"Sluice" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and other baggage, winding like an endless stream of ants through the hills to "No Creek" Lee Creek, where they re-enacted the scenes that were occurring in the town. Tents and cabins were scattered throughout the length of the valley, lumber was sawed for sluice-boxes, and the virginal breezes that had sucked through this seam in the mountains since days primeval came to smell of spruce fires and echo with ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... well," said Joe Wynbrook, "for us to be sittin' here, slingin' lies easy and comfortable, with the wind whistlin' in the pines outside, and the rain just liftin' the ditches to fill our sluice boxes with gold ez we're smokin' and waitin', but I tell you what, boys—it ain't home! No, sir, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... thousand cubic yards of masonry were used. The sluices are 180 in number, and are arranged at four different levels. The sight of the great volume of water pouring through them is a very fine one. The Nile begins to rise in July, and at the end of November it is necessary to begin closing the sluice-gates to hold up the water. By the end of February the reservoir is usually filled and Philae partially submerged, so that boats can sail in and out of the colonnades and Pharaoh's Bed. By the beginning of July the water ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... it, through the old pasture overgrown with alders, and up past the broken-down mill-dam and the crumbling sluice, into the mountain-cleft from which it leaps laughing! The water, except just after a rain-storm, is as transparent as glass—old-fashioned window-glass, I mean, in small panes, with just a tinge of green in it, like the air in a grove of young birches. Twelve feet ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... over the sluice-box, and groped with his hands over the bottom of it. There was a trickle of water flowing gently in its depths. He searched with his fingers along the riffles. And that which he found there he carefully and ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... but this monstrous beat and panting; the whole tranquil landscape seemed to breathe and pulsate with her; dwellers in the tules, miles away, heard and felt her as she passed, and it seemed to Jack, leaning over the railing, as if the whole river swept like a sluice through ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... these preparations with the greatest vigilance. At high water he closed the west sluice, which let the water into the town ditch from the Old Haven, in the rear of Helmond, in order to retain as much water as possible, and stationed his troops at the various points most threatened. Sir Horace ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... battered flat-cars, piled with sluice-props and roughly hewn sleepers, was moving slowly off into the brooding forest gloom, when I came in sight of the track; but I developed a gratifying and unexpected burst of speed, shouting all the ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... a hundred yards till she came to a crack in the rock, six or seven feet wide, along which the water was rushing like a mill-sluice. With some difficulty they reached the upper rocks, carrying the fisher-girl in their arms, and wading above their knees in water. Here they rest a moment—when a great wave rolls in, and the water runs along the little platform where they are sitting; they all rise, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... morning of the 24th, the natives paid us an early visit with their boys, and remained at the camp until we started. At the head of the water they had made a weir, through the boughs of which the current was running like a sluice; but the further progress of the floods was stopped by a bank that had been gradually thrown up athwart the channel. Crossing the Ana-branch at this point, we struck across barren sandy plains, on a N.N.E. course. From them we entered a low brush, in which there were more dead than ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... apparently fertile hillside. Clarence shifted his shovel from his shoulders, unslung his pan, and looked at Flynn. "Dig anywhere here, where you like," said his companion carelessly, "and you'll be sure to find the color. Fill your pan with the dirt, go to that sluice, and let the water run in on the top of the pan—workin' it round so," he added, illustrating a rotary motion with the vessel. "Keep doing that until all the soil is washed out of it, and you have only the black sand at the bottom. Then work ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... add to this, a slope in the fen rivers so extraordinarily slight, that the river at Cambridge is only thirteen and a half feet above the mean sea level, five-and-thirty miles away, and that if the great sea-sluice of Denver, the key of all the eastern fen, were washed away, the tide would back up the Cam to within ten miles of Cambridge; if we add again the rainfall upon that vast flat area, utterly unable to escape ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... moment were close to the rock, which it appeared almost impossible to avoid, and it was more than probable that the stream it divided would carry us broadside upon it, when the consequences would have been dreadful. The current, or sluice, was setting past the rock at the rate of eight or nine knots, and the water being confined by its intervention, fell at least six or seven feet; at the moment, however, when we were upon the point of being dashed to pieces, a sudden breeze providentially sprang up, and filling ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... cloudy amber juice. It was just in prime condition, sharpened with a blithe tingle, beaded with a pleasing bubble of froth. Dove looked upon it with a kindled eye. His arm raised the tumbler in a manner that showed this gesture to be one that he had compassed before. The orchard nectar began to sluice down his throat. ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... war in the previous history of mankind has ever been waged on so huge a scale as this, so it is also true to say that the issues raised by it are vaster and more varied than those of any previous European conflict. It is as though by the pressure of an electric button some giant sluice had been opened, unchaining forces over which mortal men can hardly hope to recover control and whose action it is ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... a curious mill which has two wheels, overshot, one in front of the other, and both driven by the same sluice. It as very hot as we stood by the wheels; the mill dust came forth and sprinkled the foliage so that the leaves seemed scarce able to breathe; it drifted almost to the stream hard by, where trout were watching under a cloud of midges ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... of any insurrection. When that work was finished, England was to join with France in making war upon Holland. In case of success, Lewis was to have the inland provinces; the prince of Orange, Holland in sovereignty; and Charles, Sluice, the Brille, Walkeren, with the rest of the seaports as far as Mazeland Sluice. The king's project was first to effect the change of religion in England; but the duchess of Orleans, in the interview at Dover, persuaded him to begin with the Dutch war, contrary to the remonstrances ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... Stock-Exchange-gambling procedure, where one man apparently has every other man on the floor against him. I understood: Bob against them all—he trying to stay the onrushing current of dropping prices; they bent on keeping the sluice-gates open. He was backed up against the rail—not the Bob of the morning; not a vestige of that cold, brain-nerve-and-body-in-hand gambler remained. His hat was gone, his collar torn and hanging over his shoulder. His coat and waistcoat were ripped open, showing the full length of his white shirt-front, ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... overtime to make him pay. Two times out of five she's salted. She can't put in crushers and costly machinery. He'd notice 'em and be onto the game. They have to pan out what they get, and it hurts their tender hands. Some of 'em are natural sluice troughs and can carry out $1,000 to the ton. The dry-eyed ones have to depend on signed letters, false hair, sympathy, the kangaroo walk, cowhide whips, ability to cook, sentimental juries, conversational powers, silk underskirts, ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... bavins of smaller wood betwixt them: and then, earth betwixt and above them: and then, having first very well rammed them and the earth, use another pile in like manner as the first were: and note, that the second pile is to be of or about the height that you intend to make your sluice or floodgate, or the vent that you intend shall convey the overflowings of your pond in any flood that shall endanger the breaking of ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... the question, with the sympathetic gentleness of it, and the too great contrast between the speaker's happy, calm, strong content and her own disordered, distracted life, suddenly broke her down. Neither, if you open the sluice-gates to such a current, can you immediately get them shut again. This she found, though greatly afraid of the conclusions her companion might draw. For a few minutes her ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... operations. There is a formidable battery erected last year by way of guarding Ostend from a "coup de main"; it is singular that the English have placed a Battery for the defence close to the celebrated sluice gates of this canal, which gates were blown up by Sir Evelyn Coote to prevent the French from inundating the country, when he ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... they took out $430,000 on a fraction of a claim which was only eighty feet by four hundred. He says the dredge people have found that they can work much poorer dirt than eight dollars a yard, which would pay a shovel-man. One man can only rock about two and a half yards a day. He can sluice about twice that. A dredge, working four men, works from 2,400 to 3,000 tons a day. So you see why dredges are in here now. He said nearly all the men who got rich easy lost their money. There was a lucky Swede who ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... course ez he steered! Howsomedever, let's do sunthin', an' not stan' idling hyar no longer. Forrad, thaar, ye lot o' star-gazin', fly-catchin' lazy lubbers! make it eight bells an' call the watch to sluice down decks! Ye doan't think, me jokers, I'm goin' to let ye strike work an' break articles 'cause the shep's aground, do ye? Not if I knows it, by thunder! Stir yer stumps an' look smart, or some o' ye'll know the ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... located on an island at the mouth of the Meuse. The magistrates and most of the inhabitants fled; and the Beggars battered down the gates, occupied the town, and put to death 13 monks and priests. When Spanish forces attempted to recapture the city, the defenders opened sluice gates to cut off the northern approach, and at the same time set fire to the boats which had carried the Spanish to the island. The Spanish, terrorized by both fire and water, waded through mud and slime to the northern shore. During the same week Flushing was taken, and before the end of June the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... their perlustrations they would not find a man reading," and won it. "Ay," said the reverend gentleman, "this is still a seat of learning, on the principle of—once a captain, always a captain. We may well ask, in these great reservoirs of books whereof no man ever draws a sluice, Quorsum pertinuit stipere Platona Menandro? What is done here for the classics? Reprinting German editions on better paper. A great boast, verily! What for mathematics? What for metaphysics? What for history? What for anything worth knowing? This was a seat of learning in the days of Friar Bacon. ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... and, like the death of the strong man, the disruption of fields in themselves so thick and adhesive, had produced an agony surpassing the usual struggle of the seasons. Nevertheless, the downward motion had begun in earnest, and the centre of the river was running like a sluice, carrying away, in its current, those masses which had just before formed ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... ideas succeeded each other with the gentle but unintermitting flow of a plentiful and bounteous spring; while I have heard those of others, who aimed at distinction in conversation, rush along like the turbid gush from the sluice of a mill-pond, as hurried, and as easily exhausted. It was late at night ere I could part from a companion so fascinating; and, when I gained my own apartment, it cost me no small effort to recall to my mind the character of Rashleigh, such as I had pictured ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... platform and descended a short flight of steps that led to the mill flume—a long box-like sluice-way that carried the water in to turn the mill wheels. These wheels were silent now, for two great gates at the end of the flume barred out the waters. The girl tripped lightly along a single plank that extended over the flume. The ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... introduced a proposal to give the two provinces hitherto administered by the proconsul Gaius Caesar from the 1st March 705 to the two consulars who were to be provided with governorships for that year. The long-repressed indignation burst forth in a torrent through the sluice once opened; everything that the Catonians were meditating against Caesar was brought forward in these discussions. For them it was a settled point, that the right granted by exceptional law to ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... superior force of their invaders. A carpenter, however, who belonged to the city, but had long been a partisan of Orange, dashed into the water with his axe in his hand, and swimming to the Niewland sluice, hacked it open with a few vigorous strokes. The sea poured in at once, making the approach to the city upon the north side impossible: Bossu then led his Spaniards along the Niewland dyke to the southern gate, where they were received ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... front garden, over the sluice, and up the steep bank to the pond, which lay in shadow, with its two wooded islets. Paul walked with ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... sense, seemed their advanced ages—which must have been at least forty! They had also set habits even in their improvidence, lost incalculable and unpayable sums to each other over euchre regularly every evening, and inspected their sluice-boxes punctually every Saturday for repairs—which they never made. They even got to resemble each other, after the fashion of old married couples, or, rather, as in matrimonial partnerships, were subject to the domination of the stronger character; although in their case it is to ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... now you be going to sluice yourself all the same. Whatever you can see in cold water, to run after it so, I can't think. If I was to flood myself like you, it would soon float me to my ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... it—for they had no respect for the heir, and indeed there was no one to whom he could complain—but he held his peace; and a week after the stone was restored to him in a way that seemed miraculous; for they ran the water of the moat off, to mend the sluice, so that the water-lilies sank in tangles to the bottom and the carp flapped in the mud; but the boy found the stone lying on the pavement of ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... mill-pond above. The big mill-house was deserted, save for a labourer and his wife who lived in the kitchen. So she passed through the empty farm-yard and through the wilderness of a garden, and mounted the bank by the sluice. When she got to the top, to see the old, velvety surface of the pond before her, she noticed a man on the bank, tinkering with a punt. It was Birkin sawing ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... the canal dry, in the immediate neighbourhood for the purpose of making repairs, the floodgate to the canal is closed, and the one to the lower part of the weir is opened, and then the water from the pond flows into the Dee, whilst a sluice, near the first lock, lets out the water of the canal into the river. The head of the canal is situated in a very beautiful spot. To the left or south is a lofty hill covered with wood. To the right is a beautiful slope ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... loose gold had been washed out of the hills by the rains and storms of countless years. So some one thought of using a heavy stream of water to break down the foot-hills themselves and to carry the gold-bearing gravel to sluice boxes. This is called hydraulic mining and is the cheapest way of handling earth, as water does all the work and very little shovelling is needed. But since a strong water-power is necessary, a large reservoir and miles of ditches or ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... the caller,—and then the sluice-gates opened, and the stream swept through and madly on again,—"nor me, neither, Mrs. Lathrop. I never even dreamed o' any such goin's on, 'n' I c'n assure you 's the shock 's come 's heavy on me 's on you. I went up garret ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... men expected to do. Those who brought large outfits and plenty of money with them were immediately obliged to hire help, but it was generally a man's help, like carpenter work, hauling and handling supplies or machinery, making gold washers and sluice boxes, or digging out the gold in the creeks. None of these could I do. On the steamer all these things had been well talked over among ourselves, for others besides myself were wondering which way they should turn when they found themselves ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... A small sluice was put at the entrance to this, to regulate the quantity of water to be allowed to flow, and all was now in readiness to complete the final operation of closing up the dam. A quantity of earth was first collected and puddled, ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... Nevertheless, iron gates held them back. Not vainly had Czerny's master-mind foreseen such a misfortune as this. Those tremendous doors which divided the upper house from its fellow were stronger than any sluice-gates, more sure against the water's advance. We held the upper house; it was ours while we could breathe in it or find ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... far strain'd, and over-bent upon its undertaking, breaks and hinders it self, like Water that by force of its own pressing Violence and Abundance cannot find a ready issue through the neck of a Bottle, or a narrow sluice. ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... holy man. 'To indulge the sinful body.... O-ho-ho! Break all the bones in it ... but she talks of tea! Oh, oh, worthy old woman, Satan is strong within us.... Fight him with hunger, fight him with cold, with the sluice-gates of heaven, the pouring, penetrating rain, and he takes no harm—he is alive still! Remember the day of the Intercession of the Mother of God! You will receive, ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... rumour, if it have an hour's start of you. As well attempt to catch up the water which first rushed through the sluice-gates, opened an hour before you ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... respite, a breathing-space of agonized suspense. As it circled around, and came again to the opening by which it had entered, it might continue on another eventless revolution, or it might, according to the whim of the eddy, be cast forth once more, irretrievably, into the clutch of the awful sluice. Sometimes two logs, after a pause in what seemed like a secret death-struggle, would crowd each other out and go over the falls together. And sometimes, on the other hand, all would make the circuit safely again and again. But always, at the cleft in the rim of ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... huge package on the ro[u]ka. Pending its disposition Rokuzo devoted himself to his ablutions with decent slowness, to allow the idea of remuneration to filter into the somewhat fat wits of these ladies. At first he was inclined thoroughly to sluice himself inwardly. The water was deliciously cool to the outer person on this hot day. But on approaching the bucket to his mouth there was an indefinable nauseating something about it that made him hesitate. Again he tried to drink. Decidedly ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... letters that it is only the grasshopper, and the grasshopper has helped more than hurt—and draws. Then possibly the army-worm comes sure enough, and cripples him. But he keeps up his courage—and draws. The five thousand dollars appear to have been employed in digging or building a sluice through which a constant current of currency flows from the city to Rottenbottom and Millefleur. The merchant has gone into bank, and the tide flows on. At last the planter writes: "The most magnificent crop ever raised on Red ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... averaged 49 inches annually, while the medium in the same period did not exceed 20 inches in the plains beneath. The height of the reservoir above the tailing, or Yuba River, is 393 feet: and the height of the head above the floor, or outlet sluice-tunnel, of the Blue Gravel ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... stokehole; and I was in no condition to argue with them, for I had suddenly begun to realize that I was far from being a well person. As one peering through a glass darkly, I saw one of the attendant demons sluice his blistered bare breast with cold water, so that the sweat and grime ran from him in streams like ink; and peering in at a furnace door I saw a great angry sore of coals all scabbed and crusted over. Then another demon, wielding ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... creek claim stood the cabin of Clyde Wharton. At present he was not washing out a diurnal thousand dollars; but his dumps grew, shift by shift, and there would come a time when those dumps would pass through his sluice-boxes, depositing in the riffles, in the course of half a dozen days, several hundred thousand dollars. He often sat in that cabin, smoked his pipe, and dreamed beautiful little dreams,—dreams in which neither the dumps nor the half-ton of dust in the P. C. Company's big ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... days up the Amazon, some hundreds of miles from the ocean, and east and west of him there was a horizon like the sea, and to the south nothing but a sand-bank island with some tufts of scrub. The water was always running like a sluice, thick with dirt, animated with crocodiles and hovering birds, and fed by some inexhaustible source of tree trunks; and the waste of it, the headlong waste of it, filled his soul. The town of Alemquer, with its meagre church, its thatched sheds for houses, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... their day. There are no domestic servants at the registries; the cap and apron, than which no uniform ever more enhanced a fair maid or extenuated a plain one, will be found only in the war museum, as relics of ante-bellum practice; we shall sluice our own doorsteps in the early morning hours, receive our own letters from the postman, have our own conversations with the butcher's young man at the area gate; and in time, perhaps, learn how it may be possible ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... world; on plains and valleys, on villages nestling in trees and flying past, on great rolling fields of grain—perhaps a smooth, light, continuous sort of sage-brush, wrinkling in the wind as the sunflowers seem to when one looks up at the mountain from the sluice-box. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... no profit that we live on the river's bank if we let its waters go rolling and flashing past our door, or our gardens, or our lips. Unless you have a sluice, by which you can take them off into your own territory, and keep the shining blessing to be the source of fertility in your own garden, and of coolness and refreshment to your own thirst, your garden will be parched, and your lips will crack. There is a 'broad river,' and there ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... it looks; and so black. Isn't that man afraid to stand there?" indicating a workman stationed upon the sluice gate, engaged in the endless task of raking fallen leaves away from ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... various schemes of consolidation, trustification, and amalgamation in which Wall Street profits are made, money is required in large quantities. When the soil is ready for the seed, when negotiations have been sufficiently matured, the trust company's sluice is tapped and the gold flows out. And gold which makes a $225 crop sprout, where previously only a $100 crop grew, is a valuable commodity, for the use of which large compensation is given the engineers. Thus the men who hold the treasury-keys ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... the alleys in their middle, at least four inches above the surface of the beds. The paths are always neater, and the moisture is retained for the use of the plants. Excessive rains can be allowed to pass off. This making alleys low sluice-ways for water is a great mistake in ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... gleam as of golden water everywhere along the horizon, washing out the cold snow-peaks, and drowning even the rising moon. The creek caught it here and there, until, in grim irony, it seemed to bear their broken sluice-boxes and useless engines on the very Pactolian stream they had been hopefully created to direct and carry. But by some peculiar trick of the atmosphere the perfect plenitude of that golden sunset glory was lavished on the rugged sides and tangled crest of the Lone Star Mountain. That isolated ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... lively and energetic character was being prosecuted that afternoon on the bar; and when the sun sunk to rest behind the purple mountains, and the blue mists of evening rose in the valley, they had their sluice-boxes and "riffles" in order, and were ready to commence washing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... with three hollows between them, down which the waters, stopped by the schist barrier, turn off into the Gabou. The belt of trees still green at the foot of the hill above the barrier, which looks, at a distance, like a part of the plain, is really the water-sluice the rector supposed, very justly, that Nature had ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac |
