"Swamp" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... writes from Stafford County that the conscripts there have hid themselves in White Oak Swamp, because the Secretary of War has exempted an able-bodied man to work for Mrs. ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... now included in the Netherlands was once a mere swamp, a wild and useless morass, unfit for the habitation of man. Three great rivers, you perceive on the map, have their course, in whole or in part, through Holland and Belgium—the Rhine, the Maas, or Meuse, ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... On the Lower Potomac, as the papers tell us, a negro comes within our lines, and tells the valiant defenders of the Union that his master conspires with the rebels, and has a quantity of arms concealed in a swamp; our soldiers go and find the arms; the master reclaims the slave; the slave is given up; the master ties him to his horse, drags him along eleven miles to his house, lashes him to a tree, and, with the assistance of his overseer, whips him three hours—three mortal ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... sundry sick, so fallen Through drinking from a swamp beside the way; But we pressed on, till, bearing over a ridge, We dipt into a world of pleasantness - A vale, the fairest I had gazed upon - Which lapped a village on its furthest slopes Called Nazareth, brimmed round by uplands nigh. In the midst thereof a fountain bubbled, where, Lime-dry ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... for a fortnight had been in the form of dry powdery snow and soft hail, the wind blowing it off the roof before it had a chance to thaw, thus robbing us of our usual water-supply. For a while we had to use swamp water, which contained a good many insects of various kinds and had a distinctly peaty flavour. Finding good water running from the hill-tops down a deep gully on the east coast, three-quarters of a mile away, we carried ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the shouting part of the business. Out of the way, Commodore! cried one, to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant threatened to swamp us. Hard down with your tail, there! cried a second .. to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity. All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... with the prize. But beyond that keen moment when the four, after their one volley from ambush, had sprung this way and that shouting absurd orders to make-believe men, cheering and firing from behind trees, and (cut off from their horses) had made for a gully and swamp, the two returned ones could tell nothing of the two unreturned except that neither of them, dead or alive, was anywhere on the ground of the fight or flight as they knew it. For days, inside the enemy's advancing lines, they had prowled in ravines and lain ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... Secret", the other an "accidental discovery", both either fakes or dangerous; to the lying claims of Hall's Catarrh Cure, that it is "a positive cure for catarrh", in all its stages; to "Syrup of Figs", which is not a fig syrup, but a preparation of senna; to Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root, of which the principal medical constituent is alcohol; and, finally, to Dr. Bye's Oil Cure for cancer, a particularly cruel swindle on unfortunates suffering from an incurable malady. All of these, with other matter, which for the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... put in Mr. Pullwool, somewhat alarmed. "That game never works. Of course they'd deny it and swear you down, for bribing witnesses is as easy as bribing members. I'll tell you what to do. Beat them at their own weapons. Raise a purse that will swamp theirs. That's the way the world goes. It's an auction. The ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... old dry grass, and not much triodia; but to the south, the latter and mallee scrub approached somewhat near. We saw several small ponds of water as we passed along, but none of any size. In seven or eight miles it split into several channels, and eventually exhausted itself upon an open grassy swamp or plain. The little plain looked bright and green. I found some rain water, in clay pans, upon it. A clay pan is a small area of ground, whose top soil has been washed or blown away, leaving the hard clay exposed; and upon this surface, one, two, three, or (scarcely) more inches of rain ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... plenty to eat and peaches and muscadines and pecans, 'cause there right smart woods and swamp there. We play in the woods and most time in the bayou on boats with planks what would float. We had the good time and had a little pet coon. You know, the coon like sweet things and he steal our syrup and when we ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... get from Norfolk in Virginia to Washington, I started by the Roanoke Railway, on the first day of my trip, and thus crossed an immense marsh, the "Dismal Swamp." The rails we ran on being laid open- work fashion on huge piles fifteen feet above the marsh, the whole road rocked under the weight of the engine, so much as to disturb the waters of the swamp and startle the numberless snakes ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... were consumed by thirst, had rushed to the cisterns. They broke open the doors. A miry swamp stretched at ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... were beginning to export Chinese man-power as an auxiliary war-aid and who were very anxious to place the whole matter on a sounder footing. Little real progress was, however, made in the face of the renewed German efforts to swamp the country with their propaganda. By means of war-maps, printed in English and Chinese, and also by means of an exhaustive daily telegraphic service which hammered home every possible fact illustrative of German invincibility, ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... descent from a variety of foreign nations, I was anxious to make myself acquainted; for I reflected that he who builds a city on ground which he has not fully examined will perhaps discover when too late that his foundation is in a swamp, and that the whole of his labour is momentarily in danger of being swallowed up. I therefore went forth not so much for the purpose of distributing the Scriptures as to make myself acquainted with the prefatory steps requisite to be taken in order to secure my grand object. ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... own resources, the Southern people became home manufacturers. The inner shuck of Indian corn was made into hats. Knitting became fashionable. Homespun clothing, dyed with the extract of black-walnut bark or wild indigo or swamp maple or elderberries, was worn by everybody. Barrels and boxes which had been used for packing salt fish and pork were soaked in water, which was evaporated for the sake of the salt thus extracted. Rye or wheat roasted and ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... know not; yet, I think, between two waves, Ludar steadied it while I got in, and then between the next two, I hauled him in. At first, it seemed, in this cockleshell, we were little better off than clinging to the spar, for every wave threatened to swamp it. Yet by God's ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... when Betty, against my maturer judgment, insisted upon the exploration on foot of a mangrove swamp on the shore of a cannibal-infested South Sea island. The immediate cause was a suddenly developed attachment on the part of one of Daddy's sea-boots to the mud on the lake-side. The twain refused to be parted, and the youthful explorer measured her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... inhabitants suffer from all the functional diseases found in other parts of the world, and, in addition, maladies which are typical of the region. Among the most important of these are the paludismus, or malarial swamp-fever, the yellow-fever, popularly recognised as the black vomit, and last but not least the beri-beri, the mysterious disease which science does not yet fully understand. The paludismus is so common that it is looked upon as an unavoidable ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... And roar at pipes and beer; But place them in a swamp, When nights are dark and damp,— Their tunes ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... dislike his leading them to church, whatever season or weather it might be, to chant matins before it was light. Once, at Marlow, when it was a long way to church, very muddy, and with a cold rain falling, one of his clergy, in hopes of making him turn back, led him into the worst part of the swamp, where he sunk up to his knees in mud, and lost his shoe; but he took no notice until, after the service was over, he had returned to his lodgings, half dead with cold, and then, instead of expressing any anger, he only ordered search to be ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... can actually make a man out of a pestle to this day?' asked Dinomachus. 'Yes, I can do that, but that is only half the process: I cannot turn it back again into its original form; if once it became a water-carrier, its activity would swamp ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... drill ground there is a large intramural swamp or reedy lake, the reeds of which have an economic value as wicks for Chinese candles. Dykes cross the swamp in various directions, and in the centre there is a well known Taoist Temple, a richly endowed edifice, with superior ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... I certainly am in trouble. That development business was a fake, and I have literally been kidnapped, with a lot of other young fellows—some colored. They're taking us away to a turpentine swamp to work. I've tried to escape, but it's no use. I appealed for help to the crowd, as did some of the others, but the contractors declared we were a lot of criminals farmed out by the State. And, as a lot of their workers really are convicts, I had ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... slipped off with Jerry to look after some colts on the black swamp, and was gone all the afternoon; and so Dad missed me; and when I got home didn't I CATCH IT! Oh lord, I'm all over blue wales; ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... whistle, "Oh, if that heralded Mark's return, how happy I should be." But many a sound like that had echoed across the Silverton hills, bringing no hope to her, and now, as it again died away in the Cedar Swamp, she pursued her way up the path till she reached the long, white ledge of rocks where with Katy she used to play, and where Bell Cameron had come with Lieutenant Bob, while Morris, too, had more than once led Katy there since ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... It certainly did not think of marrying, and only hoped to obtain leave to lie among the reeds and drink some of the swamp water. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... first place, the nine millions of bimana of thirty-two vertebrae and exclude from our physiological analysis all but six millions of people. The Marceaus, the Massenas, the Rousseaus, the Diderots and the Rollins often sprout forth suddenly from the social swamp, when it is in a condition of fermentation; but, here we plead guilty of deliberate inaccuracy. These errors in calculation are likely, however, to give all their weight to our conclusion and to corroborate what we are forced to deduce in ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... months, he fed in memory on their friendship to the last day of his life, brings home to us, as nothing else can, the force of Shelley's personal attraction; for this man lived until 1881, an almost solitary survivor from the Byronic age, and his life contained matter enough to swamp recollection of half-a-dozen poets. It seems that, after serving in the navy and deserting from an East Indiaman at Bombay, he passed, in the Eastern Archipelago, through the incredible experiences narrated in his 'Adventures of a Younger Son'; and all ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... the great road leading to Savannah, and about 3 in the afternoon appeared in sight of the American army. While making dispositions to dislodge it he accidentally fell in with a negro who informed him of a private path leading through the swamp round the right of the American lines to their rear. Determining to avail himself of this path he detached a column under Sir James Baird which entered the ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... coast approach have been described graphically enough by Robert Dunn in the summer and by Belmore Browne himself in the winter. There are no trails; the snow lies deep and loose and falls continually, or else the whole country is bog and swamp. ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... high a pitch of cultivation as their original patrimonies: and, as the commissioners were naturally anxious to secure arable land in good condition for the new settlers, the original occupiers sometimes found themselves in the enjoyment of marsh or swamp or barren soil,[444] which remained the sole relics of their splendid possessions. The judgments of the court were dissolving ancestral ties, destroying homesteads, and causing the transference of household gods to distant dwellings. ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... slow and safe transport across the river. Scarcely had the lieutenant gained the opposite bank than he was attacked by the Sikh army, which had been moving up from Bugurrarah while he was gaining the passage. This was a terrible engagement. The sun had hardly risen upon river, and swamp, and undulating plains, when the Mooltanee forces fell upon the motley crowd of the British levies, and in such superior numbers that victory seemed certain. For nine hours the English lieutenant resisted the onslaught, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... continued jerkily: "We're coming very near to war, sir; this country, our country, against those sickening anti-Christs who bayonet children, rape women, and wantonly torture unto death defenseless men—and boast of it, sir; gloat over it! It'll be our country against that polluted swamp of slimy creatures, sir; and in our country there shall be neither Democrats nor Republicans! Politics be damned, sir! Until those breeders of paresis—those Hohenzollern upstarts who, as God is my witness, ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... Sherman, were added to the pursuing column. The pursuit developed the fact that Beauregard, or a large part of his force, halted at Baldwin, fifty miles south of Corinth, in an inaccessible position behind swamp and jungle, while his line extended to the northwest, to Blackland, an approachable point west of the railroad. Pope had made all preparations to attack at Blackland and issued the order, when Buell arrived at the ...
— From Fort Henry to Corinth • Manning Ferguson Force
... from her as though they were tangible things. No, no! she would not be beaten! Insomnia, narcotics and stimulants had unnerved her for the time, but she was strong enough to pull herself together and stay the circumstances which threatened to swamp her midway in her career. Bolstered for the moment by this resolve, she threw back her head ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... We filed off in the long narrow swamp stagnating in the bottom of the trench where the moment before it had shaken under slabs of rain. Volpatte's grumbling began again amidst our sorry stroll and the eddies of floundering feet. I listened to him as I watched the shoulders of a poverty-stricken ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... for death. Thus he rode, levying blackmail, from one place to another, and in Jastrow he had the hands, the feet, and finally the head of the Protestant preacher Willich cut off and thrown into a swamp. This happened ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... of such a region of strife in the human soul. She had no suspicion what an awful swamp lay around the prison of her self-content—no, self-discontent—in which she lay chained. To her the one good and desirable thing was the love and company of Paul Faber. He was her saviour, she said to herself, and the woman who could not love and trust ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... just returning from the Isle of Pines. We reached there after a day on the water at about six on Wednesday, 22nd. They dropped us at a woodshed in a mangrove swamp, where a Mr. Mason met us with two mules. I must have said I was going to the island because every one was expecting me. Until the night before we had really no idea when we would go, so, to be welcomed wherever we went, was confusing. For four days we were cut off from ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... river Ebur in two arms that enclosed the whole plain of Fung. By now this lake would be full, swollen with rains that fell on the hills of Northern Africa, and the space between it and the Mur range nothing but an impassable swamp. ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... toil and another hour more of exertion, and I gave myself up for lost. The day was evidently fast closing in, the light over head was not near so bright as it had been, and I knew that a night passed in the miasma of the cane swamp was death. At last it became darker and darker. There could not be an hour of daylight remaining. I determined upon one struggle more, and reeking as I was with perspiration, and faint with fatigue, I rose again, and was forcing my way through the thickest of the canes, when I heard a deep growl, ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... get Firefly into a boat—we should only waste time in scouring the other bank. The swamp this side the next run has forced him into the road within five miles. The trick is transparent. He took me for a fool,' replied the Colonel, answering ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... Arabia and India, and the Nile with Abyssinia and the Mediterranean, Thebes was thus naturally allied to the richest countries on the globe; an alliance that procured it an activity so much the greater, as Lower Egypt, at first a swamp, was nearly, if not totally, uninhabited. But when at length this country had been drained by the canals and dikes which Sesostris constructed, population was introduced there, and wars arose which proved fatal to the power of Thebes. Commerce ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... side the swamp and low ground continued until the ground began to rise for the first low Surrey Hills at what is now called Clapham Rise. On the north side the swamp was bordered by a well-defined cliff from ten to thirty or forty feet high, which followed a curve, approaching the ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... when Tisdale brings a suit for libel. Hope he will do it, and that the judgment will swamp them. They must have got his name ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... and waited while the girl leisurely returned the fowling-piece to its holster. Then, together, they walked their horses forward, wading the "branch" which flowed clear as a trout stream out of the swamp on ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... gleaming brass cans; upon all the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured, resplendent, summer's day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which has dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood glass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an armoury of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs engaged in the conduct of daily life is better than the old pageant of armies drawn out in ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... set up 'cose 'tain't no use. But he wek' up sudden an' heah somefin' a-sayin', "Go to de ole house by de swamp and mebbe yo' ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo
... fourteenpence a-day. John, in a struggle to do task-work honestly, over-exerts himself, and ruins his digestion for life. Next year he is set in November to clean out a watercourse knee-deep in water; then to take marl from a pit; and then to drain standing water off a swamp during an intense December frost; and finds himself laid down with a three months' cough, and all but sleepless illness, laying the foundation of the consumption which destroyed him. But the two ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... May, they laying three eggs of a brownish or greenish color, very heavily blotched with blackish brown. Size 1.35 x .95. Data.—Winnebago City, Minn., May 31, 1901. Three eggs. Nest made of a mass of weeds and rushes floating on water in a swamp. ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... the time of need among strangers, and nothing could be more cheering in the day of trouble than this. When I left that place I started with bolder courage. The next night I put up at a tavern, and continued stopping at public houses until my means were about gone. When I got to the Black Swamp in the county of Wood, Ohio, I stopped one night at a hotel, after travelling all day through mud and snow; but I soon found that I should not be able to pay my bill. This was about the time that the "wild-cat banks" were in a flourishing state, and "shin plasters"[3] ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... in my original enterprise was the obstruction of the White Nile by the accumulation of matted vegetation, which impeded navigation, and actually closed the river. Upon arrival at Gondokoro, after the tedious process of cutting through 50 miles of swamp and vegetable matter, via the Bahr Giraffe, I had requested the Khedive to issue an order that the Governor of Khartoum should immediately commence the great work of re-opening ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... what steps have trod thy border! Here On thy green bank, the woodmann of the swamp Has laid his axe, the reaper of the hill His sickle, as they stooped to taste thy stream. The sportsman, tired with wandering in the still September noon, has bathed his heated brow In thy cool current. Shouting boys, let loose For a wild holiday, have quaintly shaped Into a cup ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... transference, the Earl sought to signalise his estimate of the Royal favour by founding a religious house. He chose for a site the swamp-girt island which lay toward the northwestern corner of his lately acquired possession. So frequent were the liturgical celebrations there that the settlement received the name of Inis Aifreen (Celtic), Insula Missarum (Latin), Inchaffray—signifying "Island of Masses." ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... a rainy day, and we had still to toil on fighting with the grasses. We marched up the wet margin of swamp all day, crossing the water at a fork near the end. The same jungle prevails on all sides, excluding all view; and the only signs of man's existence in these wilds lay in the meagre path, which is often lost, and an occasional ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... keep near him, and this I did as well as I could; but even then, three times during the course of ten days he lost himself completely in the tumultuous upheavals and canons of that badly mixed region. Another, an old grouse-hunter, walked twice in a circle within the confines of a thick swamp about two miles square. On the other hand, many exhibit almost marvelous skill in striking a bee-line for their objective point, and can always tell you, even after an engrossing and wandering hunt, exactly where camp lies. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... roads wending their way straight as a die, over hill and dale, staying not for marsh or swamp. Along the ridge of hills they go, as does the High Street on the Westmoreland hills, where a few inches below the grass you can find the stony way; or on the moors between Redmire and Stanedge, in Yorkshire, the large paving stones, of which ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... shall we manage? You don't mean to swamp us in a shove through that surf, do you?" said ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... resolved to offer a reward of two hundred dollars, "to any one killing the dog, or other animal, or giving such information as would lead to its discovery." The words "or other animal" had been inserted at the suggestion of a man who had heard unusual noises at night proceeding from the Oneida Swamp, a desolate, densely wooded tract of country, extending to within a mile or so of his dwelling. This circumstance had created in his mind the suspicion that the cause of all the trouble might not, after all, be a dog, but this ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... especially willows. Why, if they continue to grow and take more root, there'll be a hedge of living trees right across this brook. The dam will become so dense that it will back up a great quantity of water. I reckon this bottom will just naturally turn into a swamp after ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... was giving a party, the boundary between the favored and the slighted families would have been known pretty well beforehand, and there would have been no great amount of grumbling. But the Colonel, for all his title, had a forest of poor relations and a brushwood swamp of shabby friends, for he had scrambled up to fortune, and now the time was come when he must define his ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... accustomed to your glib, off-handed, smartly dressed youths. Here was a good-looking young man, of blameless life, who helped her draw up the bucket, took her to sail, taught her to row, brought her home bushes of huckleberries and branches of swamp-pinks from the pasture, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... he was accosted by his sable majesty in person. "Ha, ha!" said the prince of darkness; "so you think by these churches and convents to put me and mine to your ban, do you? Poor fool! why, this very night will I swamp the whole land with the sea." "Forewarned is forearmed," thought St. Cuthman, and hies him to sister Celia, superior of a convent which then stood on the spot of the present Dyke House. "Sister," said the saint, "I love you well. This night, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... I have to laugh. For any man who has ever had a taste of peonage, to say nothing of slavery, knows that the wage system is not real slavery; it's not the genuine, lash-driven, bloodhound-hunted, swamp-sick African slavery. None is genuine without Simon Legree and the Louisiana bloodhounds. The silk-socked wage slave, toiling eight hours for six dollars, is not the genuine old New Orleans molasses slave. He may carry a band and give a daily street parade, but if he's not accompanied ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... King was not a magnanimous man. He sentenced his brother to be confined for life in one of the Royal Castles. In the beginning of his imprisonment, he was allowed to ride out, guarded; but he one day broke away from his guard and galloped of. He had the evil fortune to ride into a swamp, where his horse stuck fast and he was taken. When the King heard of it he ordered him to be blinded, which was done by putting a red-hot metal ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... river," replied Jeems Henry, badgered at last into revealing his plan. Then, after a cautious look around,—"to Chickahominy Swamp," ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... open jar of cream (chocolate) with the gesture of the gouge in it. A woolly black wig on a shelf, its kinks seeming to crawl. There was a rim of Hattie au natural left around her lips. It made of her mouth a comedy blubber, her own rather firm lips sliding about somewhere in the lightish swamp. That was all of Hattie that looked out. Except her eyes. They were good gray eyes with popping whites now, because of a trick of blackening the lids. But the irises were ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... difficulties to me are very real. If I am to tell you it all in detail, your mind becomes confused to the point of mingling the ingredients of the description. The resultant mental picture is a composite; it mixes localities wide apart; it comes out, like the snake-creeper-swamp-forest thing of grammar-school South America, an unreal and deceitful impression. If, on the other hand, I try to give you a bird's-eye view-saying, here is plain, and there follows upland, and yonder succeed mountains and hills-you lose the sense of breadth and ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... German boy! The race made him careless of where he was going, and soon he found himself on the very edge of a swamp, similar ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... they tried the raft. Gypsy's raft was on a swamp below the orchard, and it was one of her favorite amusements to push herself about over the shallow water. But Joy was afraid of wetting her feet, or getting drowned, or something—she didn't exactly know what, so they ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... me!" ejaculated Uncle Nathan. "I will go into the swamp back of the city, afore I will look upon the ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... the house the trees ceased, and a rank vegetation of reeds and rushes took the place of the bushes, and the ground became soft and swampy. A little further pools of stagnant water appeared among the rushes, and the path abruptly stopped at the edge of a stagnant swamp, though the passage could be followed by the eye for some distance among the tall rushes. The hut, in fact, stood on a hummock in the midst of a wide swamp where the water sometimes deepened into lakes connected ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... without comment. Ardelia had never in her life eaten in silence. Through the open door the buzz of the katydids was beginning tentatively. In the intervals of William's gulps a faint bass note warned them from the swamp. ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... after the evening work was done, And the frogs were loud in the meadow-swamp, Over his shoulder he slung his gun, And stealthily ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... the slavery question been the only question, and by the end of 'fifties our land lay sick and shaking with it like a traveller who has thrown himself down at night beside a pestilential swamp, and in the morning finds the fever through the marrow of his bones. "Only muzzle the Abolition fanatics," said the South, "and all will be well again!" But the Abolitionists would not be muzzled,—they were the voice of the world's conscience, they were a part ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... sugar-maple grove Mokwa was a much chastened bear, but the incident soon faded from his memory and he once more trod the forest trails as if they had been presented to him for his sole use by Dame Nature herself. In the swamp the pointed hoods of skunk cabbage were appearing, the heat generated by their growth producing an open place in the snow about them. The odour from which the name is derived was not at all offensive to the bear who eagerly devoured many of the plants, varying the diet ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... Batten lying dead, or dying, in a mangrove swamp—I forget which," he began again presently, "with one of these very orchids crushed up under his body. He had been unwell for some days with some kind of native fever, and I suppose he fainted. These mangrove swamps are very unwholesome. Every drop of ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... afterward the Lucky Hunter took a bow and some feathers in his hand and went toward a swamp. After waiting a ...
— Two Indian Children of Long Ago • Frances Taylor
... back at once into the bush without either path or track, and steered our way by my compass. Sometimes it lay through a thick growth of young saplings, which bent aside as we pushed our way through; sometimes over a mass of decaying logs and upheaved roots; sometimes through long grass and swamp up to our knees; occasionally we came to a fallen tree, which we had to clamber over or under. Once or twice we came upon a little log hut standing in the midst of a small clearing, sometimes empty with door bolted, at other times ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... battle of Tannenberg, which lasted from August 22 to 27, 1914, inflicted a disastrous defeat on the Russian armies, capturing tens of thousands of its soldiers and driving as many more to their deaths in the swamp lands of the Mazurian Lakes. Not only did this end for the time the Russian invasion of Germany, but the latter country's armies followed the retreating enemy a considerable distance into ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... emitted is millions of times greater than that produced by any chemical combination such as the union of oxygen and hydrogen to form water. From the heavy white salt there is continually rising a faint fire-mist like the will-o'-the-wisp over a swamp. This gas is known as the emanation or niton, "the shining one." A pound of niton would give off energy at the rate of 23,000 horsepower; fine stuff to run a steamer, one would think, but we must remember that it does not last. By the sixth day the power would have ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... a net-work of small, sluggish streams and sloughs, that fairly swarm with wild ducks and geese, and justly entitle them to their local title of "the duck-hunters' paradise." Ere I am through this swamp, the shades of night gather ominously around and settle down like a pall over the half-flooded flats; the road is full of mud-holes and pools of water, through which it is difficult to navigate, and I am ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... rooms. When Istra opened the door, after tapping, the living-room was occupied by seven people, all interrupting one another and drinking fourpenny ale; seven people and a fog of cigarette smoke and a tangle of papers and books and hats. A swamp of unwashed dishes appeared on a large table in the room just beyond, divided off from the living-room by a burlap curtain to which were pinned suffrage buttons and medallions. This last he remembered afterward, thinking over the room, for the ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... satisfied with it, for at the after extremity of it there was an opening some six feet long, and as wide as the boat, through which a very considerable quantity of water might enter—quite enough, indeed, to swamp the boat. And with our canvas deck lying flat, as it then was, there was no doubt that very large quantities of water would wash over it, and pour down through the opening, should the sea run heavily. Our deck needed to be sloped upward from the forward ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... filling fast, and the great weight of the outboard motors buried her stern, so she was about to swamp in midstream. Uncle Dick in horror saw the set faces of two of his young friends at the rail beyond him, their legs under the boat, which was swinging on them, their terror showing in their eyes. He made ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... sun mounted above the forest, the odorous mists that infest those regions were drawn upward, giving out as the air grew warm a sickening and malarious influence. Vast and gloomy cypress, bay, swamp palm, ironwood, and other tropical woods reared their columnar trunks, from out a dark and noisome undergrowth, to an immense height. In those leafy depths no sun ever shone, and the absence of bird life ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... most shy and ladylike of trees, 50 Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves; The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on, Glares red as blood across the sinking sun, As one who proudlier to a falling ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... cobbler who christened his son Alexander Caesar Napoleon—sneaks stealthily along through forest and plain, like some lurking and venomous copper-snake. Cocytus would be a far better name for it. Here we are at the entrance of the first swamp, out of which the infernal scarlet ditch flows. It is any thing but a pleasant sight, that swamp, which is formed by the junction of the Tensaw, the White and Red Rivers, and at the first glance appears like a huge mirror of vivid green, apparently affording ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... her walk. She could not stir. By the help of a Stick she got half a step forward. She look'd up to God. On the sudden a new strength entered into her. She was up to the Neck in Water five times that very Day in passing Rivers. At night she fell over head and ears, into a Slough in a Swamp, and hardly got out alive.... She is come ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... We'll have it sold by men. We'll soon see if the Signal ragamuffins will attack them. And we won't pay 'em by results; we'll pay 'em a fixed wage; that'll fetch 'em. And a commission on sales into the bargain. Why! I wouldn't mind engaging five hundred men. Swamp the streets! That's it! Hang expense. And when we've done the trick, then we can go back to the boys; they'll have ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... er de do' ax Mr. Benjermun Ram fer ter walk right in, en wid dat he open de do' en walk in, en make a bow like fiddlin' folks does w'en dey goes in comp'ny; but he aint no sooner make he bow en look 'roun' twel he 'gun ter shake en shiver lak he done bin strucken wid de swamp-ager, kaze, settin' right dar 'fo' de fier wuz ole Brer Wolf, wid his toofies showin' up all w'ite en shiny like dey wuz bran new. Ef ole Mr. Benjermun Ram aint bin so ole en stiff I boun' you he'd er broke en run, but 'mos' 'fo' he ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... and looking forward the boys could see a huge wall of water dead ahead bearing down upon the yacht as if to swamp her, and at the moment when it appeared as if the final stroke had come she would lurch to leeward, presenting her side to the wave, rising on the succeeding one and shivering on its crest as if shaking the spray from her shrouds, after which came the downward plunge that caused ...
— The Search for the Silver City - A Tale of Adventure in Yucatan • James Otis
... alone rules, and all diplomacy is a pestilential swamp; decency is an infrequent guest, with scorn grinning ever over its shoulder; the entrepreneur is a rogue, the official a purchasable puppet, the lady ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... I see a wave that would be more than say fifteen foot high. It's when it comes on the rocks and strikes that the water's thrown up so far. Look at that, sir," he said, pointing towards a wave that came along apparently higher than the boat, as if it would swamp them, but over which they rode easily. ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... of foul eternal swamp, And over lonely leagues of burning sand, He wrought his purpose; Faith his quenchless lamp, And Truth his sword held ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... base of the mountain itself. Near by we discovered a lone willow-tree, the only one in the whole sweep of our vision, under the gracious foliage of which sat a band of Kurds, retired from the heat of the afternoon sun, their horses feeding on some swamp grass near at hand. Attracted by this sign of water, we drew near, and found a copious spring. A few words from the zaptiehs, who had advanced among them, seemed to put the Kurds at their ease, though they did not ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... The Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers empty into the Bay of San Francisco at the same point, about sixty miles from the Pacific, and by numerous mouths or sloughs as they are here called. These sloughs wind through an immense timbered swamp, and constitute a terraqueous labyrinth of such intricacy, that unskilful and inexperienced navigators have been lost for many days in it, and some, I have been told, have perished, never finding their way out. A range of low sloping hills approach the Sacramento ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... met a negro woman, who was also a runaway, and, after the fashion of his native land, had gone through the process of oiling her, as the marriage ceremony. They had built a cave on a rising mound in the swamp, and this was their home. This man's name was Picquilo. His only weapon was a sword made from a scythe which he had stolen from a neighboring plantation. His dress, his character, his manners, and his mode of fighting were all in keeping with the early training ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... suspicious of the printed report of the Boston place. It spoke of the men getting clean bedding, clean sheets and good meals; and experience was teaching me that that kind of catering for the tramp would swamp any institution. Then, I knew something about the padding of charitable reports. I did not care to offer any objection to the sending of a representative, but I determined to go myself; so, dressed in an old cotton shirt with collar attached, a ragged coat, a battered hat and ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... a fall on the Nolachucky River, a little below the cabin of John Crockett. Here the water rushed foaming over the rocks, with fury which would at once swamp any canoe. When David was four or five years old, and several other emigrants had come and reared their cabins in that vicinity, he was one morning out playing with his brothers on the bank of the ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... was queer!" said Dan. "You see, I was making a cut clean across country to that river of mine, and, as far as I could tell, I was in a stretch of land where there hasn't been one other white man in twenty years. Bad traveling it was swamp, cane, and swamp again for days; the mud stinking all day, the mist poisoning you all night, the cane cutting and scratching and slashing you. It was as bad as anything I've seen yet. And it was while we ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... feet above the level of the sea. This lofty headland, when viewed at a distance, appears like an island, in consequence of its being connected with the interior by low ground, which, in the vicinity of Khora Muckse, is quite a swamp. Its summits assume the aspect of turretted peaks, having ruined forts and watch-towers on the highest elevations. The hills are naked and barren, and the valley little better; the whole, however, presenting ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... social and political organizations among boys in pubescent years was well seen in a school near Baltimore in the midst of an eight-hundred-acre farm richly diversified with swamp and forest and abounding with birds, squirrels, rabbits, etc. Soon after the opening of this school[27] the boys gathered nuts in parties. When a tree was reached which others had shaken, an unwritten law soon required those who wished to shake it further first ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the stock-market, a vast and various collection exhaustive of the whole field of allegory, mythological and technical, and framed in the most bewitching aureoles of blue, red and green printer's ink. It seemed in '72 much more probable that the Coon Swamp and Byzantium Trans-Continental Railway would be able, the year after completion, to pay eight per cent. on fifty thousand dollars of bonds to the mile, sold at seventy in the hundred, than it did in '75 that ten millions ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... bogs or the mud at the bottom of tanks are deep or shallow is beyond my comprehension. Although I have seen elephants in nearly every position, I have never seen one inextricably fixed in a swamp. This is the more extraordinary as their habits induce them to frequent the most extensive morasses, deep lakes, muddy tanks and estuaries, and yet I have never seen even a young one get into a scrape by being overwhelmed. There appears to be a natural instinct which warns them ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... George took an axe and cut us a portage route from our camp through a swamp a mile and a half to the foot of a hill. This route we covered three times. It was impossible for one man alone to carry the canoe through the swamp, and in addition to it and the firearms we had at this period to transport about five hundred pounds of baggage made ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... swamp surrounded by woods, Carl's left arm about her, his right clutching the saber. Though the sunset was magnificent and a gay company of blackbirds swayed on the reeds of the slough, dusk was sneaking out from the underbrush that blurred the forest floor, and Gertie caught the panic ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... doun to the vera standard o' heathen Plawto; and sinking ae doctrine after anither, till they leave ahint naething but deism that might scunner an infidel. Deed, Matthew, if there comena a change among them, an' that sune, they'll swamp the puir kirk a' thegither. The cauld morality that never made ony ane mair moral, taks nae hand o' the people; an' patronage, as meikle's they roose it, winna keep up either kirk or manse o' itsel. Sorry I am, sin' Robert has entered ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... calls upon the name She learn'd to love him by; The waves have swamp'd her little boat— She sinks before his eye! And he must keep his dangerous post, And leave her there ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... though done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... so prudently declined to be drawn from that safe retreat of the assailed. The king and his army sat down on the outskirts of the wood. It was July, but the weather was desperately wet. The ground was in a swamp, the rain incessant; there was nothing but green oats for the horses. The whole army suffered from damp and exposure. Some labourers were hastily collected, and an attempt made to cut down the wood. This, too, as might be expected, proved a failure, and Richard, in disgust and vexation, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... and open their ports. Without negroes this State would degenerate into one of the most contemptible in the Union; and cited an expression that fell from Gen. PINCKNEY on a former debate, that whilst there remained one acre of swamp land in South Carolina he should raise his voice against restricting the importation of negroes. Even in granting the importation for twenty years, care had been taken to make us pay for this indulgence, each negro being liable, on importation, to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the world, that commands respect. His parental instinct, also, is very strong, and that simple structure of dead twigs and dry grass is the centre of much anxious solicitude. Not long since, while strolling through the woods, my attention was attracted to a small densely-grown swamp, hedged in with eglantine, brambles, and the everlasting smilax, from which proceeded loud cries of distress and alarm, indicating that some terrible calamity was threatening my sombre-colored minstrel. On effecting an entrance, ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... forest, terraces, gardens, and water he abandoned for Versailles; the dullest and most ungrateful of all places, without prospect, without wood, without water, without soil; for the ground is all shifting sand or swamp, the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... second suit he has had since then," said Mr. Red-winged Blackbird. "If you had been with us in the swamp last fall you'd have known that Bobby had a new one then. And here he is ...
— The Tale of Bobby Bobolink - Tuck-me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey |
