"Bog" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... genuine love wearing the disguise of temper. This day of all days she insisted disrespectfully, with rustic fury, that Mrs. Weir should stay at home. But, "No, no," she said, "it's my lord's orders," and set forth as usual. Archie was visible in the acre bog, engaged upon some childish enterprise, the instrument of which was mire; and she stood and looked at him a while like one about to call; then thought otherwise, sighed, and shook her head, and proceeded on her rounds alone. The house lasses were at the burnside washing, and saw her pass ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was able to head a party, and started off in quest of bog myrtle along the bank, returning with great armfuls of the delicious-smelling aromatic shrub to cast into the ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... came the swish, swish o' galloping hoofs in dry bracken, for Scaurdale was a bog-trooper and born wi' spurs on, and I heard the whimper o' the wean, and a gruff voice petting. Belle was greetin' softly, and as Dan made to lift ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... native well with a little water at the bottom. It was an extraordinary little spot, and being funnel shaped, I doubted whether any animal but a bird or a black man could get down to it, and I also expected it would prove a hideous bog; but my little friend (W.A.) seemed so determined to test its nature, and though it was nearly four feet to the water, he quietly let his forefeet slip down into it, and though his hindquarters were high and dry above his head he got a good drink, which he told me in his language ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... ground. The buffaloes had wallowed in the wet season and made round well-like holes that were now hard, dry pitfalls. Here and there a treacherous, slimy watercourse wound its slinking way along, making a bog in which a horse would sink to his shoulders; and over all these traps and pitfalls the long waving jungle-grass drew a veil. Every now and then belts of small bamboo were crossed, into which the horses dashed blindly, forcing their way through by their weight. When ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... was on the point of giving up the effort, and waiting till day light. By slow degrees, however, he went forward—sometimes, indeed, sinking unexpectedly deep into the mud; or, when he thought himself firm on a bog—sliding away, and coming down upon all fours. At length it was his good fortune, to emerge from the thicket, in an hour or so from which, he knocked at the door of the gentleman to whom he had been referred by the ...
— Whig Against Tory - The Military Adventures of a Shoemaker, A Tale Of The Revolution • Unknown
... gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of innocence—the innocence of a young star-browed calf, for example, that, being inclined for a promenade out of bounds, leads you a severe steeplechase over hedge and ditch, and only comes to a stand in the middle of a bog. ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... strange country. Nearer, a red-roofed, broad farm with white base and square dots of windows crouched beside the wall of beech foliage on the wood's edge. There were long strips of rye and clover and pale green corn. And just at his feet, below the knoll, was a darkish bog, where globe flowers stood breathless still on their slim stalks. And some of the pale gold bubbles were burst, and a broken fragment hung in the air. He thought he ...
— The Prussian Officer • D. H. Lawrence
... for their laziness. There are many ample stretches of meadow-land at a short distance from the coast, completely covered with bog, and passable only with great precautions, which the construction of a few ditches would thoroughly drain. Capital grass would then spring up in abundant crops. It is well known that such will grow in Iceland, for the hillocks which rise above the swamps are luxuriantly ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... Terra del Fuegan could envy. For the 'owners' of this land, who live in London and Paris, many of them having never seen their estates, find cattle more profitable than men, and so the men have been driven off. It is only when you reach the bog and the rocks in the mountains and by the sea shore, that you find a dense population. Here they are crowded together on land on which nature never intended men to live. It is too poor for grazing, so the people who have been driven from the better lands are ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... which she poured a whole stream that turned two mills, and afforded the best trout in the country. The bottom of the bason, however, was so ill secured, that it would not hold the water which strained through the earth, and made a bog of the whole plantation: in a word, the ground which formerly payed him one hundred and fifty pounds a year, now cost him two hundred pounds a year to keep it in tolerable order, over and above the first expence of ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... and window-shutters closed, a pair of candles on the table, and a couple of faggots of that pleasant bog-wood, which blazes so readily and fragrantly on the hearth, Irons shook off his cloak, and stood, lank and grim, and, as it seemed to Mervyn, horribly scared, but well in view, and trying, sullenly, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... our base of supplies, and the next morning in our two canoes started with our hunters to explore this wonderful bay. At high tide Chinitna Bay extends inland some fifteen miles, but at low water is one vast bog of glacial deposit. Rugged mountains rise on all sides, and at the base of these mountains there are long meadows which extend out to the high water mark. In these meadows during the month of June the bears come to feed upon the young and ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... "Tendencies of one's Time"! O those dismal Phantoms, conjured up by the blatant Book-taster and the Indolent Reviewer! How many a poor Soul, that would fain have been honest, have they bewildered into the Slough of Despond and the Bog of Beautiful Ideas!—R.B. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... writing a book, what would you like to talk about, Mr. Barton?" she asked conscientiously. "Would you like to talk about peat-bog fossils?" ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... for hours listening to its murmurs over its pebbly bed, and sometimes even sleep in the hollows of its banks, or below the willows that overhung it. Every here and there, a brown rivulet from some peat-bog on a hill—brown and clear, like smoke-crystals molten together, flowed into it, and when he had lost it, guided him back to his guide. Farm after farm he passed, here one widely bordering a valley stream, there another stretching its skirts up the ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... care of them. On fine days he led them to pasture into a bog paddock near the farm up against a pretty wood of silver beeches. A large pond of clear water covered one corner of the meadow and lost itself in the reeds and iris. There the fine big cows went to quench their thirst; quantities of frogs went ...
— The Curly-Haired Hen • Auguste Vimar
... When the mother reappeared they were worrying the baby between them as a couple of hound puppies worry the hind leg of a cub. She beat them faithfully with a broom and hove both of them out into the wide wet world, and we all slept in a bog that night, and William was much abused and loathed. But that was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... ——"So eagerly the Fiend O'er bog, or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way, And swims, or sinks, or wades, or ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the devil, chuckling joyous to himself across the bog? No, only an innocent little snipe, getting merry over the change of weather, bleating to his companions as though breeding time were come ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... at the vicarage there was a big bay-window which looked out across a desolate stretch of bog to a wild headland, against which the waves beat tempestuously in almost all weathers. The headland itself was high, but the giant breakers often dashed up far above it, and fell in showers of spray on the grass at the top. There was a telescope in the window at the vicarage, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... to walk 'in the name of the Lord' that he was lost in the desert, and never reached his journey's end. The peoples who walked in the name of any false god will find their path ending as on the edge of a precipice, or in an unfathomable bog; loss, and woe, and shame will be their portion. But 'the name of the Lord is a strong tower,' into which whoever will may run and be safe, and to walk in the name of the Lord is to walk on a way 'that shall be called the Way of Holiness, whereon no ravenous beast shall go up, but the redeemed ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... two boulders, or for the haunting and the piping of the gulls. It was older than man; it was found so by incoming Celts, and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's priests. The earthy savour of the bog plants, the rude disorder of the boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the isle,—all ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... four or five were left behind, for they feared the soft ground near the river, and did not know the pass through it. But Sir William knew it, and those who remained close to him got over that trouble. Burgo, who would still lead, nearly foundered in the bog;—but he was light, and his horse pulled him through,—leaving a fore-shoe in the mud. After that Burgo was contented to give Sir ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... sped on its winter-day journey, did it shine into any cabin in an Irish bog more desolate than these Cherry Street "homes"? An army of thousands, whose one bright and wholesome memory, only tradition of home, is that poverty-stricken cabin in the desolate bog, are herded in such barracks ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... landing on the river. The farm place was on the north side of the river on the old wagon road what run from Fort Smith out to Fort Gibson, and that old road was like you couldn't hardly call a road when I first remember seeing it. The ox teams bog down to they bellies in some places, and the wagon wheel mighty nigh bust on the big rocks in ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... savage shore, I cried, 'Such is the grave, and such are its terrific sides; those moors and wilds over which I have passed are the rough and dreary journey of life. Cheered with hope, we struggle along through all the difficulties of moor, bog, and mountain, to arrive at—what? The grave and its dreary sides. Oh, may hope not desert us in the last hour—hope in ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... affairs, almost as difficult to find, at times, by his own followers, as by the enemy. He was the true model of a partisan in a country, like ours, of swamp and thicket; leading the pursuing foe, like Puck, "through bog and through briar," till he wearied out his patience, exhausted his resources, and finally laid him open for defeat. He seldom lingered long in any one spot, changing his ground frequently, with Indian policy; ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... Helen and Margaret to assist her, ruled over a table shaped like a shamrock and laden with articles carved from bog oak, and with china animals and photographs of Ireland and ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... that is on my back. Now I saw in my dream, that, just as they had ended this talk, they drew near to a very miry slough that was in the midst of the plain; and they, being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was De spond.[13] Here, therefore, they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt; and Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the bar, raised the window and wriggled through head first, breaking our fall in the bush outside. We got through without attracting attention and ran across the country into a swamp, where we soon lost our way and wallowed around all night up to our knees in the bog, suffering severely from the cold and damp. Early in our flight the report of a gun from the camp warned us that our absence had been discovered. Our adventure in the swamp saved us from capture, for the roads were patrolled by cavalry ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with: (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood— Bog, clay and rubble, ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... involved with wandering sophistries and diatribes of self-blame. His mind had trampled upon itself in throes of introspection until it was often difficult to say which way the paths of the narrative really led. He had thought so much and acted so little that he travelled in a veritable bog of indecision. And yet, withal, some ideas, by constant attrition, had acquired a really striking form. "I am afraid before life," he said. "It makes me ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... stream of water flowed on each side of a hard, rock trail that ran straight through the center of the basin, and on both sides of the trail a black bog of quicksand spread, covering the entire ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... camp distinctly has its drawbacks. Across part of it are open drainage ditches; and another part, where no ditches are, is a slippery bog after any rain. Drilling on such a field distracts you between the natural desire to pick your footing, and the officers' constant command to keep your eyes up. We are told that the city of Plattsburg is very generous in providing this ground, and doubtless it was to begin with; yet I wonder ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... in the sheath, and gradually passes into the more insoluble ferric oxide. These actions are of extreme importance in nature, as their continuation results in the enormous deposits of bog-iron ore, ochre, and—since Molisch has shown that the iron can be replaced by manganese ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... into the right way, and when he got to the Castle it was full of folk and horses; so full it made one giddy to look at them. But Halvor was so ragged and torn from having followed the West Wind through bush and brier and bog, that he kept on one side, and wouldn't show himself till the last day when the bridal ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen
... used to be in England. The plant, from its grace and finished elegance, being a great favorite of mine, I should like to see it as frequently and of as luxuriant a growth at home, and asked their mode of culture, which I here mark down, for the benefit of all who may be interested. Make a bed of bog-earth and sand, put down slips of the fuchsia, and give them a great deal of water,—this is all they need. People have them out here in winter, but perhaps they would not bear the ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... food for the mind," said Otto; "they are as words in season; there must be movement in the lake, otherwise it will become a bog." ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... Castle. At first he was honorably treated, and allowed to indulge in hunting and other amusements; but he made an attempt to escape, and was only recaptured in consequence of his horse having plunged into a bog, whence he could not extricate himself. After this he was more closely guarded, and it is said that his eyes were put out; but there is reason to hope that this may not be true. He was under the charge of Robert, an illegitimate son of Henry, who had married Amabel Fitzaymon, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... seats were placed in order for the guests. Behind every seat stood a gigantic Highlander, completely dressed and armed after the fashion of his country, holding in his right hand his drawn sword, with the point turned downwards, and in the left a blazing torch made of the bog-pine. This wood, found in the morasses, is so full of turpentine, that, when split and dried, it is frequently used in the Highlands instead of candles. The unexpected and somewhat startling apparition was seen by the red glare of the torches, which displayed ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... Connemara peasants are none the less real because they are the product of observation by one who did not live among them. They show, as Miss Barlow says, that "there are plenty of things beside turf to be found in a bog." It is true that they represent a slight spirit of condescension, entirely absent from the work of Padraic Colum, for instance, but they approach far more closely to the heart of the Irish fishermen and farmers than ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... in making it known that Lawrence was prospering. This gave Foster a hint that he acted on later. They, however, shot a brace of partridges in a turnip field, a widgeon that rose from a reedy tarn, and a woodcock that sprang out of a holly thicket in a bog. It was a day of gleams of sunlight, passing showers, and mist that rolled about the hills and swept away, leaving the long slopes in transient brightness, checkered with the green of mosses and the red of withered fern. The sky cleared as they turned homewards, and when they ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... Dripping from the bog-holes and lathered with mud, it was the mystery of Breault's noiseless presence somewhere near him in the still night that drew Peter continually deeper ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... dazed with fear—as they reach at last some house and welcome human companionship, of the wild baying of the hounds that drifted through the murk night to their ears, or of the sudden vision of the pack passing at whirlwind speed across bog and marsh urged onward by a grim black figure astride a giant dark horse from whose smoking ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... turf in this cold weather; and Mrs. Johnson[46] and the Dean in person, with all their servants, forced to assist at the bog, in gathering up the wet ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... girls, Peggy and Nancy, were six and seven years old. Edmund was not yet nine, but he was a stout-grown, healthy boy, and well disposed to work. He had been used to bring home turf from the bog on his back, to lead cart-horses, and often to go on errands for gentlemen's families, who paid him a sixpence or a shilling, according to the distance which he went, so that Edmund, by some or other of these little employments, was, as he ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... event of aggression, he could so bog down the aggressor's supply lines and troop movements with continuous rains and snowstorms that it would be all but impossible for ...
— Summer Snow Storm • Adam Chase
... strewn about in heaps like straw or rushes. His horse waded in blood and bones to the belly; for the Kalevide slaughtered his enemies by tens of thousands, and would have utterly annihilated them, but, as he was pursuing the fugitives over hill and dale, his horse lost his footing in a bog, and ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... every evening, and touch the tips of my wings on it every morning, when I expand them to fly; yet I have not seen the Owl either older or younger than she appears to be at this day. But there is one older than I am, and that is the Frog of Mochno Bog, and if he does not know her age, there is not a creature living that ...
— Welsh Fairy-Tales And Other Stories • Edited by P. H. Emerson
... demands of spiritual functions upon the time of the monks, they cannot fairly be charged with "agricultural indolence." Their glebe consisted entirely of marsh and bog when the Abbacy was created. By 1218—i.e., in about twenty years—it had all been ditch-drained and reclaimed. The beneficial results of their labour are noticeable to-day. Fields immediately adjoining the ruin exhibit quite a different ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... days; that is to say, whether he held a court, taxed his subjects, collected revenue, kept up a standing army, sent ambassadors to foreign countries, and did all which kings do nowadays? or whether his shillelagh was his sceptre, and his domain some furze-crowned hills and a bog, the intricacies of which were known only to himself? whether he was arrayed in jewelled robes, with a crown of gold weighing on his temples? or whether he went bare-legged and bare-armed, with his bare ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... as thick to-day As flakes of snow stood yesterday, On fence and roof and twig. The orchis binds her feather on For her old lover, Don the Sun, Revisiting the bog! ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... on to the dun [1]and they unharness their horses in the place where the bog and the river meet south [W.1227.] of the dun of the macNechta.[1] And the little boy sprang out of the chariot onto the green. Thus was the green of the dun, with a pillar-stone upon it and an iron band around that, and a band for prowess it was, and there was a writing in ogam at its ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... silence reigned over the country. The rocks around her were covered with mourning-lichen, and the pale snow-lichens grew in crevices of the mountains; here and there stuck out from the black earth-rind the bog-lichen, a little pale-yellow sulphur-coloured flower, which the Lapland sagas use in the magic arts, and which here gives the impression of a ghastly smile upon these fields of death. Susanna could not free herself from the remembrance of her dream; ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... a little past eleven, and within the half-hour were at Gretna Green. Thence we rushed onward into Scotland through a flat and dreary tract of country, consisting mainly of desert and bog, where probably the moss-troopers were accustomed to take refuge after their raids into England. Anon, however, the hills hove themselves up to view, occasionally attaining a height which might almost be called mountainous. In about two hours we reached Dumfries, and alighted ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... Bog of Cree. It is a salt-water marsh formed by an inroad of the sea, and so intersected is it with dangerous swamps and treacherous pitfalls of liquid mud, that no man would venture through it unless he had the guidance of one of the few peasants who ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a deceitful hope that the end of his journey was near, by the apparition of a twinkling light or two; but, as he came up, he was disappointed to find that the gleams proceeded from some of those farm-houses which occasionally ornamented the surface of the extensive bog. At length, to complete his perplexity, he arrived at a place where the road divided into two. If there had been light to consult the relics of a finger-post which stood there, it would have been of little avail, as, according to the good custom of North Britain, the inscription had been ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... "That is the great Grimpen Mire," said he. "A false step yonder means death to man or beast. Only yesterday I saw one of the moor ponies wander into it. He never came out. I saw his head for quite a long time craning out of the bog-hole, but it sucked him down at last. Even in dry seasons it is a danger to cross it, but after these autumn rains it is an awful place. And yet I can find my way to the very heart of it and return alive. By George, there is another ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... I with a mind sore and inflamed. I did not clearly understand what had happened to me. I had blundered, offended, entangled myself; and I had no more conception than a beast in a bog what it was had got me, or the method or even the need of escape. The desires and passionate excitements, the anger and stress and strain and suspicion of the last few months had worn deep grooves in my brain, channels without end or issue, out of which it seemed ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... they were talking about her, and they knew she had been whipped and sent to bed. "I'd been gone all day since morning. I had a great way of straying off in the woods," said she. "I suppose mother was put to it when she see me coming in, all bog-mud, ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... miserable sickness; nor could I ever distinguish what particular fish it was that hurt me. All day it streamed rain; there was no dry spot to be found; and when I lay down that night, between two boulders that made a kind of roof, my feet were in a bog. ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... Trondhjem the great increase of the indebtedness of the landowners is ascribed in part to the subdivision of property by the creation of Myrmoend, literally 'bogmen' (bog-trotters?), or men supplied gratuitously, in recent times, with small plots of waste land, for the purpose of qualifying them as voters. Subdivision has likewise resulted from the partition of ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... frontier, the Germans walked straight into a bog, and since then they have been sucked deeper and deeper into the mud of their own misdeeds and calumnies. They were ankle-deep at Liege, waist-deep at Louvain, the bog rises even to their lips to-day. In the desperate efforts which they make to free themselves they ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... in the gray; and under that, miles away in the west, a great dash of silver light struck upon the sea, and glowed there so that the eye could scarcely bear it. Was it the damp that brought the perfumes of the moorland so distinctly toward them—the bog-myrtle, the water-mint and wild thyme? There were no birds to be heard. The crimson masses of heather on the gray rocks seemed to have grown richer and deeper in color, and the Barvas hills had become large and weird in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... Charles Asgill; and, ludicrously enough, once more they were suffered to escape by the eternal delays of the "late Needham." At length, however, after many skirmishes, and all varieties of local success, they finally dispersed upon a bog in the county of Dublin. Many desperadoes, however, took up their quarters for a long time in the dwarf woods of Killaughrim, near Enniscorthy, assuming the trade of marauders, but ludicrously designating themselves the Babes in the Wood. It is an inexplicable fact, that many deserters from ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Henry. You see, he's always makin' little of Irish things, an' I have no use for a man like that. Not but what some people think too much of Ireland an' too little of other places. Many's a time I get ragin' mad when I hear some of the Nationalists bleatin' about Ireland as if a bit of bog in the Atlantic were worth the rest of the world put together. Do you know what, I'm goin' to say somethin' that'll surprise you. I don't believe Irishmen'll think properly about Ireland 'til they stop thinkin' ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... end of the Social War (B.C. 88), when Sulla marched to Rome at the head of his army, and Marius was compelled to take flight, he "stripped himself, plunged into the bog (Paludes Minturnenses, near the mouth of the Liris), amidst thick water and mud.... They hauled him out naked and covered with dirt, and carried him to Minturnae." Afterwards, when he sailed for Carthage, he had no sooner landed than he was ordered ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... opening of our railway system in 1828, was the bridging of the Chat Moss, on the Liverpool and Manchester line. George Stephenson, the constructer of the "Rocket," was also the hero of the Chat Moss. This moss was a great swamp or bog, four miles in extent, which was so soft that it could not be walked on with safety, and in some places an iron rod laid on the surface would sink by its own weight. Like many other difficulties in this world, the solidification of the Chat Moss was said to be impossible, but ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... ran! But he was no longer among bog and heather. He was running—shambling now—along a road. The loping pursuit of that nameless, shapeless Something sounded like an ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... Castle, the ancestral residence of Barry Lyndon, Esq., with the projected improvements, in which the castle was represented as about the size of Windsor, with more ornaments to the architecture; and eight hundred acres of bog falling in handy, I purchased them at three pounds an acre, so that my estate upon the map looked to be no insignificant one. [Footnote: On the strength of this estate, and pledging his honour that it was not mortgaged, Mr. Barry Lyndon borrowed ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... spluttered in the boggiest places the lovely sunshine had left, till we found places squashy and squeezy enough to please the most particular and coolest of cranberry minds; and then each of us choosing a little special bed of bog, the tufts were deeply put in with every manner of tacit benediction, such as might befit a bog and a berry, and many an expressed thanksgiving to Susie and to the kind sender of the luxuriant plants. I have never had gift from you, dear Susie, more truly interesting and ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... crossed the flat, marshy bottom of an old glaciated valley, in which one of our mules got thoroughly mired while searching for the succulent grasses which cover the treacherous bog. Fording the Vilcabamba River, which here is only a tiny brook, we climbed out of the valley and turned westward. On the mountains above us were vestiges of several abandoned mines. It was their discovery in 1572 or thereabouts which brought Ocampo and the first Spanish settlers ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... to the neck as he was in the bog of failure, the doctor was going to Wyoming with a good many practical advantages ahead of thousands of his fellows. Before turning doctor he had been a farmer's boy; and he told himself that, failing in his solid determination to get up to the starting-line in his ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... of sediment, and prevented from percolating through the soil, stagnate, and cause, at the same time, decay and vicious vegetation. They are seldom deep, and can usually be reclaimed by subsoiling or otherwise breaking the pan, and so drying the upper layers of bog. Bog-turf is largely employed on Exmoor as fuel. On other precipitous descents, winter torrents have washed away all the earth, and left avalanches of bare loose stones, called, in the western dialect, "crees." To descend these crees at a slapping pace in the course of a stag-hunt, requires ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... on it. The witnesses would have done that, if it were true; but in this was the beauty of my art, and had I been permitted to say to the jury what I've said to you, the young man would have been clear. It wouldn't have been gospel, but where's the merit of a lawyer, if he can't go through a bog? This is one of the sweetest and most delightful features of the profession. Sir, it is putting the wings of fiction to the lifeless and otherwise immovable ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... leaped into the air after the flies, set little clouds of sand shimmering as they darted up and down or, when surprised, wriggled away into favorite holes and hiding places beneath the banks and trailing weeds. Ling and wortleberry too were moorland visitors in the valley, and the bog heather already budded. ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... what are the sufferings of Ireland, and what is the Land Relief enactment?" He replied: "I will tell you. Suppose I am a landlord and you a tenant. You rent from me a place for ten pounds a year. You improve it. You turn it from a bog into a garden. You put a house upon it. After a while I, the landlord, come around, and I say to my agent: 'How much rent is this man paying;' He answers, 'Ten pounds.' 'Is that all? Put his rent up to twenty pounds.' The tenant goes ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... BOG LANDER. An Irishman; Ireland being famous for its large bogs, which furnish the chief fuel in many ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... TO GARDEN PLANTS. Containing Descriptions of the Hardiest and most Beautiful Annuals and Biennials, Hardy Herbaceous and Bulbous Perennials, Hardy Water and Bog Plants, Flowering and Ornamental Trees and Shrubs, Conifers, Hardy Ferns, Hardy Bamboos and other Ornamental Grasses; and also the best kinds of Fruit and Vegetables that may be grown in the Open Air in the British Islands, with Full and Practical Instructions ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... Hair,' after, please," begged Hancock, the indicted pagan. "It will aptly prove my disputation. This wild Celt has a bog-theory of music that predates the cave-man—and he has the unadulterated stupidity to call ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... cultivated land about it; and he is told that all beyond that is barrenness and desolation, until he reach the valley of the Spey. The pine-trees at the same time decrease in number, the hills become less craggy and abrupt, and the country in general assumes a bleak, bare, windy, bog-and-moor appearance, that is apt to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... Julian, who had been leaning over towards the cigarette bog, glanced around at his friend. There was a frown on Furley's forehead. He withdrew his pipe from ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... edge of the bog, knelt down, drew aside a branch of witch-hopple. A man's footprint was plainly visible ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... eastern side of Swansea Bay enters the Vale of Neath, where is also a manufacturing town of rapid growth, while within the Vale is beautiful scenery. Neath is of great antiquity, having been the Nidum of the days of Antoninus. At the Crumlyn Bog, where white lilies blossom on the site of an ancient lake, legend says is entombed a primitive city, in proof whereof strains of unearthly music may be occasionally heard issuing from beneath the waters. In ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... mapped out our course in advance by daylight, for just such a contingency; so I struck boldly out. I was still in the swamp to my knees, and under those conditions even the short start we had might prove sufficient, since our pursuers would also bog down. The swamp was intersected by a series of small ditches and scattered bushes, which added to the difficulty of the passage. I heard Brumley floundering and swearing behind and went back to pull him out of a bottomless ditch. Simmons joined us while I was still struggling with him. In ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... but about three in the afternoon the sky became overcast, and almost at the same moment we discovered that we had strayed from the track. The country in that district resembles the more western parts of Brittany, in consisting of huge tracts of bog and moorland strewn with rocks and covered with gorse; which present a cheerful aspect in sunshine, but are savage and barren to a degree when viewed through sheets of rain or ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... hospital parade to ask to be excused. The doctor, for some reason, was absent, and, failing his order, I was compelled to join the ride in the manege. It was a beastly morning, and the field was a mere bog. We were splashed to the very buttons of our forage-caps, and the horses were loaded with mud to the flaps of the saddles. I was tired and faint enough before the ride was over, but my poor beast had to be groomed ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... sit down in his chief's presence. If I were Secretary of State (and such there have been amongst men of letters since Addison's days) I should not like to kneel when I went in to my audience with my despatch-bog. If I were Under-Secretary, I should not like to have to stand, whilst the Right Honourable Benjamin or the Right Honourable Sir Edward looked over the papers. But there is a modus in rebus: there ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as practically true as if you stepped into a bog and then sat in it and looked forlorn and said. "What a terrible thing it is that I should be in a bog like this; just think of having to sit in a black, muddy bog all the time," and staying there you made no effort ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... long country roads in the darkness. Something seemed always to retard me: my feet were weighted with lead, invisible hands were pulling me back. I heard him whistling in the distance, then I stumbled, and a black bog engulfed me, and I ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... that Quin was floundering in the bog of poverty, illness and despair, Eleanor Bartlett was triumphantly climbing the peak of achievement. "Phantom Love," after weeks of strenuous rehearsal and nerve-racking uncertainty, had had its premiere performance at Atlantic City ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... continued he, growing bolder from his companion's confidence, and the little notice the apparition seemed to take of them. "She hirples like a hen on a het girdle. I redd ye, Earnscliff" (this he added in a gentle whisper), "let us take a cast about, as if to draw the wind on a buck—the bog is no abune knee-deep, and better a saft road as bad company." [The Scots use the epithet soft, IN MALAM PARTEM, in two cases, at least. A SOFT road is a road through quagmire and bogs; and SOFT weather signifies ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... and thought to myself that whenever I came to this subject I should have to be savage against myself; and I wondered how savage you would be. I trembled a little. My only hope was that something could be made out of the bog N. American forms, which you rank as a geographical race; and possibly hereafter out of the Sicilian species. Guess, then, my satisfaction when I found that you yourself made a loophole (143/1. This perhaps refers to a passage ("N.H. Review," 1863, page 79) in which Falconer allows the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... case (27). They may be often seen sweeping swiftly along near the earth, intent upon their prey. The last cases of diurnal birds of prey (28-30) contain the Harriers. These are birds of prey that meet their victims on the ground, and frequent bog-lands. The specimens here presented, include the secretary of the Cape of Good Hope; the chanting falcon from the same region; the ash-coloured falcon, hen-harrier, and ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... with all deference, I would beg t' observe that we have got to examine the nature of changes before we have a warrant to call them progress, which word is supposed to include a bettering, though I apprehend it to be ill-chosen for that purpose, since mere motion onward may carry us to a bog or a precipice. And the questions I would put are three: Is all change in the direction of progress? if not, how shall we discern which change is progress and which not? and thirdly, how far and in what way can we act upon the course of change so as to promote it where ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... head. "Putting it coarsely, gentlemen, such was the case," he said. "And away at his wit's end he hasteneth, waning and shivering, to a great bog or quagmire—that my friend Pliable will answer to—and plungeth in. 'Tis the same story repeated. He could be temperate in nought. I knew the bog well; but I knew the stepping-stones better. Believe me, I have traversed the narrow way this same Christian ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... drew near. After the marriage, the Pig and his bride set out for his home in one of the royal carriages. On the way they passed a great bog, and the Pig ordered the carriage to stop, and got out and rolled about in the mire till he was covered with mud from head to foot; then he got back into the carriage and told his wife to kiss him. What was the poor girl to ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... people on this continent or suggested by the ones in use and are typically American; and the designs are suited to the arctics, the tropics, and temperate climes; also to the plains, the mountains, the desert, the bog, and even the water. ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... asked him abruptly one day, "Pray, sir, what and where is Palmyra? I heard somebody talk last night of the ruins of Palmyra." "'Tis a hill in Ireland," replies Johnson, "with palms growing on the top, and a bog at the bottom, and so they call it Palm-mira." Seeing, however, that the lad thought him serious, and thanked him for the information, he undeceived him very gently indeed: told him the history, geography, and chronology of Tadmor in the wilderness, with every incident ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... then it threw back a hundredfold clear echo. In between came the dull crack of the Russian shrapnel. They broke in the broad, swampy lowlands of the Rawka; they pierced the cover of ice which broke with a tremendous noise while dark fountains of bog water gushed up from the ground. In front and in back of the German batteries one could see the craters made by the Russian hits; they were dark holes where the hard frozen ground had been broken up into thick, slaglike pieces ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... each other on our escape from this 'Serbonian Bog,' and wiped our arms (half of which were rendered unserviceable by the mud) we once more pushed forward to our object, within a few hundred yards of which we found ourselves about half an hour before sunrise. Here I formed the detachment into three divisions, and ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... continued Sir Felix, "long life and good luck to you, in your stationary quarters, and may His Majesty never find a more active enemy than yourself!—By the soul of my grandmother, it would be well for poor Ireland, who has taken leave of her senses, if her bog-trotting marauders were as peaceably inclined as you are.—Fait and troth, but you're a fine looking lad after all, and with the assistance of your master, and a touch of Prometheus, we might raise a regiment of braver fellows than the King's Guards, without bounty or beat of drum, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... sturdy limbs doth bind; And many songsters, worth a name in song, Plain, homely birds my boy-love sanctified, On hedge and tree and grassy bog, prolong Sweet loves and cares, in carols sweetly plied; In such dear strains their simple natures gush That through my heart at ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... at length enabled to inform the Public that we have, at a vast expense, completed our arrangements for the transmission of the earliest news from Ireland. We have just received the Over-bog Mail, which contains facts of a most interesting nature. We hasten to lay our sagacious correspondent's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... States, where the wages of labor are thrice as much as here: who pockets the difference? Of course, there is stealing in the assessment of land damages; but so there is everywhere. When I was in Galway, a case was tried in which a proprietor, whose bog was crossed by the Midland Railroad, sued the company for more than the Appraisers had awarded him, and it was proved on the trial that his bog, utterly worthless before, had been partially drained and considerably increased ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... evident signs on the part of the road of retrograding into lane-ism; the county had evidently deserted it, and though made for cars and coaches, its traffic appeared to be now confined to donkeys carrying turf home from the bog, in double kishes on their back. Presently the fragments of a bridge presented themselves, but they too were utterly fallen away from their palmy days, and in their present state afforded but indifferent stepping-stones over a bog stream which ran, or rather ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... of 8 or ten horses but they had been wandering about in such a confused manner that we not only lost the track of the hose which we had been pursuing but could make nothing of them. in the head of this valley we passed a large bog covered with tall grass and moss in which were a great number of springs of cold pure water, we now turned a little to the left along the foot of the high hills and arrived at a small branch on which we encamped for the night, having traveled in different directions ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... road, you are plumb wrong. Every once in a while a tree would unload its snow down our backs. "Jeems" kept stumbling and threatening to break our necks. At last we got down the mountain-side, where new danger confronted us,—we might lose sight of the smoke or ride into a bog. But at last, after what seemed hours, we came into a "clearing" with a small log house and, what is rare in Wyoming, a fireplace. Three or four hounds set up their deep baying, and I knew by the chimney and the hounds that it was the home of ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... water ore, which is gathered like oysters, that mixed with bog ore and magnetic iron, and smelted with charcoal, the result as obtained is strong, ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... ribbon of lazy water twisting in a vague, perplexing way through the broad marsh of wild rice and flags, till they saw the chief village of the Outagamies on a tract of rising ground a little above the level of the bog.[348] It consisted of bark wigwams, without palisades or defences of any kind. Its only inmates were three squaws and one old man. These were all seized, and, to the horror of Pere Crespel, the chaplain, ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... of Nurse Nancy's spectacles was a real tragedy. Between the hills and the sea spectacles are not found growing like limpets on the rocks, or shaking on the wind like the bog-flowers. The rule in Trimleston House with regard to these necessary articles was that Granny's cast-off spectacles fell to Nancy, who was younger than her mistress, and who was nicely suited by glasses that had ceased to ...
— Terry - Or, She ought to have been a Boy • Rosa Mulholland
... sounds of distress, now pausing, then beginning afresh. The child, recovering her courage, hurried forward to the spot from which they came. Behind the first low-growing clump of willows the ground was wet and swampy; and fast caught in the bog stood two children;—a little girl, who was screaming with all her might, and a boy, who was tugging at his sister's arm as hard as he could. When he found that he could not pull her out he too began to cry aloud. Elsli came to their aid, and lifted the little ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... him his flannel vest and shirt, a neck-cloth of very fine muslin, and over all a black silk stock; finally a round vest of white pique, and either a chasseur's or grenadier's coat, usually the former. His toilet ended, he was presented with his handkerchief, his tobacco-box, and a little shell bog filled with aniseed and licorice, ground very fine. It will be seen by the above that the Emperor had himself dressed by his attendants from head to foot. He put his hand to nothing, but let himself be ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... with a ruined village at the top. At its foot flows a river whose source is at Tel Serraia [Arabic], a hill two hours W. of Dilly, likewise with a ruined village. The river works a mill near Dilly. In winter and spring time the district of Dilly is a deep bog; at four hours farther is a village [p.657] called Shemskein [Arabic], of considerable size, and in a prosperous state. Three hours farther is Tafs [Arabic], a village, ruined by the Wahabis in June ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... he run a fox south. Thinks I, the fox'll take a whirl back and cross the big runway; and, sure enough, it warn't long afore I heard George a-comin' back, yippin' along up through Hank Simons' holler. So I whistled to him and steered off up onto the maountin' to take a look at Bog-eddy and try and git a pickerel. When I come daown ag'in, I see George warn't whar I left him, so I hollered and whistled ag'in. Then, thinks I, you're mad 'cause I left ye, an' won't let on ye kin hear; so I come along hum without him. When I went back a while ago a-lookin' for him, would yer ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... waste bog-lands And the drooping slopes and the spreading valleys, The orchards and the cattle-sprinkled pastures Those travelling musics fill, There is my lost Abana, And there is my nameless Pharphar That mixed with my heart when I was a boy, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... land of Assyria. But the Euphrates at its beginning flows for a short distance, and is then immediately lost to sight as it goes on; it does not, however, become subterranean, but a very strange thing happens. For the water is covered by a bog of great depth, extending about fifty stades in length and twenty in breadth; and reeds grow in this mud in great abundance. But the earth there is of such a hard sort that it seems to those who chance upon it to be nothing else than solid ground, ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... daggers drawn." I am sorry to say that John Broom's fitful industry was still kept for his own fancies. To climb trees, to run races with the sheep dog, to cut grotesque sticks, gather hedge fruits, explore a bog, or make new friends among beasts and birds—at such matters he would labor with feverish zeal. But so far from trying to cure himself of his indolence about daily drudgery, he found a new and pleasant excitement in thwarting the farm-bailiff ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... are, however insignificant people may think you, however humbly you may think of yourselves, you are so great that the whole created Universe, if it were yours, would be all too little for you. You cannot fill a bottomless bog with any number of cartloads of earth. And you know as well as I can tell you that 'he that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase,' and that none of the good ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... have been hungry; but now I shall get my food so easily, so pleasantly on mountains and in the fields. Oh, once I was thirsty; but now the dew is mine and the little springs. Once I traced my way painfully by forest paths through bog and brake and tangled brier. But now my pathways are in the bright, clear air, where never thorn can tear nor beast can follow. Farewell, dear ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... as he was passing over a tract of mushkeeg or bog-land, he saw musquitoes of such enormous size, that he staked his reputation on the fact that a single wing of one of the insects was sufficient for a sail to his canoe, and the proboscis as big as his wife's shovel. But he was favored with a still more extraordinary ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... wretchedly paved, and more dirty than can be easily imagined.' Edgeworth adds: 'As we passed through the country, the hovels in which the poor were lodged, which were then far more wretched than they are at present, or than they have been for the last twenty years, the black tracts of bog, and the unusual smell of the turf fuel, were to him never-ceasing topics of reproach and lamentation. Mr. Day's deep-seated prejudice in favour of savage life was somewhat shaken by this view of want and misery, which philosophers of a certain ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... principles: as soon as anything is settled in his own mind, he quarrels with it. He has no satisfaction but in the chase after truth, runs a question down, worries and kills it, then quits it like vermin, and starts some new game, to lead him a new dance, and give him a fresh breathing through bog and brake, with the rabble yelping at his heels and the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... home from his work at the peat bog, he found the elders snuffling and sighing over their afternoon meal. Peer wiped the sweat from his forehead, and asked what ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... appearance of its continuance, our prospect of bringing the enemy to action began to brighten, as I perceived we were coming up with the chase fast, and every inch of canvas being set that could be of service, except the bog reefs which I kept in the topsails, in case of the chase, finding an escape from our thunder impracticable, should haul on a wind and give us fair battle. But this did not prove to be her commander's intention. ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... fools herself so very much. She knew she wasn't making the least dent in New York itself. She got uncomfortable there. I bet she had that feeling you get when you're riding your horse over soft ground and all at once he begins to bog down. ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... sat about wondering why Providence had inflicted upon her a weak digestion. Mr. Wrenn also wondered why, sympathetically, but Mrs. Zapp was too conscientiously dolorous to be much cheered by the sympathy of a nigger-lovin' Yankee, who couldn't appreciate the subtle sorrows of a Zapp of Zapp's Bog, allied to all the First ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... Some Haunted Houses of England and Wales, published by Mr Eveleigh Nash, I described how a bog-oak grandfather's clock was possessed by a peculiar type of elemental, which I subsequently classified as a vagrarian, or kind of grotesque spirit that inhabits wild and lonely places, and, not infrequently, spots where there are the remains of prehistoric (and ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... Sphagnum, or bog moss, especially when having pink tips, is a most beautiful object; the only thing to be said against it is the difficulty of getting it free from water, and the length of time it takes afterwards ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... flat country, full of lakes and woods, like Brandenburg; spreading out into grassy expanses, and bosky wildernesses humming with bees; plenty of bog in it, but plenty also of alluvial mud; sand too, but by no means so high a ratio of it as in Brandenburg; tracts of Preussen are luxuriantly grassy, frugiferous, apt for the plough; and the soil generally is reckoned fertile, though lying so far northward. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... forgetful ways about them. His name was Jack Gunther, he said, and he'd come to Sydney to try to get something done to his eyes. He had a portmanteau, a carpet bag, some things in a three-bushel bag, and a tin bog. I sat beside him on his bed, and struck up an acquaintance, and he told me all about it. First he asked me would I mind shifting round to the other side, as he was rather deaf in that ear. He'd been kicked by a horse, he said, and had been a little dull o' hearing ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... or town, I make no doubt, has its own peculiar air or atmosphere that one familiar with the same may never puzzle about in his mind, but finds come over him with a waft at odd moments like the scent of bog-myrtle and tansy in an old clothes-press. Our own air in Glen Shira had ever been very genial and encouraging to me. Even when a young lad, coming back from the low country or the scaling of school, the cool fresh breezes of the morning and the riper airs of the late afternoon ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... pool or bog, Not so nimble as his dog, When he walked the plank or log, There his balance losing, Splash! he went—a rueful plight! If his face before was white, 'Twas like morning turned to night, Much ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... quare sort of a siege. Here we are, with a place in front of us with ten times as many guns as we have got, and a force well nigh twice as large. Even if there were no walls, and no guns, I don't see how we could get at 'em, barring we'd wings, for this bog is worse than anything in the ould country. Then behind us we've got another army, which is, they say, with the garrisons of the forts, as strong as we are. We've got little food and less money, and the troops are grumbling mightily, I can ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... shot out over the edge of the cloud mass, and David could see a rocky coast below, dark and cold in the half-light. The Phoenix began to slant down toward it, and presently they landed in a little meadow. One side of the meadow ran down to a bog filled with reeds, and on the other side was a gloomy wood. Everything was dark and indistinct, but David thought he could tell why the Phoenix had called this the Emerald Isle. The grass beneath their feet was the thickest he had ever ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... apominations, and be curst to you!" said Donald, who perfectly understood that judgment had gone against him, "and much goot may't do you! but mysel would sooner trink the dirty bog water of Sleevrechkin. Oich, oich! the dirts! But I say, lanlort, maype you'll have got some prandies in the house? I can make shift wi' that when there's no ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... not know it, but he was nervous. All day he had been on the alert, and now to stay perfectly still in this strange, silent place, not daring to stir in the darkness lest he splash into some pool, or mire in a bog; with his eyes attempting to see, when it was too dark to see anything but the glow-worms in the grass and the ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... it must be the dreariest glen in Scotland. The trail twists in a futile manner, and, after all, is mainly bog holes and rolling rocks. The Red Hills are on the right, rusty, reddish, of the color of dried blood, and gashed with sliding bowlders. Their heads seem beaten down, a Helot population, and the Cuchullins stand back like an army of iron ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... first place, take this for your motto at the commencement of your journey, that the difference of going just right, or a little wrong, will be the difference of finding yourself in good quarters, or in a miserable bog or slough, at the end of it. Of the whole number educated in the Groton stores for some years before and after myself, no one else, to my knowledge, escaped the bog or slough; and my escape I trace to the simple fact of my having put a restraint upon my appetite. We five boys were in the habit, ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... of Cardamine pratensis, the pretty early meadow flower of which children are so fond, and of which the popularity is shown by its many names: Lady-smocks, Cuckoo-flower,[134:1] Meadow Cress, Pinks, Spinks, Bog-spinks, and May-flower, and "in Northfolke, Canterbury Bells." The origin of the name is not very clear. It is generally explained from the resemblance of the flowers to smocks hung out to dry, but the resemblance seems to me rather far-fetched. According to another ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... we'll see any how; but for to-morrow, why, I guess we must beat the 'Squire's swamp-hole first; there's ten or twelve cock there, I know; I see them there myself last Sunday; and then acrost them buck-wheat stubbles, and the big bog meadow, there's a drove of quail there; two or three bevys got in one, I reckon; leastwise I counted thirty-three last Friday was a week; and through Seer's big swamp, ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... everlastin' flow of the sap, it will perish altogether. All the money that's made here, all the interest that's paid in it, and a pretty considerable portion of rent too, all goes abroad for investment, and the rest is sent to us to buy bread. It's drained like a bog, it has opened and covered trenches all through it, and then there's others to the foot of the upland to ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... fast becoming the most popular watering place on the Pacific coast. About twelve miles beyond the Sulphur Springs are the 'Hot Springs,' which resemble the description just given of the Icelandic Geysers—the little geysera—there being the same quaking bog around them, which emits steam to the tread, and the surface being scabby, like an old salt meadow under a midsummer sun. These waters are scalding hot, but are pure, excepting a trace of iron. If they have been analyzed, the writer has ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... bottle. And then suddenly the road was cut in half by a birch-tree recently fallen, and the forest stood around, so old, lofty, and slumbering, that the air seemed pent in. In places the clearing lay under water. On both sides stretched a forest bog, all green and dark, all covered with reeds and tiny alders. Ducks flew up in pairs—and it was strange to see those water-birds darting rapidly about among the pines. 'Ga, ga, ga, ga,' their drawn-out ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... yearns for deserts free, the mariner for grog, The hielan' laddie treads the heath, the croppy trots the bog; The Switzer boasts his avalanche, the Eskimo his dog, But only London in the world, can ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... he answered with some animation. "What difference does a few days makes? Let us have another week. We haven't been over to Bog Eddy ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Over bog, and fen, and boulder, I must bear it on my shoulder, Beaten of wind, torn of briar, Smitten of rain, ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog,—a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... works that would never have been a source of poems for the canon, and one mentioned by Lonsdale, was the collection of verse published in four parts by J. Roberts beginning in 1731, The Merry-Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, commonly known simply as The Bog-House Miscellany. Its contemporary reputation may be described as infamous. James Bramston, in his The Man of Taste (1733), mentioned it as an example in poetry of the very opposite of "good Taste" (ARS ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... while Emily's litter was borne by her elder brother, Mr Paget, Tom Loftus, and Jack Ivyleaf. Mrs Clagget declined taking her seat on the litter prepared for her. "No, no; you men will be letting me down in the middle of a bog," she exclaimed. "If some one would lend me a pair of boots, I would show you that I could trudge as well as any body." As may be supposed, no boots were to be procured; but Jack Ivyleaf, ever fertile in resources, undertook to fit the old lady with a pair of seal-skin moccasins, which would ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... is it that ye do not understand?' is plainly this: their minds were so full of care about the day's bread, that they could not think with simplicity about anything else; the mere mention of leaven threw them floundering afresh in the bog of their unbelief. When the Lord reminded them of what their eyes had seen, so of what he was and what God was, and of the foolishness of their care—the moment their fear was taught to look up, that moment they began to see what the former words ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald |
