my full obedience, Zaemon, if you want it. Promise me Nais—and your arts I know can snatch her—and I will be true servant to the High Council of the Priest, and will die in the last ditch if need be for the carrying out of order. But let me see Nais given over to the fury of that wanton woman, and I shall have no inwards left, except to take my vengeance, and to see Atlantis piled up in ruins ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... [Sidenote: Agra a great citie.] Agra is a very great citie and populous, built with stone, hauing faire and large streetes, with a faire riuer running by it, which falleth into the gulfe of Bengala. It hath a faire castle and a strong with a very faire ditch. [Sidenote: The great Mogor.] Here bee many Moores and Gentiles, the king is called Zelabdim Echebar: the people for the most part call him The great Mogor. From thence we went for Fatepore, which is the place where the king kept his court. The towne ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... little proud, God knows, to be seen upon so pretty a beast, and to my cozen W. Joyce's, who presently mounted too, and he and I out of towne toward Highgate; in the way, at Kentish-towne, showing me the place and manner of Clun's being killed and laid in a ditch, and yet was not killed by any wounds, having only one in his arm, but bled to death through his struggling. He told me, also, the manner of it, of his going home so late [from] drinking with his whore, and manner of having it found out. Thence forward to ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... dark hair lightly sprinkled with gray. The second that he looked into that woman's eyes taught him her character, absolutely, as finally as if he had grown up with her. One could trust her to the last ditch, ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam
... north bank of the Maumee near the present Maumee City. There were four nine-pounders, two large howitzers, and six six-pounders, mounted in the fort, and two swivels. The entire fortification was surrounded by a wide, deep ditch about twenty feet deep from the top of the parapet. The forces within consisted of about two hundred and fifty regulars and two hundred militia. All were under command of Major William Campbell, of the Twenty-fourth Regiment. The rout of the Indian allies had been humiliating ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... dug under the mill house, which was fed by copious springs, and promised to furnish an abundant supply of water. To furnish water for the numerous mills about Mountain City and in Nevada gulch a large ditch had been dug, which started up in the mountains near the Snowy range, and wound like a huge serpent around promontories and the sides and heads of numerous gulches, with a slight incline, for some fifteen ...
— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton
... he do? Rapidly he turned over in his mind the various courses open to him. Should he try to stun Arima with a blow, and then reach forward and take the steering-wheel before the car could swerve into the ditch? ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... striking the turnpike—every rod of which he could have found in the dark—his thoughts, like road-swallows, skimmed each mile he covered. Here was where he had stopped with Kate when her stirrup broke; near the branches of that oak close to the ditch marking the triangle of cross-roads he had saved his own and Spitfire's neck by a clear jump that had been the talk of the neighborhood for days. On the crest of this hill—the one he was then ascending—his father always tightened up the brakes on his four-in-hand, and on the slope ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... than any I have ever heard of. As far as I know, however, the largest one ever made for the United States was a sixteen-inch rifled cannon—that is, it was sixteen inches across at the muzzle, and I forget just how long. It weighed many tons, however, and it now lies, or did a few years ago, in a ditch at the Sandy Hook proving ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... a man may not concern himself with the broader problems of life and attack them with all the apparatus of recorded experience, unless he happen to live on one bank or other of the Fleet Ditch! If a man have the gift, he can find all the "brass and plume of song" in his orchard edge. If he have not, he may (provided he be a bona fide traveller) find it elsewhere. What, for instance, were the use of telling Keats: "To thy surgery ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... surrounded by a stone wall about thirty feet high, with its foundation on a solid rock; but it has no ditch or glacis, and is capable of little or no defence against cannon. In the afternoon I went, accompanied by Lieutenant Thomas, and followed by the best cortege we could muster, to return the Raja's visit. He resides within the walls of the city in ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... sympathetic statement Bernard cannot be said to have enjoyed his lunch; he was thinking of something else that lay before him and that was not agreeable. He was like a man who has an acrobatic feat to perform—a wide ditch to leap, a high pole to climb—and who has a presentiment of fractures and bruises. Fortunately he was not obliged to talk much, as Mrs. Gordon displayed even more than her usual vivacity, rendering ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... of extreme peril. Sam brought the automobile to a stop. Had the roadway been wider he might have sheered to one side, but the highway was too narrow for that, and with a ditch on either side, to carry off rain water, he did not want to take a chance of ...
— The Rover Boys in the Air - From College Campus to the Clouds • Edward Stratemeyer
... order—namely, to do nothing, because if he had been able to do the smallest amount of work no one would ever give anything again. After having refreshed himself, this wise man would lay full length in a ditch, or against a church wall, and think over public affairs; and then he would philosophise, like his pretty tutors, the blackbirds, jays, and sparrows, and thought a great deal while mumping; for, because his apparel was poor, was that a reason his understanding should not be rich? His ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... been lending you a hand, and you now in the last ditch, with Dolliver riding on you and me all the time. It don't go. You hear me, it don't go. Dolliver couldn't cough up eleven dollars to save you. Let him get off and walk, and I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you the railway nickels for four days—that's forty thousand cash. And on the ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... was approached by a little bridge across a broad ditch. By the bridge stood a tall, massive post upon which a sign squeaked softly as it swayed to and fro. The inn was built round three sides of a square, the left-hand side being the house itself, the centre, the kitchen, and the right-hand ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... afterwards a shadow rose from the ditch where he had been crouching, and stood looking after them long after they had been lost in ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... from Ball, off Malta; and has brought me information, that the attempt to storm the city of Valette had failed, from—(I am afraid, I must call it)—cowardice. They were over the first ditch, and retired, damn them! But, I trust, the zeal, judgment, and bravery, of my friend Ball, and his gallant party, will overcome all difficulty. The cutter just going off prevents my being more particular. Ever ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... journey, the long road down the valley of the river Jordan. But they did not find this very pleasant, either. High above the river stood the banks, and it seemed as though the river itself were at the bottom of a great, deep ditch. And down there was the road they had to take. In some places they came to slime and mud, and dead trees and twisted roots. But sometimes there were farms and villages. It was hot at the north end of the Jordan, when first they came to it; and the farther south the travelers ...
— The King Nobody Wanted • Norman F. Langford
... entrenchments, encampments, buildings, and other fortifications, which are indeed very agreeable to a traveller that has read anything of the history of the country. Old Sarum is as remarkable as any of these, where there is a double entrenchment, with a deep graff or ditch to either of them; the area about one hundred yards in diameter, taking in the whole crown of the hill, and thereby rendering the ascent very difficult. Near this there is one farm-house, which is all the remains I could see of any town in or near the place (for the encampment has ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... drive the dagger to the heart of time, and put the axe to human growth!—that one circle of wisdom issuing of the experience and needs of their day, should act the despot over all other circles for ever!—so where at first light shone to light the yawning frog to his wet ditch, there, with the necessitated revolution of men's minds in the course ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and in the scuffle some one lurched forward against the driver at a critical turn in the road, throwing him against the wheel. The big car swerved almost into the ditch, was brought back just in the nick of time and sped on, while Death, who had looked into that tonneau, turned away ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... there is a mound 600 feet long, 400 wide, and 40 feet high. The area of its level summit measures 4 acres. There was a ditch around it, and near it are smaller mounds. Mr. J. R. Bartlett says, on the authority of Dr. M. W. Dickeson, "The north side of this mound is supported by a wall of sun-dried brick two feet thick, filled with grass, rushes, and leaves." Dr. Dickeson mentions ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... the mountain-side from the big village comes a man of some sort; such a strange man, with such a wonderful head ... that all scream: "Oy, Trishka is coming! Oy, Trishka is coming!" and all run in all directions! Our elder crawled into a ditch; his wife stumbled on the door-board and screamed with all her might; she terrified her yard-dog, so that he broke away from his chain and over the hedge and into the forest; and Kuzka's father, Dorofyitch, ran into the oats, lay down there, and began to cry ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... many men were on that fiercely pursuing locomotive, nor whether they were armed or not. He only knew that within another minute they would overtake him. He formed a desperate resolve, and a moment later Rod Blake thought he saw a dark form scrambling from a ditch beside the track as they flew past. When they reached the "dying" locomotive of which they were in pursuit and found it abandoned, he knew what had taken place. The train robber had leaped from its cab and was now making his way across ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... standards?" Edgar said. "None of the great governing forces of life can fit into a ditch of conventions." ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... of to-day in a leading metropolis of the country. It makes my soul—and, I believe, the soul of every one jealous for the glory of God and the honor of the Holy Spirit and the eternal welfare of human souls being led into the ditch of eternal night by these blind, reason-exalting leaders—cry out, 'How long, O Lord, how long,' must the followers of the life of Jesus Christ endure these things and by their silence be charged (by implication) with endorsing the present condition of things and ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... friend he most respects is always a delight. It is he that keeps the crowd in good humor, who is generally deepest and most abiding in his affection, and who at the drop of the hat would fight to the last ditch for his friend. To handle him rightly does not require a six-foot rod, or a half-inch rule. But the Teacher must keep him so busy doing the things that he likes that he will have no dull moments in which to vent ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... period of the approaches, a redoubt was to be stormed, he eagerly solicited the forlorn hope from Washington. Advancing to the charge with characteristic spirit, at the point of the bayonet, exposed to a heavy fire, he struggled through the ditch, and surmounting the defences, took the work in the most brilliant manner. He gallantly arrested the slaughter at the first moment, and thus placed his humanity upon a level ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... letter from the Women Grain Growers' Association explaining their fight for community medical service and a system of itinerant rural nurses. They're organized, and they're in earnest, and I'm with them to the last ditch. They're fighting for the things that this raw new country is most in need of. It will take us some time to catch up with the East. But the westerner's a scrambler, once ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... one side into the ditches, and dead horses and wreckage due to bombing or the brief moments of panic were likewise thrust off the road. Relays of fresh drivers took over all the lorries and tractors which would still go. The rest went into the ditch on top of the dead horses and derelict carts. The heavier loads which single tractors had been pulling were split up between two or more. In a surprisingly short time the ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... country house of weathered brick faced to the south. Save for the man sowing, and some rooks crossing from elm to elm, no life was visible in all the green land. And it was quiet—with a strange, a brooding tranquillity. The fields and hills seemed to mock the scars of road and ditch and furrow scraped on them, to mock at barriers of hedge and wall—between the green land and white sky was a conspiracy to disregard those small activities. So lonely was it, so plunged in a ground-bass of silence; so much ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... another method is employed: the water is taken out of the stream in an artificial channel dug in the earth. But in order to get the water at a sufficient height to make it flow over the fields, it is necessary to start a ditch or canal at a favorable point some distance up the stream, perhaps miles ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... of vineyard at most, the ground rising at the back of the house so steeply that it is no very easy matter to scramble up among the vines. The slope, covered with green trailing shoots, ends within about five feet of the house wall in a ditch-like passage always damp and cold and full of strong growing green things, fed by the drainage of the highly cultivated ground above, for rainy weather washes down the manure into ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... high, insomuch that the Boy used all his strength to hold back the cord; but his strength failing him, he was with a furious blast snatcht up by the Kite from the ground, and presently after let fall again into a pretty deep ditch, where the poor innocent Boy was ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... "my geography was as good as your arithmetic. It is all the same whether you fall into the ditch from this ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... with Herodotus, reappears in a Russianised form in the name "Samoyed".] Which they make more probable, because at this time they eate all kind of raw flesh, whatsoeuer it be, euen the very carion that lieth in the ditch. But as the Samoits themselues will say, they were called Samoie, that is, of themselues, as though they were Indigenae, or people bred vpon that very soyle, that neuer changed their seate from one place to another, as most nations ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... the imagination—"the madman at home" as it has been called—to an unbroken horse which has neither bridle nor reins. What can the rider do except let himself go wherever the horse wishes to take him? And often if the latter runs away, his mad career only comes to end in the ditch. If however the rider succeeds in putting a bridle on the horse, the parts are reversed. It is no longer the horse who goes where he likes, it is the rider who obliges the horse to take him wherever he ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... beet work began. They made a pretty cheerful place of this new home; though, of course, it had no floor and no window glass, and sun and stars shone in through its roof, and the only running water was in the irrigation ditch. Even under the glistening cottonwood tree it was a stifling cage on ...
— Across the Fruited Plain • Florence Crannell Means
... what he has is rather the contrary; I will, indeed, allow him courage, and on this account we so far give him credit. We have more respect for a man who robs boldly on the highway, than for a fellow who jumps out of a ditch, and knocks you down behind your back. Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when it is ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... his father and all his kinsmen scattered about the North who had sworn to die in the last ditch rather than be governed by Nationalists. "That's all very well," he said, "but there are plenty of people in Ireland who don't want to be governed by ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... afterwards, Gorju showed himself on the top of a ditch, and questioning them: "When do you want me ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... sallied out to see it, had been too good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had ever seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a marked accent and accosting some passer-by with the question, "Say! But is this little wet ditch ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... "calf." This man would fall down any time and anywhere. Standing in the road or resting on his rifle, he would fall—fall while marching, or standing in his tent. I saw him climb on top of a box car and then fall without the least provocation backwards into a ten-foot ditch. But in all his falling he was never known to hurt himself, but invariably blamed somebody for his fall. When he fell from the car, and it standing perfectly still, he only said: "I wish the d——n car would go on or stand still, one or the other." The road leading ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... wealthy mill-owner had killed one of the employees who had gone to see him peaceably and arrange matters for the men. He had thrown him out of the office into one of the new mill excavations and left him there to die like a dog in a ditch. So the story ran all through the tenement district, and in an incredibly swift time the worst elements in Milton were surging toward Mr. Winter's house with murder in their hearts, and the means of accomplishing it ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... the lowing of cattle, Cries of distress from the aged and sick, who aloft on the wagon, Heavy and thus overpacked, upon beds were sitting and swaying. Pressed at last from the rut and out to the edge of the highway, Slipped the creaking wheel; the cart lost its balance, and over Fell in the ditch. In the swing the people were flung to a distance, Far off into the field, with horrible screams; by good fortune Later the boxes were thrown and fell more near to the wagon. Verily all who had witnessed the fall, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Union Mills on the extreme right and the Stone Bridge on the extreme left, where the turnpike from Centreville to Warrenton crossed the Run. Bull Run itself was a considerable obstacle, having fairly high banks and running along the Confederate front like the ditch of a fortress. Three miles in rear stood Manassas Junction on a moderate plateau intersected by several creeks. The most important of these creeks, Young's Branch, joined Bull Run on the extreme left, near the Stone Bridge and Warrenton turnpike, after flowing through ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... along a side street where a number of men were at work digging a long and deep ditch in which to lay ...
— The Woggle-Bug Book • L. Frank Baum
... today, only at that time they were crude adobe structures. Surrounding these was a wall fourteen feet high, made of huge upright and horizontal saplings plastered with mud, and as a further means of protection, a wide ditch was dug on the outside. Here Luis Argueello was Comandante ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... the darlin' beast as well as I do my own, inside and out. But, be dashed, if the wheels without the horse aren't beyond me quite. Lord love you, but the skittish animal's given me some ugly knocks, cast me away, it has, in the wayside ditch, covering me soul with burning shame, and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... street, and women fell on their knees to receive their blessing. There were many beggars, too, in the streets; and an old man who was making hay in a field by the road-side, when he saw the carriage approaching, threw down his rake, and came tumbling over the ditch, with his hat held out in both hands, uttering the most dismal wail. The next day, the bright yellow jackets of the postilions, and the two great tassels of their bugle-horns, dangling down their backs, like two cauliflowers, told him ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... you suppose they're going to lie down just because an unknown and penniless inventor sues them? Bless you, no! They'll fight to the last ditch, they'll engage the best legal talent in the country. You'll have to carry the case to the Supreme Court of the United States if you want a winning decision. And that's going to cost you thousands—hundreds of ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... a man to fight to the last ditch. On the morning after the publication of the Express's charges, the Clarion printed an indignant denial from him. That same morning Bruce was arrested on a charge of criminal libel, and that same day—the grand jury being in session—he was indicted. Blake's attorney ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... began again from the doorway. "Drive me out into a ditch to starve for a joke. I could see he thought it was a damned good joke. A man like me! Look here! Some of the highest in the world got to thank me for walking on their two legs to this day. That's the man you've got ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Session House, the Compter, the prisons of Ludgate, Newgate, &c., several of the wharfs and stairs and landing-places on the river; all which were either burned down or damaged by the great fire of London, the next year after the plague; and of the second sort, the Monument, Fleet Ditch with its bridges, and the Hospital of Bethlem or Bedlam, &c. But possibly the managers of the city's credit at that time made more conscience of breaking in upon the orphan's money to show charity to the distressed ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... and, putting the mare for the first time to her full speed, galloped towards the opposite side of the field, which was enclosed by a strong fence, consisting of a bank with oak palings on the top and a wide ditch beyond. Slackening his pace as he approached this obstacle, he held his horse cleverly together, and, without a moment's hesitation, rode at it. The beautiful animal, gathering her legs well under her, 218faced it boldly, rose to the rail, and, clearing ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley |
