"Muck" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... afternoon," he said. "You remember Appleby setting me a hundred-and-fifty the day before yesterday? Well, I showed them up to-day, and he looked through them and chucked them into the waste-paper basket under his desk. I thought at the time I hadn't seen him muck them up at all with his pencil, which is his usual game, so after he had gone at the end of school I nipped to the basket and fished them out. They were as good as new, so I saved them up in ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... my beloved father-city, lived a man, whom people called "Little Muck." Though at that time I was quite young, I can recollect him very well, particularly since, on one occasion, I was flogged almost to death, by my father, on his account. The Little Muck, even then, when I knew him, an old man, was nevertheless but three or four feet high: ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... and sharp, piercing barks—much the sound that a pack of wolves raises when in full cry. Involuntarily I glanced backward to discover the origin of this new and menacing note with the result that I missed my footing and went sprawling once more upon my face in the deep muck. ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Roger is like me, a Hamley of Hamley, and no one who sees him in the street will ever think that red-brown, big-boned, clumsy chap is of gentle blood. Yet all those Cumnor people, you make such ado of in Hollingford, are mere muck of yesterday. I was talking to madam the other day about Osborne's marrying a daughter of Lord Hollingford's—that's to say, if he had a daughter—he's only got boys, as it happens; but I'm not sure if I should consent to it. I really am not sure; for you see Osborne ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... be discouraging to the driver for pleasure to find in rainy weather almost bottomless muck and mud on portions of the main travelled highway between New York and Buffalo, but that, for the present, is normal. The manufacturer may regret the condition and wish for better, but he cannot be heard to complain, and if the machine, with reasonably ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... a mile or two after starting, when he came to a stream. Into this he had waded, and had washed the muck stains from ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... to the habitable surfaces; and it's a good quota—a land that some future generation will love, and swear by, and fight for, if need be. And to think that for one man's narrow-mindedness and another's greed we've got to christen it in blood and muck and filth and dishonesty—it makes me sore, Kenneth; sore ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... was so monstrous that I gasped. For this awful dime-novel muck to be tumbled into the middle of my family was too sickening. My sister, running away from her husband with another man and now threatening, in the hearing of the servants, to kill him, unless he gave her a divorce, disgusted me with its cheap vulgarity. I hid, as best I could, ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... Not elated by good or depressed by bad fortune, but capable of excesses when roused. Under the influence of religious excitement, losses at gambling, jealousy or other domestic troubles they are liable to amok or run-a-muck, an expression which appears to have passed into the English language." With strangers, the Brunai Malay is doubtless taciturn, but I have heard Brunai ladies among themselves, while enjoying their betel-nut, rival any old English gossips ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... manner of his teaching, he is not always gentle, but he is always sincere. He speaks soft words to persuade; but if that is not enough, he does not scruple to knock the muck-rake out of sordid hands with a fine, sudden stroke, if so he may make men look up from the rubbish under their feet to the flowers that bloom around them and the stars that glow above and the God that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... the wiry vines should yield about one hundred and fifty bushels of berries to the acre, under skilful cultivation - a most profitable industry, since the cranberry costs less to cultivate, gather, and market than the strawberry or any of the small perishable fruits. Planted in muck and sand in the garden, the vines yield surprisingly good results. The Cape Cod Bell is the best known market berry. One of the interesting sights to the city loiterer about the New England coast in early autumn is the berry picking ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... meand by Nater for any sich skeam— But thats your Losses and youl have to make It Good, And I cant say I'm Sorry afore God if you shoud, For men mought Get their Bread a great many ways Without taking ourn,—aye, and Moor to your Prays You might go and skim the creme off Mr. Muck-Adam's milky ways—that's what you might, Or bete Carpets—or get into Parleamint,—or drive Crabrolays from morning to night, Or, if you must be of our sects, be Watchmen, and slepe upon a poste! (Which is an od way of sleping, I must say,—and a ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... to observe an edict extorted by his subjects." To all these warnings Coligny replied at one time by affirming the king's good faith, and at another by saying, "I would rather be dragged dead through the muck-heaps of Paris than go back to civil war." This great soul had his seasons, not of doubt as to his faith or discouragement as to his cause, but of profound sorrow at the atrocious or shameful spectacles and the public or private woes which ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... for you, Patrick, nor wake either, for you'll lie on the cold ground, and be ploughed in like muck." ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... I butt in he'll send me to hell quick. And if I don't feel like taking his dope lying down there'll be something like murder done. If I'm any judge of boys, or men, that kid's going to find every muck hole in Leaping Horse—and there's some—and he's going to wallow in 'em till some one comes along and hauls him clear of the filth. What he's going to be like after—why, the thought makes me sweat! And Allan—Allan was ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... uniformity of texture, the iron is rolled a third time. The bars are therefore cut again into pieces, piled, re-heated and rolled again. A bar of iron which has been rolled twice is formed from a pile of fourteen separate pieces of iron that have been rolled only once, or "muck bar," as it is called; while the thrice-rolled bar is made from a pile of eight separate pieces of double-rolled iron. If, therefore, one of the original pieces of iron has any flaw or defect, it will form only a hundred and twelfth part of the thrice-rolled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... stuff that's written there is the stuff that comes out of Garstaing's rotten head. I'd bet my soul on it. She says her marriage with you was a mistake. She didn't know. She had no experience when she married you. She needs the things the world can show her. The North is driving her crazy. All that muck. It's the sort of stuff that hasn't a gasp of truth in it. If there was you need to thank God you're quit of her. No. That hound of hell told her what to say. Poor little fool. He's got her where he wants her, and she's as much chance as an angel in hell. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... the wrongness that inhabited this muck of house and grove and matted bush. He said this loudly to the prostrate form; then, waiting a little, repeated it. He would smash the print with its fallacious expanse of peace. The broken glass of the smitten ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and treated with the utmost rigour of the law? WINSER, the cabman, who gave his false evidence so gaily in the Thirkettle Case, has been had up, and sentenced. Having dealt with WINSER, it is only a short step from WINSER to SLOUGH—but perhaps such a slough of muck, that it wants the pluck of a Hercules in the Augaean stable to commence operations, and a deus ex-machina—that is, the Public Prosecutor from the Treasury—to see that the proceedings are not abortive. Oh, where, and Oh, where is The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... human society once needed and then rejected. He collects them again, and now the poor can buy them. And he buys the soldiers' bread too, when they want to go on the spree, and throws it on his muck-heap; he calls it fodder for horses, but the poor buy it of him and eat it. The refuse-heap is the poor man's larder —that is, when the pigs have taken what they want. The Amager farmers fatten their swine there, and the sanitary commission talks about forbidding it; but no one ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... the iron is very soon made into a ball without manual aid. It is then lifted out by means of a suspended fork and carried to a Winslow squeezer, where the ball is reduced to a roll twelve inches in diameter. Thence it is taken to a furnace for a wash heat, and finally to the muck train. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... must," Peter went on. "I've got work, too." He pointed at his pile of dirt on the table. "You see, there's gold in all that muck, and—I've ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... bit of grass, sir," was the growling objection; and still worse was the suggestion, which gradually rose into a command, that the "muck-heap" should be removed to the said home-field, and never allowed to accumulate in such close proximity to ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and German oaths. Sorry looking hirelings were those two Hessians when they crawled out into the light. Wisps of hay clung to their well greased pigtail queues and their hated uniforms, blue coats and yellow waistcoats, were daubed with muck. ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... bewilderment, flitting silent at his side. But in the cattle-market she shrank from the press of men, all men, all in heavy, filthy boots, and leathern leggins. And the road underfoot was all nasty with cow-muck. And it frightened her to see the cattle in the square pens, so many horns, and so little enclosure, and such a madness of men and a yelling of drovers. Also she felt her father was embarrassed ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... in contempt. "The biggest thing you need to win elections, Doc, is plenty of dough. And I'll have that. But I'll also have the way to do more muck-raking than anybody in history. I'll sit in on every important private get-together those crook politicians have. I'll get the details of every scheme they cook up. I'll get into any safe or safe deposit box. I'll have the common people, you sneer so much ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)
... thou hast kissed have no pleasure in sadness, Bitterness, cant nor disdain. Hearts to thy piping beat bravely in gladness Through poverty, exile or pain. Gold is denied us—thine image we fashion Out of the slag or the muck. We are thy people in court or by campfire,— We are ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... Club, mate, for me; that means money, and rules, sportsman form, and sech muck. I likes to pick out my own pals, go permiskus, and trust to pot-luck. A rush twelve-a-breast is a gammock, twelve squeakers a going like one; But "rules o' the road" dump you down, chill yer sperrits, and spile all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... good chap and give this note to the dark-haired man who sat next to you. Do it nicely, now, Muck, so no one will see you. I'll pay ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... conditions that there were no less than thirty thousand professional beggars in Paris at this time. Their wan, pinched faces, gaunt forms and palsied vitality were an outstanding reproach to a flower-like but decadent aristocratic culture founded on the muck of cruelty ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... this journey. These 'dobe-holes are occasional wallows in clayey spots, and men and cattle know each one. The cattle, of course, roll in them, and they become worn into circular hollows, their edges tramped into muck, and surrounded by a thicket belt of mesquite. The water is not good, but will save life. The first one lay two stages from the well, and Genesmere accordingly made an expected dry camp the first night, carrying water from the well in the Santa Cruz, and dribbling all of it ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... the mud, and the cold, The cold, the mud, and the rain; With weather at zero it's hard for a hero From language that's rude to refrain. With porridgy muck to the knees, With sky that's a-pouring a flood, Sure the worst of our foes Are the pains and the woes Of the RAIN, the COLD, and ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... the girl built up as she lay, half waking, half dreaming between her blankets. Pictures in which MacNair, misjudged, hated, fighting against fearful odds, came clean through the ruck and muck with which his enemies had endeavoured to smother him, and proved himself the man he might have been; fancies and pictures that dulled into a pain that was very like a heartache, as the vivid picture—the real picture—which she herself had seen with her own eyes that night on Snare ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... he loves big, boundless things on the face of the earth, like the Western Plains and the glory of Niagara. The contrast between the bustling pettiness of the artificial city of Buffalo and the eternal fresh beauty of Niagara is like Bunyan's vision of the man busy with the muck-rake while over his head stood an angel with a ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... and it shows every sign of having been written to please the opera-goers of those days. Curiously, the critics of the time, in the words of the "Daily Telegraph," saw in "the Bayreuth master another form of Bunyan's man with the muck-rake," who "never sought to disguise the garbage he found in the Newgate Calendar of Mythland, or set his imagination to invent," and they were disgusted, also like the "Daily Telegraph," by "approaching incest" in "The Valkyrie"; yet they saw no harm whatever in the charming story ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... Iris is very simple and well worth while, for the species comes into bloom in late June and early July, when the German and other kinds are through. I should dig the wet soil from the spot of which you speak, for all muck is not good for this Iris, and after mixing it with some good loam and well-rotted cow manure replace it and plant the clumps of Iris two feet apart, for they will spread wonderfully. In late autumn they should have a top ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... you shall niver pass bottle full nor glass empty. God preserve the light av your onderstandin' to you, my jewel av a bhoy, that ye may niver forget what you mint to be an' do, whin you're wallowin' in the muck! May ye see the betther and follow the worse as long as there's breath in your body; an' may ye die quick in a strange land, watchin' your death before ut takes you, an' enable to stir hand ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... he rose early, to muck out the rock and clear the tunnel for a new round of holes; and each time as he came out with a wheel-barrow full of waste he cocked his eye to the west. Bible-Back Murray would be coming over soon, if he was still ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... Compare him with the most famous of the Dutch masters, and he rises into glory; coarseness and vulgarity in them had no point out of which could come instruction. If they picture the issues of their own minds, they must have been gross and sensual; they ransacked the muck of life, and the grovelling in character, for themes that one should see only by compulsion. But Hogarth's subjects were never without a lesson, and, inasmuch as he resorted for them to the open volume of humanity, like those of the most immortal ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... muck-faced jezebo of a sea-sculpin, you dare to yap out any more of that sculch and I'll come aboard you after we anchor and jump down your gullet and gallop the etarnal innards out of ye! Don't you know that I've ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... me that when I show to such men, so "respectable" and so impure, a landscape of magnificent prospects whose vistas are adorned with every charm of nature and art, they point their unclean noses at a little heap of muck here and there lying in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... he thinks fit to take his dues in kind, he then either demands his true and utmost right; and if so, it is a great hazard if he be not counted a caterpillar! a muck worm! a very earthly minded man! and too much sighted into this lower world! which was made, as many of the Laity think, altogether for themselves: or else, he must tamely commit himself to that little dose of the creature that shall be pleased to be proportioned out unto him; choosing ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... money for?" he boomed. "They'll only spend it on all kinds of muck they don't want; what the missionaries leave them, that ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... owing to the absence of all mucking. It was thought that this procedure might be pursued in the larger tunnels of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and it was tried, but it was almost immediately found to be impossible to maintain the required grade without taking a certain quantity of muck into the tunnels through the lower doors, the tendency of the shield being to rise. By taking in about 33% of the excavation displaced by the tunnel, the grade could be maintained. It was considered desirable, owing to this rising of the shields, to increase the weight of the cast-iron ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles M. Jacobs
... balanced on the third of the minute islands to look back. He saw the lash of blaster fire on the top of the cliff, Tau on his knees on the first of their chain of steppingstones, and a graz sprawled head and forequarters in the sucking muck where it had dived past the two defenders above. Needler and blaster fired together again, and then Jellico swung over the cliff rim. Tau waved vigorously and Dane took off for the next islet, just making ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... "What! give up my blessed religion and return to thy swill-tub agean; I should be a great fooil to do that,—does th' want to mak' me like an owd saa (sow), that's been weshed, and then runs back into t' muck agean; nay, thaa's rolled me i' sin lang enough; I'm thankful to be aat o' thy mud-hoil, and by the help of God, thaa'll get me there no maar." Then perhaps, when in conversation with some unconverted neighbour on the all-absorbing ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... Solitary Maid II Master Adam Warner grows a Miser, and behaves Shamefully III A Strange Visitor—All Ages of the World breed World- Betters IV Lord Hastings V Master Adam Warner and King Henry the Sixth VI How, on leaving King Log, Foolish Wisdom runs a-muck on King Stork VII My Lady Duchess's Opinion of the Utility of Master Warner's Invention, and her esteem for its Explosion VIII The Old Woman talks of Sorrows, the Young Woman dreams of Love; the Courtier flies from Present Power to Remembrances of Past Hopes, and the World-Bettered opens ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... went, and right spang in the thickest of the bushes an' muck we come across the queerest lookin' machine ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... taught. So Noyes heard how she became an instrument in the hands of the man who hated him mortally, and owed her debut and her terrible awakening to what he considered the only sporting answer to that insult. While he listened he pondered, awestruck, upon the fact that out of all this muck and blackness, the degradation of hate by the lodger, the refinement of hate by himself, had flowered that rarest of all human creatures—one that could ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... I've always loved you, Eleanor," went on Carley, earnestly. "I'm as deep in this—this damned stagnant muck as you, or anyone. But I'm no longer blind. There's something terribly wrong with us women, and it's ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... "I know; I know it's all wrong, of course; we should make a stand. Still, if we can buy Angela off, I think ... you understand?..." And he ambled off to his muck-room. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... If the work was done for Tom, 't was undone for the other lads; if his buckets were filled, theirs were upset; if his tools were sharpened, theirs were blunted and spoiled; if his horses were clean as daisies, theirs were splashed with muck, and so on; day in and day out, 't was the same. And the lads saw Yallery Brown flitting about o' nights, and they saw the things working without hands o' days, and they saw that Tom's work was done for him, and theirs undone for them; and naturally ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... behind. Then Miles tried a second double, and got into a narrow street, which a single glance showed him was a blind alley! Disappointment and anger hereupon took possession of him, and he turned at bay with the tiger-like resolve to run a-muck! ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... dejections, lesses, muck; puer, fumet, fiants, treddle, spraints, coprolite (petrified), mute, guano, ornithocopros. Associated Words: coprophagy, coprophagous, Augean, dungmeer, excrementitious, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmers door, in which his ducks ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... to de wall, sar," cautioned my guide; "dere am a gutter in de middle ob de road, and if you steps into dat you go in ober your shoes in muck." ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... indeed! That's a notion! Look at my hands. D'ye see how dirty they are? And they smell of muck, and of pitch—but yours, see, are white. And what ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... She-she-took-a-muck was a ferocious whale supposed to have lived at Hell's Gate, and to have swallowed Indians and their canoes. The whale was killed ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... we head for, Bud? Have you any particular idea?" Cash looked slightingly down at the assayer's report. "Such as she is, we've done all we can do to the Burro Lode, for a year at least," he said. "The assessment work is all done—or will be when we muck out after that last shot. The claim is filed—I don't know what more we can do ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... God: Behold, I will bring a King of kings from the north, with horses and with chariots, and with horsemen and companies and muck people. He shall slay with the sword thy ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... prodigally as if they had been auctioneers' announcements. Fastidious people who did not read it gave it a bad name, not recognizing the classic and heroic attitude of those engaged in pitchforking up and turning over the muck of the Augean stables under ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a mania reported to exist in some parts of the east, in which a man is said to run a muck; and these furious maniacs are believed to have induced their calamity by unlucky gaming, and afterwards by taking large quantities of opium; whence the pain of despair is joined with the energy of drunkenness; they are then said to sally forth into the most populous streets, and to ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... poking out of bladders of lard that did duty for their faces;" not to speak of the characterization of a "Sacred Heart" too revolting to reproduce? Surely when, after having reviled M. Tissot almost personally, he describes his works as painted with "muck, wine-sauce, and mud," it is difficult not to answer with a tu quoque as far as this word-painting is concerned—difficult not to see here some morbid and "frightful appetite for the hideous" struggling with the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... the Heath Society's youngest child. The heath is full of peat-bogs that only need the sand, so plentiful on the uplands, to make their soil as good as the best, the muck of the bog being all plant food, and they have a surplus of water to give in exchange. With hope the keynote of it all, the State has taken up the herculean task of keeping down the moving sands of the North Sea coast. All ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... a dry loft overhead with some straw, where we might get some sleep, in spite of the rain and the midges; a double layer of boards, standing at a very acute angle, would keep off the former, while the mingled refuse hay and muck beneath would nurse a smoke that would prove a thorough protection against the latter. And then, when Jim, the two-handed, mounting the trunk of a prostrate maple near by, had severed it thrice with easy and familiar stroke, and, rolling the logs in front of the shanty, had kindled a fire, which, ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... trouble with an American paper is that it has no discrimination; it rakes the whole earth for blood and garbage, and the result is that you are daily overfed and suffer a surfeit. By habit you stow this muck every day, but you come by and by to take no vital interest in it—indeed, you almost get tired of it. As a rule, forty-nine-fiftieths of it concerns strangers only —people away off yonder, a thousand miles, two thousand miles, ten thousand miles from where ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... mares are all collected. But when you get home, don't let the Baba Yaga set eyes on you, but go into the stable and hide behind the mangers. There you will find a sorry colt rolling in the muck. Do you steal it, and at the dead of night ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... all kinds from every available source. Remember that anything which will rot will add to the value of your manure pile. Muck, lime, old plastering, sods, weeds (earth and all), street, stable and yard sweepings—all these and numerous others will increase your garden successes of ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... he made a bad bargain, (e) Spirituality is better than money. He who has made an idol of his wealth, who in gaining it has lost his soul, who has allowed money to come between him and God, has paid too great a price for it. He has well been depicted by John Bunyan as the man with the muck-rake gathering straws, whilst he does not see the golden crown that is held above him. Christ tells us God regards such ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... have named it the root of all Evil, the begetter of hate and bloodshed, the sure cause of the soul's damnation. It has been called "trash," "muck," "dunghill excrement," by grave authors. The love of it is denounced in all Sacred Writings; we find it reprehended on Chaldean bricks, and in the earliest papyri. Buddha, Confucius, Christ, set their faces against it; and they have been followed in more modern times by beneficed ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... information respecting their secret beliefs and superstitions direct from the Indians. The attempts I have made thus far have, at least, been unsuccessful, partly, perhaps, because the topic was not properly apprehended by them, or by my ordinary office interpreter, who, I find, is soon run a-muck by anything but the plainest and most ordinary line of inquiry. A man of the Indian frontiers, who has lived all his life to eat and drink, to buy and sell, and has grown old in this devotion to the means necessary to secure ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Paths dirt; Top-coat, Flannel shirt; Lilacs drenched, Laburnums pallid; Spirits quenched, Souls squalid; Tennis "off," Icy breeze; Croak, cough, Wheeze, sneeze; Cramped cricket, Arctic squall; Drenched wicket, Soaked ball; Park a puddle. Row a slough; Muck, muddle, Slush, snow; Hay-fever (No hay!) Spoilt beaver, Shoes asplay; Lilies flopping, Washed-out roses; Eaves dropping, Red noses; Pools, splashes, Spouts, spirts; Swollen sashes. Gutters, squirts; Limp curls, Splashed hose; Pretty girls, Damp shows; Piled grates, Cold shivers; Aching pates, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... should explain, was but one remove above a smock-frock farmer, took a different line. He had unsavoury proverbs in which he put deep faith. "Muck was the mother of money," and also "Muck was the farmer's nosegay." He viewed it as an absolute effeminacy to object to its odorous savours; and as to the poor people, "they were an ungrateful lot, and had a great deal too much done for them," the small farmer's usual creed. Mr. Alison could ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... knots. We'll jog down to forty-nine, forty-five, or four about, and three east. That puts us say forty miles from Torbay by nine o'clock to-morrow morning. We'll have to muck about till dusk before we run in and try ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... al paese." It is almost superfluous to state that the Cardinal is no authority for speeches, except, indeed, for those which were never made. Long orations by generals upon the battle-field, by royal personages in their cabinets, by conspirators in secret conclave, are reported by him with muck minuteness, and none can gainsay the accuracy with which these harangues, which never had any existence, except in the author's imagination, are placed before the reader. Bentivoglio's stately and graceful style, elegant descriptions, and general acquaintance with his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... bloomin', blasted, infernal ice, I tell you,' he shouted in a rage, standing in black muck almost to his knees, with the same material bespattered over him from head to foot. Indeed his red and perspiring face showed a couple of great, black smirches with which he had unknowingly ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... carried out quietly without fuss, feathers or publicity. Shun the spectacular and remember it is the morality of the boy and girl that is in question. Keep away from muck-raking, be constructive and pure and business-like in ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... Pray, whom should we write for, in this age which makes its own epic upon sounding anvils, and whose lyric is yelled from the locomotive running a muck through forest and field and beside the waters no longer still? Write poetry now, when noise has become normal, and we are like the Egyptians, who never heard the roaring of the fall of Nilus, because the racket was so familiar to them! The age "capers in its own fee simple" and cries ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... all de slime runs out. Den yo' buries him in san' 'til his insides all decay. Den you puts him in a pon' an' takes him out, an' beats him wif a stick, lots o' times oveh, maybe, 'til all de jelly an' all de san' an' all de muck am out ob him. Den yo' wash him in fresh wateh 'til he's clean an' lets him dry ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the low thunder of the powerful batteries told of the milling of hundreds of tons; and the great concentrator, sprawling down on the broad hillside, washed out the copper and separated it from the muck. Long trains of steel ore-cars received the precious concentrates and bore them off to the distant smelters, and at last there came the day when the steady outpay ceased and the money began to pile up in the bank. L. W.'s bank, of course; for since the fatal fight he had been ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... under them an hundred AEtnas hissed And spluttered sulphur, gathering for the shock? Be ye our Hercules—and Lynceus-eyed: Still ye the storm or ere the storm begin— Ere "Liberty" take Justice by the throat, And run moon-mad a Malay murder-muck, Throttle the "Trusts", and crush the coils combined That crack our bones and fatten on our fields. Strike down the hissing heads of Anarchy: Strike swift and hard, nor parley with the fiend Mothered of hell and father of all fiends— Fell monster with ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... land; stockade was opposed to stockade, and the fighting was constant and severe; but he never lost a man killed during the two months, and only boasted of killing five of the enemy! The principal danger in Malay warfare is the 'Mengamuk' (Anglice, running a-muck), which is the last resource of ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... she had it figgered out I was in a quest fur some high-mucky-muck fur a dad, I didn't tell her no different. I didn't take much stock in them earls and nights myself. So fur as I could see they was all furriners of one kind or another. But that thing of being into a quest kind of interested ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... the seat, clean, frail, and inert, as a recumbent statue, moulded in blanc-mange; whilst the ancient t'other-sider oscillated his frame—saw, and the pious Pawsome lightened his toil with selections from Sankey, and the perspiring Priestley hurried up his bullocks from the ration-paddock, and Sling Muck, the gardener, used his hoe among the callots and cabbagee, with the automatic stroke of a man brought up to one holiday per annum, and no Sunday. Meanwhile, the unreturning sands of Life dribbled ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... yards away. A soft glutinous muck, worse than the outer swamp, tugged at his ankles. Corrupt fungi-growth and giant spiked ferns reached far above him ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... "And after 'muck,' John Sprott, write 'God save the King.' I don't know that 'tis necessary, but you'll be on the safe side." His Worship unfolded the proclamation again, cleared his ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Frazer's charge that a Plato director owned land used by saloons was eagerly whispered for a little while, then quite forgotten, while Frazer's reputation as a "crank" was never forgotten, so much does muck resent the muck-raker; to describe Carl's brief call on Frazer and his confusing discovery that he had nothing to say; to repeat the local paper's courageous reports of the Frazer affair, Turk's great oath to support Frazer "through hell and high water," Turk's repeated defiance: ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... merely am wondering. In any event, we do not want to see the close-up overdone. We don't want too much of the Griffith staccato. It leads to what a certain friend of mine once called Tom Lawson's method of muck-raking—'The ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... the blank morning for a blank tyke?" And for all his respectable appearance, his features become debased, and he emits a jet of disgusting profanity and brings most of the Trinity into the thunderous assertion that he has paid his fare. Then a man passes wheeling a muck-cart. And he stops and talks a long time with the other uniforms, because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform. And the crowd never moves nor ceases to stare. Then the new arrival stoops and picks up the unclaimed, masterless puppy, ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... Germans—I was fighting to bring about the new heaven and the new earth. Our politicians promised us as much. You remember their phrases. 'A world safe for democracy! A land fit for heroes to live in.' When all the muck and the heartbreak were ended, we found that outwardly it was the same old world. Heaven was as far away as ever. There were no signs that any one wanted a new earth. Nations which had been comrades, began to wrangle. ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... reported at dawn by Billy Muck, who had taken no part in the intimidation scheme, a wholesome awe crept into the old men's admiration; for a black fellow is fairly ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... [bricklayer] potters about, still the carpenter plies the creaking saw and the stunning hammer, still the plumber plumbs and the bellhanger rattles, still the cisterns overflow and the unfinished drains send forth odorous fumes, still the rains descend and all around the house is a muddle of muck and mire, and still there is so much to do that we look forward to some far distant futurity, when all that we are now suffering will be over, and we may look back upon it as upon some strange yet ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... taught me anything but to be a Hand. It's the way they do with draper's apprentices. If every swindler was locked up—well, you'd have nowhere to buy tape and cotton. It's all very well to bring up Burns and those chaps, but I'm not that make. Yet I'm not such muck that I might not have been better—with teaching. I wonder what the chaps who sneer and laugh at such as me would be if they'd been fooled about as I've been. At twenty-three—it's ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... "Well, it's a muck of a world," he declared cheerfully, taking off his coarse harvest hat and running his hand through his clustering fair hair. In the mellow light the almost brutal strength of his jaw was softened, and his sunburned face paled to the beauty of some ancient ivory carving. Cynthia, gazing ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... development, Seaton brought the Skylark to a stop and stabbed into the ground with the attractor. The first attempt brought up nothing but a pillar of muck, the second brought to light a couple of wings and one writhing arm, the third brought the whole animal, still struggling as strongly as it had in the first contest. Seaton again lifted the animal high ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... Malay (partly from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, partly from the anxiety I connected with his image for some days) fastened afterwards upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse than himself, that ran "a-muck" {18} at me, and led me into a world of troubles. But to quit this episode, and to return to my intercalary year of happiness. I have said already, that on a subject so important to us all as happiness, we should listen with pleasure to any man's experience ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... I liked the speech. You could see the niceness of the chap shining out behind the muck with which he had been spoon-fed. Also it took a load off my mind. I mightn't be much of an orator, but I was a thousand per ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... must eat their bread in the perspiration of their faces. But sweat is a word of connotation too vigorous (though honest withal) for us to use the term in the drawing room. A questionable woman in The Vicar of Wakefield betrays her lack of breeding by the remark that she is in a muck ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... heart of Hamlet's mystery pluck? Or, where most unclean beasts are rife, Some Junius—am I right?—shall tuck His sleeve, and forth with flaying-knife! Some Chatterton shall have the luck Of calling Rowley into life! Some one shall somehow run a muck With this old world for want of strife Sound asleep. Contrive, contrive To rouse us, Waring! Who's alive? 200 Our men scarce seem in earnest now. Distinguished names!—but 'tis, somehow, As if they played at being names ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... interests. Here are you and I, busying ourselves in an attempt to throw some little light—a very little it must be—on some petty problems of the origin of our race. We are looking downwards, downwards always; digging in old muck-heaps; raking up all kinds of unsavoury rubbish to prove that we are born out of the dirt. And we have never a thought for the future in all our work,—a future that may be glorious, who knows? Here, perhaps in this village, insignificant from most points of view, but set in a country that should ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... lose their way in those dark and dismal swamps and find themselves mired in the mud holes, they would be in a sorry fix, and they might even be forced to shout for assistance in order to save their lives, thus revealing themselves to their enemy, for the tenacious muck had a tendency to act in the same treacherous fashion as quicksand, clutching the victim and dragging him down, inch after inch into its ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... at first cried out, had only a slight bullet graze through the fleshy part of it; so, considering the skipper fired off no less than five shots out of the six which his revolver contained, it was a wonder more were not grievously wounded, if not killed, when he ran a-muck ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... swinging her right arm and with the left clasping the basket of provisions to her side; the air grows thick with the smell and smoke of kitchens. It again becomes clear to our Lane that the real and normal consist solely of herself, her houses, and their muck-heaps. ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... not faced that blank staring hell of anonymousness, that bottomless, weak, watery muck of irresponsibility—that terrific, devilish vagueness which a crowd is and which a crowd ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Auray!" he exclaimed. Then he dropped his whip, clasped his hands, and stood as if in ecstasy. A faint color illuminated his coarse face, and his eyes shone like diamonds dropped on a muck-heap. "Is it really the brave girl from Cottin?" he muttered, in a voice so smothered that he alone heard it. "You are fine," he said, after a pause, using the curious word, "godaine," a superlative in the dialect of those ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... gamester meets. He intoxicates himself with opium; and working himself into a fit of frenzy, he bites or kills every one who comes in his way. But as soon as this lock is seen flowing, it is lawful to fire at the person and to destroy him as fast as possible. This custom is what is called "To run a muck." Thus Dryden writes— ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... yellow muck ten feet high was charging down the gulch like a squadron of cavalry in solid formation. Logs and tree-branches were sticking out of it, and great rocks were tossing and floating. Another second, and it had passed, ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... just are, sir. Commonest muck o' men. Fit for nothing but putting under ground. Why, how I should like to take my old mother with us, and let her loose at that there captain. I wouldn't give much for his ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... difference. "Water's water," you say, with your broad, stupid generalization, and go oozing along contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches, mounting, perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction into a muck-puddle; and all the while the little brook that you patronize when you are full-fed, and snub when you are hungry, and look down upon always,—the little brook is singing its own melody through grove and orchard and sweet wild-wood,—singing with the birds and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... had come up in the draft with me on the 4th, rolling around in the death agony, tossing his head loosely about in the wild pain of it, his pallid face a white mark in the muck underfoot. A burly German reached the spot and without hesitation plunged his ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... just the ticket—some old fence rails lying in a heap. Cheer up, comrade, we'll have you out of that in a jiffy now," sang out Frank, seizing one of the long, cast-off rails, and dropping it on the surface of the muck. ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... Guess the law of the prairie'll come best from such as he. You are one of us," he went on, surveying the girl's beautiful face in open admiration. "You've allus been mostly one of us—but I take it y'are too white. No, guess you ain't goin' ter muck yer pretty hands wi' the filthy blood of yonder," pointing to Lablache. "These things is fur the likes o' us. Jest leave this skunk to us. Death is the sentence, and death he's goin' ter git—an' ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... so suitable to colonial requirements. Of course she is independent, often even cheeky, but a mistress learns to put up with occasional tantrums, provided the general behaviour and character are good. When we were first out here we used to run a-muck with our servants about once a week; but now we find it better to bear the ills we have than fly to others which we know not of. Our present Lizzie is impertinent to a degree when reproved; but then she can cook decently, ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... can't propose your health, friend, Or drink to the 'Thirteen's' luck. I must dine on—Eucalyptus, And Sulphur, or some such muck. I have no Salt to be spilling; My only knife is a spoon; And I have not the smallest notion If there is, or isn't, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the slight depression of the ground at the site, and for this reason the border was all made above the surface two feet and a half in height, composed largely of decayed sods, with an addition of muck, coal and wood ashes and a small quantity of stable manure. It has been found to work admirably, and preserve an even moisture throughout. Elevated borders are highly recommended by some exotic grape ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward
... fool, out of whose lips it would seem that praise was ordained. He looked back to divers hours when he had given himself wholly to the love of God, and to the long reaches of time between them, in which he had not cast away the muck-rake, but had trailed it after him with one hand as he walked forward, looking to the angel and the crown. He seemed to see St. Peter pointing to the life all which he had professed to devote while he had kept back part; and St. Peter said, "Whiles ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... "Heave that muck overboard," he ordered some of those who stood idling in the waist. "Then up anchor, and let us ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... exertions; and you see what physical energy can do when utterly unlimited. And a man who always spoke out in public the entire truth about all men and all things, would inspire I know not what of terror. He would be like a mad Malay running a muck, dagger in hand. If the person who in a deliberative assembly speaks of another person as his venerable friend, were to speak of him there as he did half an hour before in private, as an obstructive old idiot, how people would start! It would be like the bare bones ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... other by stone hinges Hung to its flanking tower. The path they followed Threaded an old paved road whose flags were edged With dry grass and dry weeds, even cactuses Had pushed the stones up or found root in muck heaps: The path struck up the slope of the fallen door, Basalt like midnight, o'er which dusty feet Had greyed a passage, for it rested on Some dbris fallen from the left-hand tower, And from its upper edge rude blocks like steps Led ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... mire, quagmire, alluvium, silt, sludge, slime, slush, slosh, sposh [U.S.]. spawn, offal, gurry [U.S.]; lientery^; garbage, carrion; excreta &c 299; slough, peccant humor, pus, matter, suppuration, lienteria^; faeces, feces, excrement, ordure, dung, crap [Vulg.], shit [Vulg.]; sewage, sewerage; muck; coprolite; guano, manure, compost. dunghill, colluvies^, mixen^, midden, bog, laystall^, sink, privy, jakes; toilet, john, head; cess^, cesspool; sump, sough, cloaca, latrines, drain, sewer, common sewer; Cloacina; dust hole. sty, pigsty, lair, den, Augean stable^, sink of corruption; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Oh I have been to Ludlow fair And left my necktie God knows where, And carried half-way home, or near, Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer: Then the world seemed none so bad, And I myself a sterling lad; And down in lovely muck I've lain, Happy till I woke again. Then I saw the morning sky: Heigho, the tale was all a lie; The world, it was the old world yet, I was I, my things were wet, And nothing now remained to do But begin the ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... the 'Pilgrim's Progress' with his muck-rake, always scraping with downcast looks, never gazing upwards," remarked James. "Ah! it is sad work; and yet, when a person gets down in the world, and feels the want of the wealth he once possessed, it must be a severe trial to him to prevent his mind from continually ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... ought to be thankfull you are there at home with your wife where you can watch her and keep your eyes on her and find out what she is doing with her spare time though I guess at that they wouldn't be much danger of old Bertha running a muck and I don't suppose she would half to wear bob wire entanglements to keep Jack the Kisser away but when a man has got a wife like Florrie and here I am over here and there she is over there well Al a man don't get to sleep no quicker nights from thinking about ...
— The Real Dope • Ring Lardner
... there! Come out, you buck! Tailor, Tailor, muck! muck! muck!" Buck could bear all sorts of jeering, Jibes and jokes in silence hearing; But this insult roused such anger, ...
— Max and Maurice - a juvenile history in seven tricks • William [Wilhelm] Busch
... o' heather honey, and the music o' the brae, As I watch the great harts feeding, nearer, nearer a' the day. Oh, to hark the eagle screaming, sweeping, ringing round the sky— That's a bonnier life than stumbling ower the muck to ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... succeed in blinding himself to that fact. Even the garish, cheap environments, the glitter and tinsel, the noise and brutality, had utterly failed to tarnish Beth Norvell. She stood forth different, distinct, a perfectly developed flower, rarely beautiful, although blooming in muck that was overgrown with noxious weeds. Winston remained clearly conscious that some peculiar essence of her native character had mysteriously perfumed the whole place—it glorified her slight bit of stage work, and had already indelibly impressed itself upon those rough, boisterous Western ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... feet out of revenge. I have just spoken to the wretched woman as she deserves. She is a shameless courtesan; I have told her that I am leaving her house, that I would not have my honor smirched in that muck-heap.—I owe myself to my family ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... There seemed nothing unusual about them, while they would have passed muster as fair specimens of lumbermen in any Michigan camp. But outside, in the darkness, where holes yawned in the ground, were many men engaged in windlassing muck and gravel and gold from the bottoms of the holes where other men received fifteen dollars per day for scraping it from off the bedrock. Each day thousands of dollars' worth of gold were scraped from bedrock and windlassed ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... I mighty glad you mention dat,' says Brer Tarrypin, sezee. 'Mr. Mud-Turkle is setch clos't kin ter me dat I calls 'im Unk Muck, en I lay ef you sen' dar atter dat sane you won't fine Unk Muck so ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... Not that he might not devoutly hope for an antidote to the poisonous doctrines of monarchy and aristocracy, though in very truth the existence of any such poison was only one of the maggots which, bred in the muck of party strife, had found a lodgment in his brain; not that it was not a commendable public spirit to wish for a good newspaper to circulate where it was most needed; not that it was not a most excellent thing in him to hold out a helping ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... fasting, the poor animals were so tame that they ate out of Pablo's hand and submitted to be stroked and caressed; and before they were a fortnight in the stable. Alice and Edith could go up to them without danger. They were soon broken in; for the yard being full of muck, Pablo took them into it and mounted them. They plunged and kicked at first, and tried all they could to get rid of him, but they sank so deep into the muck that they were soon tired out; and after a month they were all three tolerably ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... everything whitewashed. The group of three commissioners sat for months and in that time they exposed to the burning sun of publicity the muck of thievery and dishonor on which Lake City's placid beauty ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... conviction: "Yes, and always will be, thank Gawd!" This ended the talk. But the last speaker, turning round, saw her two-year-old daughter asprawl in the garden, and with sudden change from satisfied drawl to shrill exasperation, "Git up out of all that muck, you dirty little devil," she said. For she was a cleanly woman, proud of her children, and ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... meeting took place in Essex Hall, Essex Street, Strand, on September 17, 1926. G.K. summed up their aim in the words: "Their simple idea was to restore possession." He added that Francis Bacon had long ago said: "Property is like muck, it is good only if it be spread." The following week the first committee meeting took place. Chesterton was elected President; Captain Went, Secretary, and Maurice Reckitt, Treasurer. It was planned to form a branch in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... interpreted, it belongs to a class of proverbs, which have a tendency to make us undervalue money. Of this cast are those notable observations, that money is not health; riches cannot purchase every thing: the metaphor which makes gold to be mere muck, with the morality which traces fine clothing to the sheep's back, and denounces pearl as the unhandsome excretion of an oyster. Hence, too, the phrase which imputes dirt to acres—a sophistry so barefaced, that ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... clothes," said Liza. Mrs. Garth gave her no time to say more, for, at the full pitch of indignation, she turned to Rotha, and added: "And ye're a rare pauchtie damsel. Ye might have been bred at Court, you as can't muck a byre." ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... to mask his features, that they are rarely to be seen in their primitive state. Not satisfied with these triumphs, our monk descended even into the kingdoms of the dead—tore skulls from the graves, and the bones of animals from the muck-heaps; and showed his visitors why the dead were dead, and, from their bones, how it was impossible that they should be otherwise than dead. In a word, he proved, clearly and unanswerably, that death never yet came without ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... evacuated it was deliberately converted into a mass of muck. There is no Bapaume now. It is perfectly understandable that the retreating soldiers should destroy their trenches and put up the question, "Tommy, how do you like your new trenches?" But why smear filth over the photograph of three little girls, ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... as is only found in France. We were given truffled omelets, wonderful salads of eggs, anchovies, and tunny-fish, ducks with oranges and olives, and other delicacies of the Provencal cuisine prepared by a consummate artist, and those four English cubs termed them all "muck," and clamoured for plain roast mutton and boiled potatoes. It really was a case of casting pearls before swine! Those ignorant hobbledehoys actually turned up their noses at the admirable "Cotes du Rhone" wine, ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... the summer was the hay field. On the fair meadows we turned and gathered the hay. It was a large crop; although the hay was not all of the best, it was mostly of fair quality. And when the hoeing, weeding and haying were done, the farmers dug meadow-muck for compost. ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... series of scummy pools with the vegetation still meeting almost solidly over it. And it brought him to a wall with a drain through which he was sure he could crawl. Disliking to venture into that cramped darkness, but seeing no other way out, the scout squirmed forward in slime and muck, feeling the rasp of rough stone on his shoulders as he made his worm's ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... in a candle-box with all the proper papers—lawful child o' some couple in Lunnon somewheres—mother dead, father drinkin'. And there was that Lunnon society's five shillin's a week for her. Jim's mother she wouldn't despise week-end money, but I never heard Jim was much of a muck-grubber. Let be how 'twill, they two mothered up Mary no bounds, till it looked at last like they'd forgot she wasn't their own flesh an' blood. Yes, I reckon they forgot Mary wasn't their'n ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... all do you or anybody else? You're stirring up muck, and you're getting the only thing you ever get by that kind of activity, a bad smell." He paused for his effect; then delivered himself of a ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... pay good wages to its employees, and to see that they are comfortable and contented. As a result of this policy the Standard Oil Company is seldom bothered with strikes, and most of its workers have no connection with labor unions, do not listen to muck-rakers and other vile breeders of social discontent, and are quite satisfied with their little round of duties and their secure ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... porto, quoth Bias, when he had nothing but bread and cheese in a leathern bag, and two or three books in his bosom. Saint Francis, a holy saint, and never had any money. It is madness to doat upon muck. That young man of Athens, Aelianus makes mention of, may be an example to us, who doated so extremely on the image of Fortune, that when he might not enjoy it, he died for sorrow. The earth yields all her fruits together, and why should we not spend them together? ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... being in the Fourth Ward school-house, where planks have been laid over the tops of desks, on which the remains are placed. A corpse is dug from the bank. It is covered with mud. It is taken to the anteroom of the school, where it is placed under a hydrant and the muck and slime washed off. With the slash of a knife the clothes are ripped open and an attendant searches the pockets for valuables or papers that would lead to identification. Four men lift the corpse on a rude table, and ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... boiling it melts that vegetable dross into its heart which it is our business to clear away; for impure oil is death to colour. No; take your oil and pour it into a bottle with water. In a day or two the water will turn muddy: that is muck from the oil. Pour the dirty water carefully away and add fresh. When that is poured away, you will fancy the oil is clear. You're mistaken. Reicht, fetch me that!" Reicht brought a glass trough with ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... magazine muck-rake, doctor," I said as I got out of the motor (he had taken me up through the Park to Morningside and back, while I was telling him), "and I'll probably be a little shy ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... hurt The stwone-vloor wi' a little dirt; Vor what wer brought in doors by men, The women soon mopp'd out ageaen. Zoo we did come vrom muck an' mire, An' walk in straight avore the vier; But now, a man's a-kept at door At work a pirty while, avore He's screaep'd an' rubb'd, an' cleaen and fit To goo in where his wife do zit. An' then if he should have a whiff In there, 'twould only breed a miff: He c[a]nt ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... much," protests Rupert. "You see, I lived in a little town in southern Illinois. Father ran a general store. I had to help in it—sold shingle nails, molasses, mower teeth, overalls. How I hated that! But there was the creek and the muck pond. I had an old boat. I played smuggler and pirate. I used to love to read pirate books. I wanted to ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... and indefinite wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time they would hold on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end they would camp, here and there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes through frozen muck and gravel and washing countless pans of dirt by the heat of the fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all according to the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting. Summer arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs, rafted across blue ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... other graded schools in this country. The halls were long and dark and dusty, and because the building had been put up under contract at a period when public contract-work was not so scrupulously honest as it notably is in our present cleanly muck-raked era, the steps of the badly built staircase creaked and groaned and sagged and gave forth clouds of dust under the weight of the myriads of little feet which climbed up and clown those steep ascents every day. Everything was of ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... America's head muck-rakers, I found that I was popular with the British ruling classes; they found my books useful in their campaigns against democracy, and they were surprised and disconcerted when they found I did not agree with their interpretation of my writings. I had told of corruption ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... to the Widow Plus. George Pye-boord, a Scholar and a Citizen. Peter Skirmish, an old Soldier. Captain Idle, a Highway-man. Corporal Oath, a vain-glorious Fellow. Nichols St. Antlings, Simon St. Mary Overies, Frailty, Serving-men to the Lady Plus. Sir Oliver Muck-hill, a Suitor to the Lady Plus. Sir John Penny-Dub, a Suitor to Moll. Sir Andrew Tipstaff, a Suitor to Frances. The Sheriff of London. Puttock, Ravenshaw, Two of the Sheriffs Sergeants. Dogson, a Yeoman. A Noble-man. A Gentleman ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... boys watched the stream was turned off, and men took from the cleats quantities of mingled muck and gravel, which they proceeded to "wash" to ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... replied absently. "F'r instance, Aunt Julia, I don't see what you want to go walking with Newland Sanders for, when you said yourself you wished he was dead, or somep'n, after there got to be so muck talk in the family and everywhere about his sayin' all that about the Bible when you hurt your ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... render a little first aid there. We had our pocket-knives out and were slashing away at the twisted maze of ropes and straps that bound the brute down between the shafts, when a particularly shrill chorus of shrieks checked us. We stood up and faced about, figuring that the poor devil on the muck heap had died and that his people were bemoaning his death. That was not it at all. The entire group, including the fat old woman, were screaming at us and shaking their clenched fists at us, warning us not to damage that harness with our knives. Feeling ran ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... o' learning you have piled up of a ruck; The only name it went by in my feyther's time was muck. I knows not how the tool you call a nallysis may work, I turns it when it's rotten pretty handy ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... plunged it into the turbid mass, turning it round and round. As he lifted it up, the drops which trickled from it hardened into earth of their own accord; and thus dry land was formed. As Izanagi was cleansing his spear the lumps of muck and mud which had adhered to it flew off into space, and were changed ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... Anonyma to howl unanswered. I shall also treat with scornful silence the miserables who, when shown a magnificent prospect, a landscape adorned with the highest charms of Nature and Art, can only see in a field corner here and there a little heap of muck. 'You must have been looking for it, Madam!' said, or is said to have said, sturdy old ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton |
