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Backwater   Listen
noun
Backwater  n.  
1.
Water turned back in its course by an obstruction, an opposing current, or the flow of the tide, as in a sewer or river channel, or across a river bar.
2.
An accumulation of water overflowing the low lands, caused by an obstruction.
3.
Water thrown back by the turning of a waterwheel, or by the paddle wheels of a steamer.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Backwater" Quotes from Famous Books



... Point methods of kill or cure. John replied to the rector that he was now given leave to swim with the Westways boys. The pool was an old river-channel, now closed above, and making a quiet deep pool such as in England is called a "backwater" and in Canada a "bogan." The only access was through the Penhallow grounds, but this was ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... from the backwater of the fork, and she often had to wade up to her waist, but she kept on, and a little after daylight she came to the river. Ordinarily, it was not a large stream; a boy could chuck a stone across it, and there was a ford ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page

... a question of liking; it's a mere detail of not being able to do without it. I don't like breathing, but I should die if I didn't. I want some delicious, hole-in-the-corner, lazy backwater sort of place, where nothing ever happens, and nobody ever does anything. I've been observing all the morning, and your habits are adorable. Nothing ever happens here, and that will precisely suit me, when I ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... remarked in motherly fashion that she was glad to hear it, and it was high time too. He told her to keep all his letters till he sent for them. He had no importunate correspondents, his next book was as good as placed, and all he desired at the moment was to cut the painter, and drift into some quiet backwater where he could lie up till life should wear a more ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham

... quicksands in that river, and more than one army has perished in the effort to force its way across. The only possible safety lay in keeping to mid-stream and sweeping along with the current until something should turn up—a boat—a log—possibly a backwater, or even ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy

... 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

... of so much finer and rarer temper than those about her had ever suspected? Both passions are absorbing; both tend to blunt in many women the natural instinct of the woman towards the man. Nelly had been an old-fashioned, simple girl, brought up in a backwater of life. Now she was being drawn into that world of the new woman—where are women policemen, and women chauffeurs, and militant suffragists, and women in overalls and breeches, and many other strange types. The war has shown us—suddenly and marvellously—the adaptability of women. Would little ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... lighter oars in the cross currents, as the boats were heavy and did not mind quickly, and to backwater suddenly on one of the slender oars broke it like a reed. Some of the longer, heavier oars were then cut down to eight feet and were found to be entirely serviceable. The steering oars were cut down from eighteen to sixteen ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... 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 ...
— Teething Ring • James Causey

... 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, ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... after this stipulation, gone down to the river. They had taken a punt, and pushed out from the hot, reeking boathouse that smelt strongly of the tar that was growing soft and viscous on its roof beneath the heat of the day, and slid down the backwater towards the river. The weeds here wanted cutting, and they wrapped themselves affectionately round the punt-pole, and dragged their green slender fingers along the bottom of the punt as if seeking to delay its passage. Then for a moment ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson

... is to get out of this backwater, and back into the main stream! Even I get stale here. But in those great London meetings—there one catches on again!—one realises again—what it all means! Why not come up with me next week, even if the flat's not ready? I can't have you running ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... provision for this unprecedented outbreak. I saw that my deep, wide cut had kept the flood 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 had given way at a point too low down to ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... 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 away the flies that were tormenting him; but ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop

... friends of his may be. Her girl friends do see her in the daytime, but gradually they meet less and less because their interests and hers no longer focus in common. Gradually the stream of the social world goes rushing on, leaving the two who are absorbed in each other to drift forgotten in a backwater. He works harder, perhaps, than ever, and she perhaps occupies herself in making things for her trousseau or her house, or otherwise preparing for the more contented days which seem ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... 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

... 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 ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... miles a day during this period. That does not sound like a great distance for high-powered motor cars, but we did a good deal of stopping, you see, here and there and everywhere. We were roaming around in the backwater of war, you might say. We were out of the main stream of carnage, but it was not out of our minds and our hearts. Evidences of it in plenty came to us each day. And each day we were a little nearer to the front line trenches than we had come the day before. We were ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder

... that's what I say. Every year they are shallower and shallower, and there are not the deep holes there used to be. And do you see the bushes yonder?" the old man asked, pointing to one side. "Beyond them is an old river-bed; it's called a backwater. In my father's time the Pestchanka flowed there, but now look; where have the evil spirits taken it to? It changes its course, and, mind you, it will go on changing till such time as it has dried up altogether. There used ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... the thoroughfare he was seeking, and between whose houses, submerged to their first stories, a steamboat was really paddling. Other boats and rafts were adrift on its sluggish waters, and a boatman had just landed a passenger in the backwater of the lower half of the street on which he ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte

... 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 ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood

... in his chair—this would never do. He must wind up his affairs here and return to New York. The tranquil backwater had overpowered him for a time; but, again awake, he would strike out strongly... with Sidsall. Endless doubt and hope fluctuated within him. Voices rose from the Napier garden, and from a tree sounded the whirring of the first locust he had ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer

... found working a loom in a cottage by the side 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 ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... 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 ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... respite, one more chance for an extra pull with the oars. The big log, thus poised, made a backwater eddy on the surface of the river, checking the force of the current. Ross reached back for another stroke, with every ounce of ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler

... 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 touring painfully about the world ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... the fly-line on the water that I could not but let myself enjoy that at least. The slender lancewood rod swayed, the line swished through the air, and the fly dropped a few inches too high up the rapid among the stones—I had meant it to fall farther across in the dark backwater at the foot of the fall. The swift rush of the current carried the fly instantly downwards, but not so quick as to escape a troutlet; he took it, and was landed immediately. But to destroy these under-sized fish was not sport, and as at that moment ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... was evil, he asked? Looking back over the years, he saw much evil for himself, for everything and every one he cared about, and mingled with it there was little good, and that good purely accidental, the result of fortuitous circumstances. He knew that until the war broke out he had lived in a backwater of life, himself and Myra, contented, happy, untried by adversity. Once swung out of that backwater they had been swept away, powerless to know where they went, to ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... 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 ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... 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 Kate where she would be safe whether they should come ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman

... strange convulsions; we envy them because they enjoyed the delicious calm which was the product of that indifference. Wearied by the incessant tossing and boiling of the torrent which carries us away, we look back with fond regret to the little backwater so far above Niagara, where scarcely a ripple marks the approaching rapids. There is a charm in the great solid old eighteenth-century mansions, which London is so rapidly engulfing, and even about the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... 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

... desire to carry on the record of my life any further, and there, in limbo, it has remained for three years. But the other day I took it out for reference; and now as I am holiday-making in a certain little backwater of the world, where it is raining in a most unholiday fashion, it occurs to me that, as everything has happened to me which is likely to happen (Heaven knows I want no more excursions and alarums in my life's drama), I may as well bring the narrative up to date. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... "you could call him that—just in the same way you could call Napoleon a soldier or Lincoln a statesman. He is a detective, if you like to call him that, the master detective of the world. He has a great house in one of the backwater squares of New York, for his office. He has wireless telegraphy, private chemists, a little troop of spies, private telegraph and cable, and agents in every city of the world. If he moves against any gang, they break up. No one can really understand him. ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... firewood 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 pile that would, they calculated, with ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty

... sat for hours in the dark trying with the most pitiful futility to fathom the riddle of life, or that he wandered aimlessly about the place, which was stamped with his father's fine and kindly personality,—like a stick suddenly swept out of the current of the main stream into a tideless backwater, untouched by the sun? And when finally, still deaf to the call of spring, his father's message of courage, "We count it death to falter, not to die," rang out and straightened him up and set him on the rails of action once again, it was not quite the same ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... we were, 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 be most ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... front of us the water seemed shallower. It was probably only a tributary or backwater of the main stream. But it was sprinkled with smaller vessels—sloops, and yawls, and luggers—all filled with people and slowly ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke

... cardinal importance of Marx that his books will presently demand 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 production as a world process, passing by necessity ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... backwater of traffic, and was very silent. He disliked dogs, but a dog even would have been company. His gaze, travelling round the walls, rested on a picture entitled: 'Group of Dutch fishing boats at sunset'; the chef d'oeuvre of his collection. It gave him no pleasure. He ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... her about his sentimental journey, and how he found all the creations of his childhood's imagination still so alive and kicking in a forgotten backwater of his mind that they all hopped out and took objective form—the sprites, the starlight express, the boundless world of laughter, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... broached that for fear of missing the chance to be rude to an American the Japanese became rude to all outlanders indiscriminately. One indeed gathered the impression that, except in Kyoto, which is a backwater, foreigners are no longer wanted. "Japan for the Japanese" would seem to be the motto: one day, not far distant, to be amended to "The World for Japan." I shall never forget the humiliation I suffered in a stockbroker's office in Tokio, into which, seeing ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas

... and their Behaviour towards the Different Paper Fibres—Coal Tar Colours, which rank foremost, as far as their fastness to light is concerned; Colour Combinations with which colourless or nearly colourless Backwater is obtained; Colours which do not bleed into White Fibres, for Blotting and Copying Paper Pulp; Colours which produce the best results on Mechanical Wood and on Unbleached Sulphite Wood; Dyeing of Cotton, Jute and Wool Half-stuff ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech

... the next day we passed Carwar, about fifty miles south of Goa, and one of the most interesting ports in India. Adjoining it is a backwater, such as are often met with on the south-west coast of India, along which it is possible to sail for many miles in a native boat with great comfort and ease. Further south is Honahwar, whence the famous Falls of Gairsoppa, in Mysore, ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... little backwater of rest and quiet into which we men of blood and iron drift at all too infrequent intervals—that is when we become what is known officially as "barn orderly." A barn orderly is the company unit who looks after the billets of the men out on parade. In ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill

... a part of Johnstown, through which Stony Creek ran. Although we were a square from the creek, the backwater from the stream had flooded the streets in the morning and was up to our front porch. At 4 o'clock on Friday afternoon we were sitting on the front porch watching the flood, when we heard a roar as of a tornado or ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... 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 ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren

... distinct line as it cuts through the clear water of the main river, and the floating rafts of vegetation brought down by the White Nile, instead of continuing their voyage, are headed back, and remain helplessly in the backwater. The sources of the Sobat are still a mystery; but there can be no doubt that the principal volume must be water of mountain origin, as it is coloured by earthy matter, and is quite unlike the marsh water of the White Nile. The expeditions of the slave-hunters have ascended ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker

... 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 that the next bend ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various

... yards wide, forming a channel through the great extent of water grass resembling high sugarcanes, which conceal the true extent of the river. About six miles west from the Sobat junction on the north side of the river, is a kind of backwater, extending north like a lake for a distance of several days' boat journey: this is eventually lost in regions of high grass and marshes; in the wet season this forms a large lake. A hill bearing north 20 degrees west so distant as ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... which stood 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; and sometimes we saw it ahead of us, looping up the ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... works—all 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, with a touching insistence. This bedroom ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... when Maud and Reggie Byng set out on their journey, shone on the West-End of London with equal pleasantness at two o'clock. In Little Gooch Street all the children of all the small shopkeepers who support life in that backwater by selling each other vegetables and singing canaries were out and about playing curious games of their own invention. Cats washed themselves on doorsteps, preparatory to looking in for lunch at one of the numerous garbage cans which dotted the sidewalk. Waiters peered austerely from the windows ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... days—they were all joyous days, this one most of all—I was up the backwater, the "Mud Lark" (Fin's name for the punt) anchored in her element by two poles, one at each end, to keep her steady, when Fin broke through a new aperture ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... 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

... 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 ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... she observed, "that in these days, although we have become callous to everything else in life, cocktails and flirtations still attract us. You shall take me to a backwater after dinner, Sir Timothy. I shall wear my silver-grey and take an armful of those black cushions from the drawing-room. In that half light, there is no telling what success ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... feet,—a path that was on dry land in the summer-time. We followed it, feeling carefully, and at length, when we had suffered all that we could bear, we stumbled on to a dry ridge. Here we spent another night of torture, with a second backwater facing us coated with a full inch ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... I. "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 water, while now and again dragon-flies dart ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates

... believe that this quiet backwater was within an hour or two of the trenches. G.H.Q. was indeed situated well back behind "the Front," which, however precise the maps in the newspapers may affect to make it, is, like the Equator of ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... been rowing well in toward the Kentucky shore, to avoid the swift current of the Kentucky River which rushes into the Ohio at Carrollton. A few yards below its mouth, in the quiet stretch of backwater along shore, lay the wharf-boat, little more than a landing stage. The hotel was but a hundred feet away, at the top of the steep levee. It was midnight, so everyone in the village had long been asleep. After several ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... peaceful 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, and the shrill voices of newspaper boys came ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... was an underthought that she and Comte were odd fish to be at home together in that placid backwater of the Latin Quarter. Next door to the old-fashioned house in which she rented three rooms was a cabaret, a mere wreck of a wineshop, apparently cast there by the torrent of the Boule Mich, which roared a few yards away. Its ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy

... 18,000 men. With this force he proceeded southwards bent on reducing the entire tract between the desert and the Eastern or real Euphrates. The most important city of the southern region was at the time Obolla which was situated on a canal or backwater derived from the Euphrates, not far from the modern Busrah. It was the great emporium for the Indian trade, and was known as the limes Indorum or "frontier city towards India." The Persian governor was a certain Hormuz or Hormisdas who held the post with 20,000 men. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson

... o'clock, five of our men went out to some cabins on the bluff, about one quarter of a mile below the fort, to bring a grind-stone. The backwater of the Mississippi, rendered it so they went in a canoe. On their return they were attacked by a party of Indians, supposed to be about fifty in number; they killed and tomahawked three and wounded one mortally. While about this mischief, ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake

... poplars I am thinking of are alongside a stately old French mill, built, towered, and gabled, of fine grey stone; and the image of them brings up in my mind, with the draught and foam of the weir and the glassiness of the backwater, and the whirr of the horse-ferry's ropes, that some of the most delightful moments which one's bicycle can give, are those when the bicycle is resting against a boat's side (once also in Exmouth harbour); or chained to an old lych-gate; ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee

... Charles,—I 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 quickly convince ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various

... sprang out into 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 ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton

... across the mountains to Sevier and Shelby. Sevier had his hands full at Watauga, but he dispatched two hundred of his troops; and Isaac Shelby, with a similar force from Sullivan County crossed the mountains to McDowell's assistance. These "overmountain men" or "backwater men," as they were called east of the hills, were trained in Sevier's method of Indian warfare—the secret approach through the dark, the swift dash, and the swifter flight. "Fight strong and run away fast" was the Indian motto, as their women had often been heard to call it after the red men ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner

... in London, my inherent weakness for obscure studies and another motive to which I may refer later had caused me to abandon my chambers in the Temple and to retire with my library to this odd little backwater where my only link with Fleet Street, with the land of theaters and clubs and noise and glitter, was the telephone. I scarcely need add that I had sufficient private means to enable me to indulge these whims, otherwise as a working journalist I must have been content to remain ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... borough. To our left 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 veritable "haunt of ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New

... scorching afternoon, the greater part of a stifling night moored under a mud-bank with a grove of trees on top from which gigantic fire-flies hung as though the place were illuminated for a garden fete, and then, rowing on again in the comparatively cool hours before dawn, turned into a backwater at cock-crow. ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... in Harley Street," said Sir Richmond, "I have been trying myself over in my mind. (We can drift down this backwater.)" ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... 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 the new ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey

... keep your eyes skinned if you have to swim any bits of backwater, now the creeks are up. Don't cross anywheres unless you have some cattle to send in fust, and keep clost up to their tails if yous can't get in among 'em. 'Gaters like man and horse meat next best ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke

... looked indescribably desolate, and yet there was a certain beauty in it, too. I had been told exactly how to reach the House by the Lock, and when, after passing the somewhat weedy-looking lock, I began skirting along a species of backwater, and came in sight of a long, low-browed house close to the river, I knew I had ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson

... If Malines is a backwater of the Middle Time, as somnolent or as dull (so some, I suppose, would call it) as the strange dead towns of the Zuyder Zee, or as Coggeshall or Thaxted in our own green Essex, Antwerp, at any rate, which lies only some fifteen miles or so to ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris

... doon the waters frae his hills, ye grummle an' compleen at the spate that's been foreordeen't frae the verra black mirk o' eternity. What wad ye think o' a bairn gaein' compleenin' o' you 'cause your backwater had ta'en awa' his wheelie o' rashes, whaur it was whurlin' bonnie afore ye liftit ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... men can live for them, and love them, the lovely things," Terrence added. "Listen, Mr. Graham, and I'll tell you a secret. We philosophers of the madroo grove, we wrecks and wastages of life here in the quiet backwater and easement of Dick's munificence, are a brotherhood of lovers. And the lady of our hearts is all the one—the Little Lady. We, who merely talk and dream our days away, and who would lift never a hand for God, or country, or the devil, are pledged ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... 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 Hand ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner

... of 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 ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... The backwater was snug and fair, And the gay Canoeist cavorted there. Thinks he, "I have built up everywhere A reputation for pluck and stay!" Amidst the reeds the river ran; Behind them floated a Grand Old Swan, And loudly did lament The better deeds of a better day; Ever the gray ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 28, 1891 • Various

... 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 joins the harbour. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... this celebrated cavern that no mention need be made of its interior features. The place seems excellently adapted as a habitation for primitive people. It is situated on a hill at whose foot is the bank of Blue River. Five miles away, as the road runs, is the Ohio. The backwater sometimes reaches up the tributary for more than 10 miles. The flint-bearing stratum of the Harrison County aboriginal quarries outcrops a short distance away and appears at several points within the cave. The country is extremely rugged, and good springs occur frequently. ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... has been run in the Soviet style of government ownership of substantially all the means of production and government planning of all but the smallest details of economic activity. Thus, Cuba, like the former Warsaw Pact nations, has remained in the backwater of economic modernization. The economy contracted by about one-third between 1989 and 1992 as it absorbed the loss of $4 billion of annual economic aid from the former Soviet Union and much smaller amounts from Eastern Europe. The government ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... the true aspect of things, as Courtenay discovered when he had successfully brought the ship past three ugly reefs and dropped anchor in the backwater of a small sheltered bay. He speedily abandoned the half-formed hope that the Kansas might have run into an ocean water-way which communicated with Smyth Channel. The rampart of snow-clad hills had no break, while a hasty scrutiny ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy

... 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 ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... more he thought of it, the more he shrank from the ordeal. Once he had hoped Mr. Bronson would be the one to show him the way out of the backwater of Crawberry. Hiram had not forgotten how terribly disappointed he had been when he could not find the gentleman's card in ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... and the tale began. By the time it was ended the boat was at a standstill on the little backwater below the ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit

... Carl wrote short honest notes to Gertie, to his banker employer, to Bennie Rusk, whom he addressed as "Friend Ben." He found himself writing a long and spirited letter to Bone Stillman, who came out of the backwater of ineffectuality as a man who had dared. Frankly he wrote to his mother—his mammy he wistfully called her. To his father he could not write. With quick thumps of his fist he stamped the letters, then glanced at the Turk. He was gay, mature, business-like, ready for anything. "I'll pull out in half ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... a place had a down-at-heel, out-of-elbow sort of look, it was Calvary Alley. At its open end and two feet above it the city went rushing and roaring past like a great river, quite oblivious of this unhealthy bit of backwater into which some of its flotsam and jetsam had been caught and held, generating crime and disease and sending them out again ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice

... is Lake Superior, the largest sea of fresh water in the world, which is connected with Lake Nipigon on the north. The waters of Lake Superior are carried over the Sault Ste. Marie rapids into Lake Huron and find a huge backwater in Lake Michigan.[9] Out of Lake Huron again they flow past Detroit into Lake Erie. From Duluth, at the westernmost extremity of Lake Superior, to Buffalo, on the easternmost point of Lake Erie, including all Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, with its bays and ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston

... 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 ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald

... Vincent at the end of Rotten Row, Mark Ashburn continued his walk alone through Kensington High Street and onwards, until he came to one of those quiet streets which serve as a sort of backwater to the main stream of traffic, and, turning down this, it was not long before he reached a row of small three-story houses, with their lower parts cased in stucco, but the rest allowed to remain in the original yellow-brown ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... 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 ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... Durrant looking up from his novel. He kept reading a few pages and then looking up in a curiously methodical manner, and each time he looked up he took a few cherries out of the bag and ate them abstractedly. Other boats passed them, crossing the backwater from side to side to avoid each other, for many were now moored, and there were now white dresses and a flaw in the column of air between two trees, round which curled a thread of blue—Lady Miller's picnic party. Still more boats kept coming, and Durrant, without ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... line of white fire. But there was one rope which was the master-rope. He could see that rope. If he could pull it once, it was absolutely and mathematically certain that the disordered fleet would reassemble itself in the backwater behind the guard-tower. But why, he wondered, was Peroo clinging so desperately to his waist as he hastened down the bank? It was necessary to put the lascar aside, gently and slowly, because it was necessary to save the boats, and, ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling

... 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 real ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... shadows a boat was waiting, with one man in it, leaning on a long pole, and when the Rajah and Gerrard had stepped in, this man punted them out into the starlight in perfect silence, and across the lake into a kind of backwater, covered thick with the flat leaves of the lotus, in an opposite corner. Gerrard expected to see the boat held fast among the twining roots, but it was evident that a channel was kept clear, for they slid through without difficulty. ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier

... way to outwit it would be to use the beast's own tactics. When it gathered itself for the thrust and started in to hurl the doomed vessel the full length of its mighty arms, the sloop's only safety lay in widening the space. A cushion of backwater would then receive the sloop's forefoot in place of the snarling teeth ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith

... "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 ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... 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

... of Wainwright; business stopped short of it, and the "fashionable residence section" had overleaped this "forgotten backwater," leaving it undisturbed and unchanging, with that look about it which is the quality of few urban quarters, and eventually of none, as a town grows to be a city—the look of still being a neighborhood. This friendliness ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington

... indignant with Warboise, could not help feeling just a reflex touch of vexation with Mr. Colt. The Chaplain no doubt was a stalwart soldier, fighting the Church's battle; but her battle was not to be won, her rolling tide of conquest not to be set going, in such a backwater as St. Hospital. Confound the fellow! Why could not these young men ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... exact spot where she had disappeared; this, being nearly the same weight, would be equally acted upon by the stream, and would form a guide which they should follow until it should lead them to some deep eddy, or whirlpool formed by a backwater; should the pilot log remain in such a spot, they would most probably find the body in the same place. The men immediately procured a log, and set off with the sheik himself to carry out the experiment. In the ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker

... 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 ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson

... 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 boy to ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... 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 ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... 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 ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan

... at Kumprasi, a few huts close to the embouchure of the iron-bedded Avin streamlet and backwater. The little zinc-roofed hut, called by courtesy a store, belonging to Messieurs Swanzy, was closed. Katubwe, the northern hill on the left bank, had been bought, together with Akromasi Point and the Avin valley, by the late M. Bonnat, who cleared ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... Gardner, is there any way those people can get out on the other side of the Reserve, down the West Fork? You know the backwater above the little dam, two miles below the big dam? Most of the timber we intended to float out that way, to the mill at the little dam. They may have ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough

... the mighty scheme of things;' as being in the world, and not of it; watching the clouds and the stars, poring over a book, or gazing at a picture without a thought of becoming an author or an artist. He has drifted into a quiet little backwater, and congratulates himself in all sincerity on his escape from the turbulent stream outside. He drinks in the delight of rest at every pore; reduces himself for the time to the state of a polyp drifting on the warm ocean stream, and becomes a voluptuous hermit. He ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... a letter stealthily conveyed to me from Big Peter, to say that he and Leof were resolved on escaping. They had a boat, he said, concealed about eight miles up the Lena under some willows on a stagnant backwater. They intended to try for the north as soon as the water opened, and hoped then to go towards the west and Wrangell Island, where they felt pretty sure of being picked up by American sealers by the month of August ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett

... 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 by ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... point of drawing-room meetings and bazaars? You want to have ideas, Mary; get hold of something big; never mind making mistakes, but don't niggle. Why don't you throw it all up for a year, and travel?—see something of the world. Don't be content to live with half a dozen people in a backwater all your life. But you won't," ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... 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 putty, and destroys the comfort of a jaundiced world. The famous Dr. Abernethy had his hobby, ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... 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 would make a ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower

... trout stream wound its flashing and foaming way through a ravine in the rocky moorland. It was a windy, shadowy evening. A heavily clouded sunset lay low and red in the west. A solitary angler stood casting his fly at a turn in the stream where the backwater lay still and deep under an overhanging bank. A girl (myself) standing on the bank, invisible to the fisherman beneath, waited eagerly to ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins

... 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 ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... 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 minute of loneliness and darkness and ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris

... 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 ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... unnecessary to mention, but I was hugely relieved to learn that so far there was no suspicion as to who was really responsible for the damage to the creek. Apart from the inconvenience which it would have entailed, to be arrested for blowing up a bit of mud in a Thames backwater would have been a sad come-down for a ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges

... the ships of the Jomsborg vikings were both larger, and higher in the gunwale, than were those of Earl Hakon, but nevertheless were they boldly beset from both sides. Vagn Akason pressed the ships of Svein Hakonson so hard that Svein let his men backwater & came nigh to fleeing, whereupon Earl Eirik came up into his place & thrust himself into the battle against Vagn, and Vagn backed his ship, and the craft lay again as ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson

... in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal ornaments. Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people are Cimbri, and holds that it is "more consonant to all the evidence of history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders at different periods deposited this backwater of barbarians" in the district they now inhabit. "The whole space, which in addition to the seven burghs contains twenty-four villages, is bounded by rivers, alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are the Brenta ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... with him into the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, and threading his way without hesitation through its maze of unsavoury slums, paused before a narrow three-storeyed house overlooking a stagnant backwater. ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome

... pulling hard with his right line, when suddenly there was a shock in the Parrett's boat, followed by a loud shout from Parson, and next moment the boat was shooting helplessly straight towards the bank, from which it was only saved by a prompt order to "Backwater all!" from Bloomfield. ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed

... For the first time since his avowal to Peter Ascham he found himself without an occupation, and understood that he had been carried through the past weeks only by the necessity of constant action. Now his life had once more become a stagnant backwater, and as he stood on the street corner watching the tides of traffic sweep by, he asked himself despairingly how much longer he could endure to float about in the sluggish circle ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... at Grimstad seems to have proceeded until Ibsen reached his twenty-first year. In this quiet backwater of a seaport village the passage of time was deliberate, and the development of hard-worked apothecaries was slow. Ibsen's nature was not in any sense precocious, and even if he had not languished in so lost ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... out of his way to overdo it, too. Needn't have come out half so strong. No chance now to backwater—not a chance on earth to explain what he really did mean—and make it something different." "Quixotic! That's how it reads ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.

... "It'll be something of a bother packing but it'll 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

... the chances at a glance, and sped off across the narrow neck to the mainland, tore along the cliff round Pegane and Port a la Jument, then away past the head of Saut de Juan, and down the cliff-side to where the black shelves overhang the backwater ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham

... on through the crowd that continued to chaff us good-naturedly—"joshing" they called it. Then we managed to struggle into a sort of backwater at the side of the dais upon which an alleged string band was trying to make good, as ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen

... away at a lively pace. The water dashed over the rocks that obstructed its passage, and was churned into foam and spray that leaped high into the air. As the roar below grew more terrible, I lost some courage and endeavored to check up, fearing to encounter backwater. In attempting to stop myself, I grasped a rock as I was being carried by; but did not have strength enough to resist the force of the current, and so was hurled along. The current ran about thirty kilometers an hour, and the rocks were so high on ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton

... the river 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, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... fishing-boat amongst many others. Lie hidden there till he comes if you value your lives." So in we got, and while that good Samaritan went back to her house we cautiously paddled through a deserted backwater to where it presently turned through low sandbanks to the gulf. There were the boats, and we hid the canoe and lay down amongst them till, soon after, a man, easily recognised as the husband of our friend, came ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... an eerie backwater in which they were paddling, a sluggish stream which moved between dark houses. Sometimes it scraped against their sides and lapped their balconies; sometimes it was held in check by walls and narrow terraces. For Billy the water between the ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley

... enough," said Vince; "it's a regular backwater, and just what we wanted. We shall do ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn

... 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 might have broken, even shattered her, ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison

... 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 Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts

... the party, following a trail along the bluffs, rode up in the direction of the contractors' camps they discerned out on the river bottom a motley cluster of tents and shanties pitched under a hill. A number of flatboats lay in the backwater behind the bend and a quantity of ties corded along the bank indicated a loading-place, but no one seemed to be doing any loading. The few men that could be seen in the distance appeared to be loafing in the sunshine along the straggling street-way ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman

... launches nor lawns tempt him that pursueth the rural Pan. In the hushed recesses of Hurley backwater where the canoe may be paddled almost under the tumbling comb of the weir, he is to be looked for; there the god pipes with freest abandonment. Or under the great shadow of Streatley Hill, "annihilating all that's made to ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame

... hour's walk of the camp was a beaver dam fully half a mile wide, built with astonishing skill and strength. The backwater flooded the country for many square miles, and gave the remarkable animals just the place they wanted for their curious huts, of which I shall have something to tell you ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis

... the African Current, runs down the coast until, just below the Canary Isles, it merges into the Lesser Equatorial Current, which, parallel to the parent stream, and separated from it by a narrow band of backwater, travels west and filters through the West Indies, making puzzling combinations with the tides, and finally bearing so heavily on the young Gulf Stream as to give to it the sharp turn to the northward ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... out of reach, but into a curious backwater, which eddied it right under the boat hook of the bowman. In an instant it was seized, and the line made fast to a thwart. 'I've a great mind to trust to it,' said Jarvist Arnold, but caution prevailed, and they made fast a stout rope to ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor

... 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

... The swamp was a backwater of the lake, accessible by a narrow channel. Barra slowed the boat, easing it along through the still water. Here, the channel was clear, he knew, and it would soon widen. But there were some gravel bars a little farther along that could be troublesome if one were careless. And his attention ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole

... young Briton now made the mistake of his life. He sent a prisoner, Samuel Phillips, over to the frontier settlements, to Colonel Isaac Shelby, with the insolent message that, if the "backwater" men did not quit resisting the royal arms, he would march his army over the mountains, and would straightway lay waste their homes with fire and sword, ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell

... off, and listened to the sounds of a London morning. Their house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of buildings separated it from the main thoroughfare. One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating. Though the promontory consisted of flats—expensive, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster

... 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; ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut

... 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 hot yellow sand, sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun, a cloudless blue ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various

... and your business," I said. "Knowing what is before you, you can—you need not lend money, accept obligations. You can gradually draw out of the stream of credit in which your fortune is involved, get into a backwater for a while. You have time enough. I am expressing myself all wrong; but you ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham



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