"Backwater" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Warren, "for if we are obliged to work like this, hauling the ship by the strength of our arms, my advice is to backwater." ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... There was too much he couldn't understand. Moreover, he was a lone wolf. Had been since the Second Interplanetary War wrenched him from the quiet backwater of his country home an eternity of eight years before and hammered him into hardness—a cynic who trusted nobody and nothing ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... that, I am not proud, since pride is destruction; but take notice, it is Fate, and against his Fate no one who swims or walks or runs should say anything at all. I am well contented with Fate. With good luck, a keen eye, and the custom of considering whether a creek or a backwater has an outlet to it ere you ascend, much may ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... But someone has to do this sooner or later; we have restrained ourselves and argued away from the question too long. There is, I allege, a great lack of vigorous and inspiring minds in our schools. Our upper-class schools are out of touch with the thought of the time, in a backwater of intellectual apathy. We have no original or heroic school-teachers. Let me ask the reader frankly what part our leading headmasters play in his intellectual world; if when some prominent one among them speaks ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... about the ordinary city folk. They have an air of elaborate superciliousness which testifies to ages of systematic half-culture. They seem to utter that hopeless word, connu! And what, as a matter of fact, do they know? They are only dreaming in their little backwater, like the oysters of the lagoon, distrustful of extraneous matter and oblivious of the movement in a world of men beyond their shell. You hear next to nothing of "America," that fruitful source of fresh notions; ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Harry! I came up because I had to see you. You pay no attention to my letters. I never dreamed that you would stay a month in this backwater. What is wrong? What is ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... I were a bird," said the old lady. Grangerville was a backwater place, badly served by the railway, and it would take the best part of a day to get there ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... outside world he might safely have been termed rather rum, but here in this backwater, so full of the oddest flotsam, his waywardness was rather less than the average. He had, for instance, a diverting habit of modifying the time, and even the tune, of the hymns on Sunday, and he confessed to having kissed all the nurses and housemaids except three. But ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... thought Norma never knew or cared. The surprising blankness of the disappointment made her almost dizzy; she turned aside blindly, and stumbled into the quiet backwater behind a stairway, where she could recover her self-possession and endure unobserved the first pangs of bitterness. It seemed to her that she would die if she could not see Wolf, if she had to endure another ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... hers more closely. "But I can't allow it. We can't spare you. And you—yourself, Juliette—you will never endure life in a backwater. You will pine for the old days, the old friends, the old lovers,—as they will ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... cricket match formed the social landmarks of the year, the feeling of exile might not be very crushing, might indeed be lost in the sense of change and adventure. But Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre of things to regard life in a backwater as anything else than stagnation, and stagnation while one is young he justly regarded as an offence against nature and reason, in keeping with the perverted mockery that sends decrepit invalids ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... to the workers at the forest edge. He spent some moments with each gang, afterwards returning to his house. For nearly an hour things went on as before, and then Mr. Coburn reappeared at his hall door, this time accompanied by his daughter. Both were dressed extraordinarily well for such a backwater of civilization, he with a gray Homburg hat and gloves, she as before in brown, but in a well-cut coat and skirt and a smart toque and motoring veil. Both were carrying dust coats. Mr. Coburn drew the door to, and they walked towards the mill and were lost to sight behind it. Some ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... because he had no particular love for the world and no great susceptibility to its temptations; but what had drawn Daniel Gray from the open sea into this quiet little backwater of a Shaker Settlement? After an adventurous early life, in which, as if youth-intoxicated, he had plunged from danger to danger, experience to experience, he suddenly found himself in a society of which he ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... are usually about women, and their position in the world to-day. You know I am conservative, clinging much to old ideals, old fashions, to the beliefs of gentler times—but Cousin Patty in this backwater of civilization has gone far ahead of me. She believes that the hope of the South is in its women. "They read more than the men," she says, "and they have responded more quickly to ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... the water and raced with fury to kill them, though the boat contained three times their own number. It is good to read how they wiped out all but those who escaped in terror by swimming! At last only fourteen of the English were left alive and they got hopelessly penned in a backwater. These men charged the army of Sepoys on the banks and made them keep their distance. They secured themselves in a tiny temple on the margin of the river and killed all who approached. At length, seeing preparations made for blowing them up with gunpowder, ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... the stationary, law-abiding, state-reforming type; Cecrops, Erechtheus, Theseus, are not splendid, flashing, all-conquering figures like Achilles and Agamemnon. Athens might, it would seem, but for the coming of Homer, have lain stagnant in a backwater of conservatism, content to go on chanting her traditional Spring Songs year by year. It is a wonderful thing that this city of Athens, beloved of the gods, should have been saved from the storm and stress, sheltered from what ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... weakness for conceited style. Everybody speaks in antitheses, and the intolerable fancy similes, drawn from a kind of imaginary natural history, are sometimes as prominent as in Euphues itself. Lyly's theatre represents, in short, a mere backwater in the general stream of dramatic progress, though not a few allusions in other men's work show us that it attracted no small attention. With Nash alone, of the University Wits proper, was Lyly connected, and this only problematically. He was an Oxford man, and ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... somewhat romantic area from which anything, however startling, might any day materialize. Sometimes a few Indians paddled up to trade and, leaving Filmer's store, would slip silently up stream, and edging into the backwater at the foot of the rapids, lay their paddles across the thwarts and stare silently at the great structures that began to arise. And this, in a way, was the attitude of most of the folk of St. Marys. They were in it ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... but even they were satisfied when, after a careful search of the craft's tiny cabins and forecastle, they were invited to sample a bottle of choice Madeira, on some four or five dozen of which Leslie willingly paid duty. The next day her sails were unbent and she was taken up the Backwater and laid up, in charge of Simpson; and a month or two later her ballast was taken out of her and stowed away in a shed under which she also was hauled up. A certain portion of this ballast was soon afterwards packed up somewhat carefully and conveyed to London by train; ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... still further increased by women and dogs, we proceeded on our way, until choosing a high sandy bank overlooking the estuary of the small lake on the South, the creek to the North-West, and a backwater to the North, we halted and prepared to make camp. This was attended by some difficulty, for our native friends, now in considerable numbers, evidently wished to look upon it as their camp too. They soon became so tiresome that I had to tell them through Tiger, as interpreter, that unless they ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... we contrived to get into a creek, or backwater, near the Major's gate. Here the men ran the boat up, and we all climbed out, stiff, battered, and terrified, but doing our best to ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... Welwyn-Baker; such trouble had never seemed necessary. Through the anxious year of 1868 Mr. Welwyn-Baker sat firm as a rock; an endeavour to unseat him ended amid contemptuous laughter. In 1874 the high-tide of Toryism caused only a slight increase of congratulatory gurgling in the Polterham backwater; the triumphant party hardly cared to notice that a Liberal candidate had scored an unprecedented proportion of votes. Welwyn-Baker sat on, stolidly oblivious of the change that was affecting his constituency, denying indeed the possibility of mutation in human things. ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... the raking spars of a privateer owned by Cullerne adventurers. All these had long since sailed for their last port, and of ships nothing more imposing met the eye than the mast of Dr Ennefer's centre-board laid up for the winter in a backwater. Yet the scene was striking enough, and those who knew best said that nowhere in the town was there so fine an outlook as from the upper windows of ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... appears in fact that the stables of Augeas was another name for the sign of Capricorn through which the Sun passes at the Winter solstice (1)—the stable of course being an underground chamber—and the myth was that there, in this lowest tract and backwater of the Ecliptic all the malarious and evil influences of the sky were collected, and the Sungod came to wash them away (December was the height of the rainy season in Judaea) and cleanse the year towards ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... "impressions" of America devoted one of their longest chapters in the heyday of Elijah Pogram and Jefferson Brick. But the War between the States has changed all that, and Lichfield endures to-day only as a pleasant backwater. ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... War, was so anxious to escape that he turned over the command to Pillow, who declined it in favor of Buckner. That night Floyd and Pillow made off with all the river steamers; Forrest's cavalry floundered past McClernand's exposed flank, which rested on a shallow backwater; and Buckner was left with over twelve thousand men to make what terms he could. Next morning, the sixteenth, he wrote to Grant proposing the appointment of commissioners to agree upon terms of surrender. But Grant had made up his mind that compromise was out of place in civil war ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... glimpse of green trees, and of a brilliant bed of flowers, down a little narrow street on the south side of the Strand. Many people must have noticed these things, few have had the curiosity to explore further; yet it is well worth while to get down from omnibus or cab and venture into this little backwater of the Savoy. Between eleven and one, and two and four o'clock every day the garden gate is open, and the verger is in the chapel, ready to answer questions. The little graveyard garden, with its waving trees, is a veritable ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... That's why I made a little war on my own. Declared it myself, waged it myself, ended it myself. Each of those nicks is for a slave murderer—a good row of them—what? That big one is for Pedro Lopez, the king of them all, that I killed in a backwater of the Putomayo River. Now, here's something that would do for you." He took out a beautiful brown-and-silver rifle. "Well rubbered at the stock, sharply sighted, five cartridges to the clip. You can trust your life to that." He handed it to me and closed ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the last century of an age, was a backwater in education as in literature. The great revival was to come. The fifteenth century was indeed a century of revolution in so far as under the almost placid surface of continuity and conformity, there were forces of revolt at work, probing, accumulating knowledge and ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... know that from your superior standpoint as a Londoner you are disposed to regard us as dwellers in a quiet backwater, unswayed by the currents of political strife, but you must not imagine that the stirring events of the past few weeks have failed to leave their mark on the life of our little town. A study of the Press—that faithful mirror of our time—would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... and quiet, as only a backwater of London can be. Occasional hoots from far-away tugs and steamers told of the busy life down below in the crowded Pool. A faint hum of traffic was borne in from the streets outside the precincts, ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... is one of those books which, for some reason or other, have failed to come down to us, as they deserved, along the current of time, but have drifted into a literary backwater where only the professional critic or the curious discoverer can find them out. "The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy;" and nowhere more blindly than in the republic of letters. If we were to inquire how it has happened that the true value of ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... which, having become frayed and past their usefulness, we bought at the village store for a song. These Larry filled with the soft, elastic moss that florists use, of which there is any quantity in the low backwater meadows of the river. A good-sized tree (and we are not moving any of more than four or five feet in height; larger ones, it seems, are better moved in early winter with a ball of frozen earth) has a bag to itself, the roots, with some earth, being enveloped in the moss, the bag as ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... discharged its load of soldiers or citizens, and ran up through the deep cut in the steep, caving river-bank. From there, over the western end of the Lancaster quarter, across the coulee under a hub-depth of muddy backwater—at the only point where the sumach-grown sides sloped gradually—it took its ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... the bank where boats could be hired, for they had put in there once to replace an oar, having lost one down a weir in the neighborhood. The weir had not been on the main stream, but they had come upon it in exploring a backwater. It could not be ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... of smooth backwater just in the wake of the island, they drove their canoes up by main force, and fastened them safely by the side of the Indian's, while Amyas, always the foremost, sprang boldly on shore, whispering to the Indian ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... said: "I work because I found that when Stephen came home at night, I had nothing to talk to him about. He is out in the world and meets people and does things. I was in a little backwater and lost the habit of thinking about the same things that are on his mind. I had to go back to work to regain the same atmosphere and to be ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... had been collected on the shore, for boughs of trees and drift-wood, brought down by the river, often came into the backwater, and these were always drawn ashore, however busied the men might be at the time in fishing. All through the summer every scrap of wood that came within reach had been landed, and the result was a great ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... northern shore. The right-hand branch swerved away to the east, running with swift, silent fury. On the lower edge of this desperate race of brown billows, a huge whirlpool formed and dissolved every two or three minutes, now eddying round in a wide backwater into a rocky bay on the end of the island, now swept away by the rush of waves into the white rage of the ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... Deanery of St. Paul's, that frowning and melancholy house in a backwater of London's jarring tide, where the dust collects, and sunlight has a struggle to make two ends meet, and cold penetrates like a dagger, and fog hangs like a pall, and the blight of ages clings to stone and brick, to window and woodwork, with an adhesive ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... Temple; and the tale began. By the time it was ended the boat was at a standstill on the little backwater below ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... passage which exists to this day near Trinity schools. This passage led him to a water-brink, where there was a roughly built quay with a parapet, and to the right he made out a bridge. It was the bridge over the Wey, connecting Weymouth with Melcombe Regis, and under the arches of which the Backwater ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... that they should not at once appear before King AEetes, but visit him after they had seen the strength of his city. They drew their ship into a shaded backwater, and there they stayed while day grew and faded ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... looked, on the long side of the retreating train. But the grin was visible, undeniable, stoutly maintained; till a curve swept him from our sight, and he was borne away in the dying rumble, out of our placid backwater, out into the busy world of rubs and knocks and competition, out ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... plays you forget all about self-determination, syndicalism, guild-control, proletariats, sunspots and even Mr. SMILLIE. If you are a poet, and we are all poets nowadays, you dream yourself into a punt on the Sonning backwater, wondering if the summer was ever so amazing before, nearly being shipwrecked on a sandy spit, startling moorfowl or it may be dabchicks, sending a frisson into the fritillaries, losing and regaining your punt-pole, always believing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... from Thame to Isis. Beyond is Dorchester, the abbey of the oldest see in Wessex, and the Abbey Mill. The feet of the hills are clothed by Wittenham Wood, and above the wood stretches the weir, and round to the west, on another great loop of the river, is Long Wittenham and its lovely backwater. Even in winter, when the snow is falling like bags of flour, and the river is chinking with ice, there is plenty to see and learn, or in the floods, when the water roars through the lifted hatches and the rush of the river throbs across the misty flats, and the weeds and sedges smell rank as the ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... "You see, my dear, we're not facing it now. If we were, it would be different. But now we're in a backwater. In an hour or two we shall be on the broad stream of Life once more. The current is very strong sometimes. But here there is no current, nor any time, nor action. Only the sun makes shining patches on ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... had reached Pitt Street, a quiet little backwater just beside one of the briskest currents of London life. No. 131 was one of a row, all flat-chested, respectable, and most unromantic dwellings. As we drove up, we found the railings in front of the house lined by a ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... were wrecked at this spot. One split on the reef. Another was caught in the backwater. Others sank in the whirlpool below the rapids. Others went under at the first leap into the cataract. Two of the canoes had foolishly been lashed abreast. They sidled, shipped a billow, and sank. All the men clung to the gunnels; but one who was a powerful swimmer struck ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... drive, shut off the view to or from the road. Somehow, the whole yard, with its peace and quiet and sunshine and shadow, and above all, its retirement, made a great appeal. It seemed so homelike, so shut away, so comforting, like a sheltered little backwater where a ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... and the creek, Laramie prudently said nothing. It was the worst of the journey. Two stretches were filled with backwater. Across these they cautiously waded and swam the horses. When they gained high ground adjoining the creek, Kate breathed more freely. There was a halt for reconnaissance. For this, Laramie and Hawk, after placing ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... difficult to ford the swollen creeks before arriving at the Big Hill. At Shady Creek there was nothing for the horses to eat, and beyond it the ground became treacherous and full of crabholes. At the Moe the backwater was found to be fully a quarter of a mile wide, encumbered with dead logs and scrub, and no safe place for crossing the creek could be found. During the night the famishing horses tore open with their teeth the packages containing the provisions, and before morning all that was left ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... length lying dead in the Coln, and protruding from the mouth of the fish was a large snake, also dead. The snake must have been swimming in the water (as they are known to do occasionally), and the trout being in a backwater, where food was scarce, must have seized the snake and choked himself in his efforts to bolt it This was a remarkable occurrence, because a Coln trout is most particular as to his bill of fare, and snakes ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... in the river bed continued to rise and a backwater began forming, extending nearly a quarter of a mile upstream before it stopped. Now the bore hole was visible only as a muddy boil of turbulence churning in the center of the ...
— The Thirst Quenchers • Rick Raphael
... quoting it right, but I wish I'd said it. They were called wild when most of their wildness was exuberant vitality; their mistakes were magnified, their mad pranks exaggerated. If I'd been married to you, my dear, while Dick was growing up, I wouldn't have let you keep him here in this little backwater of life; he needed more room, more movement. They wouldn't have been so down on him in ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... is a pretty cottage, and beyond, seen among the trees but with outhouses abutting on the road, is the Mansion House, still retaining in every feature that old-world sense of remoteness and repose so precious in these days; like a backwater of a rapid river, lying unmoved while the stream of life rushes vociferously by; a ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... Smithsons were on the platform waiting to receive us and welcome us as strangers and pilgrims in an unknown land. They have only remained here to meet us, and they proceed to Kashmir to-morrow, sleeping in a carriage in the quiet backwater of a siding, to save themselves the worry of a desperately early ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... pension-room and the garden. The postern gate, too, in Houghton Street still remains, though the arch is bricked up inside. Passing it lately, I made the rough sketch which appears on next page, and which shows all that is left of this pleasant old London backwater. ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... Major with dignity, "I dislike violating local tabus, but must I explain the impact of a neural distorter on a backwater culture? What if your Neanderthal had been given atomic blasters? Where would you have been today? Swinging through trees, no doubt. What if your Hitler had force-fields?" He exhaled. "Where ...
— Teething Ring • James Causey
... the slight bustle and activity of the Monday seemed to penetrate even to this scenery. Now and then we had to muster all our energy to get round a point, where the river broke rippling over rocks, and the maples trailed their branches in the stream, but there was generally a backwater or eddy on the side, of which we took advantage. The river was here about forty rods wide and fifteen feet deep. Occasionally one ran along the shore, examining the country, and visiting the nearest ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... had a pathetic ugliness, redeemed by a certain consistency of quality. And then the poky, comfortable arrangements, the bath-chair in the coach-house, the four-post bedsteads, the hand-rail on the stairs, the sandbags for the doors, all spoke of a timid, invalid life, a dim backwater in the tide of things. There had been children there at some time, for there were broken toys, collections of dried plants, curious stones, in an attic. The little drama of the house shaped itself for me, as I walked through the frowsy, faded rooms, ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the old army. They were gathered there, the salvage of the Mons retreat, of the Marne, of the glorious first battle of Ypres, broken men every one of them, debris tossed by the swirling currents of war into this backwater. ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... Backwater tells me that I may place implicit reliance upon your judgment and discretion. I have determined, therefore, to call upon you and to consult you in reference to the very painful event which has occurred ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... and sweep of social life and duty, of official and political ambition-heart-hungry, for she had no child; heart-lonely, though she had scarce recognised it in the duties and excitements round her—she had floated suddenly into this backwater of a motionless life in Hamley. Its quiet had settled upon her, the shackles of her spirit had been loosed, and dropped from her; she had suddenly bathed her heart and soul in a freer atmosphere than they had ever known before. And David and Hamley had come together. The ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... not going to give you the full story of Vivie's trial. I have got so much else to say about her, before I can leave her in a quiet backwater of middle age, that this must be a story which has gaps to be filled up by the reader's imagination. You can, besides, read for yourself elsewhere—for this is a thinly veiled chronicle of real events—how she was charged, and how the magistrate refused bail though it was offered in large ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... of the scheme, but nevertheless he decided to give it a trial. Setting to work with our axes, we soon had a raft built, lashing the poles together with the fibre which grows in abundance all over the district. When it was finished, we pushed it out of the little backwater where it had been constructed, and the young engineer jumped aboard. All went well until it got out into midstream, when much to my amusement it promptly toppled gracefully over. I helped my friend to scramble quickly up the bank out of reach of possible crocodiles, when, ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... stream. But those present were too hilarious to be watchful, and, lying flat in his canoe, the scout glided safely past, the dug-out not distinguishable from a piece of driftwood. Before the new day dawned he reached the backwater of the Mississippi, but in the darkness he missed the outlet of the Yazoo and paddled into ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... carried us in shore and then swept us out again; the willow branches tore our hands as we seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled many a yard of sandy bank into the water before at length we shot with a great sideways blow from the wind into a backwater and managed to beach the bows in a cloud of spray. Then we lay panting and laughing after our exertions on the hot yellow sand, sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun, ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... make our way along the banks with the rest. We had got some distance down, when we saw what appeared to be an eddy or backwater in the river. Below it the stream rushed on with the same impetuosity as before. I called to John. "I think we may save him," I said; and signed to the Indians to cut some long sipos which hung down from the branches ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... places, and noted uneasily how much deeper it was than when they had crossed before. He cursed the conventions which forbade his staying and watching over the girl back there in the house which already stood upon an island, cut off from the safe, high land by a strip of backwater that was widening and deepening every minute, and, when it rose high enough to flow into the river below, would have a current that ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... Sunbury Lock at half-past three. The river is sweetly pretty just there before you come to the gates, and the backwater is charming; but don't attempt to row ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... of interest in the monotony of camping in lonely places for a young girl to whom her mother wished to give every opportunity of settling in life, whatever might be her own ideas respecting a vocation. Muktiarbad, though a rural backwater of Bengal, and pronounced by the gay-minded, a penal settlement, had matrimonial possibilities not to be despised by anxious parents with daughters to be happily ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... commonly called in the neighbourhood Old Kayal, and erroneously named Koil in the Ordnance Map of India, is situated on the Tamraparni River, about a mile and a half from its mouth. The Tamil word kayal means 'a backwater, a lagoon,' and the map shows the existence of a large number of these kayals or backwaters near the mouth of the river. Many of these kayals have now dried up more or less completely, and in several of them salt-pans have been established. The name of Kayal was naturally ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... might quit hold of the osier, and, entering a shallow backwater, disturb shoals of roach playing where the water was transparent to the bottom, after their wont. Winding in and out like an Indian in his canoe, perhaps traces of an otter might be found—his kitchen modding—and in the sedges moorhens and wildfowl would hide from me. From ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... Lane saw a crowd of people on the bridge below the dam. They were waving encouragement. He saw men run down the steep river bank below the mill; and he knew they were going to be ready to assist him if he were fortunate enough to ride down the sluice into the shallow backwater on that side. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... reaches, as idle as a mill-pond; yet the day soon came when I was in the grip of a torrent, flung breathless from rock to rock by a destiny which I could not control. But for the present I was in a backwater, no less than the Garden City of Biggleswick, where Mr Cornelius Brand, a South African gentleman visiting England on holiday, lodged in a pair of rooms in the cottage of Mr ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... No, indeed; I only feel my life unspeakably empty. No one to live for anymore. (Gets up restlessly.) That was why I could not stand the life in my little backwater any longer. I hope it may be easier here to find something which will busy me and occupy my thoughts. If only I could have the good luck to get some regular work—office ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... there, captain, is the very man who chased you up here when you first came." Brown observed nonchalantly that it would be just as well to avoid him, and with the same detached, musing air Cornelius declared himself acquainted with a backwater broad enough to take Brown's boat past Waris's camp. "You will have to be quiet," he said as an afterthought, "for in one place we pass close behind his camp. Very close. They are camped ashore with their boats hauled up." "Oh, we know how to be ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the advice of Argus Jason bade them enter a shaded backwater and let the ship ride at anchor off shore; and it was near at hand in their course and there they passed the night. And soon the dawn appeared to their ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... backwards.] Regression — N. regress, regression; retrocession^, retrogression, retrograduation^, retroaction; reculade^; retreat, withdrawal, retirement, remigration^; recession &c (motion from) 287; recess; crab-like motion. refluence^, reflux; backwater, regurgitation, ebb, return; resilience reflection, reflexion [Brit.] (recoil) 277; flip-flop, volte-face [Fr.]. counter motion, retrograde motion, backward movement, motion in reverse, counter movement, counter march; veering, tergiversation, recidivation^, backsliding, fall; deterioration ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... slowcoach. With this knowledge, and the presence under his eye of a basket containing ground-bait kneaded in the woodhouse while the breakfast rashers were frying, S. opined that he might snatch an hour or so of honest reaching in the backwater while the rabbit people were ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... more is needed than a hunch of bread and some fish-hooks; but as they ran Speug had dropped the word Woody Island, and a day on Woody Island was a work of art. It lay a couple of miles above the town, long and narrow, formed with a division of the river into its main current and a sluggish backwater. It was covered with dense brushwood, except where here and there a patch of green turf was left bare, and the island was indented with little bays where the river rippled on clean sand and gravel. It was only a little island, but yet you could lose yourself in it, so thick ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... in swimming across a rapid river, was swept away by the current and carried a long way downstream in spite of his struggles, until at last, bruised and exhausted, he managed to scramble on to dry ground from a backwater. As he lay there unable to move, a swarm of horseflies settled on him and sucked his blood undisturbed, for he was too weak even to shake them off. A Hedgehog saw him, and asked if he should brush ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... always keeping its equilibrium, was edged away both across and down the stream. At last it began to move more slowly, and Sakalar found himself under the shelter of a huge iceberg, and then impelled up stream by a backwater current. In a few minutes the much wished-for ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... overcome them. That was her secret, the belief in her own power. He had faced his difficulties bravely enough, but he had not had the courage to hope; therein lay his weakness, and this girl, this princess, had shown it to him. He had allowed himself to drift into a backwater; it was time he pulled out into the stream again, and fought his way back to his rightful place, inch by inch, against whatever ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... somewhere on the water front of Quebec. It stood in a backwater where the busy tide of seafaring traffic passed it by. But it was sufficiently adjacent to permit its clientele swift and convenient access to the docks, at once a safety valve and ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... of bank with alder bushes ran out into the stream, a smooth eddy or backwater curling within. I caught a bough of alder, and, though nigh carried down by the drowning man's weight, I found bottom, yet hardly, and drew my man within the backwater. He lay like a log, his face in the stream. Pushing him before me, I rounded the ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... restatement in contemporary phraseology, and revision in the light of contemporary facts. He opened out Socialism. It is easy to quibble about Marx, and say he didn't see this or that, to produce this eddy in a backwater or that as a triumphant refutation of his general theory. One may quibble about the greatness of Marx as one may quibble about the greatness of Darwin; he remains great and cardinal. He first saw and enabled the world to see capitalistic ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... staircase going to the basement ran down over the cellar in some way, and it was so rotten in parts that it gave way one day and he fell through. It was in the spring, when the river was so high that the cellar was half full of backwater, and the child drowned before ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... in a petulant mood, or in a fearful or foreboding mood. In truth, bile is the prolific mother of moods. The stream of life flows through the biliary duct. When that is obstructed, life is obstructed. When the golden tide sets back upon the liver, it is like backwater under a mill; it stops the driving-wheel. Bile spoils the peace of families, breaks off friendships, cuts off man from communion with his Maker, colors whole systems of theology, transforms brains into ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... our boat to a tree in a little backwater where the current was barely felt and mutely watched the changes in the great turquoise satin tent above us that seemed held aloft by the hills to shelter the landscape of barley and corn and wheat that swished and swished like ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... matter of fact, proved by evidences without and within, was made this way and not that, for this purpose and not the other. Yet he had used the conveniences which he hated; he had left London a bare twelve hours before, and now here he sat in a place which was either a stagnant backwater of life, or else the very mid-current of it; he was not yet ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... was over and the unrest grew too strong to be fought, he crept down the black, creaking stairs, through the sleeping backwater of Drayton Mews, and out into the streets. He walked fast, with his head down, guiltily, like a man flying from a crime. But in the grave square where Francey Wilmot lived he slackened speed, and, under the ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... wholly from the upper part of the meadow, which contained a very valuable bed of high-priced strawberry plants, and that the slowly moving tide which covered the lower part was little more than backwater and overflow. The wide ditches were carrying off swiftly and harmlessly the great volume that, had not such channels been provided, would have made my rich alluvial meadow little else than a stony, gravelly waste. And the embankment ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... of the river kept a ferryboat, and with his help I crossed again to the other bank. Wandering on with a somewhat vague purpose, I soon found myself—now under a gray sky—on a marshy flat, which a backwater of the Dordogne had almost made an island. Here there were many low shrubs of dwarf elder covered with berries; pools, and wide ditches, where the dark water scarcely moved, all fringed with tall reeds; while here and there was the gleam of a white flower upon the erect stem of a ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... solitary poplar-trees, formerly haunts of Corot and Daubigny. I could see the spots where they had set their easels—that slight rise with the solitary poplar for Corot, that rich river bank and shady backwater for Daubigny. Soon after I saw the first weir, and then the first hay-boat; and at every moment the river grew more serene, more gracious, it passed its arms about a flat, green-wooded island, on which there was a rookery; ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... provided in advance against the main destructiveness of war, the archetypal language of the whole sub-race has been preserved. The Aryans went down into India, and there, at the extreme end of the Aryan world, enjoyed some of the advantages of isolation: they were in a backwater, over which the tides of the languages did not flow. By esotericizing their history, I imagine they have really kept it intact, continuous, and within human memory; as we have not done with ours. As if ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... certainly be a pleasure to get back to New Chicago. Some women's husbands get good posts in half-way civilized parts of the Universe. I don't know why I should always have to be stuck in every backwater, hick town there is." ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... kept them apart, though they never held together after the death of Brentano's wife in 1806, but that each projected his individuality into his literary work rather than into a common polemic ideal. The path-finding and discovery had already been done; in the quieter backwater it was possible to develop well-rounded works of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... humiliation Bob could not avoid a fleeting inner smile over this last remark. Responsibility! In this sleepy, quiet backwater of a tenth-floor office, full of infinite little statistics that led nowhere, that came to no conclusion except to be engulfed in dark files with hundreds of their own kind, aimless, useless, annoying as so many gadflies! Then he set his face for ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... village help till morning and that man can never cling there so long. He will freeze to death, for it is growing colder every minute. His only chance is to swim ashore if he can swim. The danger will be when he comes near shore; the undertow of the backwater on the quicksand will sweep him away and in his probably exhausted condition he may not be able to make ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... non-musical world is now more intimate and conscious than ever before. Forty or fifty years ago—in spite of brilliant individual exceptions—musicians were, in the main, self-centred craftsmen; they were inclined to drift into a backwater, away from the chief currents of the intellectual, or often indeed of the general artistic life of their day, and they seem on the whole to have been content to have it so. In England we were somewhat behindhand, no doubt, in our participation in the gradual but steady ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... critical period, life at Darmstadt bored him considerably. His presence there was valued highly by Queen Victoria, one of whose daughters had married the Grand Duke; but Morier felt himself to be in a backwater, far from the main stream of European politics, and society there was dull. So he welcomed in 1871 his transference first to Stuttgart, and a few months later to Munich, the capital of the second state in the new Empire and a great centre of literary culture. Here lived Dr. Doellinger, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore |
