"Pit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Only the pit-pats of their footsteps wakened dull echoes through the vaulted cavern. Johnny could not help feeling that there were more than three men in this cave. In vain he strained his eyes to catch a glimpse of the walls to right and ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... been losing the debate rapidly, when the accident happened. One of the men, curiously examining Bassett's shot-gun, managed to cock and pull a trigger. The recoil of the butt into the pit of the man's stomach had not been the most sanguinary result, for the charge of shot, at a distance of a yard, had blown the head of one of the ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... struck into a half-made road across a warren. A cart-track led at right-angles to a gravel pit, beyond which the chimneys of a cottage rose amongst a clump of trees at the border of a thick wood. Tussocks of feathery grass covered the rough surface of the ground, and out of these the larks soared into the hate of sunshine. On the far horizon, over a countless succession ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... active operation. A small quarter of the great slope of masonry facing the stage was roped off into an auditorium, in which the narrow level space between the foot-lights and the lowest step figured as the pit. Foot-lights are a figure of speech, for the performance was going on in the broad glow of the afternoon, with a delightful and apparently by no means misplaced confidence in the good-will of the spectators. What the piece was that was deemed ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... lad began to repent. He wept bitterly, but said it was not so much for the fear of death as the apprehension of his soul being thrown into the pit of destruction and eternal misery. However, by degrees, he recovered a little spirit, confessed all the enormities of his past life, and begged pardon of God, and of the persons whom he had injured. If we were to attempt ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... roared the lions, with horrid laughing jaws; They bit, they glared, gave blows like beams, a wind went with their paws; With wallowing might and stifled roar, they rolled on one another: Till all the pit, with sand and mane, was in a thunderous smother; The bloody foam above the bars came whizzing through the air: Said Francis, then, "Faith, gentlemen, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... a dollar Bye, baby bumpkin As I was going to sell my eggs Once I saw a little bird come hop, hop, hop Willy boy, Willy boy, where are you going? Little Robin Red-breast sat upon a rail Ding, dong, darrow Pit, pat, well-a-day Lit-tle Jack Hor-ner sat in a cor-ner Lit-tle Tom Tuck-er Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle A dog and a cat went out together Little Polly Flinders Four and twen-ty tai-lors went to kill a snail A little cock-sparrow sat on a tree Bless you, bless you, bonny bee One day, ...
— Aunt Kitty's Stories • Various
... in great haste, and then hurried back to the theatre where a queue of people had already formed outside the entrance to the pit. Soon after he joined the queue, the doors were opened, and in a little while he found himself sitting at the end of the second row. He had chosen this seat so that he might be able to hurry out of the theatre quickly, without disturbing ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... in the prosperity. It is because he 'went with Abram' that he 'had flocks, and herds, and tents.' Of course, the connection between despising the world and possessing it is not thus close in New Testament times. But even now, one often sees that the men who will be rich fall into a pit of poverty, and that a heart set on higher things, which counts earthly advantages second and not first, wins a sufficiency of these most surely. Foxlike cunning, and wolf-like rapacity, and Devil-like selfishness, which make up a large portion of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... a painter, that glance would have been worth the taking. The iron curtain was raised, the house loomed vaguely; the balconies, covered with cloth, stood out like cliffs; the pit, with its seats under a gray drugget, because of the dust, lifted toward the stage its rows of motionless waves. The stage itself was strange: a sort of huge cave, with strips of scenery hanging like stalactites; near the wall, a ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... digestion, and no limestone rock can long resist it. Sherman's soldiers tell of a monster spring in northern Alabama,—a river leaping full-grown from the bosom of the earth; and of another at the bottom of a large, deep pit in the rocks, that continues its ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... A coal-pit has not often found its poet; but, that it may not want its due honour, Cleveland has ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... business, gag, buffoonery. light comedy, genteel comedy, low comedy. theater; playhouse, opera house; house; music hall; amphitheater, circus, hippodrome, theater in the round; puppet show, fantoccini^; marionettes, Punch and Judy. auditory, auditorium, front of the house, stalls, boxes, pit, gallery, parquet; greenroom, coulisses [Fr.]. flat; drop, drop scene; wing, screen, side scene; transformation scene, curtain, act drop; proscenium. stage, scene, scenery, the boards; trap, mezzanine floor; flies; floats, footlights; offstage; orchestra. theatrical costume, theatrical properties. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... there. His mother was unwilling to have him engage in these schemes. She was afraid he would, sooner or later, involve himself in dangers from which he could not extricate himself, and that he would end by being plunged into the same pit of destruction that had ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... always loved the actors, especially the old actors, from his youth; and this was the last of the Romans. Accordingly Lamb and his sister went to the Drury Lane; but there being no room in the ordinary parts of the house (boxes or pit), Munden obtained places for his two visitors in the orchestra, close to the stage. He saw them carefully ushered in, and well posted; then acted with his usual vigor, and no doubt enjoyed the ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... clouds. Nature herself seems to wield a new peculiar spell in such association—old quarries, the rusting tramways choked with fern; forgotten mines with the wild vine twining tenderly about the old iron of dismantled pit-tackle, grown as green as itself with the summer rains; roads once dusty with haste over which only the moss and the trailing arbutus now leisurely travel. Wherever Nature is thus seen to be taking to herself, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... In other words, he descended immediately into a bottomless pit of confusion, and the Young Person followed him down. I really don't know when I have been so amused. I left them at the bottom of the pit as long as they diverted me. When they ceased to divert me, I exerted my intelligence, and pulled them ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... women, were commanded to come and help build it, and none dared to stay away. It is about two hundred feet square, twenty-five feet high, and as many feet thick, of solid stone, just like a massive wall. Within we saw where the sacrifices were laid overnight, and the pit where they were thrown in the morning,—a place called by the ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... he could, no doubt, find some coarse hell at which he could stake it till it would be all gone; but the gates of the A—— and the B—— and the C—— would be closed against him; and he would then be driven to feel that he had indeed fallen into the nethermost pit. Were he once to play at such places as his mind painted to him he could never play at any other; and yet when the day drew nigh on which he was to go to London, on his way to Buston, he did bethink ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... husband, and she answers also in singing that so she will do. As soon as she arrives at the place where they are always burned she waits with the musicians till her husband is burned, whose body they place in a very large pit that has been made ready for it, covered with much firewood. Before they light the fire his mother or his nearest relative takes a vessel of water on the head and a firebrand in the hand, and goes three times round the pit, and at each round ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... her the justice to say she encourages trade.—Why, do you know, Bob, my best coal pit won't find her in white muslins—round her neck hangs an hundred acres at least; my noblest oaks have made wigs for her; my fat oxen have dwindled into Dutch pugs, and white mice; my India bonds are transmuted ...
— Speed the Plough - A Comedy, In Five Acts; As Performed At The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden • Thomas Morton
... to her feet, thinking only of her brother. "Oh! I wonder if—" And then they heard her go pit-a-pat through the hall to the front of the house, heard Mrs. Fletcher more deliberately follow, heard presently the beat of horses' hoofs on the hard roadway, and the whir of coining wheels. "I'll go out to meet ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... interfering in what only remotely concerned me. At any rate, that was certainly the view that Grogoff would take, and Nina, perhaps also. I felt, as I rang the bell of No. 3, that unpleasant pain in the pit of the stomach that tells you that you're going to make a fool ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... know what it means, Dick," he said bitterly, "but it seems to me that, like Lucifer, you've been falling from dawn to dewy eve, and now you are likely to consort with the devils in the pit. Are you the old Dick who used to be ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... replied the prince, "as a necessary scourge, which one can pit against the bad taste of second-rate authors. His satires, of too personal, a nature, and consequently iniquitous, do not please me. He knows it, and, despite himself, he will amend this. He is at work upon an 'Ars Poetica,' after the ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... supposing the white men were still running on in advance. As the foremost, a tall, muscular fellow, with the agility of a panther, bounded over the bush behind which Jacques was concealed, he was met with a blow from the guide's fist, so powerfully delivered into the pit of his stomach that it sent him violently back into the bush, where he lay insensible. This event, of course, put a check upon the headlong pursuit of the others, who suddenly paused, like a group of infuriated ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... is whitening all the lea. Now Cytherea leads the dance, the bright moon overhead; The Graces and the Nymphs, together knit, With rhythmic feet the meadow beat, while Vulcan, fiery red, Heats the Cyclopian forge in Aetna's pit. 'Tis now the time to wreathe the brow with branch of myrtle green, Or flowers, just opening to the vernal breeze; Now Faunus claims his sacrifice among the shady treen, Lambkin or kidling, which soe'er he please. ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... fat with all that cleaueth to the skin. This they take with them, leauing the bodies behind, and so go to shore. Where they digge pits, in the grounde of a fadome and an halfe deepe, or thereabout, and so taking the fat or lard off from the skinne, they throw it into the pit, and cast in among it boat burning stones to melt it withall. The vppermost and purest is sold, and vsed to oile wool for cloth, the grosser (that is of a red colour) they sell to ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... underwood that was between us; but it seemed me that the damsel was bemoaning her for the son of the Widow Lady that had given her back her castle, and the knight said that for love of him he would put her into the Serpent's pit. An old knight and a priest went after the knight to pray him have mercy on the damsel, but so cruel is he, that so far from doing so, he rather waxed sore wroth for that they prayed it of him, and made cheer and semblant as though he would ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... replied Mr. Cuthbert, whose business it was to know everybody. "Chicago wheat. She looks like Ceres, doesn't she? Quite becoming to Reggie's dark beauty. She was sixteen, they tell me, when the old gentleman emerged from the pit, and they packed her off to a convent by the next steamer. Reggie may have the blissful experience of living in one of his own ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to the feelings of an Englishman. The consequence was that Jack had few fights, but these were invariably with the largest bullies of the district; and he, in each case, inflicted such tremendous facial punishment on his opponent that he became a noted man, against whom few cared to pit themselves. ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... Tony as if a thick mist of darkness fell all about him, and as if he were sinking down, down, very low into some horrible pit where he would never see the light of day again. But by-and-bye he came to himself, and found old Oliver sobbing in short, heavy sobs, and swaying himself to and fro, while Beppo was licking Dolly's hand, and barking with a sharp, quiet bark, as he had been wont to do when he wanted her to ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... points in the opposite direction. Even in the matter of muscular power it is difficult to make any absolute statement. The muscular development of women among primitive peoples is well known. Japanese women will coal a vessel with a rapidity unsurpassable by men. The pit-brow women of the Lancashire collieries are said to be of finer physical development than any other class of women workers. I have seen the women of Northern Spain perform feats of strength ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... a quarter of a mile south to junction of large creek from south-west, which I named Hervey Creek, near which we observed several flocks of pigeons; at 11.50 made half a mile east-south-east to where the channels are confined, and where there is on the left side a strange deep rocky pit; at 12.12 made three-quarters of a mile south-south-west down the river; at 12.21 made quarter of a mile south-east down the river; at 12.35 made three-quarters of a mile south-south-east to the junction of creek from north-east which I have named Chester Creek; at 12.58 made one mile ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... took Absalom and cast him into a great pit in the wood, and laid a very great heap of stones upon him." (2 Sam. xviii. 17.) When one dies in open desert, the people lay a heap of stones over the grave, the heap being smaller or larger according to the rank and consequence of the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... nice." She, his wife, had also thought him "nice," and that was the sole reason why she had united herself to him for life, had given up every other hope, every other project to join her destiny to his. She had plunged into marriage, into this pit from which there was no escape, into all this misery, this grief, this despair, simply because, like Rosalie, she had ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... modulation, as if he were the nightingale of a thousand melodies. I greatly admired his elegant and decorous speech; but, assuming a face of anger, I exclaimed, "O, you Satan in human form! what net is this that thou hast spread, and in thine own path what pit hast thou dug? What is thy religion, and what rite is this I see? Of what prophet's sect are thou a follower? If thou wast an infidel, even then what sense is there in thy conduct? what is thy ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... their young days they may chop and change, which changes are generally marked by little iron crosses in the woods, but, once they have settled down, desertion is far rarer than in civilised countries. I have seen a native workman with his shoulder blade in his arm-pit, his face cut to ribbons, and with pieces of casting sticking to his back through the carrying away of a crane, cavil against the idea of being taken into the township where the doctor was, lest his old woman, unused ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... and species of atheist will rejoice, if evolution be accepted,-whether modernists, liberals, rationalists, or simple unbelievers on their way to the bottomless pit. If evolution wins, Christianity loses ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... short trip. Jason barely had time to catch up on his sleep before they grounded on Darkhan. Being without luggage they were the first ones through customs. They left the shed just in time to see another ship landing in a distant pit. Kerk stopped to watch it and Jason followed his gaze. It was a gray, scarred ship. With the stubby lines of a freighter—but sporting as many guns ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... paradoxical thing you must battle for and can only win at last when utterly beaten. Hard by their inn, close enough for a priestly homily to have been audible, stood a church campanile, wherein hung a Bell, not ostensibly communicating with the demons of the pit; in daylight rather a merry comrade. But at night, when the children of nerves lay stretched, he threw off the mask. As soon as they had fairly nestled, he smote their pillows a shattering blow, loud for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... week a rough, strong, habitable home was made, door, window, shutter and bars included, two of their helpers having come provided with a pit-saw for cutting the bigger pine-trunks up into rough boards, which were to be paid for out of the first gold winnings the ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... into the pit-gloom ahead of them, so dark that the canoe seemed about to drive against a wall. Under its bow the water ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... there may be something of worth lying even in the earth-pit, or at the bottom of the stagnant water in ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... juvante evaserunt. Pagani locum vacuum reperientes, Monasterium sanctae Mariae sanctique Petri, et cuncta aedificia igne iniecto adurunt, in solitudinem omnia redigentes. Hac itaque patrata eversione, locus, qui tauto honoris splendore diu viguerat, exturbatis omnibus ac subuersis domibus, cA"pit esse cubile ferarum et volucrum: maceriis in sua soliditate in sublime porrectis, arbustisque densissimis; et arborum virgultis per triginta ferme annorum curricula ubique ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... broken by lumps of rock, bushes, and holes, which made temporary breaks in the ranks as the men had to give way to pass on either side of them, and then run up into their places again. Behind every rock and bush, crouched in every pit or hollow, were Arabs, who seized the opportunity to dash amongst the men, getting into the very ranks, and striking with their spears and sharp swords right and left, ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... life, singing her songs at the top of her voice, her dark eyes fixed in the distance before her. Foma hears tumult, howls, laughter, drunken shouts, irritable disputes about copecks—songs and sobs hover over this enormous restless heap of living human bodies crowded into a pit. They jump, fall, crawl, crush one another, leap on one another's shoulders, grope everywhere like blind people, stumbling everywhere over others like themselves, struggle, and, falling, disappear from sight. Money rustles, soaring like bats over the heads of the people, and ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... George's burden him. At last he loitered behind so long that George sat down and lighted his pipe. Presently up comes Niger with the sleeves of his coat hanging on each side of his neck and the potatoes in them. My lord had taken his tomahawk and chopped off the sleeves at the arm-pit; then he had sewed up their bottoms and made bags of them, uniting them at the other end by a string which rested on the back of his neck like a milkmaid's balance. Being asked what he had done with the rest of ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... canzons of a more indecorous nature. Demetrios sang the loves of Douzi and Ishtar, which the gaoler found remarkable. He said so and crossed himself. "Man, man, you must have been afishing in the mid-pit of hell to net ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... perfume of a flower when one passes it in a king's garden.' Then, after having used the cunning eloquence of woman and soared on the wings of pleasure, after having quenched my thirst, I could have you cast into a pit, where none could find you, which has been made to gratify vengeance without having to fear that of the law, a pit full of lime which would kindle and consume you, until no particle of you were left. You would stay in my ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... t' us, Whether 'twas said by TRISMEGISTUS, 660 If it be nonsense, false, or mystick, Or not intelligible, or sophistick? 'Tis not antiquity, nor author, That makes Truth Truth, altho' Times daughter; 'Twas he that put her in the pit 665 Before he pull'd her out of it; And as he eats his sons, just so He feeds upon his daughters too. Nor does it follow, 'cause a herald, Can make a gentleman, scarce a year old, 670 To be descended of a race Of ancient kings in a small space, That we should all opinions hold Authentic ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... description of the earth. They considered the earth as a parallelogram, flat, and surrounded by four seas, as a kind of house, with heaven as its upper story and the earth as its ground floor. To the north of the earth was a great mountain; at night the sun was pushed into a pit and pulled out again in the morning, with heaven as a loft and hell as a cellar. In the Atlantic Ocean, at some unknown distance from Europe, was one of the openings into hell, into which a ship sailing to this point, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... for the pit is, almost without exception, in the vicinity of a drinking place, and the natives exhibit a great amount of cunning in felling trees across the usual run of the elephants, and sometimes cutting an open pit across the path, so ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... on the first guard, and they worked out with shameful ease. When the soldier saw the left coming for the pit of his stomach, he crouched and hugged himself, thereby extending his jaw so that it waited there with the sun shining on it until the young man's right swing came across and changed the middle of the afternoon to midnight. Number ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... in response to Haldane's glance; "come soon, or else I shall be in my grave, and I've got the awful fear that it is the mouth of the bottomless pit. Otherwise I'd be glad to ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... of others by thine own evil heart. Thou, at least, art unrivalled in perfidy, and standest alone—a base deceiver in the garb of virtue and religion—like a deep pit whose yawning mouth ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... know, better than any other living, the heart of the woman who is supposed to be so calm and placid! Now you can have some idea what I have suffered to-night, when I saw the same pit opening for you? Do you understand me? ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... some we lost in the skirmish, And some were killed in the fight, But he was captured by fever, In the sentry pit, at night. ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... on with appreciative, though not loving eyes. "If he had lived in the time of his father JACOB, it would have been no use his brothers putting him in the pit; he would have argued himself clean out before they were half a mile on their way back to the family place in Canaan. Weak part of his position is that he is trying to serve two Bills, BALFOUR'S and PARNELL'S. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation. And all Israel that were round about them fled at the cry of them: for they said, Lest the earth swallow us up also. And there came out a fire from the Lord, and consumed the two hundred and fifty ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... many others on the Sabbath day to eat bread. Here he saw a man with the dropsy and he asked them if it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath day. 'And they held their peace, and he took him and healed him,' and asked them 'which of them having an ox or an ass fall into the pit, would not straightway pull him out on the Sabbath day; and they could not answer him again.' 1-6 v. And 'he continued to teach them, by showing them when they made a feast to call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and then they should ...
— The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign - 1847 edition • Joseph Bates
... his bogie-tale, The Hole of the Pit (ARNOLD). It is a story of the Civil Wars, though these have less to do with the action than the uncivil and very gruesome war waged between the Lord of Deeping Castle and the Unseen Thing that lived in the Pit. The Pit itself is real joy. It was covered always by the tide, but could be distinguished by a darker shadow on the surface of the sluggish stream, a shadow streaked at times by wavering bands ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... and his Sunday shoes and limped down the sidewalk to the Jones's, where the boys and girls were to meet before descending upon Bud Perkins, there was rancor in the royal heart and maternal hair-oil on the royal head. But a strange throb of glad pain in the pit of the royal stomach came at the thought of the two bright eyes that would soon meet his own. The eyes made him forget his blistering shoes, and a smile at the door divested his mind of the serrated collar upon which his head had been pivoting for five distracted minutes. ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... truth all the actions of mankind are craft, malice, or what you will, rather than wisdom. Homer says he hates him worse than hell-mouth that utters one thing with his tongue and keeps another in his breast. Which high expression was grounded on divine reason; for a lying mouth is a stinking pit, and murders with the contagion it venteth. Beside, nothing is lasting that is feigned; it will have another face than it had, ere long. {41} As Euripides saith, ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... formidable appearance; night came on, and with it an increase of the flood. We stood up against trees to rest; some crawled in fence-corners; a few, more lucky, found an old log stable and a smoke-house; these were quickly filled from "pit to dome," as Fred Hunt would say, for some slept on rafters, cross-beams, etc. Still it poured down; still the fountains of heaven gushed forth, fifth, tenth, or twentieth; anyhow, it continued to ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... gingerly back to heaven one by one; for there was but one cloud; and two artisans worked it up with its supernatural freight, and worked it down with a winch, in full sight of the audience. These disposed of, the bottomless pit opened and flamed in the centre of the stage; the carpenters and Virtues shoved the Vices in, and the Virtues and Beelzebub and his tormentor danced merrily round the place of eternal torture ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... a matter of course that most of them fell steadily and rapidly into the pit; the place occupied by the criminally inactive, the "public-house props." So they returned poor, heavy-laden creatures, by way of charity, to the institutions of the "rates," thus completing the vicious circle of life forced upon them by an ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... on this wise mayest thou come to know this. After thou hast returned home, cause the island to be measured in its length and breadth, and in the place where thou dost find the exact central point, there cause a pit to be dug, and cause a cauldron full of the best mead that can be made to be put in the pit with a covering of satin over the face of the cauldron. And then in thine own person do thou remain there watching, and thou wilt see the dragons fighting in the form of terrific animals. ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... with dread. When on reading the newspapers he saw long lists of casualties, and heard stories of the men he had known, who went out healthy and strong and never came back again, and others who were brought home maimed for life, he had a strange feeling at his heart, and a sinking at the pit of his stomach. It was not that he felt afraid, but there was a kind of dread of the unknown. What would ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking
... with him I can assure you, sir, that our troubles will end,' I said, looking only at the surface of the matter and speaking confidently out of the bottomless pit of my inexperience as the young are like ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... th' candles?" he cried excitedly. "Thar sart'in is a cave in thar; but it is as dark as the bottomless pit. We must have lights before we can ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... his boyish head, chuck full of sports and frolics, he had little room for girls' secrets, and even the knowledge thrust upon him by Grace in her trip to the woods had long ago gone the way of his lost game of "Bear in the Pit." Boys have a wonderful way of forgetting failures, and it is that trait which later entitles them to the claims of being good sports, using the title "sport" in its best ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... coal. According to Way, Promptorium Parrulorum, p. 506, note, the Catholicon Anglicanum has "A turfe grafte, turbarium." Grafte is here evidently the same word as the A.-S. grafa, and the Danish Torvegraf, a turf-pit, confirms this opinion. Coal is not mentioned in King Alfred's Bede, in Neckam, in Glanville or in Robert of Gloucester, though the two latter writers speak of the allied mineral, jet, and are very full in their enumeration of the mineral productions of the island. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... though some maritime matter engaged him, and thence making the transit of the Vieux Port in a bateau mouche. It was while crossing in the ferryboat that a sudden shuddering beset him: as he perceived with horror—but without repentance—the pit into which he descended. In his previous, always professional, meetings with criminals his position had been that of unassailable dominance. In his pending meeting—since he himself would be not only a criminal but an inciter to crime—he would be, in the essence of the matter, the under dog. ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... bodies of the enemy to be thrown into a pit, and remained three days upon the field of battle dividing the spoil; on occasion of which a quarrel arose between the helpers and the refugees, and to quiet them the eighth chapter of the Koran was brought from heaven. It begins thus, "They will ask thee concerning the spoils: ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... Cain and Abel and running through the entire scripture a record of the conflict caused by the enmity between the seed of woman and that of her seducer. This conflict is to end when Christ the "seed of the woman" shall return to reign and shall cast his adversary into the bottomless pit. Along with this promise he also provided for them garments of the skins of animals such as were suited to their new and hostile environment and in which most writers find a suggestion of the covering of righteousness that comes to guilty ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... circle on the surface of the sand by jerking himself backwards and flinging the sand away with his flat head and closed forceps, which form a kind of shovel. Each circle is smaller than the last, until the pit is like an inverted cone, and the ant-lion lies buried at the bottom, only his forceps being visible. When an ant has fallen headlong down into the pit it makes frantic efforts to escape, and if the ant-lion sees that it is likely to get beyond his reach, he then with his forceps ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... police at work to find Follet's accomplice; and I will not leave a stone unturned on 'Gravel Pit Hill,' but I will discover him ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... said I at last, 'is hell: this is the air—those are the sounds of the bottomless pit! I have a right to deliver myself from it if I can. The sufferings of this mortal state will leave me with the heavy flesh that now cumbers my soul. Of the fanatic's burning eternity I have no fear: there is not a future state worse than this present one—let me break ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... and blue and black and white-veined pebbles. It sucked up the little drop of water that lay in the hollow of the curved shells; it bleached the pink convolvulus that threaded through and through the sand-hills. Nothing seemed to move but the small sand-hoppers. Pit-pit-pit! They ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... fat hogs, which Louis bought, and four cases of ship's biscuit were sent over from the Casco, which is lying at Papeete for repairs.... Our hogs were killed in the morning, washed in the sea, and roasted whole in a pit with hot stones. When done they were laid on their stomachs in neat open coffins of green basket work, each hog with his case of biscuits beside him. Early in the morning the entire population began bathing, a bath being the preliminary to everything. ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... The Rich Iew of Malta. As it was playd before the King and Qveene, in His Majesties Theatre at White-Hall, by her Majesties Servants at the Cock-pit. Written by Christopher Marlo. London; Printed by I. B. for Nicholas Vavasour, and are to be sold at his Shop in the Inner-Temple, neere the Church. ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe
... her—that was his task. He rallied sharply from his despondency. He would pit himself against the police. A desperate man, guided by love, could do much—might even outwit the tremendous forces of Scotland Yard. He would not be worthy of Sisily if he lost heart because the odds were against him. Fortune's ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... moment he began the Etrurian ceremonies, by digging a circular pit down to the hard clay, into which were cast with great solemnity some of the first-fruits of the season, and also handfuls of earth, each man throwing in a little from the country from which he had come. The pit ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... while the month is closed and the other nostril compressed on the pipe with the hand of the assistant, the lungs are to be slowly inflated by steady puffs of air from the bellows, the hand being removed from the mouth and nose after each inflation, and placed on the pit of the stomach, and by a steady pressure expelling it out again by the mouth. This process is to be continued, steadily inflating and expelling the air from the lungs, till, with a sort of tremulous leap, Nature takes up the process, and the infant begins to gasp, and finally to cry, at first low ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... books as missiles, with which they kept up a skirmishing cannonade against the foe. Imagine the tableau! Two elderly gentlemen enter hurriedly, paterfamilias receiving, quite unintentionally, the first edition of "Paradise Lost" in the pit of his stomach, his friend narrowly escaping a closer personal acquaintance with a quarto Hamlet than he had ever had before. Finale: great outburst of wrath, and rapid retreat of the combatants, many wounded (volumes) being left ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... cover my father with contumely, who dared impute to him a crime that was any man's but my father's. I realize that certain policies called for this stroke on your part, but it can not be. My dear uncle, you have digged a fine pit, and I hope you will find a safe way out of it. I refuse to marry the Princess Hildegarde. This is final. It can be arranged without any discredit to the duke or to yourself. Let it be said that her serene highness has thrown me over. I shan't ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... loll'd out her fawning tongue: They suck'd secure, while, bending back her head, She lick'd their tender limbs, and form'd them as they fed. Not far from thence new Rome appears, with games Projected for the rape of Sabine dames. The pit resounds with shrieks; a war succeeds, For breach of public faith, and unexampled deeds. Here for revenge the Sabine troops contend; The Romans there with arms the prey defend. Wearied with tedious war, at length they cease; And both the kings and kingdoms plight the peace. The ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... men who have the rottenest time of anyone—they're the miners who burrow and dig, dig and burrow day and night towards the German lines; poor half-naked fellows who wheel little trucks of earth to the pit shaft or who lie on their stomachs working away with picks. And it's always an awful race to see if they'll blow up the Germans, or if it will be the ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... considerable time. Yet, surely, I reflected, something resembling interment must have taken place on the arrival of each corpse, especially as it was coffinless. The contrivance, as I afterwards learned, was simple enough. A little sawdust was sprinkled over each corpse, on being laid in the pit, which was thus kept open until it had received its ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... Butte, Montana, where she lives, she wanders among the box rustlers, the beer jerkers, biscuit shooters, and plunges out into the sand and barrenness, but finds everything dumb. The six toothbrushes in the bathroom make her wild and profane. She flirts with death at the top of a dark, deep pit, and thinks out the stages of decomposition if she yielded herself to Death, who would dearly love to have her. She confesses herself a thief on several occasions, but comforts herself because the stolen money was given to the poor. Sometimes ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... pit the resources of the outer world against the militarism of Napoleon; and, drawing the resources of the tropics to the new power-looms of Lancashire and Yorkshire, they might well hope to pour their unequalled ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... eyes, a dark-brown crispy-haired cunt with a tiny bit of pink clitoris showing between a large pair of thighs like ivory, and a sweet face above turned on one side with eyes closed, and blushing a yielding up to me. And I liked the woman, felt mad for her, yet as my prick rubbed against her pleasure-pit, it became useless. I got up, looked at her as she lay motionless with thighs extended, stood almost frantic, frigged my prick, probed her, and again threw myself on her as I stiffened; but no sooner had my prick touched her beautiful cunt, than ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... Congreve, and with neither is the result at once so consummate and so tame. For both Wycherley and Vanbrugh are playwrights, and Congreve is not. Congreve is only an artist in style writing for himself and half a dozen in the pit, while Wycherley and Vanbrugh—and for that matter Etherege and Farquhar—are playwrights producing for the whole theatre. In fact Congreve's plays were only successful in proportion as they were less literary and 'Congrevean.' ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... a skirmish in the place; but who fought in it, who were killed in it, and what the result was, nobody knew. Half a dozen old skulls of much earlier date and of great size were once found in a gravel pit two miles away, and were the subject of much talk, some taking them for Romans, some for Britons, some for Saxons, and some for Danes. As it was impossible to be sure if they were Christian, they could not be put in consecrated ground; they were therefore ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... busy and excited that I hardly had time to enjoy the sweet scent of the flowers in that cool, soft pit; but in a short time I was so far accustomed that I had an eye for the men bringing in fresh supplies, just cut, and for the women who, working at rough benches, were so cleverly laying the buds in a half-moon shape between their fingers and thumbs, the flowers being laid ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... speaking, the oubliette seemed to be the prevailing fashion in vengeful murder. Sometimes the bed sank into the oubliette; sometimes the floor gave way and cast the victim into the oubliette; sometimes the whole room sank slowly into the oubliette; but death for the victim always lurked in the pit. ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... birks, we saw a trottin' burnie wimplin' 'neath the white-blossomed slaes and hirplin' doon the hillside; an' while a herd-laddie lilted ower the fernie brae, a cushat crooed leesomely doon i' the dale. We pit aff oor shoon, sae blithe were we, kilted oor coats a little aboon the knee and paidilt i' the burn, gettin' gey an' weet the while. Then Sally pu'd the gowans wat wi' dew an' twined her bree wi' tasseled ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... readily imagine, with the aid of the striking picture which Fabre has drawn for us, what life was in these surroundings, and what the teaching was: "Between four high walls I see the court, a sort of bear-pit where the scholars quarrelled for the space beneath the boughs of a plane-tree; all around opened the class-rooms, oozing with damp and melancholy, like so many wild beasts' cages, deficient in light ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... to-morrow as we said, but pray for us to the Lord without ceasing," which message was most grateful to the bishop, and he soon set his face north. His exultant chaplains felt sure that all would turn out well, for on the steps of the chapel, when their hearts were all pit-a-pat, they had heard the chorus prose of St. Austin being chaunted, "Hail, noble prelate of Christ, most lovely flower," a lucky omen! And again when they reached chapel doors they heard the bishops and clerks within in unison continue the ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson |
