"Ditch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Giles's Pound, and so along the Tyburn-road. Saint Andrew's, Holborn, was next infected; and as this was a much more populous parish than the former, the deaths were more numerous within it. For a while, the disease was checked by Fleet Ditch; it then leaped this narrow boundary, and ascending the opposite hill, carried fearful devastation into Saint James's, Clerkenwell. At the same time, it attacked Saint Bride's; thinned the ranks of the thievish horde haunting ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... seventieth or sixtieth of all their lives), and nearly all their credit with the public, to this duck-pond delineation. Now it is indeed quite right that they should see much to be loved in the hedge, nor less in the ditch; but it is utterly and inexcusably wrong that they should neglect the nobler scenery, which is full of majestic interest, or enchanted by historical association; so that, as things go at present, we have all the commonalty, that may be seen whenever we choose, painted ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... wall across the isthmus; thus keeping his soldiers at once from idleness, and his foes from forage. This great and difficult work he perfected in a space of time short beyond all expectation, making a ditch from one sea to the other, over the neck of land, three hundred furlongs long, fifteen feet broad, and as much in depth, and above it built a wonderfully high and strong wall. All which Spartacus at first slighted and despised, but when provisions began to fail, and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the house stands the church, rebuilt, with the exception of the tower, in 1898 by Sir Tatton. There is no wall surrounding the churchyard, neither is there ditch, nor bank, nor the slightest alteration in the ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... quite a week," said Townsend; "and now that we're started I hope we'll stick together and make a real, honest-to-goodness patrol. Joe is with us to the last ditch—out for the ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... such filth retreat, Go delve and ditch, in wet or dry, Turn groom, give horse and mule their meat, If you've no clerkly skill to ply; You'll gain enough, with husbandry, But—sow hempseed and such wild grasses, And where goes all you take thereby? - 'Tis all to ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... Basin to Madison Valley, 45 m. It was hell. Didn't see the sun but once after Feb. 1, and it stormed insessant, making short sights necessary, and with each one we would have to dig a hole to the ground and often a ditch or a tunnel through the snow to look through. The snow was soft to the bottom and an instrument ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... his host slowly across the sandy plain, till at length he halted it two bow-shots from the camp of the barbarians. The camp was shaped like a bow, and the river Sihor formed its string, and round it was a deep ditch and beyond the ditch a wall of clay. Moreover, within the camp and nearer to the shore there was a second ditch and wall, and behind it were the beaks of the ships and the host of Aquaiusha, even of his own dear ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... called it, before the last of May, when beet work began. They made a pretty cheerful place of this new home; though, of course, it had no floor and no window glass, and sun and stars shone in through its roof, and the only running water was in the irrigation ditch. Even under the glistening cottonwood tree it was a stifling cage on a ...
— Across the Fruited Plain • Florence Crannell Means
... lazily, and by the end of another quarter-hour the land was clear and our curiosity was enabled to satisfy itself. No living creature was in sight! We now perceived that additions had been made to our defenses. The dynamite had dug a ditch more than a hundred feet wide, all around us, and cast up an embankment some twenty-five feet high on both borders of it. As to destruction of life, it was amazing. Moreover, it was beyond estimate. Of course, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... galleries, or "gangways," in which were laid railway-tracks. Over these, trains of loaded and empty coal-cars drawn by mules were constantly coming and going. By the side of the track in each gangway was a ditch containing a stream of ink-black water, flowing towards a central well in one corner of the chamber, from which it was pumped to the surface. Opposite to where he stood, Derrick saw the black, yawning ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... Cambridge—never was a prettier race seen at Newmarket—Dick must have beat hollow, but a d——d fat alderman who was inside, and felt alarmed at the velocity of the vehicle, moved to the other end of the seat: this destroyed the equilibrium—over they went, into a four-feet ditch, and Joe lost his match. However, he had the satisfaction of hearing afterwards, that the old cormorant who occasioned his loss, had nearly burst ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... wrecked, two of which were his own. Instead of being hundreds of miles ahead in the lead of the year's drive, as he expected, he now found himself in charge of a camp of cripples. What few trains belonging to his herd had escaped the ditch were used in filling up other unfortunate ones, the injured cattle from the other wrecks forming his ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... lees. All men's faults are not written on their foreheads, and it's quite as well they are not, or hats would need very wide brims; yet as sure as eggs are eggs, faults of some sort nestle in every bosom. There's no telling when a man's sins may show themselves, for hares pop out of the ditch just when you are not looking for them. A horse that is weak in the legs may not stumble for a mile or two, but it is in him, and the driver had better hold him up well. The tabby cat is not lapping milk just now, but leave ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... repaired; and the six battles of the French formed their encampment against the front of the capital, the basis of the triangle which runs about four miles from the port to the Propontis. [65] On the edge of a broad ditch, at the foot of a lofty rampart, they had leisure to contemplate the difficulties of their enterprise. The gates to the right and left of their narrow camp poured forth frequent sallies of cavalry and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... was situated on the edge of an extensive tract of marsh,—lagoon would be a more descriptive word for it, perhaps,—a splashy, ditch-divided district, extending along the borders of a lake for miles. Snipe-shooting was my motive there; and dull work it was in those dark, Novembry, October days, with "the low rain falling" half the time, and the yellow leaves all the time, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... was made on a train near Ogallala Station in September, 1868. The ends of two opposite rails were raised so as to penetrate the cylinders, the engine going over into the ditch and the cars piling up on top of it. The fireman was caught in the wreck and burned to death, the engineer and forward brakeman, riding on the engine, escaped unhurt. The train crew and passengers being armed, defended the train, keeping the Indians off until a wrecking train ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... page 76. A jet of water poured on to the part within which the head is concealed will make the creature unroll, and it is said that foxes and some dogs have discovered a way of applying this plan, and also that foxes will roll a hedgehog into a ditch or pond, and thus make him either expose himself to attack or drown. Gipsies eat hedgehogs, and consider them a delicacy—the meat being white and as tender as a chicken (not quite equal to porcupine, I should say); they cook them by rolling them in clay, and baking them till the clay is dry; ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... was enlarged to a hundred and eight feet [90] in length, with two wings of sixty feet each, having small towers at the four corners. In front and on the borders of the river a platform was erected, on which were placed cannon, while the whole was surrounded by a ditch spanned by drawbridges. ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... threatening times, and did all that was possible to induce him to make reasonable concessions. Although numbers of his followers and counsellors were strongly in favour of doing something to avert the coming storm, the President himself seemed inclined to fight until the last ditch was reached rather than concede anything. In reply to the Mercantile Association he said that he was quite willing to give the franchise, but that it would be to those who were really worthy of it—those ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... hospitable doors, and here and there clothing and oddments which, if they did not wear, they knew how to dispose of advantageously. What extremes of ways and means such people must be acquainted with! no ditch was too low to rummage in, no rat-hole too hidden to be ravaged; a gate represented something to be climbed over: an open door was an invitation, a locked one a challenge. They could dodge under the ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... doorway, a painted reredos, and a beautiful old roodstone in good preservation. Avebury House is Elizabethan, with a curious stone dovecot. The village has encroached upon the remains of a huge stone circle (not quite circular), surrounded by a ditch and rampart of earth, and once approached by two avenues of monoliths. Within the larger circle were two smaller ones, placed not in the axis of the great one but on its north-eastern side, each of which consisted ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... exception of one usurper and outcast homesteader, Alan Macdonald by name, who had invaded the land over which Chadron laid his extensive claim. Fifteen miles up the river from the grand white house Macdonald had strung his barbed wire and carried in the irrigation ditch to his alfalfa field. He had chosen the most fertile spot in the vast plain through which the river swept, and it was in the heart of Saul ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... fortress is situate at the entrance of the forest of Vincennes, (now reduced to a wood of small trees, the large timber having been cut down during the revolution) and surrounded by a deep ditch of great width, about two miles from the Barriere du Trone. During many ages, it had been the casual residence of the sovereigns of France. Philip de Valois added considerably to its dimensions in 1337. John continued the works, and during ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... was quite wonderful how much there proved to be to write about. Bess wrote back, enviously, that never did anything interesting, by any possibility, happen, now that Nan was away from Tillbury. The town was "as dull as ditch water." She, Bess, lived only in hopes of meeting her chum at Lakeview ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... false rumour—but it boots not recount his wanderings. Six months after he left Ancona, ragged, hatless, unkempt, hungry, he came within sight of the strong towers of Gratz; and as he went limping by the town ditch he heard a clear, high ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... befouling the earth and the streets with the excrements of themselves and their lives, love-making and begetting, and suffering stolidly all through the centuries, and one wonders why? as one wonders before a ditch full of tadpoles. Low mass was going on at a side altar, and the canon's mass in the beautiful marble choir, behind the ambones, behind those delicate marble railings and seats, which, with their inclusion, makes the fine aristocratic, swept and garnished quality of that ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... city, long and narrow, and well walled and enclosed with a great ditch, and it was wont to be called Ephrata, as Holy Writ sayeth, 'Lo, we heard it at Ephrata.' And toward the end of the city toward the East, is a right fair church and a gracious. And it hath many towers, pinnacles and turrets full strongly made. And within ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... sufficient for the landlord and the government to seize upon, leaving the other three to support the family of the man whose labour had produced them. But what are the facts?—the landlord and the government sweep all away, and the peasant and his family starve by the ditch sides. As an illustration of this condition of things, he quotes from a southern paper an account of an inquest held on the body of a man named Boland, and on the bodies of his two daughters, who, as the verdict ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... in each division, and this part of the Calle de Tacuba is occasionally called the "Plazuela del Sopilote," "San Fernando," and the "Puente de Alvarado," which is the more classic of the three, as celebrating the valour of a hero; while a ditch, crossed by a small bridge near this, still retains the name of "el Salto de Alvarado," in memory of the famous leap given by the valiant Spaniard, Pedro de Alvarado, on the memorable night called the "noche triste," of the 1st of July, 1520, when the Spaniards were forced ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... come a little way out of the town, he put his hand in his wallet and drew out the magistrate's certificate and tore it in two; and then he took out the gold pieces and threw them into the ditch, and they were not half as bright as the buttercups. But when he came to the ringlet he smiled at it and put ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... he sat and held his magnifying glass before his eye, and looked at a drop of water that was taken out of a little pool in the ditch. What a creeping and crawling was there! all the thousands of small creatures hopped and jumped about, pulled one another, ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... with a description of the scenery of the eastern approach to Verona, with special remarks upon its magnificent fortifications, consisting of a steep ditch, some thirty feet deep by sixty or eighty wide, cut out of the solid rock, and the precipice-like wall above, with towers crested with forked battlements set along it at due intervals. The rock is a soft and crumbling limestone, containing "fossil creatures still ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... immanently intertwisted, indwelling in the idea. Therefore it happened that a man, however heartsick of this tumid, bladdery delusion, although to him it was a balloon, by science punctured, lacerated, collapsing, trailed through ditch and mud under the rough handling and the fearful realities of life, yet he durst not avow his private feelings. That would have been even worse than with us: it would have been to proclaim virtue and ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... was awkward for him, having only one hand available to lace up his boots. He looked out of the window. Evidently this was at the end of the house. There was a flagstone walk, beside which ran a ditch full of swift, muddy water. It made a pleasant sound. There were trees strange of form and color to to him. He heard bees, birds, chickens, saw the red of roses and green of grass. Then he saw, close to the wall, a tub full of water, and a bench upon which lay basin, soap, towel, ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... one day through a meadow that stretched for miles in front of him, when he came to a deep open ditch. He was turning aside to avoid it, when he heard the sound of someone crying in the ditch. He dismounted from his horse, and stepped along in the direction the sound came from. To his astonishment he found an old woman, who begged him to help ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... great temptation to this gambling is, as is the case in other gambling, the success of the few. As young men who crowd to the army, in search of rank and renown, never look into the ditch that holds their slaughtered companions; but have their eye constantly fixed on the General-in-chief; and as each of them belongs to the same profession, and is sure to be conscious that he has equal merit, every one deems himself the suitable successor of ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... of?' 'Murder, Socrates.' Then Euthyphro explains the case, which quaintly illustrates Greek civilisation. Euthyphro's father had an agricultural labourer at Naxos. One day this man, in a drunken passion, killed a slave. Euthyphro's father seized the labourer, bound him, threw him into a ditch, 'and then sent to Athens to ask a diviner what should be done with him.' Before the answer of the diviner arrived, the labourer literally 'died in a ditch' of hunger and cold. For this offence, Euthyphro was prosecuting his own father. Socrates shows that he disapproves, and Euthyphro thus defends ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... "Have you three lives in your pocket, besides the one in your body, my lad, that you can afford to let your tongue run away with them at this rate? Come, come, I'll take care to keep you out of the Colonel's way; for, egad, you will not be five minutes with him before the next tree or the next ditch will be the word. So, come along to your companions ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... The Danish work was a wall of earth, stones, and wood, with a deep ditch in front, and a castle at every hundred fathoms, between the rivers Eider and Slien, constructed by Harald Blatand (Bluetooth) to oppose the progress of Charlemagne. Some traces ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... bad business," she said to herself thoughtfully. "He's rushed his fence and there's a ditch on the other side of it, deep ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... little ditch, then, Captain. Five pun' fine for you, when we gets there. Hold on inside, old gentleman. Kuck, kuck, Bob, you was a hunter once. It ain't more than fifty ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... with him two large vehicles containing his wife, the necessary theatrical paraphernalia, and the members of the company. Well, soon after passing Chatelaudren, he perceived something white lying by the roadside, near the edge of a ditch. 'I must go and see what that is,' he said to his wife. He stopped the horses, alighted from the vehicle he was in, went to the ditch, picked up the object he had noticed, and uttered a cry of surprise. You will ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... The race course was a large three-mile ring of the form of an ellipse in front of the pavilion. On this course nine obstacles had been arranged: the stream, a big and solid barrier five feet high, just before the pavilion, a dry ditch, a ditch full of water, a precipitous slope, an Irish barricade (one of the most difficult obstacles, consisting of a mound fenced with brushwood, beyond which was a ditch out of sight for the horses, so that the horse had to clear both obstacles ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... knew that in a certain spot stood an enchanted palace invisible to men. He went to the place, and just where the front of the house appeared whenever it was visible, he began to dig a ditch. The witch who lived in the house appeared and asked: "What are you ditching there ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... quite to the end of Ligny. On the left in the distance the Prussians were shooting from the windows again, while we did not reply. The shout rose—"The Guard! the Guard!" I do not know how that mass of men passed the muddy ditch, probably by means of plank thrown across, but in a moment they were on ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... preached for several weeks in a country parish in Maryland, he had invitations to settle in Charleston and Pittsburg, and he had an opportunity to become the president of a college by subscribing to the doctrinal tests required, which he would not do; for "he would sooner die in a ditch than submit to human authority in matters of faith."[45] In June, 1784, he preached in the Brattle Street Church of Boston, and he anticipated becoming its minister; but his pronounced doctrinal position seems to have made that ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... pass a roadside ditch or pool in spring-time, take from it any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the stick: eggs of a small ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... briskly the length of the ditch and she was returning smiling nods and flinging retorts that were not too delicate over her shoulder, she began to feel herself a personage; she was filled with a growing sense of importance ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... field, and found there was no way out—no chance of a bore through the great thick, high hedge, except at a branchy willow, where there was just enough room to squeeze a horse through, provided he didn't rise at the ditch on the far side. At first I was for getting off; indeed, had my right foot out of the stirrup, when the hounds dashed forrard with such energy—looking like running—and remembering the tremendous climb I should have to get on to old Daddy's back again, and seeing some of the nasty ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... bridge cost does not include the L5,830 spent in altering and filling up the Fleet Ditch, or the L2,167 the cost of the temporary wooden bridge. The piers, of bad Portland stone, were decorated by some columns of unequal sizes, and the line of parapet was low and curved. The approaches to the bridge were also ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... As she went on down the street past the stores with their rude platform entrances, and the saloons where tired horses stood with bridles dragging, she was again assured of what was the bread and wine of life to her—that she was loved. Dirty boys playing in the ditch, clerks, teamsters, riders, loungers on the corners, ranchers on dusty horses little girls running errands, and women hurrying to the stores all looked up at ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... London, is a collection of old buildings, enclosed within a wall, and surrounded by a ditch. The latter, however, is dry. The most curious of the structures, and the one which gives the place its picturesque appearance, in the distance, is a cluster of exceedingly slender, tall, round towers, in which the prisoners are usually confined, and which ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... valuable. It was therefore coveted by the white man. At first men had said: "She will die soon; the boy will then sell the hut for a song, gamble off the money, and then go the way of all who are stained with the dark and tawny blood of the savage—death in a ditch from some unknown rifle, or death by the fever in the new Reservation." But the old woman still lived on; and the boy, by his industry, sobriety, duty and devotion to his mother, put to shame the very best among the new generation ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... ground on the bank of the Agueda. The fortifications were fairly strong, and being protected by a very high glacis, it was difficult to effect a breach in them. The glacis is the smooth ground outside the ditch. In well-constructed works the walls of the fortification rise but very little above the ground beyond, from which they are separated by a broad and deep ditch. Thus the ground beyond the ditch, that is, the glacis, covers the walls ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... at Palel for some hours a start was made, at eleven o'clock at night; and at daybreak we came upon some villages, each house in which was standing alone in a large enclosure, surrounded by a wall, ditch, and hedge. We went at them and carried them, one by one, without any great loss to ourselves. Issuing on the other side, we came upon a plain about a thousand yards across. Beyond this was a bridge, on fire. ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... below them the irresistible onrush of the current slipped smoothly over the rim, sending up a roar like the thunder of breakers. As they struggled up the opposite bank after a final slump into a narrow ditch Creede looked back and laughed merrily at his ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... "A drop of ditch-water under a microscope" Hogan calls the society of his native city—"everybody pushing upward on the social ladder kicking down those behind." This zoological spectacle is not confined to Dublin, but there appears to be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... It was God's will that I, who have risked all and lost ALMOST all in the cause, be taunted, suspected, and the sweat of agony and tears which I have poured out be estimated at the value of the water of the ditch or the moisture which exudes from rotten dung; but I murmur not, and hope I shall at all times be willing to bow to ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... elephant is capable of great speed, it cannot jump, neither can it lift all four legs off the ground at the same time; this peculiarity renders it impossible to cross any ditch with hard perpendicular sides that will not crumble or yield to pressure, if such a ditch should be wider than the limit of the animal's extreme pace. If the limit of a pace should be 6 feet, a 7-foot ditch would ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... the joyful vacation times, and finally his decision to seek adventure far, far to the south—in Brazil, Guatemala, Panama, where he had developed his own executive caliber as a commander of men, in the great construction work on the Big Ditch.... Then came the sorrowful day when he had returned from his travels, to behold the ravages of time on his mother's aging face and his father's stooping shoulders. Even the servants were changed, and it had been to keep a closer bond with the dear old estate that he had taken faithful ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... marriage, when he was with his old father the sexton. Now, how he and Tom manage their matters, I don't know; but Tom gave him a lick on the head with a stick, which killed him on the spot. As the devil would have it, all this was seen by two people, a laborer working in a ditch hard by, and Scantling's son, a boy of ten years old. The end of it is, Tom was instantly pursued, and apprehended; your good uncle, Sir John, was called to take the depositions, and without any remand whatever, committed our good friend for trial. Tom's only chance is to prove that it was ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... all laws but its own devouring passion. Faustus, braving all penalties, human and divine, is another variety of the same type: and when we have to do with a weak character like Edward II., we feel that it is his natural destiny to be confined in a loathsome dungeon, with mouldy bread to eat and ditch-water to drink. The world is for the daring; and though daring may be pushed to excess, weakness is the one unpardonable offence. A thoroughgoing villain is better than a trembling saint. If Shakespeare's instinctive taste revealed the absurdity of the bombastic exaggeration of such tendencies, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... miles from the county seat Rand stopped his car on a deserted stretch of road and got out. Unwinding the wire Kirchner had wrapped around the revolver, he picked up an empty beer-can from the ditch, set it against an embankment, stepped back about thirty feet and began firing. The first shot kicked up dirt a little over the can—Rand never could be sure just how high any percussion Colt was ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... house having stood for some time unoccupied, people had tended to use it as a short cut. The kindly farmer obviated this by putting up a little notice-board, to indicate that the path was private. A day or two afterwards it was removed and thrown into a ditch. I was perturbed as well as surprised by this, supposing that it showed that the notice had offended some local susceptibility; and being very anxious to begin my tenure on neighbourly terms, I consulted my genial ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ate. Then he produced three or four magnificent specimens of apple-hood, crimson and yellow, with polished skin and delicious flavor, and set them in a row on the table beside some more of the little specked apples. They looked like a sunset beside a ditch. The young men drew around the beautiful apples admiringly, feeling of their shiny streaks as if they half thought them painted, and listening to the story of their development from the little sour ugly ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... splendid!" he exclaimed; "you're fine! You could put life into a dead man. You're the kind of girl that are the making of men. By Jove, you'd back a man up, wouldn't you? You'd stand by him till the last ditch. Of course," he went on after a pause—"of course I ought to go to New York. But, Blix, suppose I went—well, then what? It isn't as though I had any income of my own, or rich aunt. Suppose I didn't find ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... were proceeding opened into Gracechurch Street, leading still up the hill and away from the Thames. It was a fairly broad highway, but totally unpaved, and disgraced by a ditch or "kennel" into which found their way the ill-smelling slops thrown from the windows and ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... wondered, turned aside, then kneeled down in the rank grass and weeds of the ditch and surveyed the dog ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... palace is a handsome building of Italian architecture, surrounding three sides of a square. It is built of hewn stone, and over the centre entrance is placed a large gilt crown. Not far from the modern palace is the ancient Chateau, surrounded by a deep ditch, and flanked by gloomy bastions, formerly the requisites to a prince's residence, but incompatible with the luxury sought for in ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... luck! Well, let's get busy." He pulled out the keg and held it up for another disgusted look. "I won't bother fixing that at all. Call Happy and Bud back, will you, and have them roll this barrel of developer out and ditch it? And then take those two half barrels you were going to fix, and wrap them with clothesline,—that cotton line on one of the trunks,—and knock off all the hoops. I'm going to beat it to 'Querque and see if that stuff's there. We'll try developing the rest this evening, ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... be welcome to such material as the author has by him, for elucidating the truth. If he has been misled by a blind guide, that guide must plead that he has consulted good oculists and worthy spectacle-makers, and has had every good intention of steering clear of the ditch. ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... classes, distinguished by unknown multitudes of properties, and not solely by a few determinate ones—which are parted off from one another by an unfathomable chasm, instead of a mere ordinary ditch with a visible bottom—are the only classes which, by the Aristotelian logicians, were considered as genera or species. Differences which extended only to a certain property or properties, and there terminated, they considered as differences ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... confirmed old Michaud. "Thus, while I was at Vernon—you perhaps remember the incident, Madame Raquin—a wagoner was murdered on the highway. The corpse was found cut in pieces, at the bottom of a ditch. The authorities were never able to lay hands on the culprit. He is perhaps still living at this hour. Maybe he is our neighbour, and perhaps M. Grivet will meet him ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... as strange as horrible; their hearts, in especial, have been torn out, and left at some paces off, half- gnawed. Also, the men persist that they found the print of a naked human foot in the soft mud of the ditch, and near it—this." And he held up what seemed a broken link ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... it does," Chester answered. "This ditch was cut by water, and the water had to find ...
— Boy Scouts on the Great Divide - or, The Ending of the Trail • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... would turn the dry ditch into an open sewer—a vast trough of muddy water—in which draggled women would paddle for submerged household gods. Many would prefer to tramp back to the town at night and sleep in their own shrapnel-riddled homes. But ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... everything that we desired to see except the transmission room and the upper conning tower—the twin holy of holies in a commissioned ship—and slipped away, escaping the Captain by a bare two minutes. Which was lucky, as he would probably have had us thrown into the "ditch." ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... ten years in the temperance reform. While she has shown the dreadful results of the liquor traffic, she has been kind both in word and deed. Some time ago, passing along a Boston street, she saw a man in the ditch, and a ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... the line of hills, and three hundred south of the ravine just described, commences another of a more singular nature; with its steep sides, almost exactly perpendicular, it perfectly resembles a ditch cut for purposes of defence. Rising near the middle of the second bottom, it runs westwardly to the upper edge of the first, with a depth at its head of four or five feet, increasing as it descends, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... an hour after throwing away his crutch, he leaped a great ditch ten feet wide, and of undiscoverable muddy depth. I wonder if the old cripple would think me the lamer one now, thought Israel to himself, arriving on the ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... went off like the wind. Nothing but a natural tendency to hold tight with my knees prevented me from being left beside Blind-boy. We went at racing-speed to the gate, and then found, on looking back, that we might have spared ourselves the rush, for Blind-boy was standing as we left him! The ditch had proved an impassable barrier, and he was gazing after us in apparent wonder at our haste. My own wonder at the smart behaviour of my horse was removed when Johnny told me that it was the identical steed ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... his left, by way of emphasising his remark, "Hookum daddy, saringo spolli-jaker tooraloo be japers bang falairo—och!" he added, turning away with a look of disgust, "he don't understand a word. I would try him wi' Frinch, but it's clear as ditch wather that ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... eyes from him. How pale he was! But he did not speak again. The horse ran a few rods, leaped across a ditch, clambered up a stone wall with his ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... "It is a boy." The Chinaman cook carried it to the Jap chore boy, "It is a boy." The Jap chore boy carried it to the teamsters, "It is a boy." The teamsters carried it to the men on the ditches, "It is a boy." The ditch men carried it to the men in the orchard, "It is a boy." The prune trees took up the glad news and whispered it to the apricot trees, "It is a boy." The apricot trees whispered it to the peach trees, "It is a boy." The peach trees whispered it to all the ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... truth she was not. She was caked with mud and dirt from head to foot, an appalling figure in the lamplight. The rain dripped from her hair, her sinister clothing, her whole person. She looked as if she must have hidden in a wet ditch. I gazed horror-struck at my speckless matting and pale Oriental rugs. I had never allowed a child or dog in the house for fear of the matting, except of course my poor Lindo, who had died a few months previously, ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... is this: a nipana is a shallow pond or ditch where cattle drink. The very oceans are the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... times that I would, if spared, try to find out what "gipsying" really was. It was a puzzle I was always anxious to solve. Many times I have been like the horse that shies at them as they camp in the ditch bank, half frightened out of my wits, and felt anxious to know either more or less of them. From the days when carrying clay and loading canal-boats was my toil and "gipsying" my song, scarcely a week has ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... were far in the rear, reaching for some botanical curiosity, on the other side of a wet ditch, or they would certainly have put a stop to this conversation, which was not very profitable to any of the parties concerned. Dora was rather a matter-of-fact little person, and a very good implement for teazing with, as she did not at all suspect the use made of her, until a sudden thought striking ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is it! Glory be to God! who ever heard of such a thing? The farmers are a poor proud lot. They'd let a labourer die in the ditch!" ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... a torrent of fire rushing through my blood, and it was with difficulty I refrained from hurling the heartless scoundrel who leaned on my arm, into the ditch. A moment of reflection, however, warned me of the precipice on which I stood. He was Mr. Hardinge's son, Lucy's brother; and I had no proofs that he had ever induced Grace to think he loved her. It was so easy for those who had been educated as we four had been, to ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... to come forward and hand over what they possessed. No recently discharged firearms were found, but the invaders divided the peasants into three groups. Those in one group were bound and eleven of them placed in a ditch, whither they were afterward found dead, their skulls fractured by ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... beautiful as it is, it becomes pale and small in comparison with the wonderland that lies beyond the rubber plantations between Hana and the Honomanu Gulch. Two days were required to cover this marvellous stretch, which lies on the windward side of Haleakala. The people who dwell there call it the "ditch country," an unprepossessing name, but it has no other. Nobody else ever comes there. Nobody else knows anything about it. With the exception of a handful of men, whom business has brought there, nobody has heard of the ditch country of Maui. Now a ditch is a ditch, ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... and visible on every projecting point of the cliffs along the northern side, from most of which a pebble could be snapped down upon the road. Just beyond, after turning a bend in the canon, all the willows along the creek had been cut away, and through the cleared space a ditch five or six feet wide and ten feet deep was dug across the bottom. The dirt thrown from it was packed so as to form an embankment, on which logs were so arranged that it would answer for a breastwork, behind which riflemen could be posted under cover. At ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... of weathered brick faced to the south. Save for the man sowing, and some rooks crossing from elm to elm, no life was visible in all the green land. And it was quiet—with a strange, a brooding tranquillity. The fields and hills seemed to mock the scars of road and ditch and furrow scraped on them, to mock at barriers of hedge and wall—between the green land and white sky was a conspiracy to disregard those small activities. So lonely was it, so plunged in a ground-bass of silence; so much too big and permanent for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... worn out of his shoes and the soles of his feet began to get sore from the shovel, he hit on a plan: he cut the bottom out of a tin can and stuck his toe into the cylinder. And the first evening when he came home from the ditch- digging. and was struggling to remove from himself that sticky clay which is peculiar to the soil of Manitoba, he could not help saying to his wife: It's really remarkable how filthy the mud is here ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... waste none of it by random or careless shooting. The fort consisted, as all the border fortifications did, of a simple stockade, inside of which was a block-house for the protection of the women and children, and designed also as a sort of "last ditch," in which a desperate resistance could be made, even after the fort had been carried. The stockade was made of the trunks of pine-trees set on end in the ground, close together, but pierced at intervals with port-holes, through which the men of the garrison could fire. Such a stockade ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... France to escape from being used in the enemy's service. These derelict things stood there in long rows with a dismal look of lifelessness and abandonment, and as I looked at them I knew that though the remnants of the Belgian army might be fighting in its last ditch and holding out at Antwerp against the siege guns of the Germans, there could be no hope of prolonged resistance against overwhelming armies. These engines, which should have been used for Belgian transport, for men and food and ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... as the sheet anchor of Great Britain—the prop that supported her maritime superiority—the strongholds of her power. "Deprive her of her colonies," said Talleyrand. "and you break down her last wall; you fill up her last ditch."—Fas est et ab hoste ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... old playing with one of his companions, had seen an enormous key in a ditch by the roadside; he had picked it up and carried it to ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... the third house past the poplar. First there was a plank bridge across a grass-grown ditch; then a tiny patch of garden; then a humble whitewashed cottage with a small leaded casement window on each side of the front door. Unlike Hope Cottage, it did not look at all the residence of Miss Janet and Miss Anne. Its appearance, indeed, was woe-begone. Aristide, however, went up to the ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... the gentleman addressed as Luke Sturgis. "And show me the man as ain't cur'ous" he said, with a wink, "and I'll show you the man as is good at a plough and inwalable at a ditch, and wery near worth his weight in gold at gapping a hedge, and mucking up a horse-midden, and catching them nasty moles wot ruin the county worse nor ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... behind me. My hand went back in search: there was no time to look: the prairie just here was cut up with little gopher-holes and criss-crossed by tiny canals from the main acequia, or irrigating ditch. It was that wretched Smith & Wesson bobbing up and down in the holster. The Colt revolver of the day was a trifle longer, and my man in changing pistols had not thought to change holsters. This one, made for the Colt, was too long and loose by half an inch, and the pistol was pounding up ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... voice called on the case of Bread v. Cheese, in which there were pounds at stake, but no principle. Oh, with what zest they all went into it; being small men escaping from a great thing to a small one. Never hopped frogs into a ditch with more alacrity. Alfred left the court and hid himself, and the scalding tears forced their way down his cheeks at this heartless proceeding: to let all the witnesses come into court at a vast expense to the parties: and raise ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... on the defensive. They leaped into the ditch and began to take pot-shots at the more daring of the rapidly approaching mass, determined, to hold the place or die in the attempt—indeed, ...
— Bamboo Tales • Ira L. Reeves
... his pioneers began to smash a breach, twenty fathoms wide, in one of the walls of the city, rolling the rubble into the ditch to fill it up at the spot. When the operation was complete, Charles rode through the gap, as a conqueror, with vizor lowered and lance on thigh at the head of his Burgundians, into his city of Liege, whose fortifications he commanded ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... Rockefeller an' Phil Ar-rmour an' Jay Pierpont Morgan an' th' r-rest iv ye is settin' back at home figurin' how ye can make some wan else pay ye'er taxes f'r ye. What is it to ye that me nevvew Terry is sleepin' in ditch wather an' atin' hard tacks an' coffee an' bein' r-robbed be leeber Cubians, an' catchin' yallow fever without a chanst iv givin' it to e'er a Spanyard. Ye think more iv a stamp thin ye do iv ye'er counthry. Ye're like th' Sugar Thrust. F'r two cints ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... the strong garrisons. It seemed likely that they would have been glad to arrange the terms of peace sooner, but there was much inner turmoil at home. The men who, through thick and thin, had abetted the King in one plan after another to fight to the last ditch had nothing more to propose. Lord North, when he heard of the surrender of Yorktown, almost shrieked, "My God! It is all over; it is all over!" and was plunged in gloom. A new ministry had to be formed. Lord North ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... he can blame us," said Dave. "We simply couldn't pass him on the left. If we had tried, we'd have gone in the ditch sure. And the scraping we did to his buggy amounts ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... called to the driver. And as he whipped up the horses again, his Homeric laughter mingling with the curses of the man in the ditch, she sank back trembling and gasping. It was her first experience of the vileness of man, for the men of her day respected the women of their own class unless met half way, or, violently enamoured, given full opportunity ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... that's all. Don't you realize you're an old fuss budget with your steam and your boiler and your fire and what not? You're tied to your rails and if everything about your old tracks isn't kept just so you tumble over into a ditch or do some fool thing. Now I'm the one that can endure real hardships. Sparks and gasoline! you just sit right there, you baby, you railclinger, and watch me take that hill! Honk, honk!" And he ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... with the swollen Wheels came along and tried to Ditch him. They showed him the same courteous consideration that would be lavished upon a Colored ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... he lay down and gradually fell asleep. His cap came off, rolled down into the ditch and ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... that I was on the wrong road, and at last, when the Brigadier himself came up to me and said he thought I must have lost the way, I really began to waver in my conviction that I was right. At that moment my horse stumbled into a ditch, which proved to be the boundary of the main road. I was immensely relieved, the Brigadier was delighted, and from that moment I think he was satisfied that I had, what is so essential to a Quartermaster-General in the field, ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... the consolations of religion, strips not death of its character as the king of terrors. But to die as the drunkard dies, an outcast from society, in some hovel or almshouse, on a bed of straw, or in some ditch, or pond, or frozen in a storm; to die of the brain-fever, conscience upbraiding, hell opening, and foul spirits passing quick before his vision to seize him before his time—this, this is woe; this is the triumph of sin and Satan. Yet, in the last ten years, 300,000 ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... say she jumped the ditch three or four times, and acted like a wild creature. You'll only be late at school, and ...
— McGuffey's Second Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... mass, the nature of which they could not divine, but it threatened to annihilate every thing that opposed it. While gazing at this additional source of danger, the horses, blinded by the surrounding light, plunged into a deep ditch that the rain had washed in the rich soil. Neither men nor horses, fortunately, were injured; and after several ineffectual efforts to extricate themselves, they here resolved to await the coming of the fire. Ringwood and Jowler whined fearfully on the ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... It was three feet in depth, with perpendicular sides. At nine inches from the edge a trench a foot deep was dug. In the centre was an old flour barrel filled with earth. Upon this stood the tent-pole. The tent was brought down so as to extend six inches into the ditch, the nine-inch rim of earth standing inside serving as a shelf on which to put odds and ends. A wall of sods, two feet high, was erected round the outside of the little ditch. Thus a comfortable habitation ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... I was less fortunate, there being no way of entering the building, save by walking in through the gate, or climbing the walls with the help of a scaling ladder. The place is much more formidable looking than the battery, being in appearance a strong castle, with dry ditch, drawbridge, and portcullis to the main and, so far as I could see, the only entrance. In plan it is shaped like the letter L, with the angle turned harbour-ward; and it must mount about thirty pieces of ordnance, for I managed to count that number of embrasures on its two ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... in the afternoon. I had watched these beasts at their feverish exercises for nearly an hour before I perceived that they were gradually hemming me in. They seemed to be forming up, in ranks, on the garth. Only a ditch separated us—I was in the cloister-walk, a hundred-and-three gaunt, expectant, desperate cats facing me. Their famished pale eyes pierced me through and through; and two-hundred-and-two hungry eyes (four cats supported life in one ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... sent him to the other side of the dyke, where, he said, did she think he was afraid of her? Another strutted by her side, mimicking her in such diverting manner that presently the others had to pick him out of the ditch. Thus Grizel moved onward defiantly until she reached Monypenny, where she tossed the letter in at the smithy door and immediately returned home. It was the letter that had been sent to her mother, now sent back, because it was meant for ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie |
