"Rotten" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... our boss, four hundred of us, till ye can skate on hell," a huge Irishman, one of half a dozen standing at Vorse's bar on Saturday night, remarked when the saloon-man uttered a sneer at the manager. "Say that agin and we'll tear your rotten booze joint to pieces and make ye eat it! And if another stinkin' greaser tries to wing him from the dark, we'll come down here and wipe your dirty little town off the map! That goes both ways from the jack!" He snapped his fingers under the other's ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... herself, but for vital issues. When doing more campaigning in Pennsylvania she had to travel through the mining districts, where her frank words were often ridiculed and she was pelted with stones, rotten eggs, and other unpleasant missiles. But she bore it all like a warrior, and made a remarkable record for speeches in parts of the State where no man dared to go. Despite this and the fact that the victorious party ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... of this city," said Mr. Newberry, leaning back in a leather armchair at the Mausoleum Club and lighting a second cigar, "it's rotten, that's all." ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... belonged to him first, and me second. Now this afternoon I'm alone here. You know I can't do much. And I'm going to ask you to help me respect the law. I don't say that in this big country there may not be places, and there may not be times, when the law is too young or else too rotten to take care of itself, and when the American citizen must go back to bed-rock principles. But is that so in our valley? Why, if this prisoner is guilty, you can't name me one man of your acquaintance who would want ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... was the usual signal for the family to retire to Bed. Soon after I perceived lights in the Castle moving backwards and forwards in different directions. I conjectured the company to be separating. I could hear the heavy doors grate as they opened with difficulty, and as they closed again the rotten Casements rattled in their frames. The chamber of Agnes was on the other side of the Castle. I trembled lest She should have failed in obtaining the Key of the haunted Room: Through this it was necessary ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... are you afraid?' To show his mate that he was not afraid, he ordered a glass of brandy, but no sooner did he put it in his mouth than he spat it out again, saying the 'filthy stuff tasted like rotten soapsuds.' My friend B. said, that, till he told me, to no one had he mentioned the fact, and that what he did to his poor neighbor he did in order to see if it were possible to use mesmerism as a remedial ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... a sort of cloud of humiliation. The atmosphere was exactly what it would have been in England if he had been accused of cowardice or card-sharping. And there was nothing whatever the matter with the poor young man except that some rotten mine or other in Arizona had not 'made good.' Now in England we should either be below or above that ideal of good. If we were snobs, we should be content to know that he was a gentleman of good connections, perhaps too much accustomed to private means to be expected to be businesslike. If we ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... painted women." It covers about three hundred and ninety acres, and has a pretty sheet of water called the Serpentine. The fashionable drive is on the southern side, and here also is the famous road for equestrians known as Rotten Row, which stretches nearly a mile and a half. On a fine afternoon in the season the display on these roads is grand. In Hyde Park are held the great military reviews and the mass-meetings of the populace, who occasionally display their discontent by battering down the railings. At ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... the year 1892, in a work published over a pseudonym, the present writer described the rotten condition of the Tsardom, and ventured to foretell its speedy collapse.[274] The French historian Michelet wrote with intuition marred by exaggeration and acerbity: "A barbarous force, a law-hating world, Russia sucks and absorbs ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... plentiful harvest in this neighbourhood. I used to have great pleasure in driving between the fields of wheat, oats, and barley; but the crop has been entirely ruined by the rain, and nothing is now to be seen on the ground but the tarnished straw, and the rotten spoils of the husbandman's labour. The ground scarce affords subsistence to a few flocks of meagre sheep, that crop the stubble, and the intervening grass; each flock under the protection of its shepherd, with his crook and dogs, who lies every night in the midst of the fold, in a little ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... in the way in which they moved out presently, to bay. The first tang of salt air, that rotten, indescribable smell of the sea, tickled her nostrils. It was all she could do to keep from being drunk with it. She felt skittish. She ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... roaring sound, like that of the ocean, was heard in the woods. It came rapidly nearer, and in a few moments the swaying trees showed that it was passing onward over the camp. The frightened and bewildered birds circled screaming overhead, the rotten limbs and twigs went flying through the air, and thick darkness gathered at once over the forest. A moment later, several big drops of water pattered through the leaves like so many bullets and immediately the rain came ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... Mr. Chillingworth, without any hesitation, dipped his hands at once into the coffin, and took up some fragments of rags which were there. They were so rotten, that they fell to pieces in his grasp, like so many ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... that what had seemed in the moonlight to be smooth walls of ice were really furrowed and wrinkled like an old man's face by the streams of melted water which were continually running down them. The whole huge mass was brittle and honeycombed and rotten. Already they could hear all round them the ominous drip, drip, and the splash and tinkle of the little rivulets as they ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... goods are of less value, and he takes nothing off the price on that account—danger, if this defect either hinder the use of the goods or render it hurtful, for instance, if a man sells a lame for a fleet horse, a tottering house for a safe one, rotten or poisonous food for wholesome. Wherefore if such like defects be hidden, and the seller does not make them known, the sale will be illicit and fraudulent, and the seller will be bound to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... into that flame of war known as the Austrian Succession. Before either Quebec or Boston knows of open war, Louisburg has word of it and sends her rangers burning fishing towns and battering at the rotten palisades of Annapolis (Port Royal). Port Royal is commanded by that same Paul Mascarene of former wars, grown old in service. The French bid him save himself by surrender before their fleet comes. Though Mascarene has less than a hundred men, the weather is in his favor. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... affirmed, for the fifth time at least, "amongst intelligent men. Every one of us is naturally a coward. Of course we are. The more imagination we've got the more we can realize how pleasant life is, after all, and how rotten the adjuncts of sudden death. It's reason that does the trick—reason and tradition. Do you know of any one who is brave when he is alone—except, that is, when it is a case of self-preservation? No! Of course not. Did you ever hear of any ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... opinion of this Vestry that the Old Church is rotten and unfit for repair, but that a new church be built ...
— A Virginia Village • Charles A. Stewart
... "Rotten!" he answered, cheerfully. "I was late, but I got in to hear Hendrick's speech. The Vice-President was there, everyone else I knew. I cut ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... were well acquainted with Western European ways and fully aware of the fact that the reactionary governments of Austria and Prussia had invented several contrivances for handling the Jewish problem which might be usefully applied in their own country. Though anxious to avoid all contact with the "rotten West," and being in constant fear of European political movements, the Russian Government was nevertheless ready to seize upon the relics of "enlightened absolutism" which were still stalking about, particularly in Austria, in the early decades of the nineteenth century. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... pair of spurred military boots, green and rotten with decay. In them were the leg bones of a man. Among the tiny bones of the hands was an ancient fountain pen, as good, apparently, as the day it was made, and a metal covered memoranda book, closed over the bones of an ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... showed the skua, a black knob atop of the black blob of his bowlder, apparently fast asleep, invisible if we did not know he was there. She showed black dots bobbing upon silver lanes, which were sea-duck of various kinds—scaup, long tail, scoter, and the rest. She showed a line of old, rotten posts, broken off short by the waves, along a sand-ridge, which were wild-geese; and she showed three big, white swans—wild-swans, wilder even than the geese—floating like ghosts ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... ill-naturedly. "Chetwode, you're to take in the private cheque book.... I tell you what, Jarvis," he added, slowly resuming his stool, "the governor's not himself these days. The least he could have done would have been to introduce me, especially as he's been up at our place so often. Rotten form, I call it. Anyway, she's not ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... stood a clay Legba-pot of cooked maize and palm oil, which got eaten by the turkey-buzzard or vulture. This loathsome fowl, perched upon the topmost stick of a blasted calabash tree, struck Burton as the most appropriate emblem of rotten ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... rock. It was a picturesque spot; rowan-trees hung from clefts in the crags, their bright berries rivalling the scarlet of the hips and haws; green fronds of fern bent at the water's edge, and brilliant carpets of moss clothed the boulders. At one point a great tree-trunk, a giant of the fells, rotten through many years of braving the strong west wind, had fallen and lay across the torrent. It stretched from bank to bank like a rough kind of natural bridge, with the stream roaring and foaming only six feet below. The girls scrambled ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... on the errors of the time is very proper when we are trying our predecessors in foro conscientace: The houses they dwelt in may have had some weak or decayed beams and rafters, but they served for their shelter, at any rate. It is quite another matter when those rotten timbers are used in holding up the roofs over our own heads. Still more, if one of our ancestors built on an unsafe or an unwholesome foundation, the best thing we can do is to leave it and persuade others to leave it if we can. And if we refer ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... when I got there I found the teamsters, George and Harry, making the air blue with oaths. They were giving it to the boss because he would not get new harnesses, the old ones being mended all over with wire and baling rope and the lines rotten. Harry's leaders had broken their lines twice that day, it seemed, and he had nearly lost control of them in consequence. 'The old fool keeps a-promising and a-promising to get new harness,' said George, 'but he never gets it; and he hasn't got a harness ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... Here, in one corner of this vast empire, a revolt lacking all signs of terrorism, growing out of nothing into a sudden burst of indignation, knocked over the most absolute of autocracies. Just to look, it is hard to believe it true. As a Socialist said to me to-day: "The empire was rotten ready. One kick of a soldier's boot, and the throne with all its panoplies ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... evil soul, producing holy witness, Is like a villain with a smiling cheek; A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O, what a ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... the Abolitionists encountered here the worst opposition of all. The hall was filled with a howling, drunken, infuriated crowd, headed by Ezra Downer, a liquor dealer, and Luke McKenna, a pro-slavery Democrat. Even Mr. May, who was venerated by all Syracuse, was not allowed to speak. Rotten eggs were thrown, benches broken, and knives and pistols gleamed in every direction. The few ladies present were hurried out of the room, and Miss Anthony faced that raging audience, the only woman there. The Republican chief of police refused to make any effort toward keeping order. The mob ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... clever fellow! From the cold indeed! Why, it was hot. If it had been from the cold, ours would not have rotted either. 'But,' he says, 'go up to ours and they are all rotten and maggoty. So,' he says, 'we tie our faces up with kerchiefs and turn our heads away as we drag them off: we can hardly do it. But theirs,' he says, 'are white as paper and not so much smell as ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... out for has just come in. Her skipper is a friend of mine, and although he's been mighty lucky, I've rotten bad news for him, and wish some one else could tell it to him. Damn all women, I say!—leastways, all those who don't stick to the ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... mud, the hooks caught an old chest, upon the top of which had been thrown a great many large stones; and after much effort and time, we succeeded in raising it to daylight. The sides and lid were decayed and rotten; it needed no locksmith to open it; and we found within, what I was certain we should find, and which paralyzed with horror all the spectators, who had not my pre-convictions—we found the remains of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... "Let me see how was it!" (Deep thought as he rubbed his face in his palm; smile as recollection came) "On Rutledge Plantation a man wouldn't take no beating. Found a large hollow cypress tree been rotten out long years. Gone in. Lie down sleep. Fore day wake up! Feel something crawl over him. Nother one crow like game chicken!" (Negroes all say rattlers crow!) "Smell him. Crawl over him. Crawl ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... somewhat larger pile of dust mixed with soft and punky splinters of rotten wood. Amid all this decay she saw some bits of rust, a corroded type-bar or two—even a few rubber key-caps, still recognizable, though with the letters ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... me the cause of this disease, and I have to admit that among the authorities themselves there are no settled convictions. Some hold—and for my part I am with them—that the attack is caused by quinine given in too large a dose to a subject who is rotten with malaria. But there are others who maintain that it is a malarial manifestation only, and that the big dose of quinine, which seems to some to precipitate the attack, is only a coincidence. Be that as it may, there is little difference in the treatment adopted ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... have gi'en 'ye whole evening of my sinking life to ye dribbling of it forth, with trembling and uneasy soul, not launched it sudden in its matchless might, taking mine own life with violence, rending my weak frame like rotten rags. It was not ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... that while a number of good men had been sacrificed at the stake for the Reformed doctrines, no one was burned for saying mass; the worst that happened, notwithstanding their fierce enactments, being the exposure in the pillory of a priest. Rotten eggs and stones are bad arguments either in religion or metaphysics, but not so violently bad as fire ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... rotten at the core"; "The preacher touched the core of the subject": in which of these sentences is "core" used in its literal, in which ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... apples, little apples, freckled apples, speckled apples, green apples, and dried apples. A bad boy on the front row shouted the other night, "And rotten apples!" ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... too speaks, and acts, in Formulas; all men do so. And in general, the more completely cased with Formulas a man may be, the safer, happier is it for him. Thou who, in an All of rotten Formulas, seemest to stand nigh bare, having indignantly shaken off the superannuated rags and unsound callosities of Formulas,—consider how thou too art still clothed! This English Nationality, whatsoever from uncounted ages ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... it by the fact that "the situation in Ireland was complicated by personal misunderstandings," producing "an atmosphere of suspicion," which was an obvious reference, as most people supposed, to such denunciations as that of Mr. William Moore of the Chief Secretary's "wretched, rotten, sickening policy of conciliation." The disingenuousness marking the whole proceeding is well shown by the fact that although on announcing Mr. Wyndham's resignation Mr. Balfour said:—"The ground of his resignation is not ill-health,"[23] less ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... Vargas had much to atone for and to suffer until his death. The auditor Grimaldos died, soon after Pardo's banishment, "from a painful disease, in which the tongue with which he had spoken so much evil of his illustrious Lordship became rotten, and the arm with which he had seized the anointed of the Lord was withered." The auditor Viga, who went to seize the Dominican provincial, Calderon, died in exile, in Cagayan, without having consented to make his confession. He and his colleague ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... man stopped her; but the broken sentence was to me a volume. They sat and looked lightnings at each other; and I contented myself with thinking, that when a rotten tree splits, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... present life's experience, could I know anything about kimchi? Yet I know kimchi. It is a sort of sauerkraut. When it is spoiled it stinks to heaven. I tell you, when I was Adam Strang, I ate kimchi thousands of times. I know good kimchi, bad kimchi, rotten kimchi. I know the best kimchi is made by the women of Wosan. Now how do I know that? It is not in the content of my mind, Darrell Standing's mind. It is in the content of Adam Strang's mind, who, through various births ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... these words and fled. Gunrig sprang up to pursue, but, fortunately for the girl, a modest bramble, that scarce ventured to raise its branches above the ground, caught his foot and sent him headlong into a rotten stump, which seemed only too ready to receive him. Extracting his head from its embrace, he stood up in a bewildered frame of mind, found that the light-footed Branwen had escaped him, and sat down again on the fallen tree to ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... attracted Mr. Grey's attention—something that had got jammed in a space between two rotten beams which floated alongside the flooring of the crazy old wharf—and his heart leaped in his breast with a throb of sickening fear. He stooped over the water, reached forward his stout staff, and with its hooked head carefully hauled ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... effects of that disturbing medium that our observations have been so defective and our mistakes so sinister. We still fail to perceive that decay has overtaken the organs of our Party Government and the groundwork of our State fabric is rotten. Yet everything about and around us is in flux. We are in the midst ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... traveller must also pass over many a field of snow not yet melted by the sun, and frequently concealing chasms and masses of lava; and this is attended with danger almost as great. At every footstep the traveller sinks into the snow; and he may thank his lucky stars if the whole rotten surface does not give way. In September the violent storms of wind and rain commence, and heavy falls of snow may be expected from ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... blamed rotten truth," he admitted, waving his great red hand toward the door; "but let's have supper first and settle down to talk on a full stomach. Thar's no hurry with all night before us, and that, to come to facts, is why I sent for you. No lawyer's office ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Thought I was bear meat by this, didn't you, blast yore rotten soul to hell! But I'm back, Bill Simms. Back, an' this time ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... open space perhaps forty feet across. Near the center of this place was Walter, waving his torch frantically back and forth. He ceased his cries as their lights flashed into view. "Stop, stop!" he shouted, "don't come a step further. I am sinking a foot a minute. The ground is rotten here. I guess it's up to me to say good-bye, chums," he continued in a voice he strove vainly to make steady. "You can't help me, and I'm ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... liquors heated, shine not; and several hard bodies, as Iron, Silver, Brass, Copper, Wood, &c. though very often struck with a hammer, shine not presently, though they will all of them grow exceeding hot; whereas rotten Wood, rotten Fish, Sea water, Gloworms, &c. have nothing of tangible heat in them, and yet (where there is no stronger light to affect the Sensory) they shine some of them so Vividly, that one may make a shift to ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... home increase. The Ministry is upon a very narrow bottom, and stand like an isthmus, between the Whigs on one side, and violent Tories on the other. They are able seamen; but the tempest is too great, the ship too rotten, and the crew all against them. Lord Somers has been twice in the Queen's closet, once very lately; and your Duchess of Somerset,(10) who now has the key, is a most insinuating woman; and I believe they will endeavour to play the ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... them from reason, employing sensuality as his bait. As then there are some kinds of food which neither benefit the blood or spirit, nor brace up the nerves and marrow, but stir the passions, excite the lower nature, and make the flesh unsound and rotten, so the language of the flatterer adds nothing to soberness and reason, but encourages some love passion, or stirs up foolish rage, or incites to envy, or produces the empty and burdensome vanity of pride, or joins in bewailing woes, or ever by his calumnies and hints makes malignity and illiberality ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... as desired, and the small rope was soon dangling within reach of Wychecombe's arm. It is not easy to make a landsman understand the confidence which a sailor feels in a rope. Place but a frail and rotten piece of twisted hemp in his hand, and he will risk his person in situations from which he would otherwise recoil in dread. Accustomed to hang suspended in the air, with ropes only for his foothold, or with ropes to grasp with his hand, his eye ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... history! Hence, gilded cheat! . . . Many old rotten-timbered boats there be Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified To goodly vessels, many a sail of pride, And golden-keeled, is left unlaunched and dry. But wherefore this? What care, though owl did fly About the great Athenian admiral's mast? What ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... long way to the high-road, and to get there I had to cross a wooden bridge which was out of repair. The rain of the last few days had swelled the little river and the water splashed up on to the bridge through the rotten planks. I began to get nervous because the water and the wind between them made a noise that I had never heard before. But I refused to be frightened, and ran across the slippery bridge as quickly as ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... philosophical ground in his view of the matter, and had accused the structure of society. There must be something rotten, he said, at the core of our civilization, when every morning brought the story of a defalcation, great or small, in some part of our country: not the peculations of such poor clerks and messengers as their employers could be insured against, but of officials, public and corporate, for whom we ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... the cattle had churned up, and, lifting the broken gate, pushed it back so that Grace could cross a drier spot. Then, as he stood with his hands on the rotten bars, she stopped. ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... front, lowering his voice, gave directions to avoid striking against these rotten constructions. The night was clear. They saw well to direct the boat, but ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... supreme—snuffs out the searching light of Intelligence with total impunity—and hoots, owl-like, in answer to every form of protest, See how well we all do in the dark! One of these days that audacious assertion will be practically contradicted, and the whole rotten system of modern society will come down ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... subsided they examined the bread, and found a great deal of it had become mouldy and rotten; but even this was carefully kept and used. The boat was now near some islands, but they were afraid to go on shore, as the natives might attack them; while being in sight of land, where they might ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Batchelors are under their immediate Inspection, and my Friend produced to me a Report given into their Board, wherein an old Unkle of mine, who came to Town with me, and my self, were inserted, and we stood thus; the Unkle smoaky, rotten, poor; the Nephew raw, but no Fool, sound at present, very rich. My Information did not end here, but my Friends Advices are so good, that he could shew me a Copy of the Letter sent to the young Lady who is to have me which ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... nuff," replied the negro in a few moments, "but not so berry rotten as mought be, Mought ventur' out leetle way 'pon de ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... own cave-door on his first foray into the world. It was by sheer blundering that he chanced upon the shrewdly hidden ptarmigan nest. He fell into it. He had essayed to walk along the trunk of a fallen pine. The rotten bark gave way under his feet, and with a despairing yelp he pitched down the rounded crescent, smashed through the leafage and stalks of a small bush, and in the heart of the bush, on the ground, fetched up in the midst ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... at noon Caleb was going to his flock in the fields, walking by a hedge, when he noticed Bob sniffing suspiciously at the roots of an old holly-tree growing on the bank. It was a low but very old tree with a thick trunk, rotten and hollow inside, the cavity being hidden with the brushwood growing up from the roots. As he came abreast of the tree, Bob looked up and emitted a low whine, that sound which says so much when used by a dog to his master and which his master does not always rightly understand. At all events he ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... echoes in my brain, shouting his opinion of intensive culture for all the world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery of a crop with a hoe. We had tied them up with bast only a week or so before, and now half were rotten and half had shot up into tall slender growths. He had the hoe in both hands and slogged. Great wipes he made, and at each ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... mountains ahead from a bluff just below our evening camp. River runs north apparently; it must therefore be Low's Northwest River I think. Mountains look high and rugged, 10 to 25 miles away. Ought to get good view of country from there, and get caribou and bear. Moccasins all rotten and full of holes. Need caribou. Need bear for grease. All hungry all day. George weak, Wallace ravenous; lean, gaunt and a bit weak myself. Fish ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... window on a level with, or rather sunk somewhat below, the surface of the ground, with a kind of area around it. 'There; there are iron gratings, but they are set in the wood, which is all rotten. Quick! try them ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... the time the banca nosed her way slowly in among the rotten docks and ruined hulks of steamships, and with a gentle rustling came to rest among the reeds and rushes now growing rank at the foot of what ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... more and more, and after three or four minutes the roots, that had begun to crack, gave way with a craunching sound, and down crashed the great stub. Its hollow top struck across a fallen log and burst open in a shower of dust, splinters and rotten wood. The boys rushed to the spot to catch the Squirrel, if possible. It did not scramble out as they expected it would, even when they turned over the fragments. They found the front of the stub with the old ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... throats, all we Made women by our hunger; and I saw Gigantic thirst grieving our mouths with dust, Scattering up against our breathing salt Of blown dried dung, till the taste eat like fires Of a wild vinegar into our sheathed marrows; And a sudden decay thicken'd all our bloods As rotten leaves in fall will baulk a stream; Then my kill'd life the muncht food of jackals.— The wind of vision died in my brain; and lo, The jangling of the caravan's long gait Was small as the luting of a ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... headway, only achieving thirty-one miles in the best part of the week, but on the 29th the floes became thin and the ice showed signs of recent formation, though intermingled with heavier floes of old and rotten ice. There was much diatomacea in the rotten floes. About 2.40 a.m. the ship broke through into a lead of open water six ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... She was some time under examination, for she answered all the questions asked her so wisely and so firmly, that the Commissioners themselves were disconcerted. They took refuge, as such men usually did, in abuse, calling her ugly names, and asking "if she wished to burn her rotten old bones?" ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... whether he has really been pardoned and will be saved finally, because here salvation is not exclusively based on the sure and immovable grace and promises of God, but, at least in part, on man's own doubtful conduct—a rotten plank which can serve neither foot for safely crossing the great abyss of sin and death. Only when presented and taught in strict adherence to the Bible is the doctrine of election and grace fully qualified to engender divine ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... it was tremendous. The masts snapped at the board, like rotten sticks. The vessel shivered from stem to stern and, drawing back for an instant, was again cast down with terrible force; and, as if struck by lightning, parted amidships, and then seemed to fall all to pieces, like a ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... mi rooad; But aw thowt awd ne'er seen sich a day— It worn't fit ta be aght for a tooad. Sooin th' big en agean slipt away, An sam'd summat else aght o'th' muck, An he cried aght, "Luk here, Bill! to-day Arn't we blest wi' a seet o' gooid luck? Here's a apple! an th' mooast on it's saand: What's rotten aw'll throw into th' street— Worn't it gooid to ligg thear to be faand? Nah booath on us con have a treat." Soa he wiped it, an rubb'd it, an then Sed, "Billy, thee bite off a bit; If tha hasn't been lucky thisen Tha shall share wi me sich as aw get." Soa ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... is formed of two pieces, bound to either end of a thin belt of rotten linen, and united by hook and socket. Its whole dimensions are but 3 inches by 2 inches, but inside its curiously carved border it is entirely covered with writing in rude English character. The narrowing funnel of the trough had kept it from ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that I wote nat what Surrien & of theyr flocke whiche be but newly crepte vp to ho[-] nour out of the donghyll is now made con[-] sull of the city. For this seruile colour hath nat deceiued vs nor hery cheke balles / nor rotten & fylthy tethe / thyne iyes / thy bro- wes / forhed / & hole cou[n]tenau[n]ce / which in a maner doth manifest me[n]nes co[n]dicio[n]s & na[-] ture it hath deceiued vs. This done / we must consyder how he hath ...
— The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke • Leonard Cox
... makes a whole lot to me," said Farwell. "I'm interested in my profession. I want to get to the top of it. I'm halfway up, and time counts. And then to be sent down here on this rotten job! Pah! it ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... quantity of cloves. The Dutch and English are contending with each other in the Moluccas; and the former, it is said, are intending to attack the Spanish forts there soon. Gaviria has but few men, and some of these are unfit for duty. He needs a few galleys, as he has "only one rotten galliot"; also troops, money, and clothing. Gaviria thinks that the Dutch are being to some extent supplanted by the English; and that the latter will gladly unite with the Spaniards against the common enemy. He recommends the abandonment of the Spanish posts in Gilolo. A letter ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... flies—varied with cherries, apples, figs, berries and green corn. Acorns form its principal food during the greater portion of the year. Of these it stores away large numbers in the thick bark of pines, in partly rotten limbs of oak trees, telegraph poles, and fence posts. A writer in the "Auk" says of its habits: "It is essentially a bird of the pines, only occasionally descending to the cotton woods of low valleys. The oaks, which are ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... sordid outlook, old thing!" he urged. "You simply aren't anywhere near it. Right off the target, absolutely! What Lucille told me to ask you was if you would mind—at some tolerably near date—being a grandfather! Rotten thing to be, of course," proceeded Archie commiseratingly, "for a chappie of your age, but there ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... look right, don't they, if that's so! Obey, Obey! I'd have liked to see England just once again—I would indeed. If I could only see her just once. If I'd a letter from her, or her picture. This is a rotten, rat-in-a-hole, lonely, uncreditable way to die! I wish Juggut Khan were here. I'd have somebody to help me keep my good courage up ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... while your society-look where it is after one hundred years in France, in Italy, in England—thanks to that detestable Gladstone, of whom pride has made a second Nebuchadnezzar. It is like Russia, your society; according to the only decent words of the obscene Diderot, 'rotten before mature!' ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... "'Something is rotten in the State of Denmark,'" I quoted in startled comment to myself; and not knowing what else to do, stared down at the turf at ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... appear at first reading, console sufferers by the thought that God is above rapacious dignitaries, but bids the readers not be surprised if small officials plunder, since the same corruption goes upwards through all grades of functionaries. With such rotten condition of things is contrasted, in verse 9, the happy state of a people living under a patriarchal government, where the king draws his revenues, not from oppression, but from agriculture. The Revised Version gives in its margin this rendering. The connection of these ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Cornwallis N. 38 deg. E; and a long, low island (Turn-again., of Bligh,) N. 35 deg. to 58 deg. W. At three p.m. the reefs were so numerous, that the ships were obliged to anchor, until the boats could sound for a passage: the depth here was 41/2 fathoms, on a bottom of rotten stones and coral. ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... a midday sun when he came on deck. Its low, square houses were glaring white; here and there a splotch of vivid Cuban blue stood out; the rickety, worm-eaten piling of its water-front resembled rows of rotten, snaggly teeth smiling out of a chalky face mottled with unhealthy, artificial spots of color. Gusts of wind from the shore brought feverish odors, as if the city were sick and exhaled a tainted breath. But beyond, the hills were clean and green, the ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... judges they would have fetched about 24 shillings per thousand at Kingston-upon-Thames (where he resided) in the year 1784. Their greatest fault is being too brittle. The tiles he thinks not so good as those made about London. The stuff has a rotten quality, and besides wants the advantage of being ground, in lieu ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... doing their best. I take off my hat to the hens. As nice a hard-working lot as I ever want to meet, full of vigour and earnestness. It's that damned incubator that's letting us down all the time. The rotten thing won't work. I don't know what's the matter with it. The long and the short of it is that it ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... as a woman with a mission! She formulated nowhere any scheme for the re-organization of those social conditions whose bases she had very eloquently and very trenchantly held to be rotten and impure. She had written as a prophet of woe! She had preached only destruction, and from the first she had left her readers curious as to what sexual system could possibly replace the old. The thing which happened was inevitable. The amazing demand for her book was exactly in inverse proportion ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... all their sails and dropt their anchors, and the ship soon righted; yet the ship took in so much water at the deck that the people were not able to keep the hold clear, they were so much spent for want of provisions. For some time they had been reduced to a pound of rotten biscuit daily with half a pint of wine, unless when they happened to catch fish, which could not be kept from day to day on account of the climate. This want and short allowance was common to all, and the admiral speaks thus of it in his journal addressed to their Catholic majesties. "I am myself ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... of mockingly laughing gods. This was the great vomiting he had longed for: death, the smashing to bits of the form he hated! Let him be food for fishes, this dog Siddhartha, this lunatic, this depraved and rotten body, this weakened and abused soul! Let him be food for fishes and crocodiles, let him be chopped ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... there is death. And we must live as long as we can. But it must be real life too. Death is no life. The life of most men is a slow miserable death. There is no honor and no merit in maintaining a life that should more truly be called death. A bloodless, enervated, foul, rotten life. It is a shame that men do not yet know how to live, and even greater shame that they know still less how to die. I wanted to have you live. But I did not succeed and now I shall teach you to die. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... but a proud, thrawart ploughman, that stood uncow'ring under the glunsh o' a hail session; and so they opened on him the artillery o' the kirk, to bear down his pride. Wha could hae told them that they were but frushing their straw an' rotten wood against the iron scales o' Leviathan? An' now that they hae dune their maist, the record o' Robert's mishanter is lying in whity-brown ink yonder in a page o' the session-buik, while the ballads hae sunk deep deep intil the very mind o' the country, and may ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... midst of the park is a great black tank or lake, bristling over with rushes, and here and there covered over with patches of pea-soup. A shabby temple rises on an island in this delectable lake, which is approached by a rotten barge that lies at roost in a dilapidated boat house. Clumps of elms and oaks dot over the huge green flat. Every one of them would have been down long since, but that the Marquis is not allowed ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Rotten luck!" groaned Nick, shaking his head dolefully. "I'm pining away, fellows, inch by inch. Why, my clothes are ready to drop off me, I'm getting so like a scarecrow. Mebbe you don't believe me, but it's a fact. And I'm that nervous I keep ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... "that it is a ruined family, a dead branch of a rotten trunk. The Bourbons have so intermarried with one another that the race is depraved; Louis XIV. exhausted all its sap, all its vigor.—You know history, sir?" asked Bonaparte, turning to ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... or of what was to be revealed by my explorations, but the dismalness of the picture presented to that first glance gave me a shock impossible to explain. The house itself, big and glaring as it was, was nevertheless little better than a ruin, the porch beams rotten, the front blinds sagging frightfully, the paint blistered by the sun. Several of the windows were broken, and the steps sagged and trembled under my weight. The front yard, a full half acre in extent, was a tangled mass of bushes and weeds, a high, untrimmed hedge shutting off all view of the ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... sheets of iron were bent back, probably by a storm. Some of the planks which covered the house from outside were torn away in several places; these were easier to get by breaking the rusty nails that held them. Both porches, but especially the side porch he remembered so well, were rotten and broken; only the banister remained. Some of the windows were boarded up, and the building in which the foreman lived, the kitchen, the stables—all were grey and decaying. Only the garden had not decayed, but had grown, and was in full bloom; from ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... with rotten cases, and without handles are sick and need a doctor. Go after the owner and ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... with pathos. "Why," he went on, memory suddenly stirring, "there was an Englishman at this hotel only a week or two ago who went about knocking it in a way that would have amazed you! Said it was a rotten place! MY hotel!" ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... should be wintered in a greenhouse with a night temperature of about 40 deg., occupying a shelf near the light. By the end of February they should be moved into 8-inch or 10-inch pots, using a compost of three parts good turfy loam, one part leaf-mould, and one part thoroughly rotten manure, with a fair addition of sand. They need plenty of light and air, but must not be subjected to draughts. When the pots get well filled with roots, they must be liberally supplied with manure water. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various |
