"Rotten" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... large room, like a salon, and had a big table in it of enduring oak and well preserved; but the chair were worm-eaten and the tapestry on the walls was rotten and discolored by age. The dusty cobwebs under the ceiling had the look of not having had any ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... six heads carry towers and fourteen handles of javelins, is the prince of armies, the fire-devourer. The old man riding on a crocodile is going to bathe the souls of the dead on the seashore. They will be tormented by this black woman with rotten teeth, the governess of hell. The chariot drawn by red mares, which a legless coachman is driving, is carrying about in broad daylight the master of the sun. The moon-god accompanies him in a litter drawn by three gazelles. On her knees, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... tell me that a single Christian land in this nineteenth century era is one whit purer or better in its spiritual or moral character than was Jerusalem a thousand years ago? Does it influence commerce, trade, governments, laws—even civilisation? If it did, not one rule or law that binds the rotten fabric of civilised life together would stand for a single moment. Why? Because no one would lie; no one would cheat; no one would murder, either wholesale because of country prejudices, or retail because of private animosities. Everyone would be honest, charitable, merciful, and unselfish. You ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... his name it was also Jones — He swore that he'd leave them old red hills and stones, Fur he couldn't make nuthin' but yallerish cotton, And little o' THAT, and his fences was rotten, And what little corn he had, HIT was boughten And dinged ef a livin' was ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... against him under the law of Maintenance. Mr. Newdegate was a hard-mouthed witness, but he-was saddled, bridled, and ridden to the winning-post. His lips opened literally, making his mouth like the slit of a pillar-box. Getting evidence from him was like extracting a rotten cork from the neck of a bottle but it all came out bit by bit, and the poor man must have left the witness-box feeling that he had delivered himself into the hands of that uncircumcised Philistine. His cross-examination lasted three hours. It was like flaying alive. Once or ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... Tiny, I'm almost ashamed to accept your hospitality," he observed with winning sincerity. "We've all been so rotten to you—never coming to see you or anything. Dad's terribly cut up that he hasn't made a single trip East since ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... the upper half, the apples are thoroughly cleansed from all earthy or extraneous matter. Such is the friction caused by the concussion of the fall, the rolling and rubbing of the apples together, and the pouring of the water, that decayed sections of the fruit are ground off and the rotten pulp passes away with other impurities. From this tank the apples are hoisted upon an endless chain elevator, with buckets in the form of a rake-head with iron teeth, permitting drainage and escape of water, to an upper story of the mill, whence by gravity they descend to the grater. The ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... Every look of them is a sigh—'Would I were something other! I am sick and tired of what I am.' In this swamp-soil of self-contempt, every poisonous weed flourishes, and all so small, so secret, so dishonest, and so sweetly rotten. Here swarm the worms of sensitiveness and resentment, here the air smells odious with secrecy, with what is not to be acknowledged; here is woven endlessly the net of the meanest of conspiracies, the conspiracy of those who suffer against those who succeed and are victorious; here ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... which are a far more constant quantity than any theological system. This perhaps was what Goethe meant, when he pronounced the subject of Paradise Lost, to be "abominable, with a fair outside, but rotten inwardly." ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... and garnished horribly with broken bottles; but it was also old, and when I came to pick at the mortar with my screw-driver, I found it reasonably rotten ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... seemed to come up from the river bottom. His head suddenly parted the water beneath the old pollard, and he swam slowly across the stream, craning his neck before him. The pollard was inwardly rotten to the core—a snug retreat for snakes, to which the ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... its people in the same way. Unaggressive characters, who talk and think but do not act, fill its novels; they dream of the great age of the "Universal Idea" that shall come for all and regenerate the "rotten west," where "rationalism is the original sin"; the typical west that Slavophilism condemns—the west of the struggles between the rulers and the ruled; between Scripture and tradition and the upper and lower classes. The Slavophile idea, in theory at least, leaves no room for this. Christian ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... if I could shoot. I said yes, but that I didn't care to go out shooting because I had nothing but a rotten old one-barreled gun. ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... tyrant. The heavy silver fork of the Morenos fell to his plate with a crash. "The mine's as rotten as an old lung. There isn't a handful of decent ore left in her. No more clodhoppers 'll get rich out of that mine. You haven't been investing, have you?" His ferret eyes darted from one face to another. "If ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... in his way a kind of Higher Critic judging from a remark he made on the Ark: "How did you manage," he said, as if addressing Noah in person, "how did you manage to keep the first plank of your boat from getting rotten before the last was nailed on, if you actually took 120 years to put the whole ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... This extraordinary garment, which would have contained two men of his size, he chose, for some reason best known to himself, to wear inside out, and he never took it off, even in the hottest weather. It was fluttering all over with seams and tatters, and the hide was so old and rotten that it broke out every day in a new place. Just at the top of it a large pile of red curls was visible, with his little cap set jauntily upon one side, to give him a military air. His seat in the saddle was ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... "that although you do not know it, it is an unjust sentence, built up on the lies of one who has always been my enemy, and of a man whose brain is rotten. I never betrayed the Boers. If anyone betrayed them it was Hernan Pereira himself, who, as I proved to the General Retief, had been praying Dingaan to kill me, and whom Retief threatened to put upon his trial for this very ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... him for not recording the history of ideal engagements, and who remarked, "You know, there are sound potatoes and rotten potatoes in this world," Ibsen cynically replied, "I am afraid none of the sound ones have come under my notice"; and when Guldstad proves to the beautiful Svanhild the paramount importance of creature comforts, the last word of distrust in the sustaining power of love had been said. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... and even increased about Westminster and Whitehall. The cry incessantly resounded against "bishops and rotten-hearted lords."[**] The former especially, being distinguishable by their habit, and being the object of violent hatred to all the sectaries, were exposed to the most dangerous insults.[***] Williams, now created archbishop ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... without a pilot these many years through rough water, rolls and shoots hither and thither because it is without ballast. Do not, then, allow her to be longer exposed to the tempest; for you see that she is waterlogged. And do not let her split upon a reef[5]; for her timbers are rotten and will not be able to hold out much longer. But since the gods have taken pity on this land and have set you up as her arbiter and chief; do not betray your country. Through you she has now revived a little: if you are faithful, she may live with ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... arranged that on this afternoon Willie Woodley should go with them to Hyde Park, where Bessie Alden expected to derive much entertainment from sitting on a little green chair, under the great trees, beside Rotten Row. The want of a suitable escort had hitherto rendered this pleasure inaccessible; but no escort now, for such an expedition, could have been more suitable than their devoted young countryman, whose mission in life, it might almost be said, was to find chairs for ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... our good Fezandie himself, they spoke more or less of everyone within view, as beggars and beasts, and I remember to have heard on their lips no qualification of any dish served to us at dejeuner (and still more at the later meal, of which my brothers and I didn't partake) but as rotten. These were expressions, absent from our domestic, our American air either of fonder discriminations or vaguer estimates, which fairly extended for me the range of intellectual, or at least of social resource; and as the general ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... bring the water all this way to the hut. That won't take long. I can carry the whole of it in two journeys, and quickly put it up. I must take the fire after it. That will keep in for many hours, I see, with the help of this rotten wood. If I go working on in these clothes, I shall soon wear them out. I must see what I can do to make others out of the bark of the paper-mulberry, as the natives do; I thought I saw some of those trees yesterday. I daresay I shall not succeed at first, ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... he left it a half-hour before. Gnulemah's curtain had not been moved. The other door was closed; he ran up the steps between the granite sphinxes, and found it locked. Butting his shoulder against the panel with impatient force, the hinges broke from their rotten fastenings, and the door gave inwards. Balder stepped past it, and found himself in the sombre lamp-lit ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... himself to sail, and about to pass through the raging waves, calleth upon a piece of wood more rotten than the vessel that ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... of suffering none to die that had five hundred pistoles to present for a cure, was very good news to me, and I found I was not at all obliged to my youth or beauty, but that a man with half a nose, or a single eye, or that stunk like an old Spaniard that had dined on rotten cheese and garlic, should have been equally as welcome for the aforesaid sum, to this charming insensible. I must confess, I do not love to chaffer for my pleasure, it takes off the best part of it; and were I left to my own judgement of its worth, I should hardly ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... appeared and evolved and grown rotten ripe inside the bubble, sir. All in the space ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long
... cried one; "she'll be overboard double quick if she fouls agin them blessed bulwarks. It's as rotten ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... of Gaunt, Do give and do grant To Roger Burgoyne, And the heirs of his loin, Both Sutton and Potton,[3] Until the world's rotten. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 360 - Vol. XIII. No. 360, Saturday, March 14, 1829 • Various
... of that to me? for you know he could, had he been so inclined, have kept me out of all by the law—ay, baffled me on till my heart was sick, and till my little substance was wasted, and my bones rotten in the ground; but, God's blessing be upon him! he's an honest man, and done that which many a lord in his place would not have done; but a good conscience is a kingdom in itself, and that he cannot but have, wherever he goes—and all which grieves me is that he is going ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... don't keep sheep; but hens Mrs. Dyer did keep. It was the potatoes that were most successful, for it was one summer when everybody's potatoes had failed. They had all kinds of diseases, especially at Spinville, near which Mr. Dyer lived. Some were rotten in the middle, some had specks outside; some were very large and bad, some were small and worse; and in many fields there were none at all. But Mr. Dyer's patch flourished marvellously. So, after he had taken in all he wanted ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... with the old house on the Headland and the family inhabiting it, was a clean place with a clear atmosphere and inhabited by robust, sane, straightforward persons. You felt homesick." Cornwall is notoriously inhabited by queer people, and the Pendragon family was not merely queer but hereditarily rotten and decadent: the old father, who burns a valuable old book of his own to appease his violent temper; the granddaughter a kleptomaniac; the son of forty addicted to hideous cruelties. Unpleasant but well drawn, all of them. Mrs. C. A. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... all over the land. Again and again Wendell Phillips was mobbed. Once, at the very beginning of his career as an abolitionist, he spoke with an old Quaker. People waited to greet the old Quaker and asked him home for the night; but they pelted Wendell Phillips with rotten eggs as he went down the street in the dark. Afterwards Wendell Phillips said to the old Quaker, "I said just what you did, and yet you were invited home to fried chicken and a bed, while I received ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... but hog manure for cabbage,—barn manure, rotten kelp, night-soil, guano, fertilizers, wood ashes, fish, salt, glue waste, hen manure, slaughter-house manure. I have used all of these, and found them all good when rightly applied. If pure hog manure is ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... uncontrollably—me, a conceited, egotistical fellow who is no more worth her devotion than the pompous beast who opens her father's front-door! And because, out of her love, she commits a heedless, impulsive act which deals a blow at my rotten pride, I slap her face and turn my back upon her, and suffer her to leave my rooms as though she's a charwoman detected in prigging silver from my cash-box! [Clasping his brow and groaning.] Oh—! [In sudden fury at seeing ROOPE thoughtfully ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... going to, before I do some reckless thing and lose it again. I hear you have prospered; that was why I had to wait so long. I often think of dear old Hugh, and his interest in some of the things about the neighbourhood, and I have been given to see while living in this rotten hole of a city how much I underestimated the people about us in Kansas. I would be glad to come back and live among them. Will you let me? A telegram will bring me to ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... "It's only cowardice that's made me cut with him. I know my motives are all rotten, but no matter; I was gloriously happy half-an-hour ago, when I had made the resolution. And now I'm melancholy. That's why I'm talking about being a great man. You must ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... electors, or two thousand, or five thousand, or ten thousand, as the quota might be, every one of whom would have not only voted for him, but selected him from the whole country; not merely from the assortment of two or three perhaps rotten oranges, which may be the only choice offered to him in his local market. Under this relation the tie between the elector and the representative would be of a strength and a value of which at present we have no experience. Every one of the electors would be personally ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... than Daphne, after all. So I thought about it a bit, and then wrote and said I'd remembered her now, and would she come again to see me? She wrote back and said she would, and I must congratulate her as she was just engaged to be married. That was a rotten day, I remember, because in the afternoon Daphne came and said that she was engaged to be married too. A perfect epidemic. But ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... the carpenter examined the pumps, and to our great mortification, found them all in a state of decay, owing, as he said, to the sap's being left in the wood; one of them was so rotten, as, when hoisted up, to drop to pieces, and the rest were little better; so that our chief trust was now in the soundness of our vessel, which happily did not admit more than one inch of water ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... the earth. He was no bigger than a child that has seen the flowers bloom and the corn ripen twice. Yet he appeared to be very old, for his hair was of the colour of the moss upon the sunny side of the oak; his teeth were rotten and decayed; his knees were bent out like warped bows; and his voice was not the voice of a young man, but sounded like the voice of the muck-a-wiss singing in the hollow woods in the summer moons. His face was covered with hair of the colour of the feathers of the blue heron, and stood out like ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... moment he was swinging himself from branch to branch, eating all the ripest kakis and filling his pockets with the rest, and the poor crab saw to her disgust that the few he threw down to her were either not ripe at all or else quite rotten. ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... "Bally rotten, I call it. You're quite right. People don't realize things the way they ought, except in a few selected moments. They live like animals. I shall be sick ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... "Far from rotten, my young friend, I can assure you!" Lavendar returned. "It will furnish coloured illustrations for countless summer numbers of the Graphic and The Lady's Pictorial, and fill Waller R. A.'s pockets with gold, some of ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and smiling is thy face, how precise thy dress and snow-white thy linen! thy words (except to the poor,) are well-chosen and marked with strict grammatical propriety.—The world doffs its hat to thee, and calls thee 'respectable,' and 'good.' Thou rotten-hearted villain!—morally thou art not fit to brush the cowhide boots of the MAN that thou callst thy servant! ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... now she's bit me right through the hand. I only hopes you won't have to pay my widow for it, Squire, under the Act, as foxes' bites is uncommon poisonous, especially when they've been a-eating of rotten rabbit." ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... bed, and that they might just as well resign themselves first as last, they would have cried him down, and called him unfriendly and unfeeling, and, perhaps, in the secrecy of their hearts thrown rotten eggs at him. ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... his way, but that, of course, will be good for him. What pennies I have I'm obliged to count with a provident eye. I've added to 'em from time to time along the road. So far I've been intermittently a rotten ploughman, a fair fence-mender and a skillful whitewasher. My amazing facility there I attribute to an apprenticeship in sunsets. Once, during a period of rain, I lived in a corncrib for three days at an average of seven cents a day. I've reduced ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... nice gentleman just to provoke a quarrel. I'd never seen him before, and ordinarily I hesitate to accost strangers; but I felt as if I'd have hysterics if I couldn't lick somebody; so I walked up to this person and told him his necktie was in rotten taste." ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... him draw it forth by them, being very careful to keep the head from being locked into the passage; and that it be not separated from the body; which may be effected the more easily, because the child being very rotten and putrefied, the operator need not be so mindful to keep the breast and face downwards as he is in living births. But if notwithstanding all these precautions, by reason of the child's putrefaction, the head should be separated and left behind in the ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... been glorious. There had been plenty of hard work, forcing our way through bushes, climbing fallen trees, some so rotten that they crumbled to dust with our weight, and threading our way among rocks; but at every turn there was the grand river foaming and rushing down toward the sea, and masses of black-green forest with pines spiring up toward the sky. One morning as we toiled slowly on, it was very ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... Thad," he was saying, quietly but sincerely, "I'm getting to be hopeful of Nick. I honestly believe that fellow has seen a great light. I think he's made up his mind to turn over a new leaf and redeem his rotten past. And I want to say here and now it's up to every boy in Scranton High to treat him decently while he's still fighting his old impulses of evil. I know I shall let him feel I believe in him, until he does ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... "Rotten!" groaned the factor. "Every trapper's son of them took out big supplies this fall and we're stripped. Beans, flour, sugar'n'prunes—and caribou until I feel like turning inside out every time I smell it. I'd give a month's commission for a pound ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... reputation that I have will be satisfaction to my brewer for the seventy pounds I owe him. Reputation won't pass for the current coin of this here realm; and let me tell you, that if it ain't backed by some of it, it ain't a bit better than rotten cabbage, as I have found. Only three weeks since I was, as I told you, the wonder and glory of the neighbourhood; and people used to come to look at me, and worship me; but as soon as it began to be whispered about that I owed money to the brewer, they presently left off all that ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... it may seem to you, I shall fight you and your machine to a finish. You think I can't do it? I'll show you. I've got five days, and they are all my own. This campaign has been rotten to the core from the very beginning. You have tried to keep me from finding it out, and you have partly succeeded. But I know a little, and inside of the next twenty-four hours I shall know more. That's ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... Leave a lie on the bosom of Silence, and it sinks. A truth floats there fair and stately, like some stout ship upon a deep ocean. Silence buoys her up lovingly for all men to see. Not until she has grown worn-out and rotten, and is no longer a truth, will the waters of ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... peace, and vnder the protection of his naturall Princes, be wronged with those spoylings, then which, it could endure no greater, at the hands of any forrayne and deadly enemy: for the Parke is disparked, the timber rooted vp, the conduit pipes taken away, the roofe made sale of, the planchings rotten, the wals fallen downe, and the hewed stones of the windowes, dournes & clauels, pluct out to serue priuate buildings: onely there remayneth an vtter defacement, to complayne vpon this vnregarded distresse. It now appertayneth by lease, to Master Samuel, who maried Halse : his father (a wise and ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... with precautions against gas. The North Valley mines were especially "gassy," it appeared. In these old rambling passages one smelt a stink as of all the rotten eggs in all the barn-yards of the world; and this sulphuretted hydrogen was the least dangerous of the gases against which a miner had to contend. There was the dreaded "choke-damp," which was odourless, and heavier than air. Striking into soft, ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... up our prayers, we took our scanty breakfast of water and a small piece of dried meat, with such parts of the rotten fruit as we could eat. Uncle Paul then stood up and looked about him. "We shall have a breeze, I think, before long," he said, "and we must at once prepare the sail. I am sorry, Marian, to deprive you of the covering ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... doores brake open, and locks, bolts, and posts fell downe, that you would verily have thought that some Theeves had been presently come to have spoyled and robbed us. And my bed whereon I lay being a truckle bed, fashioned in forme of a Cradle, and one of the feet broken and rotten, by violence was turned upside downe, and I likewise was overwhelmed and covered lying in the same. Then perceived I in my selfe, that certaine affects of the minde by nature doth chance contrary. For as teares oftentimes trickle downe the cheekes of him that seeth or heareth some joyfull ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... snarl that would have done credit to a panther driven off its prey, he slunk up a byway to shelter himself and think of new obscenities; and as he stood beneath a cloth awning to await the passing of a more than usually heavy downpour, the rotten fibers burst at last and let ten gallons of ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... the question, Brentwood," Bertie drawled. "You're as bad as Hanover, intruding the moral element. I haven't said that anything is right or wrong. It's all a rotten game, I know; and my sole kick is that you fellows are squealing now that you're down and labour's taking a gouge out of you. Of course I've taken the profits from the gouging and, thanks to you, gentlemen, without having personally to do the dirty ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... agreed the Texan. "An' likewise, maintainin' weak reservoirs that lets go an' drowns other folks' cattle is a public nuisance, an' a jury's liable to figger up them damages kind of high—'specially again' you, Johnson, bein' ornery an' rotten-hearted, an' tight-fisted, that ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... something rotten," he said, when Prale had concluded his statement. "I want you to know, Sid, that I believe you. You're not the sort of man to kill a fellow like Rufus Shepley over a little spat. I believe your ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... bodies. We set our streams to work for us, and choke the air with fire, to turn our pinning-wheels—and,—are we yet clothed? Are not the streets of the capitals of Europe foul with the sale of cast clouts and rotten rags?[244] Is not the beauty of your sweet children left in wretchedness of disgrace, while, with better honour, nature clothes the brood of the bird in its nest, and the suckling of the wolf in her den? And does not every winter's snow robe what you have not robed, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... with his half-blind eyes, but under his feet he felt a sudden giving way, and the fire-eaten tangle of earth and roots broke off like a rotten ledge, and with it both he and Black Roger went crashing into the depths below, smothered in an avalanche of ash and sizzling earth. At the bottom David lay for a moment, partly stunned. Then his fingers clutched a bit ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... A rotten sticke more fit to burne then vse, I maruell what from age you do expect, Let my experience their defect accuse, And teach thee how thy equals to affect; When they should toy, iocund & sport with thee, Their gouts, coughs ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... compensate for the flower and fruit, consequently the tree is seldom cut down. When an old one falls the trunk and large limbs are sometimes used for sluices in tanks, for the heart wood is generally rotten and hollow, and it stands well under water. If you ask a Gond about the mohwa he will tell you it is his father and mother. His fleshly father and mother die and disappear, but the mohwa is with him for ever! A good mohwa crop is therefore always anxiously looked ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... head to my feet. And he, you may swear, who's my husband and lover, Has kist me, and felt me, and smelt me all over, And if he can say an ill scent does arise, From my ears, or my armpits, my c——t, or my thighs, Like rotten old Cheshire, low Vervane or Ling, And altho' I'm goddess, I'll hang in a string. Your self, Lady Fair, that arose from the sea, Sure will not presume to be fragrant as me: The spark that has laid at ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... be out of that crush," Captain Webb said, as he lazily gathered up his cards. "Fearfully rotten show I call it—not a pretty girl among the lot, and a heat enough to make the devil envious! I can't think what induced our respected Napoleon to make ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... liberty to go and acquaint my patron with my booty. When I had informed him, he gave me a good meal, commended my dexterity, and caressed me highly. We went afterwards together to the forest, where we dug a hole for the elephant; my patron designing to return when it was rotten, and take his ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... a different thing in his comrades' quarters. Often one could scarcely make one's way across the muddy yard; in the outer room, behind a canvas screen, with its covering peeling off it, would lie stretched the snoring orderly; on the floor rotten straw; on the stove, boots and a broken jam-pot full of blacking; in the room itself a warped card-table, marked with chalk; on the table, glasses, half-full of cold, dark-brown tea; against the wall, a ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... come to a decision about, or prove which is best for the welfare of the country. It only wastes a young country's time, and keeps it off the right track. Federation isn't a problem—it's a plain fact—but they make a problem out of every panel they have to push down in the rotten ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... clemency toward Berlin than Prussia did toward Leipsic? To be sure, the Russians carried off the Jewish elders into captivity because they could not pay, but then they treated these poor victims of their avarice like human beings. They did not make them sleep on rotten straw; they did not let them starve, and die of misery and filth; they did not have them scourged and tortured until they wet with their tears the bit of bread thrown ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... dub, Three men in a tub, The butcher, the baker, the candle-stick maker, They all jumped out of a rotten potato." ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... long poles, with, surmounting one of the figures, a cast-off cap of the hostess's. Beyond the garden again there stood a number of peasants' huts. Though scattered, instead of being arranged in regular rows, these appeared to Chichikov's eye to comprise well-to-do inhabitants, since all rotten planks in their roofing had been replaced with new ones, and none of their doors were askew, and such of their tiltsheds as faced him evinced evidence of a presence of a spare waggon—in some ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... length of road has he led the English people! From rotten boroughs to household suffrage; from a government of classes to a government more truly popular than any other in the world outside of Switzerland and the United States. Then consider the advance on Irish ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... for a garner of plenty; they knew that strawberries, though not really insects, were almost as delicious; they knew that the huge danaid butterflies were good, safe game, if they could only catch them, and that a slab of bark dropping from the side of a rotten log was sure to abound in good things of many different kinds; and they had learned, also, that yellow-jackets, mud-wasps, woolly worms, and hundred-leggers were ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... flocks to some favourite roosting-place, either a reed-bed or a wood of evergreens, where they assemble in thousands. One of these communal sleeping-places is the duck island in St. James's Park. In hard weather they feed on the saltings and round the shore, especially where rotten seaweed abounds, with great quantities of insect life in it. At such times they roost in the crevices of the great sea cliffs. Under Culver Cliff, for instance, they may be seen flying along the shore and coming in to bed in the frost fog ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... along;— It is to you, to souls that favoring heaven Has made like yours, the glorious task is given:— Oh! but for such, Columbia's days were done; Rank without ripeness, quickened without sun, Crude at the surface, rotten at the core, Her fruits would fall, before her spring ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... couple of years' time there wouldn't be a tenth part of the murders we have now. Statistics prove, went on the wise ones, that only one out of every hundred is hanged. What's that? The jury system is rotten! No sirree, we are 'way behind England in that respect. Just look at that big murder case in London last month! Remember it? Murderer was hanged inside of three weeks after he was caught. That's the way to do it! And the London police catch 'em too. Our police stand around doing nothing ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... granted. Then, hailing Sim from the street, he procured by his assistance a bundle of straw and a candle. The straw, clean and sweet, he exchanged with his fellow-prisoners for that which had served them for beds. Then, gathering the rotten stuff into a heap in the middle of the floor, he put a light to it and stirred it into a fire. This was done partly to clear the foul atmosphere, which was so heavy and dank as to gather into beads of moisture on the walls, ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... at first in satisfying the cravings of his appetite. He searches for the cranberries in the open bogs, and is driven even to eat the rank marshy grass. As the snow disappears, he seeks for wood-lice and other creatures in rotten trunks. Hungry as he is, he labours very patiently for his food. The prehensile form of his lips enables him to pick up with wonderful dexterity even the smallest insect or berry. As the ice breaks up in the lakes, he proceeds thither to fish ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... son, I was already very old in those days. The sun had scarce heat enough to warm my benumbed limbs. I was no better than an old rotten tree, that has lost its crown of fresh leaves and singing birds. Each returning Autumn brought my end nearer; and one Winter's morning they found me ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... precluded his concern for his men. He valued men very highly. They were the greatest instrument then. They still are today. That's why I can't really make too much out of the monkey. I feel pretty rotten about him and all that. But the monkey up there means a man someplace is still ...
— What Need of Man? • Harold Calin
... Hall, he paused to admire the pseudo-Gothic chapel. He felt a little thrill of pride as he stared in awe at the magnificent building. It had been willed to the college by an alumnus who had made millions selling rotten pork. ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... their attempt on Anthelia, but has mast-headed them on the top of a rock perpendicular. But the gem of the book is the election for the borough of One-Vote—a very amusing farce on the subject of rotten boroughs. Mr. Forester has bought one of the One-Vote seats for his friend the Orang, and, going to introduce him to the constituency, falls in with the purchaser of the other seat, Mr. Sarcastic, who is a practical humorist of the most accomplished kind. The satirical arguments ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... in France, in Italy, in England—thanks to that detestable Gladstone, of whom pride has made a second Nebuchadnezzar. It is like Russia, your society; according to the only decent words of the obscene Diderot, 'rotten before ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was a man right adjoining me who had an asparagus bed, and he used a lot of rotten manure the summer before, and he got very little asparagus that was marketable. I asked him what the trouble was, and he said he didn't know. This year he had a good crop. I can't say it was the manure that did that, only it looks ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... branch was giving way. He was nearly to the roof. He clutched at it. The mud-covered, rotten mat that he grasped broke through his fingers, and the dust descended into his face. He grasped again, with the same result. The branch was momentarily growing ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... said Dale, "I'll ask Raggles to give me an unpaid billet somewhere. But," he added, with a sigh, "that will be an awful rotten game in comparison." ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... elsewhere; there is enough of it, but it is carried on in secret; it is deeper and preys more on the vitals of society than with us. This vice with us, like a humor on the skin, deforms the surface, but here it infects the very heart; the whole system is affected; it is rotten to the core. ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... have been your dupe; you have neither shame nor regret, nor remorse: you are rotten to the heart; you have never had an honest sentiment; you have not robbed as long as you had enough to satisfy your caprices; that is what is called probity by rich people of your stamp; then followed want of decency, then baseness, crime, and forgery. This is only the first period ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... me love. Now of God, our Father and Master, I entreat quick death if I am not to win you. For, God willing, I shall come to you again, even if in order to do this I have to split the world like a rotten orange." ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... rotten country!" came, two rows back from where I stood, a Cockney voice uplifted to the leaky skies. "There ain't nothin' to eat in it, and there ain't nothin' to drink ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... eyes upon her. He was, it seemed, not quite rotten through and through; there was still in him—in the depths of him—a core that was in a measure sound; and that core was reached. Most of all had the story weighed with him because it afforded the only explanation ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... to think for themselves about the events portrayed; and if I have succeeded in doing that, I shall be satisfied. The history of the United States does mean something: what is it? Are we a decadent fruit that is rotten before it is ripe? or are we the bud of the mightiest tree of time? The materials for forming your judgment are here; form it according as your ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... mouldy institutions, they continue to be simply because they have been. Old Governments are like those ancient dykes which are rotten at the base, and only stay in position by ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... window, recalling scenes and people she remembered there, or watching for the big wagon to make its appearance; while Reuben and Faith went to the outhouses, and finally by dint of perseverance found a supply of wood in an old rotten tumbled-down fence. Mrs. Derrick proclaimed that the wagon was coming, as the foragers returned; but there was a splendid blaze going up chimney before the aforesaid conveyance drew up at the door, and the whole first party turned out to ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... but what profit lies in that? We are crowned with a vain conquest; he has mustered Again his scattered forces, and anew Threatens us from the ramparts of Putivl. Meanwhile what are our heroes doing? They stand At Krom, where from its rotten battlements A band of Cossacks braves them. There is glory! No, I am ill content with them; thyself I shall despatch to take command of them; I give authority not to birth, but brains. Their pride of precedence, ...
— Boris Godunov - A Drama in Verse • Alexander Pushkin
... with one another. The robin-red-breast also, so pretty of note and colour and carriage, but instead of bread and crumbs, and such like harmless matter, with a great spider in his mouth. A tree also, whose inside was rotten, and yet it grew and had leaves. So they went on ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... appears to be in no proportion to the compromise it is likely to make with abuses. I have read, I believe, all the utmost possible things that can be said in its favour, the articles, for instance, written by the Times newspaper (admirable, as far as a rotten cause can let them be, and when not afflicted by some portentous mystery of personal resentment); and though I trust I may lay claim to as much willingness to be convinced, as most men who have suffered and reflected, I have not seen a single ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... make your great spirit fall.' 'If men allow themselves in malice and envy,' writes Thomas Shepard, a contemporary of Rutherford's, 'or in wanton thoughts, that will condemn them, even though their corruptions do not break out in any scandalous way. Such thoughts are quite sufficient evidence of a rotten heart. If a man allows himself in malice or in envy, though he thinks he does it not, yet he is a hypocrite; if in his heart he allows it he cannot be a saint of God. If there be one evil way, though ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... fluid trickled down beneath his waistcoat, he felt that all further powers of coaxing the electors out of their votes, by words flowing from his tongue sweeter than honey, was for that occasion denied to him. He could not be self-confident, energetic, witty, and good-humoured with a rotten egg drying through his clothes. He was forced, therefore, to give way, and with sadly disconcerted air retired from the open window at which he had ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... Illiadic, in the way in which they moved out presently, to bay. The first tang of salt air, that rotten, indescribable smell of the sea, tickled her nostrils. It was all she could do to keep from being drunk with it. She felt skittish. She wanted to ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... against this new gas.... It just corrodes the lungs as if they were rotten in a dead body. In the hospitals they just stand the poor devils up against a wall and let them die. They say their skin turns green and that it takes from five to seven days to die—five to seven days ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... decided to try a crop of artichokes. I had a very nice spot of land that I thought would suit me for this purpose. I prepared it as I would prepare land for Irish potatoes, knowing that artichokes were, like the Irish potato, a tuber. I took a four-horse wagon and hauled one and a half tons of rotten cotton seed, and of this I put a double handful every 18 inches apart in the drill; I then dropped the artichokes between the hills. I cultivated first as I would Irish potatoes. The plants grew luxuriantly and were all the way from 8 to ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... Alle Petit Chat, Saint Gervais—it sounded rotten, and would sound worse still to the Genevan syndics, who knew just where it was and what, and were even now engaged in plans for pulling down and rebuilding all the old wharfside quarter. No; he could ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... nearly fell to the temptation that first night; for I could see into your room as well as into his!" He slapped me boisterously on the back, but his gray eyes were suspiciously moist. "Dear old Petrie! Thank God for our friends! But you'd be the first to admit, old man, that you're a dead rotten actor! Your portrayal of grief for the loss of a valued chum would not have convinced a ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... this place," he asserted. "If it weren't for—for some of the people here, I'd never come inside the doors. It's a rotten way of spending one's time. You ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that he had not thought it necessary to keep his word to those whom he held to be heretics and infidels, and so forth. His face, which, as above mentioned, had scorbutic marks, is stated to be 'like a rotten russet apple when it is bruiz'd'; or, like the cover of a warming-pan, 'full of oylet-holes.' He is called an 'uglie Pope Bonifacius;' also a 'bricklayer;' and he is asked why, instead of building chimneys and ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... when men wading breast high were crushed by the weight of iron. Harnessed two and three hundred to a gun, they had dragged the pieces one after the other over rocks and through bog and slime, and had then served them in the open under the fire of the enemy. New Englanders had died like "rotten sheep" in Louisbourg. The graves of nearly a thousand of them lay on the bleak point outside the wall. What they had gained by this sacrifice must now be abandoned. A spirit of discontent with the mother country went ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... criticism, but unsympathetic. It is in the spirit of a reviewer who wants to smash a man. We don't want Stephen to be stoned here, we want him confuted." I remember once how he said with indignation: "That is simply throwing a rotten egg! And its maturity shows that it was kept for that purpose! You are not criticising, you are only paying off an ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... What could the witch expect? It was nothing, after all, but a scarecrow stuck upon two sticks. But the strong-willed old beldam scowled, and beckoned, and flung the energy of her purpose so forcibly at this poor combination of rotten wood, and musty straw, and ragged garments, that it was compelled to show itself a man, in spite of the reality of things. So it stepped into the bar of sunshine. There it stood, poor devil of a contrivance that it was!—with only the ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... We shall find loose change enough on board of the Josephine to keep us happy till we get to Paris, by the way of Marseilles, and then we shall be rotten with stamps." ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... things, they are all rheumatic and stiff, but continue to live here because, poor souls, they think the rent is low. Ye gods, the place is not fit for dogs to live in, and yet he charges all the way from five dollars up for these filthy, worm-eaten, rotten holes. And yet the old decrepit inhabitants of this rich man's house unbend their stiff knees in ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... together. That's more than can be said for us Russians. We're a rotten lot. Well, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... which he had a collection at Nevers. Thank Heaven they are dead! Thank Heaven he is dead! Thank Heaven he lost most of the money for which he preyed on his kind. He was a vulture, a scaly-headed vulture. He was the carrion kite above every rotten financial concern in London and Paris. That which went near to ruin my poor vain fool of a father-in-law filled his bulging pockets. I hated him living and ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... is the thing that rotten 'Rion played them with, is it?" Tunis demanded. "Trying to make them think my beautiful Seamew was once the Marlin B.? Why, the poor fools, this broken oar came out of Mike Pareta's woodpile, or I'm a dog-fish! See that blue streak? I saw this broken oar at Pareta's house. ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... settlement arrived, the "captain" being apparently unconscious of the fact that payment was necessary, and the three proceeded on board. The brig turned out to be about as bad a specimen of her class as could well be met with—old, rotten, leaky, and dirty beyond all power of description. Nevertheless her skipper waxed so astonishingly eloquent when he began to speak her praises, that the idea never seemed to occur to either Bill or Bob that to venture to sea in her would be simply tempting Providence, ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... an' swam out. I kud smell the thing afore I wur half-way, an' when I got near it, the birds mizzled. I wur soon clost up, an' seed at a glimp that the calf wur as rotten as punk." ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... am I here?—Thou hast not need of me, Home of the rotting and the rotten dead— For thou art cumber'd to satiety, And wilt be cumber'd—ay, when I am fled! Why stand I here, the living among tombs? Answer, all ye who own a grassy bed, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... said. "Johnson says thirty-eight. I hope they're experienced travelers. This pressure sickness is a rotten nuisance—keeps me dashing around all night assuring frightened women they're not going to die. Last voyage, coming out of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... till. A little girl, sent by her mother to match a skein of cotton thread, of a peculiar hue, took one that the near-sighted old lady pronounced extremely like, but soon came running back, with a blunt and cross message, that it would not do, and, besides, was very rotten! Then, there was a pale, care-wrinkled woman, not old but haggard, and already with streaks of gray among her hair, like silver ribbons; one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you at once recognize as worn to death by a brute—probably a drunken brute—of a husband, and at least nine children. ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... within their doors or put a finger in their purses. All this and much more is in him; that abhorring degrees and universities as reliques of superstition, hath leapt from a shop-board or a cloak-bag to a desk or pulpit; and that, like a sea-god in a pageant, hath the rotten laths of his culpable life and palpable ignorance covered over with the painted-cloth of a pure gown and a night-cap, and with a false trumpet of feigned zeal draweth after him some poor nymphs and madmen that delight more to resort to dark caves ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... under their immediate Inspection, and my Friend produced to me a Report given into their Board, wherein an old Unkle of mine, who came to Town with me, and my self, were inserted, and we stood thus; the Unkle smoaky, rotten, poor; the Nephew raw, but no Fool, sound at present, very rich. My Information did not end here, but my Friends Advices are so good, that he could shew me a Copy of the Letter sent to the young Lady who is to have me ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... my cobbler. This arch-maniac, who might have been something if he had left himself in your hands, has some notion of standing aloof: he writes against theatricals after having done a bad play; he writes against France which is a mother to him; he picks up four or five rotten old hoops off Diogenes' tub and gets inside them to bay; he cuts his friends; he writes to me myself the most impertinent letter that ever fanatic scrawled. He writes to me in so many words, 'You have corrupted Geneva in requital of the asylum ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... have reprints by Burroughs, Cummings and Merritt. I am eagerly waiting for the next issue. Do not enlarge the magazine because I cannot afford it. Don't publish stories like "From an Amber Block." They're rotten. Publish more future and interplanetary stories.—Joseph Edelman, 721 De Kalb Ave., ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... word, we have no right to insist on educating a child; for its education can end only with its life and will not even then be complete. Compulsory completion of education is the last folly of a rotten and desperate civilization. It is the rattle in its throat before dissolution. All we can fairly do is to prescribe certain definite acquirements and accomplishments as qualifications for certain employments; and to secure them, not by the ridiculous ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... things in an army, and without them it is impossible to have any other service of the troops than of a confused heap of stones, bricks, timber, and tiles; but when everything is in its due place, as in a building, when the foundations and the covering are made of materials that will not grow rotten, and which no wet can damage, such as are stones and tiles, and when the bricks and timber are employed in their due places in the body of the edifice, they altogether make a house, which we value among our most considerable ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... the world and then He made this rotten old office," the man said quietly. "Into it He put you—and me. What, before that day, has gone to the making and marring of me, and the making and perfecting of you, is not to the point. It is enough that we have realised, heart, and soul, and ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... Meanwhile the trumpets prophesied wars and disasters, the cymbals ever and again inserted a clashing jar about the fatal delay in the automobile insurance, while the triangle broke into a plangent solo on the topic of a certain rotten gate-post he always forgot in the daytime, and how in consequence the cows from the glebe farm got into the garden and ate Mrs. ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... for the dirty, yawning fool Who wants to be Oppression's tool, May envy gnaw his rotten soul, And discontent devour him! May dool and sorrow be his chance, Dool and sorrow, dool and sorrow, May dool and sorrow be his chance, And nane say 'wae's me' for him! May dool and sorrow be his chance, Wi' a' the ills that come frae ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... roof, made of similar poles, was heavily heaped with earth. What with this deep earth-covering, and with their grovelling toward the earth in such a flat and neighborly fashion, they had a dreadfully under-foot look, and seemed rather dens than houses. Many were ragged and rotten, all inconceivably cheerless. No outhouses, no inclosures, no vegetation, no relief of any kind. About and between them the swardless ground is all trodden into mud. Prick-eared Esquimaux dogs huddle, sneak, bark, and snarl around, with a free fight now ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... able to move, often broke out in words like these: "O Lord Jesus, thou art the King of glory, the King of kings and Lord of lords; thou art great and holy, and merciful. I am a sinner, condemned. My face is black, my bones are rotten. O Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me, poor, and blind, and naked, and miserable. O Lord Jesus Christ, I am vile. I am lost; but ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... moment. Then: "My room is chock full of toys," the Banker said reflectively. "But this is a rotten town for candy canes—they only had little ones." ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... repair so long that the means of repair looked a hundred years old, and had themselves fallen into decay; a quantity of washed linen, spread to dry in the sun; a number of houses at odds with one another and grotesquely out of the perpendicular, like rotten pre-Adamite cheeses cut into fantastic shapes and full of mites; and a feverish bewilderment of windows, with their lattice-blinds all hanging askew, and something draggled and dirty dangling out ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... has a theory about all South American States. He thinks they are all rotten, and that sort of thing. He insists that you are thrown ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... and here they were strangled to death or left to starve. It was the Mamertine Prison. I did not like it. I also recall the opening of an oubliette in the castle of San Angelo, which affected me like a nightmare. Before leaving Concord, in 1853, I had once tumbled through a rotten board into a well, dug by the side of the road ages before, and had barely saved myself from dropping to the bottom, sixty feet below, by grabbing the weeds which grew on the margin of the hole. I was not much scared at the moment; but the next day, taking my father to the ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... portraits of the character of his people, whom no word of their God nor any of His heavy judgments could move to repentance. He paints a hopeless picture of society in Jerusalem and Judah under Jehoiakim, rotten with dishonesty and vice. Members of the same family are unable to trust each other; all are bent on their own gain by methods unjust and cruel—from top to bottom so hopelessly false as even to be blind ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... offered for the display of grand and stately architecture by the passage of a river through the midst of a great city. It seems, indeed, as if the heart of London had been cleft open for the mere purpose of showing how rotten and drearily mean it had become. The shore is lined with the shabbiest, blackest, and ugliest buildings that can be imagined, decayed warehouses with blind windows, and wharves that look ruinous; insomuch that, had I known nothing more of the world's metropolis, I might ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... process of this morning had to be repeated—rickety pier, rotten steps, and small boat included—before we reached the whale-boat, after which we had an eight miles' sail out to the yacht. It was a cold, dull night, and getting on board proved rather difficult work, owing to ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... Why, thin, it's me that'll talk till I hoarse meself dumb for yer good. It was the famine, miss, that came first, and stole the bit o' food that was saved. The praties were rotten in the field; and the poor pigs starved that should have helped us out wi' the rint. Och, but it was a sore time o' grief whin sorra a mouthful were left for the bit childer and the ould people who were weak before wi' ould age! In the worst time o' all, whin the need was the sorest, our Bessie ...
— Live to be Useful - or, The Story of Annie Lee and her Irish Nurse • Anonymous
... indicating the bands round the cuffs and cap. The imitation gold-lace had gone green but clung to the rotten material. ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... their Blackness; and those made with Logwood and Red-Roses might also be chang'd, the one into a Red, the other into a Reddish Liquor; and with Oyl of Vitriol I have sometimes turn'd Black pieces of Silk into a kind of Yellow, and though the Taffaty were thereby made Rotten, yet the spoyling of that does no way prejudice the Experiment, the change of Black Silk into Yellow, being never the less True, because the Yellow Silk is the less good. And as for Whiteness, I think the general ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... to a broad sheet of solid ice. Then it was "Out with her, Bill!" and they were both out and sliding their bowl so quick over, that they had not time to go through the rotten surface. This was drowning business; but neither could be spared ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... aw,' 'aw'll be another,' an ther wor sooin thirteen shillin an' sixpence sam'd up. 'Nah, awm ready,' he sed, 'tak off yor hats, an' handle it gently for its rayther rotten.' They all did as they wor tell'd, an' havin getten ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... heaven!" he snorted; "I've heard tell of rotten boroughs, and I'm thinking Mr. Allen will be standing for one. What be him and Mr. Grafton a-doing here, sir, plotting all kinds o' crime while the old gentleman's nigh ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... circle than around in a parallelepipedon, for it seems cleaner and perhaps freer from mathematics—or for the same reason we prefer Whittier to Baudelaire—a poet to a genius, or a healthy to a rotten apple—probably not so much because it is more nutritious, but because we like its taste better; we like the beautiful and don't like the ugly; therefore, what we like is beautiful, and what we don't like is ugly—and hence we are glad ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... No kiddin'—where is your Editor's pride? We want a magazine to be proud of, don't we? Its binding is abominable. The edges are terrible: it takes ten minutes to find a certain page. The paper itself is absolutely rotten. What about the poor readers who want to have a Science Fiction library? He wants a magazine that can be bound and will look half good. Please put better grade paper in your magazine. And for goodness sake, answer in the department all questions and inquiries ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... religiously and afterwards to receive happiness, this is to make the fruit of religion something different from religion; but bodily exercise is but the cause of death, strength results alone from the mind's intention; if you remove from conduct the purpose of the mind, the bodily act is but as rotten wood; wherefore, regulate the mind, and then the body will spontaneously go right. You say that to eat pure things is a cause of religious merit, but the wild beasts and the children of poverty ever feed on these fruits and medicinal herbs; these then ought to gain ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... flint or quartz, a hard white stone that is common nearly everywhere. The sparks should fall in some dry tinder or punk and the little fire coaxed along until you get a blaze. There are many kinds of tinder used in the woods, dried puff balls, "dotey" or rotten wood that is not damp, charred cotton cloth, dry moss, and so on. In the pitch pine country, the best kindlings after we have caught a tiny blaze are splinters taken from the heart of a decayed pine log. They are full of resin and will burn like ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... Honestly, I was getting afraid that you never could do it at all, with the rotten reputation they've pinned on you here. Good enough! Still it's absurd to cite the opinion of a little child in a matter ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... seven of our native species of snakes lay eggs, usually depositing them under the bark of rotten logs, or in similar places, where they are left to hatch by the heat of the sun or by that of the decaying vegetation. It is interesting to gather these leathery shelled eggs and watch them hatch, and it is surprising how similar to each other some of the various species ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe |
