"Blight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strong and salty; smells of the moist and damp soil, the bitter-sweet of wetted weeds, the aromatic flavor that shell-life yields, and the smells also of rotten and decaying fish—all these were inextricably blended in the air, that was of the keenness of a frost-blight for freshness, and yet was warm with the softness of ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... reckless, worldly pleasure, and of cruel, slavish toil. When I saw it again, three-and-twenty years thereafter, it showed no signs of progress for the better. It there be a God of justice and of love, His blight cannot but rest on a nation whose pathway is stained with corruption and steeped in blood, as is undeniably the case with ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... whine at his losses, A man doesn't whimper and fret, Or rail at the weight of his crosses And ask life to rear him a pet. A man doesn't grudgingly labor Or look upon toil as a blight; A man doesn't sneer at his neighbor Or sneak from a cause that ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... as I then was, but learning my weekly lessons from the "Nation," I can remember how my blood boiled one day when I saw in a shop window a cartoon of "Punch"—a large potato, which was a caricature of O'Connell's head and face, with the title—"The Real Potato Blight." ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... bare and lone The stony garden waste and sere With blight of breezes ocean blown To pinch the wakening of the year; My kindly friends with busy cheer My wretchedness could plainly show. They tell me I am lonely here— What do they know? What ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... not leave us all in gloom Because thy song is still, Nor blight the banquet-garland's bloom With grief's ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... touched something red hot Marcia dropped it, and pushed it with her foot far back under the bed. Then shutting the door quickly she went downstairs. Was it always to be thus? Would Kate ever blight all her joy ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... blight the fruits of my students. A faith- [1] ful student may even sometimes feel the need of physical help, and occasionally receive it from others; but the less this is required, the better it is ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... most important improvements, that he may cultivate his sense of justice, his benevolence, and the desire of perfection. Toil is the school for these high principles; and we have here a strong presumption that, in other respects, it does not necessarily blight the soul. Next, we have seen that the most fruitful sources of truth and wisdom are not books, precious as they are, but experience and observation; and these belong to all conditions. It is another important consideration, that almost all labour demands intellectual ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... the State of Europe;" a work, however juvenile, which is said to exhibit much both of the peculiar spirit and of the method of its illustrious author. But the death of his father, in 1580, put an end to his travels, and cast a melancholy blight upon his opening prospects. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and enjoyed her because she was always so willing to do whatever Georgina wished. And now to think that instead of being the like-everybody-else kind of a young lady she seemed, she was like a heroine in a book who had lived through trouble which would "blight her whole life." ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... period when a sceptical philosophy came down like a blight, and destroyed the bloom of his art and faith, he thus recognized that growing knowledge was an essential condition of growing goodness. Pompilia shone with a glory that mere knowledge could not give (if there were such a thing as ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... land beyond sight or conceiving, In a land where no blight is, no wrong, No darkness, no graves, and no grieving, There lies the great ocean of song. And its waves, oh, its waves unbeholden By any save gods, and their kind, Are not blue, are not green, but are golden, Like ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and desolation; but my life, with its wasted energies and flagging purpose, rises up before me, darkly and reproachfully reminding me of what I might have done, have been! O Heaven! what bitter years of suffering and crushing disappointment, years on which the tracks of time have left their blight and mildew, have passed since first I listened to the bird-like warbling of its simple strains. Then was the blissful May-time of my existence, when I was governed by youth's generous impulses, led ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sighed. When but a blighted bud was left, Which Indra's hand in seven had cleft:(213) "No fault, O Lord of Gods, is thine; The blame herein is only mine. But for one grace I fain would pray, As thou hast reft this hope away. This bud, O Indra, which a blight Has withered ere it saw the light— From this may seven fair spirits rise To rule the regions of the skies. Be theirs through heaven's unbounded space On shoulders of the winds to race, My children, drest in heavenly forms, Far-famed as Maruts, Gods of storms. One God to Brahma's sphere ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... disgust, he pictured the Prince of Darkness not as a gentleman, not even as a picturesque personage with horns and tail, but as Mr. Button. As regards his mother, he had a confused idea that he was a living blight on her existence. He was not sorry, because it was not his fault, but in his childish way he coldly excused her, and, more from a queer consciousness of blighterdom than from dread of her hand and tongue, he avoided her as much as possible. In the little Buttons his experience as scapegoat ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... clears, however, though the softness remains, when, ceasing to press too far backward, I meet the ampler light of conscious and educated little returns to the place; for the education of New York, enjoyed up to my twelfth year, failed to blight its romantic appeal. The images I really distinguish flush through the maturer medium, but with the sense of them only the more wondrous. The other house, the house of my parents' limited early sojourn, becomes that of those of our cousins, numerous at that time, who pre-eminently figured ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... suppliant hands to heaven at the new moon, and appease the household gods with frankincense, and this year's fruits, and a ravening swine; the fertile vine shall neither feel the pestilential south-west, nor the corn the barren blight, or your dear brood the sickly season in the fruit-bearing autumn. For the destined victim, which is pastured in the snowy Algidus among the oaks and holm trees, or thrives in the Albanian meadows, with its throat shall stain the axes of the priests. It is not required of you, ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... and meant to do; and however incomplete may be its attainments, the lowest form of a God-fearing, God-obeying life is higher and more nearly 'perfect' than the fairest career or character against which, as a blight on all its beauty, the damning accusation may be brought, 'The God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... I accepted this statement as gospel, but in my heart I thought I had never seen a sadder face than that of Gladys Hamilton; to me it looked absolutely joyless, as though some strange blight had fallen on her youth. I kept these thoughts to myself, like a wise woman, and when Max looked at me rather searchingly, as though he expected a verbal assent, I said, 'Yes, you are right, some girls are like that,' and ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... further enunciation of this joyous theory of life, Young naturally replies in characteristic terms, emphasizing life's evanescence and joy's certain blight. But Sterne, though acknowledging the transitoriness of life's pleasures, denies Young's deductions. Yorick's conception of death is quite in contrast to Young's picture and one must admit that it has no justification in Sterne's writings. On the contrary, Yorick's life was one long flight from ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... atrocious system which, having attained to the fullest measure of detestable injustice and cruelty, was now fast crumbling into ruin, inevitably doomed to be overwhelmed because it was all so wicked and abominable, inevitably doomed to sink under the blight and curse of senseless and unprofitable selfishness out of existence for ever, its memory universally ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... them with whom my early years were spent have passed away. Of all the fruit borne by the tree of life, how small a portion drops from it when fully ripe, and in the due course of nature. The worm, and premature decay, are continually thinning them; and the tempest and the blight destroy the greater part of those that are left. Poor dear worthy old Minister, you too are gone, but not forgotten. How could I have had these thoughts? How could I have enjoyed these scenes? and how described them? but for you! Innocent, pure, and simple-minded man, how fond you were of nature, ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... in my side, Thy father's first-born, and his shame; Unstable as the rolling tide, A blight has fall'n upon thy name. Decay shall follow thee and thine. Go, outcast ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... Angel (receding). Alas! alas! Like a vapor the golden vision Shall fade and pass, And thou wilt find in thy heart again Only the blight of pain, And ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... know," he replied, "unless to deplore it to the last hour of your life. You can never know unless you outrage my will. I have the power to make you wretched forever, to blight and destroy you. And if you treat my warning with contempt, I will do it without fail, without mercy, without remorse. The jester who has contributed so largely to your entertainment, and furnished such a delectable theme for your secret ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... silently they rode home, - Rohtraut, Beauty Rohtraut! The boy was lost in his delight: 'And, wert thou Empress this very night, I would not heed or feel the blight; Ye thousand leaves of the wild wood wist How Beauty Rohtraut's mouth I kiss'd. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mother will nurse her own offspring; for what can be more hardening and demoralising than to call forth the tenderest feelings of a woman's heart and cherish them yourself as long as you need them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for them is ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... answer; mark a soothfast word, Not the true parent is the woman's womb That bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed New-sown: the male is parent; she for him, As stranger for a stranger, hoards the germ Of life; unless the god its promise blight. And proof hereof before you will I set. Birth may from fathers, without mothers, be: See at your side a witness of the same, Athena, daughter of Olympian Zeus, Never within the darkness of the womb Fostered nor fashioned, but a bud more bright Than any goddess in her breast might bear. ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... father, smiling sadly; 'but Castle Blanch training might make the mischief more serious. It is a gay household, and I cannot believe with Kit Charteris that the children are too young to feel the blight of worldly influence. Do not you think with me, Nora?' he concluded in so exactly the old words and manner as to stir the very depths of her heart, but woe worth the change from the hopes of youth to this premature fading into despondency, and the implied farewell! ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the evil eye from the superstitious fear inculcated in their minds in the nursery. Parents in the East feel no delight when strangers look at their children in admiration of their loveliness; they consider that you merely look at them in order to blight them. The attendants on the children of the great are enjoined never to permit strangers to fix their glance upon them. I was once in the shop of an Armenian at Constantinople, waiting to see a procession which was expected to ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... a good many small shops; but the only stock in trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside. The sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the place, were the public-houses; and in them, the lowest orders of Irish were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of houses, ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... marked The Ring and the Book is blameless for the most characteristic of all the shortcomings of contemporary verse, a grievous sterility of thought. And why? Because sterility of thought is the blight struck into the minds of men by timorous and halt-footed scepticism, by a half-hearted dread of what chill thing the truth might prove itself, by unmanly reluctance or moral incapacity to carry the faculty ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... and the laborer. In many parts of the world it is not so. In Blantyre, for example, according to MacDonald, "to be called a liar is rather a compliment." Once more: English sentiment is such that the mere suspicion of incontinence on the part of a woman is enough to blight her life; but there are peoples whose sentiments entail no such effect, and, in some cases, a reverse effect is produced: "Unchastity is, with the Wetyaks, a virtue." It seems, then, that in respect of all the leading divisions of human conduct, different races of men, and the same ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... all wrong, and we must put them right So say all Socialists, and truly too. Man does not get the chance here to subdue The brute in self; and hence the fearful blight Which makes one sicken at the dreadful sight Of all society in ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... fought against the Romans at their first landing, which would carry them far eastward of Cornwall. Hals thought that the Mawgan figures were brought from the old chapel of their manor-house, which stood here by the Carminow creek; but Blight is of opinion that the effigies were removed from Bodmin. In Loe Bar we have a formation slightly resembling the famous Chesil Ridge of Dorset, and the bar at Slapton Sands in Devon; but this Loe Bar is on a much smaller scale. Being formed ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... blossoms droop and die. Such is the fate of all the dainty things That dance in wind and water. Nature herself Makes war on her own loveliness and slays Her children like Medea. Nay but, my Lord, Look closer still. Why in this damask here It is summer always, and no winter's tooth Will ever blight these blossoms. For every ell I paid a piece of gold. Red gold, and good, The fruit ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... around the unhappy island. The first symptoms of the dread potato disease showed themselves in the autumn of 1845, and even that year there was much suffering, though a trifle to what was to follow. Many remedies were tried, both to stop the blight and save the crops, but all alike proved unavailing. The next year the potatoes seemed to promise unusually well, and the people, with characteristic hopefulness, believed that their trouble was over. The summer, however, was very warm and wet, and with August there ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... and muttered and murmured was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me. I withdrew; but this was not enough. In other countries—in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue depth of the lakes—I was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. I crossed the mountains, but it was the same; so I went a little farther, and settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who betakes ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... sewer Smells— Loathsome Smells! What a lot of typhoid their intensity foretells! Through the pleasant air of night, How they spread, a noxious blight! Full of bad bacterian motes, Quickening soon. What a lethal vapour floats To the foul Smell-fiend who glistens as he gloats On the boon. Oh, from subterranean cells What a gush of sewer-gas voluminously wells! How it swells! How it dwells In our ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... went back to my sitter I found that the blight which had always settled upon them when they were together was disappearing quickly. They were talking quite amiably, and although I should have been glad to have said something to show that I noticed the change, I expect that it was prudent of me to be silent. For the first time, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... needy man who has spent his all, beggared himself, and pinched his friends, to enter the profession, which is destined never to yield him a morsel of bread. The waiting—the hope—the disappointment—the fear—the misery—the poverty—the blight on his hopes, and end to his career—the suicide perhaps, or the shabby, slipshod drunkard. Am I not right about them?' And the old man rubbed his hands, and leered as if in delight at having found another point of view in which to place his ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... all one. She is marked with the gallows. Ill-luck attaches to her. There has been a blight on her from the beginning. I mind when her father chucked her down all among the fly-poison. Now she has got the Broom-Squire, she may count herself lucky, and thank ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... why he fevered me so much. Must I say it?—He had ceased to entertain me. Instead of a comic I found him a tragic spectacle; and his exuberant anticipations, his bursting hopes that fed their forcing-bed with the blight and decay of their predecessors, his transient fits of despair after a touch at my pulses, and exclamation of 'Oh, Richie, Richie, if only I had my boy up and well!'—assuming that nothing but my tardy recovery stood in the way of our contentment—were ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sprayings with Bordeaux increased the yield 233 bushels per acre, while three sprayings increased it 191 bushels. The gain was due chiefly to the prolongation of growth through the prevention of late blight. The sprayed potatoes contained one ninth more starch and were ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... ornamental flower garden; "out of Weathersfield" Wethersfield (the modern spelling), Connecticut, was famous for its onions (there is still a red onion called "Red Weathersfield"), until struck by a blight about 1840; "old Egyptians" ancient Egypt was ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... pity me, O pity me! Alas! how soon is the cup of bliss dashed from the lips of us poor mortals. I can hardly write, hardly hold my pen, or hold my head up. I cannot bear that, from my hand, you should be informed of the utter blight of all our hopes which blossomed so fully. Alas! alas! but it must be. O my head, my poor, poor head—how it swims! I was sitting at the fireside, thinking when you would return, and trying to find out if the wind was fair, when I heard a knock ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... for a man of spirit, knowing them to be evil and urgent of resistance, there is needed a vigour and freedom of mind that but few understand and even fewer appreciate or encourage. The prejudices that grow around a man's principles are like weeds and poison in his garden: they blight his flowers, trees and fruit; and he must go forth with fire and sword and strong unsparing hand to root out the evil things. He will find with his courage and strength are needed passion and patience and dogged persistence. For men defend a prejudice with bitter ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... scarcely seventeen when the Plague swept over Kennons. That mysterious blight, rising in the orient, traveling darkly and surely unto the remotest West, laid its blackened hand upon the fair House ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its beauty with ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... your father be thinking of? Here had we got three of the ugliest Philistines in Coombeland in our hand, and we've let 'em go to blight and freeze and blast everything. What could Sir Godfrey ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... prospered despite an unprecedented disregard for the teachings of his father and his grandfather before him. The wolf stayed a long way off from his door, the prophetic mortgage failed to lay its blight upon his lands, his crops were bountiful, his acreage spread as the years went by,—and so his uncles, his cousins and his aunts were never so happy as when wishing for the good old days when his father was alive and running ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... height, but the small boulders of difficulty trip them up, for they are hopelessly unpractical; they have neither strength of purpose nor fortitude, and their best-laid schemes are always frustrated at the critical moment, by either the incurable blight of vacillation, or by the determination to amplify their scheme ere it has proved successful, sacrificing probable results ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... the countless objects Mrs. Jeffrey always had about her. The noise seemed to startle her mistress, who had walked to the window after opening the door, for she wheeled impetuously about and Loretta saw her face. It was as if a blight had passed over it. Once gay and animated beyond the power of any one to describe, it had become in twenty-four hours a ghost's face, with the glare of some awful resolve on it. Or so it would appear from the way Loretta described it. But such girls do not always see correctly, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... intrude. It seemed a long while that they remained so, but at last Christine sat up, turning upon him a face so strange and terrible that he trembled at the look of it. Sorrow had seared it like a blight. She had been lying upon a seam in the lounge and it had left a red mark across her face. He thought it looked like the wound upon her ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... At last came a very wet summer, and everything went wrong in the country round. The hay had hardly been got in, when the haystacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight; only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Everybody came to buy corn at the farm, and went away pouring maledictions on the ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... to ward off the attacks of beasts, the logs which aforetime had barred the gateway lay strewn in a sprouting undergrowth, and naught but the kitchen middens remained to prove that once they had sheltered human tenants. Phorenice's influence seemed to have spread as though it were some horrid blight over the whole face of what was once a ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... year 1848, while the settlers and their families were contentedly at work developing the resources of the country, the astounding cry, "Gold discovered!" came through the valley like a blight, stopping every ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... of Puritanism. The early records of our General Court are thickly strown with appointments of Fast-Days that the people might discover the especial occasion of God's anger toward them, manifested in the blight of some expected harvest, or in a scourge upon the cattle in the field. Some among us who claim to hold unreduced or softened the old ancestral faith have been twice in late years convened in our State-House, by especial call, to legislate upon the potato-disease and the pleuro-pneumonia ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... Wenceslas shall never set foot in that woman's house. I ask you to make the sacrifice, if it is a sacrifice to forgive the husband you love so small a fault. I ask you—for the sake of my gray hairs, and of the love you owe your mother. You do not want to blight my later years with bitterness ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... woman went from door to door asking if Death had visited there, and in every home the answer was "yes!" Nowhere could she find a house that was free from the blight of Death. Then the woman saw that the only happiness lay in renouncing the ties that bound her to other human beings and in seeking the peace of Nirvana, for Buddha had taken this way of teaching her that Death is the common lot of all; ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... you know as much about certain features of this chestnut disease as I do myself; for I have only worked over certain sides of the whole question. I also presume that you are all acquainted with the fact that this disease, which is known as chestnut blight or the chestnut bark disease, is without doubt the most serious disease of any forest tree which we have had in this country at any time, that is, so far as its inroads at present appear ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... through his lips, I live in his life, his passions are my own; and it is impossible for me to know noble and pure emotions excepting in the heart of this being unsoiled by crime. You have your fancies, here I show you mine. In exchange for the blight which society has brought upon me, I give it a man of honor, and enter upon a struggle with destiny; do you wish to be ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... duchess had sunk, and gazed dreamily over the screen which she held in her hand. Some of the ladies gathered in little groups, others turned to the books and albums, one or two yawned almost openly. A kind of blight seemed falling upon them. Nell, who was unused to the phenomena of dinner parties, looked round, aghast. Were they all going to sleep? Suddenly she realized that it was at just such a moment as this that she was supposed to come in. She went ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... the works of civilization in order to prepare the country for their nomadic life; they pulled down cities to put up tents. Though they long ago ceased to be nomads, they have to this day never learned to comprehend civilized life, and they have been simply a blight upon every part of the earth's surface which they have touched. At the beginning of the eleventh century, Asia Minor was one of the most prosperous and highly civilized parts of the world;[320] and the tale of its devastation by the terrible Alp Arslan and the robber chiefs ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... that had drawn them. Dead horse or mule or bullock, decomposing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... life seems so fair and sweet, Yet tyranny is stalking here, And hate and lust and foul deceit Hang heavy on the atmosphere. Injustice seeks to throttle right, And laughter's stifled to a sigh. If death can take so great a blight From human ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... trees from some cause, after they had gone through the winter of 1950 and 1951, at a temperature of nineteen below zero without injury. It may have been they were caught last fall by a hard freeze in full foliage, early before the apples were all picked; and, again, it may be blight. I hope not. But this I do know, the hickory and black walnut in their natural habitat ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... territories the tourist can find, and still fertile,—though the hills have forgotten their fruit and the plain its river,—and capable of sustaining a much larger population than it now supports, if the Mohammedan blight were off it. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... history preserved the memory of Ralegh's exile from Court, his public life was so animated that the displeasure of the Queen need hardly have been remarked. To himself the blight on his prospects was always and dismally visible. The Queen had raised him from obscurity, and afforded his genius scope for shining. Well as he understood the value of his powers, he knew they derived still from her, as ten or a dozen years before, their opportunity of exercise. ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... she remained with William, her daughters, and her two aged unmarried sisters in the plain old house in Albany Street. But Dante Gabriel moved to Cheyne Walk, and began that craze for collecting blue china that has swept like a blight over the civilized world. His collection was sold for three thousand five hundred dollars some years after—to pay his debts—less than one-half of what it had cost him. Yet when he had money he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... upon which you are entering? Can you not see that you are passing deeper and deeper into the shadow of the past? What good can it do them? Could they speak would they say, 'We wish our sorrows to blight your life'? You are not happy, you cannot be happy. It is contrary to the law of God, it is impossible to human nature, that happiness and bitter, unrelenting enmity should exist in the same heart. You are not only unhappy, but you are in ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... 'oo's allus a turr'ble far-seeing sort of chap, 'e says, "Reckon the trolley 'ull be along fust thing i' the marnin' from the brewery, Missus?" An' when Mrs. Izod 'er says as 'er didn't know, but 'twas to be 'oped as 'twud, a sort of a blight settled down on the lot on us, which I reckon is a pretty fair way o' puttin' it, for a blight allus goes 'and-in-'and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... he cried, "'tis nigh the midnight hour and she a noted witch—heed her not lest she blight ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... ruefu' chance Has twin'd ye o' your stately trees? Has laid your rocky bosom bare— Has stripped the cleeding o' your braes? Was it the bitter eastern blast, That scatters blight in early spring? Or was't the wil'fire scorch'd their boughs, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... may no untimely blight fall on thy garland of love, no thorns be found with its glowing blossoms, no canker-worm of jealousy feed on ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... liable to several diseases, which affect the flour made from it, and render it unfit for good bread. The principal of these are the blight, mildew, and smut, which are occasioned by microscopic fungi, which sow themselves and grow upon the stems and ears, destroying the nutritive principles, and introducing matter of a deleterious kind. The farmer is at the utmost ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... flowers, of speech Which the Seven Dialecticians teach; Filthy Conjunctions, and Dissolute Nouns, And Particles picked from the kennels of towns, With Irregular Verbs for irregular jobs, Chiefly active in rows and mobs, Picking Possessive Pronouns' fobs, And Interjections as bad as a blight, Or an Eastern blast, to the blood and the sight: Fanciful phrases for crime and sin, And smacking of vulgar lips where Gin, Garlic, Tobacco, and offals go in - A jargon so truly adapted, in fact, To each thievish, obscene, and ferocious act, So fit for ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... automobile passed along the country road, the same filled with lively boys, and also a number of sacks stuffed to their utmost capacity with what appeared to be black walnuts, shell-bark hickories, butternuts, and even splendid large chestnuts. Apparently, the strange and deadly blight that was attacking the chestnut groves all through the East had not yet appeared in the highly favored region around the town of Scranton, in which place the boys in question lived, and attended the famous high school where Dr. Carmack, ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... So natural a craze, therefore, however baseless, would never have carried Lord Monboddo's name into that meteoric notoriety and atmosphere of astonishment which soon invested it in England. And, in that case, my childhood would have escaped the deadliest blight of mortification and despondency that could have been incident to a most morbid temperament concurring with a situation of visionary (yes! if you please, of fantastic) but still ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... should slow diverge, and listless stray Into some thought, feeling, or dream unright, O Watcher, my backsliding soul affray; Let me not perish of the ghastly blight. Be thou, O Life eternal, in me light; Then merest approach of selfish or impure Shall start me ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... time a small town, which modern enterprise and capital has transformed into a great manufacturing city.[763] A little farther, at St. Rambert on the Loire, an incident occurred which threatened to blight all the fair hopes the Protestants had now again begun to conceive of a speedy and prosperous conclusion of the war. Admiral Coligny fell dangerously ill, and for a time serious fears were entertained for his life. It was ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... hardly pushed to know in what way it was her duty to answer it. It would be very expedient, of course, that some story should be told for Linda which might save her from the ill report of all the world,—that some excuse should be made which might now, instantly, remove from Linda's name the blight which would make her otherwise to be a thing scorned, defamed, useless, and hideous; but the truth was the truth, and even to save her child from infamy Madame Staubach would not listen to a lie without refuting ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... withering scorn. "As if a child of mine who had her vaccination beautifully would have small-pox! No, no, it's heart-blight, neighbor, it's heart-blight, and I doubt if my girl ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... the parent species, the nuts being double the size of the wild parent and of sweet, rich quality. The trees were very shapely and bid fair to become extremely productive but a year or two later were all attacked by the dreaded blight or bark disease, then spreading from its original starting point in Long Island. The work of destruction was very rapid and by the third year all were hopelessly crippled, but a few individuals continued to send up suckers as ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... that though he was dignified by the king, he had shorn himself of all his honours in the sight of the people. The influence which the Earl of Bute was supposed to have had over him tended still more to blight his fair fame. He was taunted with being a willing agent of men whom he did not esteem, and his acceptance of a peerage was a never-failing source of invective. Moreover, in his negociations with his brother-in-law, Lord Temple, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and others; arts of grace Sappho and others vied with any man: And, last not least, she who had left her place, And bowed her state to them, that they might grow To use and power on this Oasis, lapt In the arms of leisure, sacred from the blight Of ancient influence and scorn. At last She rose upon a wind of prophecy Dilating on the future; 'everywhere Who heads in council, two beside the hearth, Two in the tangled business of the world, Two in the liberal offices of life, Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss Of science, ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... three cruel plagues,' he said, 'out through the country since I was born in the west. First, there was the big wind in 1839, that tore away the grass and green things from the earth. Then there was the blight that came on the 9th of June in the year 1846. Up to then the potatoes were clean and good; but that morning a mist rose up out of the sea, and you could hear a voice talking near a mile off across the stillness of the earth. It was the same the next ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... companion, who had taken his stand on the very site which they proposed to cover with a marble floor, shook his head and frowned, and the young man and the Lily deemed it almost enough to blight the spot and desecrate it for their airy temple that his dismal figure had thrown its shadow there. He pointed to some scattered stones, the remnants of a former structure, and to flowers such as young girls delight to nurse in ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... about China, as indeed about nearly all of the heathen world, is the spirit of stagnation. There is a deadness, or sort of stupor, over everything. It is as if a blight had spread over the land, checking all progress. Habits, customs, and institutions remain apparently as they were a thousand years ago. This stands out in sharp contrast with the spirit of growth ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... London that many an ill has spread over the land? London is the antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the great centre of corruption. I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with schools of the ordinary kind; the issue would ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... driving through a fine piece of chestnut wood as she said this. The blight had not struck these beautiful trees and they hung full of the prickly burrs. The frost of the previous night had opened many of these, and the brown nuts smiled ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... coast of Yorkshire, it seemed as if a blight hung over the land and the people. Men dodged about their daily business with hatred and suspicion in their eyes, and many a curse went over the sea to the three fatal ships lying motionless at anchor three miles off Monkshaven. When first Philip ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... "Sentinel" was founded fifty years ago, in contrast with the greatly changed conditions which confront the journals of to-day. The people of Juniata county were a well-to-do class, adapted to the primitive conditions in which they lived. The enervating blight of luxury and the despair of pinching want were strangers in their midst. They believed in the church, in the school, in the sanctity of home, in integrity between man and man. Christianity was accepted by them as the common law, sincerely by many and with a respect akin to reverence by ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... nearly forty years, and her advancing years in no way lessened his love, which was independent of beauty. Whether Stella was satisfied, who shall say? Mrs. Oliphant thought that few women would be disposed to pity Stella, or think her life one of blight or injury. Mr. Leslie Stephen says, "She might and probably did regard his friendship as a full equivalent for the sacrifice.... Is it better to be the most intimate friend of a man of genius or the ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... the hours, lest I myself mislead By blind desire wherewith my heart is torn, E'en while I speak away the moments speed, To me and pity which alike were sworn. What shade so cruel as to blight the seed Whence the wish'd fruitage should so soon be born? What beast within my fold has leap'd to feed? What wall is built between the hand and corn? Alas! I know not, but, if right I guess, Love to such joyful hope has only led To plunge my weary life in ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... condition of Godfrey Cass in this six-and-twentieth year of his life. A movement of compunction, helped by those small indefinable influences which every personal relation exerts on a pliant nature, had urged him into a secret marriage, which was a blight on his life. It was an ugly story of low passion, delusion, and waking from delusion, which needs not to be dragged from the privacy of Godfrey's bitter memory. He had long known that the delusion ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... own tubs and sent him to Rome to be dealt with properly. There was a tremendous row, it is said, when the cask was opened. In the confusion, Satan escaped; but in revenge for the trick that had been played on him, he put a blight on the vines of the Adda, and from that day to this never a liter of decent ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... but cold and altered, Like all whose hopes too soon depart; Like all on whom have beat, unsheltered, The bitter blasts that blight ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... settling with the boatman. They were now, he knew, between the two Niles, which joined their waters at Khartoum. The country here had evidently been rich and prosperous before the host of the Mahdi passed like a blight over it. They halted a few miles from the river, near a ruined and deserted village. Edgar was told to watch the camels while they plucked heads of corn from the deserted fields, while the Arabs lit a fire ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... grouping of the imagination, or a reality from without—or her, with whom I fondly hoped to have travelled the weary road of life. Friends approved—fortune smiled—one little month, and we should have been one; but it pleased Him, to whom in my present frame of mind I dare not look up, to blight my beautiful flower, to canker my rose—bud, to change the fair countenance of my Elizabeth, and send her away. She drooped and died, even like that pale flower under the scorching sun; and I was driven forth to worship Mammon, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... know!" said Kenneth. "Of course I'm devoted to these two girls, but I'm not going to let it blight my young existence and crush my whole career, just because I have to live ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... the low hills that surrounded the white walls of the presidio grew more and more to resemble in hue the leathern jacket of the commander, and Nature herself seemed to have borrowed his dry, hard glare. The earth was cracked and seamed with drought; a blight had fallen upon the orchards and vineyards, and the rain, long delayed and ardently prayed for, came not. The sky was as tearless as the right eye of the commander. Murmurs of discontent, insubordination, and plotting among ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... were to have been married just a year ago. To-day I have been going over her own story of her life—of her meeting with Darmstetter, of the blight he cast upon her, of her growth in loveliness, her brief fluttering in the sunshine, her failure, her supping with sorrow, ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... the only object for which these wretches were invented and lived, and they also seemed to be quite ready and willing to die, rather than desist a moment from their occupation. Everybody had an attack of the blight, as ophthalmia is called in Australia, which with the flies were enough to set any one deranged. Every little sore or wound on the hands or face was covered by them in swarms; they scorned to use their ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... said. We are packing our bags to leave for Brussels tomorrow. When I went to the Convent this morning, I found all the soldiers in bed and looking so wretched. Merciful Heaven! What blight could have fallen on our children over night? But it was a farce. They had heard that the officers of the regiment, here, were coming to inspect the wounded with the idea of sending those who are well enough on to Germany as, of course, they are prisoners. So the ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... blight our vines, Nor Sirius blaze above us, But you and I shall drink our wines And sing to ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... in France and Italy, who condemn the demand for these precautions as un-Christian and impolitic. Such laxness is the soil in which thrives the upas tree whose shade has so long darkened the organs of our empire and now threatens to blight the whole organism. ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... had taught her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her;—if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... After doing this, if time and energy remained, they might try some of Sir Edwin Sandys' ideas—maybe set out a few grapevines or mulberries, as they had been instructed to do. There was good reason for the growing fear among the leading adventurers in London that tobacco might put a blight ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven
... But ever a blight on their labours lay, And ever their quarry would vanish away, Till the sun-dried boys of the Black Tyrone Took a brotherly interest in Boh Da Thone: And, sooth, if pursuit in possession ends, The Boh and his trackers ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... they had no Bazimo, or none worth having, seeing they had never invented the like for them. The chief, Mankambira, likewise treated us with kindness; but wherever the slave-trade is carried on, the people are dishonest and uncivil; that invariably leaves a blight and a curse in its path. The first question put to us at the lake crossing- places, was, "Have you come to buy slaves?" On hearing that we were English, and never purchased slaves, the questioners put on a supercilious air, and sometimes refused to sell us food. This want ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... of, to break? Ours was everything a relation could be, filled to the brim with the wine of consciousness; and if it was to have no meaning, no better meaning than that such a creature as you could breathe upon it, at your hour, for blight, why was I myself dealt with all for deception? why condemned after a couple of short years to find the golden flame—oh, the golden flame!—a mere handful of black ashes?" Our young woman so yielded, at moments, to what was insidious in these foredoomed ingenuities ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... blight to find out afterwards that he was a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... more horrible than to see this man, upon whose life such a terrible blight was about to fall, so bright and ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... man nurses, Never deem them idly born; Never think that deathly curses Blight them on a ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... and wise writer, George Eliot, expressed her matured views on the subject of religious opinions in these words: "I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no faith, to have any negative propagandism left in me." This had not always been her attitude, for in her youth she had had a good deal of negative propagandism in her; but the experience of a lifetime led her to form this estimate of the value ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... happened, to ask any of my friends to receive her. Naturally, she shrinks from speaking of that terrible time, but I understand that she spent no less than three nights alone in the mountains with him. And that fact in itself would be more than sufficient to blight any girl's career from a social standpoint. I often think that the rules of our modern etiquette are very rigid, though I know well that we cannot afford to disregard them." Again came that soft, regretful sigh; and then in an apologetic tone, "You will say, I know, that for the ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... despotism. It inspires a blind and bigoted hatred of race and creed, and thus puts far out of sight the salutary truth of the brotherhood of man. Because of these and other scarcely less prominent defects in its teachings, Islam has proved a blight and curse to almost every ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... scathed by frost, that has made a strong and successful effort to live, and still in its struggling existence bears the mark of the early blight on ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... one's hope, not realize one's expectation. [cause to be disappointed] disappoint; frustrate, discomfit, crush, defeat (failure) 732; crush one's hope, dash one's hope, balk one's hope, disappoint one's hope, blight one's hope, falsify one's hope, defeat one's hope, discourage; balk, jilt, bilk; play one false, play a trick; dash the cup from the lips, tantalize; dumfound, dumbfound, dumbfounder, dumfounder (astonish) 870. Adj. disappointed &c v.; disconcerted, aghast; disgruntled; out of one's reckoning. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of health, happiness, and usefulness to many an unfortunate little waif, whose earthly inheritance is utter blackness, and whose moral blight can be outgrown and succeeded by a development of intelligence and ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Agriculture, or a speedy way to grow rich" concerning which he wrote to his agent. It deals with a great variety of subjects, such as of roots and leaves, of food of plants, of pasture, of plants, of weeds, of turnips, of wheat, of smut, of blight, of St. Foin, of lucerne, of ridges, of plows, of drill boxes, but its one great thesis was the careful cultivation by plowing of such annuals as potatoes, turnips, and wheat, crops which hitherto had been tended by hand or left to fight their battle ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... women are wont to let dawdle over the arms of chairs. Then I was a boy, with a boy's haughty way of regarding girlish softness. I was haughtier that day because I sought in my pride to cover up my debt to her. Now I am a man, but the boy's picture of Penelope Blight, the little girl in the patched blue frock and broken shoes, standing by the mountain stream, holds in the memory with ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... The black sheep was offered up a sacrifice. Evan Lamotte had flung away his last rag of respectability for his sister's sake. Henceforth he would appear in the eyes of the people doubly blackened, doubly degraded, the destroyer of his sister's happiness, the blight upon her life, and yet, he was innocent of this; he was a martyr; he the ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... projects of good, and of studying the prosperity of a nation, rather through the "microscope of experience" than by "vague, though splendid, telescopic glances" at times and things beyond our power. "The man," said he, "who discovers the cause of blight in an ear of corn, is a greater benefactor to the world than the man who discovers a new fixed star." From the glow on his countenance, and the sudden brightness of his eye, I could see that he was about to throw himself loose on some new current of rich and rapid illustration, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... before him; and placing the lamp upon the ground, and shading it with his coat, there, sure enough, not more than a dozen yards away, was a patch of light—blight moonlight. ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... rose-bushes, blooming bravely in the overgrown squares, were the only survivals of the summer splendour that I remembered. Turning out of the path, I plucked one of these gallant roses, and found it pale and sickly, with a November blight at the heart. Only the great elms still arched their bared branches unchanged against a red sunset; and now as then the small yellow leaves fluttered slowly down, like wounded ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... to brown and blue to blight Beneath the blemish of the sun; And e'en the spotless robe of white, Worn overlong, grows dim and dun Through the ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... the wrong I did you. I should never have spoken love to you at all, or if I did, I should have told you of the blight upon it; but the sky and the trees and the hill were clothed that night in the beauty that wrapt my soul and I thought that God had forgotten and had shrived me in the same sacred light. But He does not forget. That light itself cannot drive the shadow from Gethsemane and the cup has never since ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... could not see, and that the future also might reveal joys now hidden and unknown, if she would only be patient. Every rustling leaf that fluttered in the gale, but did not fall, called to her with its tiny voice: "Cling to your place, as we do, till the frost of age or the blight of disease brings the end in God's own time and way." A partridge with her brood rustled by along the edge of the forest, and the poor girl imagined she saw in the parent bird, as she led forward her plump little bevy, the pride and complacency of a happy motherhood, which now would never ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... of his race was Kano Indara; the last of a mighty line of artists. Even in this material age his fame spread as the mists of his own land, and his name was known in barbarian countries far across the sea. Tokyo might fall under the blight of progress, but Kano would hold to the traditions of his race. To live as a true artist,—to die as one,—this was his care. He might have claimed high position in the great Art Museum recently inaugurated by the new government, and housed in an abomination of pink stucco with Moorish towers ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... danger. Yes, to bolt again, as he had done that time before, would be an easy way out. But its selfishness was too obvious. He could not do it. To do so would be to drag them in his train of disaster, to blight their lives and leave them under the grinding shadow ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... surprised to recognise by their foliage, to-day, some fine mulberry trees, by Jones's Creek; perhaps they are the remains of the silk-worm experiment that Mr. C—— persuaded Major —— to try so ineffectually. While I was looking at some wild plum and cherry trees that were already swarming with blight in the shape of multitudinous caterpillars' nests, an ingenuous darkie, by name Cudgie, asked me if I could explain to him why the trees blossomed out so fair, and then all 'went off into a kind of dying.' Having directed his vision and attention to the ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... between the Deity and the devil for the possession of every soul, the latter generally being considered victorious. The flood, the tornado, the volcano, were all evidences of the displeasure of heaven and the sinfulness of man. The blight that withered, the frost that blackened, the earthquake that devoured, were the messengers ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of brotherhood is severed as flax that falls asunder at the touch of fire. Let the lot of bitter poverty be mine, and the hand of man blight every hope of earthly enjoyment, and I would prefer it to the condition of any man who lives at ease, and shares in every fancied pleasure, that the toil, the sweat, and blood of slaves can procure. Alas for the tyrant slave-holder when God shall make his award to his poor, oppressed, ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... family, for generations back, a single case of feeble-mindedness, nor of disease that would undermine the nervous organization. Close scrutiny does not reveal a single assignable cause. She came, as an accident, to blight an otherwise normal family. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... sir! Oh, I forgot you don't know. But I told these young ladies about me being in a mutiny, an' I'm under suspicion in connection with it still. I can't go in an English port, and that's a nice blight to put on a man!" he ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... ascribe all their misfortunes to his machinations. To Bula Matadi (which was the generic name by which the Government of the Congo Free State was known) was traceable the malign perversity of game, the blight of crops, the depredations of weaver birds. Bula Matadi encouraged leopards to attack isolated travellers, and would on great occasions change the seasons of the year that the N'gombi's gardens ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... he explained, "on my departure to-night. The cause hangs upon it. A blight on my evil luck!" he cried. "Were Colonel Myddelton at home, I should not be fleeing from my own country empty-handed. I shall be writing to him most of this day, but a spoken word is worth a volume of ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... briskly the conversation had been prospering hitherto, if, at Holy Mass or jovial supper board, Laurence so much as breathed a question concerning the subject next his heart, an instant blight passed over the gaiety of his companions. Fear momently wiped every other expression from their faces, and they answered with lame evasion, or more often ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... to attract customers; and the ragged boys who usually disport themselves about the streets, stand crouched in little knots in some projecting doorway, or under the canvas blind of a cheesemonger's, where great flaring gas-lights, unshaded by any glass, display huge piles of blight red and pale yellow cheeses, mingled with little fivepenny dabs of dingy bacon, various tubs of weekly Dorset, and cloudy rolls of ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... man wagged his head solemnly with a blight of forecast on his wrinkled, aged face. "That thar sayin' is goin' ter be mighty hard ter live up to whilst Jerome Ackert's critter company is a-raidin' of ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... her peculiar views and interests. Nor is it for us to decide whether these would be for the better or worse. Let the majority rule. Vox populi vox Dei. Woman's intellect would enlarge with her more commanding political condition, and though she might blight the hopes of many a promising aspirant, yet the Union would not be dissolved under her administration. Believing the time has come when an appeal on her behalf to the voters of this State will not be in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... child, imbeshreer. It's got my eyes and nose. It's a rare handsome baby, imbeshreer. Only it won't be its mother's fault if the Almighty takes it not back again. Milly has picked up so many ignorant Lane women who come in and blight the child, by admiring it aloud, not even saying imbeshreer. And then there's an old witch, a beggar-woman that Ephraim, my son-in-law, used to give a shilling a week to. Now he only gives her ninepence. She asked him ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... one is born in blight, Victim of perpetual slight: When thou lookest on his face, Thy heart saith 'Brother, go thy ways! None shall ask thee what thou doest, Or care a rush for what thou knowest. Or listen when thou repliest, Or remember where thou liest, Or how thy supper is ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... so, dear father," she answered, gently, "it has been because I knew your secret must be a painful one. I have lain awake night after night, wondering what was the cause of the blight that has been upon you and all you have done. But why should I ask you questions that you could not answer without pain? I have heard people say cruel things of you; but they have never said them twice in my hearing." Her eyes flashed through a veil of tears as she spoke. "Oh, father,—dearest ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the heat of the toilsome day. Look up! the lengthening shadows are falling like dew upon you! tired hearts, look up! purple-red hangs the clustering fruit of your life-long work; the vintage has come, the freest from blight that can ever come—the vintage of a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... country, or seemed so; more sedate and more conventional. She also noticed as they walked along that he was saluted by a great many people, and also, before she had done with him that morning, she noticed that the leery, impudent looking, coloured folk seemed to come under a blight as they passed him, giving him the wall and yards to spare. It was as though the impersonification of the blacksnake whip were walking with her as well as a most notoriously dangerous man, a man ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole |
