"Murrain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of wolf. His frequent visitations have of late Perplexed me; now the riddle reads itself. A proper man, a very proper man! A fellow that burns Trinidado leaf And sends smoke through his nostril like a flue! A fop, a hanger-on of willing skirts— A murrain on him! Would Elizabeth In some mad freak had clapped him in the Tower— Ay, through the Traitor's Gate. Would he were dead. Within the year what worthy men have died, Persons of substance, civic ornaments, And here 's this ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... rough, it made me start And think of my poor boy tossing about Upon the roaring seas. And then I seem'd To feel that it was hard to take him from me For such a little fault. But he was wrong Oh very wrong—a murrain on his traps! See what they've brought ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... to report that I have sold the wool to Master Baldwin of Winchester at two shillings a bale more than it fetched last year, for the murrain among the sheep has raised ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "Now a murrain on thee, Shrope, for mentioning that name," cried Elizabeth her humor changing instantly. "We, too, have somewhat to say of Francis Stafford, but the time is not yet ripe. When it is, then will I hear what thou hast to say. Until then we would ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... year the king invaded the bishopric of Rochester; and this year came first the great murrain ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... said the youth, "and he that has taken a falcon's nest in the Scaurs of Polmoodie, has done something to brag of, my fair sister.—But that is all over now—a murrain on the nest, and the eyases and their food, washed or unwashed, for it was all anon of cramming these worthless kites that I was sent upon my present travels. Save that I have met with you, pretty sister, I could eat my dagger-hilt for vexation ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... murrain on all women, black and white!" swore Mahommed Khan beneath his breath. Then he turned on the priest again, and placed one foot ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... a murrain to you? No honest buyer, I'll warrant, but a hanger-on of the dicers—or something worse. Go! dance off, and find fitter company, or I'll give you a tune to a little quicker time ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... murrain upon their cattle, because they had pressed the Israelites into their service as shepherds, and assigned remote pasturing places to them, to keep them away from their wives. Therefore the murrain came and carried off all the cattle in the flocks the ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... murrain on ye! have you two 'scap'd hanging?[190] Hark ye, my lord: these two fellows kept at Barnsdale Seven year to ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... or you would not need to ask. When half the folk in the country were dead it was then that the other half could pick and choose who they would work for, and for what wage. That is why I say that the murrain was the best friend that the ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... nations; no man thought himself secure, either in his person or possessions, from the machinations of the devil and his agents. Every calamity that befell him he attributed to a witch. If a storm arose and blew down his barn, it was witchcraft; if his cattle died of a murrain—if disease fastened upon his limbs, or death entered suddenly and snatched a beloved face from his hearth—they were not visitations of Providence, but the works of some neighbouring hag, whose wretchedness or insanity caused the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... see that you do not overreach me, master. You are not the first man whom I have known to have fallen, even sometimes to the endangering, if not breaking, of his own neck, for endeavouring to rise all at once. A murrain seize thee for a blockheaded booby, cried the angry seller of sheep; by the worthy vow of Our Lady of Charroux, the worst in this flock is four times better than those which the Coraxians in Tuditania, a country of Spain, used to sell for ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... go out an' stay, An' hev their fill o' mutton every day; 300 Then dogs an' shepherds, after much hard dammin', [Groan from Deac'n G.] Turned tu an' give 'em a tormented lammin', An' sez, 'Ye sha'n't go out, the murrain rot ye, To keep us wastin' half our time to watch ye!' But then the question come, How live together 'thout losin' sleep, nor nary yew nor wether? Now there wuz some dogs (noways wuth their keep) Thet sheered their cousins' tastes an' sheered the sheep; They sez, 'Be gin'rous, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... shape and his soul. None the less, if, by any chance, O man from Jullundur, thou rememberest what thou hast seen, either among the elders sitting under the village tree, or in thine own house, or in company of thy priest when he blesses thy cattle, a murrain will come among the buffaloes, and a fire in thy thatch, and rats in the corn-bins, and the curse of our Gods upon thy fields that they may be barren before thy feet and after thy ploughshare.' This was part of an old curse picked up ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... week the distemper has raged fearfully—fearfully, indeed," said Rainbird; "but yesterday and to-day have far exceeded all that have gone before. The distempered have died quicker than cattle of the murrain. I visited upwards of a hundred houses in the Borough this morning, and only found ten persons alive; and out of those ten, not one, I will venture to say, is alive now. It will, in truth, be a mercy if they are gone. There were distracted mothers raving over their children,—a young husband ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... one of a virulent and the other of a chronic character,—the former inflammatory and the latter typhoid. Numerous modifications of these fevers, or particular phases of them, are more or less extensively known among our readers as black-leg, bloody murrain, etc. The fever which in many instances follows parturition, particularly in the cow, is familiarly known as calving fever, or milk fever; and the ordinary fevers of sheep, swine, dogs, upon the whole, follow the same general law as the ordinary fevers of the horse, and are classifiable ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... pestilential and noxious influences to attach themselves to him only. He is assisted by a priest. Finally the scapegoat, hotly pursued by men and women beating gongs and tom-toms, is driven with great haste out of the town or village. In the Punjaub a cure for the murrain is to hire a man of the Chamar caste, turn his face away from the village, brand him with a red-hot sickle, and let him go out into the jungle taking the murrain with him. He must not ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... sweated and shivered with cold; he has abstained from love and wine; he who sings the Pythian strains, was a learner first, and in awe of a master. But [in poetry] it is now enough for a man to say of himself: "I make admirable verses: a murrain seize the hindmost: it is scandalous for me to be outstripped, and fairly to Acknowledge that I am ignorant of that which I ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... the disease of death in a hind than for the same murrain in a minister of the Gospel—or a landed gentleman," said Gordon, touched in his tone a little by the austerity of his speeches as we heard ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... across blue bays, which must be good for the soul. Though they face a sea out of which any portent may arise, they are not forced to protect or even to police its waters. They are as ignorant of drouth, murrain, pestilence locusts, and blight, as they are of the true meaning of ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... later in the same reign, a very curious tenure is registered. 'Walter Barun held certain lands and tenements in the town of Holicote, of the King in capite, by the service of hanging upon a certain forked piece of wood the red deer that die of the murrain in the King's forest of Exmoor; and also of lodging and entertaining the poor strangers, weakened by infirmities, that came to him, at his own proper costs, for the souls of the ancestors ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... name." If a Banjara swears by Siva Bhaia, placing his right hand on the bare head of his son and heir, and grasping a cow's tail in his left, he will fear to perjure himself, lest by doing so he should bring injury on his son and a murrain ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the persecution of this very year, hated him with a deadly hatred. His French alliances, his declaration of war with the Emperor, hindered the trade with Flanders and secured the hostility of the merchant class. The country at large, galled with murrain and famine and panic-struck by an outbreak of the sweating sickness which carried off two thousand in London alone, laid all its suffering at the door of the Cardinal. And now that Henry's mood itself became uncertain ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... founding a religious lending library in his remote corner of the parish; that he expounded the Scriptures in cottages; and that his preaching was attracting the Dissenters, and filling the very aisles of his church. The rumour sprang up that Evangelicalism had invaded Milby parish—a murrain or blight all the more terrible, because its nature was but dimly conjectured. Perhaps Milby was one of the last spots to be reached by the wave of a new movement and it was only now, when the tide was just on the turn, that the limpets there got a sprinkling. ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... "A murrain on such pagan thirst!" exclaimed he who had been toasted, snatching the cup away. "Art thou altogether unslakable? Is thy belly a lime-kiln? Nay, shalt taste not a single drop more, Hubert, till we have a stave. ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... an' her just gone away from us, as it went to my heart to part wi' her. An' I know one thing, as if trouble was to come, an' I was to be laid up i' my bed, an' the children was to die—as there's no knowing but what they will—an' the murrain was to come among the cattle again, an' everything went to rack an' ruin, I say we might be glad to get sight o' Dinah's cap again, wi' her own face under it, border or no border. For she's one o' them things as looks the brightest ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... To cure the Murrain in Cows.—This disease is supposed to be caused by the cow having been stung about the mouth while feeding, in consequence of contact with some of the larger larvae of the moth (as of the Death's-head Sphynx, &c.), which have a soft fleshy horn on their ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... to retort the imputation, and ask how a man of your profound sagacity could leave your fortune at the discretion of ignorant peasants? How could you be so blind as not to foresee the necessity of repairs, together with the danger of bankruptcy, murrain, or thin crop? Why did you not convert your land into ready money, and, as you have no connections in life, purchase an annuity, on which you might have lived at your ease, without any fear of the consequence? Can't you, from ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... one may presume, of my disastrous love-business; and with all an author's relish of emotion, in others, chose his gambit swiftly. "Mr. Townsend, is it not? Then may a murrain light upon thee, Mr. Townsend,—whatever a murrain may happen to be,—since you have disturbed me in the concoction of ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... small cup; and he shall moisten his lips, but not wet his palate. Him also some one, enjoying both [parents],[718] shall push away from the banquet, striking him with his hands, and reviling him with reproaches: 'A murrain on thee! even thy father feasts not with us.' Then shall the boy Astyanax return weeping to his widowed mother,—he who formerly, indeed, upon the knees of his own father, ate marrow alone, and the rich fat of sheep; but when sleep came upon him, and he ceased childishly crying, ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... cattle. It spread rapidly over the country, affecting all domesticated animals except horses, and although seldom attended by fatal results, caused everywhere great alarm and loss. It was soon followed by the more terrible lung-disease, or pleuro-pneumonia. In 1865 the rinderpest, or steppe murrain, originating amongst the vast herds of the Russian steppes, had spread westward over Europe, until it was brought to London by foreign cattle. Several weeks elapsed before the true character of the disease was known, and in this brief space it had already been carried by animals purchased ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... (ay de mi!), she asked no more of 'em at first than to wait a while off that coast—the Gascons' Graveyard—to hover a little if their ships chanced to pass that way—they had only one tall ship and a pinnace—only to watch and bring me word of Philip's doings. One must watch Philip always. What a murrain right had he to make any plantation there, a hundred leagues north of his Spanish Main, and only six weeks from England? By my dread father's soul, I tell you he had none—none!' She stamped her red foot again, and the two children shrunk back ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... by shot or sword-stroke make up the chief sum of mortality. As usual the murrain-like pestilence which swept off its daily victims both within an without the town, was more effective than any direct agency of man. By the month of December the number of the garrison had been reduced to less than three thousand, while it is probable ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... "A murrain on your youth," cried Adrian, testily. "However, since there 's no quieting you otherwise, I suppose, for the sake of peace, I 'd best tell you, and have done with it. Well, then,"—he stood off, to watch the effect of ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... the chief is checked by that of the priest. A supposed skill in medicine, imaginary arts of divination, and an accredited power over the elements are the prerogatives of certain witches and wizards. Thus, when a murrain among the cattle, or the death of an important individual has taken place, the blame is laid upon some unfortunate victim whom the witch or wizard points out. And the ordeal to which he must submit, is equal in cruelty to those of the Gold Coast. He is beaten with sticks, and ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... idea, because when the priest of Taufers, who has an Olm there, goes and says mass and prays for the cattle, or when the Sterniwitz (landlord of the Stern), who has acres of pasturage and many heads of cattle at Jagdhaus, pays a Capuchin to go thither and pray, the murrain ceases." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various |
