"Muck" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... comin'," Daylight agreed. "Wait till that big strike is made up river. Then you-all'll see a new kind of mining. What's to prevent wood-burning and sinking shafts and drifting along bed-rock? Won't need to timber. That frozen muck and gravel'll stand till hell is froze and its mill-tails is turned to ice-cream. Why, they'll be working pay-streaks a hundred feet deep in them days that's comin'. I'm sure going along with ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... plot, if it be barren? But if you determine to manure the whole site, this is your way: digge a trench halfe a yard deepe, all along the lower (if there be a lower) side of your Orchard plot, casting vp all the earth on the inner side, and fill the same with good short, hot, & tender muck, and make such another Trench, and fill the same as the first, and so the third, and so through out your ground. And by this meanes your plot shall be fertile for your life. But be sure you set your trees, neither ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson
... 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, ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... he pulls off the cassock; goes to fire for his coat: returns: drags it on]. I don't know! Things 'av' got in a bit of a muck with me! I'm rather like a ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy
... the name of M'Lean, nephew to the Laird of the isle of Muck, came this morning; and, just as we sat down to dinner, came the Laird of the isle, of Muck himself, his lady, sister to Talisker, two other ladies their relations, and a daughter of the late M'Leod of Hamer, who wrote a treatise on the second sight, under the designation of THEOPHILUS ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... this way, Miss Gordon," said Mr. Huntley solicitously, as he guided her across the black muck of the crossing, to which the snow had already been converted. "I hope you do not come ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... standing around with a kind of "How-do-you-know?" and "Did-it-happen-to-you?" air every time a man says something he knows by—well—by seeing it—perfectly plain seeing it. One doesn't need to stand up to one's neck in experience, in a perfect muck of experience, in order to know things, in order to know they are there. People who are experienced within an inch of their lives, submerged in experience, until all you can see of them is a tired look, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... 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. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... den on the other side of the mound—a den which Loll no doubt was at that moment exploring. Her brother-in-law was preparing to spring across one of the little brown pools. . . . Then, to her despair, he stumbled, and one leg went down in the soft muck of the farther edge. As he fell, he tried to throw his rifle to the bank, but the heavy, metal-stayed butt ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... girl as they walked slowly out into the office; he was wondering what her object might be in this pilgrimage. His mind flitted briefly over the ideas of muck-raking reporters and inquisitive lady novelists; yet surely this self-possessed but quiet young lady suggested nothing of either class, and besides, a niece of Silas Osgood's could scarcely deserve suspicion. At the same time, detecting in ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... women and children. 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, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... 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 very hard pillow at most,) Or you might be any ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... 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 progress ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... invited one day by the laird and lady of Muck, one of the western islands, two miles long, and three quarters of a mile high. He has half his island in his own culture, and upon the other half live one hundred and fifty dependants, who not only live upon the product, but export ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... 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, and begged for beer. In justice I must add that we were none of us used to truffles ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... 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 by ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... 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. ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... They "knew" the gold was there, and they persisted. Somehow, the romance of the land and the quest entered into their blood, the spell of it gripped hold of them and would not let them go. Man after man of them, after the most terrible privation and suffering, shook the muck of the country from his moccasins and departed for good. But the following spring always found him drifting down the Yukon on the tail of the ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... but I'm too discreet To run a-muck, and tilt at all I meet; I only wear it in a land of Hectors, Thieves, supercargoes, sharpers, and directors. 1574 POPE: Satire i., ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... 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
... hit upon some researches of Daubree's at the Paris Laboratorie des Poudres et Salpetres. He exploded dynamite in a tightly screwed steel cylinder, too strong to burst, and I found he could crush rocks into a muck not unlike the South African bed in which diamonds are found. It was a tremendous strain on my resources, but I got a steel cylinder made for my purpose after his pattern. I put in all my stuff and my explosives, built up a fire ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... liege, I'll never lin, But I will thorough thick and thin, Until at length I bring her in; My dearest lord, ne'er doubt it." Thorough brake, thorough briar, Thorough muck, thorough mire, Thorough water, thorough fire; And thus ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... and stay by her half an hour, till Eliza, the German nurse, comes to take her to bed. The cows merely stand there, and do nothing; yet the mere sight of them is all-sufficient for Jean. She requires nothing more. The other evening, after contemplating them a long time, as they stood in the muddy muck chewing the cud, she said, with deep and reverent appreciation, "Ain't this a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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 ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... 'em," lamented Dank; "they know the real article, and you can't fool 'em. She knows that he is the high muck-a-muck in this party and she won't even look at me, you ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 case I get ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... warning," I said to him. "You have shown yourself a fool by your contempt of me. I may not be your match in craft; but I am in manhood. Lay low there in your native muck." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... back room, cooking some sort of a meal over an alcohol stove. Zerkow was a Polish Jew—curiously enough his hair was fiery red. He was a dry, shrivelled old man of sixty odd. He had the thin, eager, cat-like lips of the covetous; eyes that had grown keen as those of a lynx from long searching amidst muck and debris; and claw-like, prehensile fingers—the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses. It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know instantly that greed—inordinate, insatiable greed—was the dominant ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... and stiffly, and with a laugh on her mouth like a Gallic whelp. Throng round her, and claim them back. "O putrid punk, hand back our writing tablets; hand back, O putrid punk, our writing tablets." Not a jot dost heed? O Muck, Brothel-Spawn, or e'en loathsomer if it is possible so to be! Yet think not yet that this is enough. For if naught else we can extort a blush on thy brazened bitch's face. We'll yell again in heightened tones, "O putrid punk, hand back our writing tablets, hand ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... saddle, a five dollar bridle, a two and a half quirt and the best cayuse in Spence's Bridge, and worth seventy-five dollars. Peter had nothing but the wage he earned working on the C.P.R. section, which had been just enough to supply him with his daily muck-a-muck (food) before marriage. How he calculated to feed two with the one basket of o-lil-ies (berries) which had been only large enough for one, did not seem to worry the community, as such things were taking ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... bird as an idle tradition, saying that the sap which produces the plant is such as "the tree doth excerne and cannot assimilate," and Browne ("Vulgar Errors") was of the same opinion. But the opposite opinion was perpetuated in the very name ("Mistel: fimus, muck," Cockayne),[163:1] and was held without any doubt by most of the writers in ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... the two "old timers" came upon them in the early winter they found them in bomb-proof hovels, sunk into the muck, banked with log walls, and thatched over ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... his laughing answer. "It seems to me that a few months since I was like the old man with the muck-rake in 'Pilgrim's Progress,' seeking to gather only money, facts, and knowledge—things of use. I now am finding so much that is useful which I scarcely looked at before that I am revising my philosophy, and like it much better. The simple truth is, ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... that they would look well in print, though I am not sensitive as to what newspapers say about me or I should have been in my grave years ago; but Sergeant Smith and his knowledge touches me at a raw place. You are always messing about with narcotics and muck of all kinds, and you will understand when I tell you that the money I give Sergeant Smith every week serves a double purpose. It is an ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... come down yere to-morrer, and you'll git to know wot stinks is. Let Teddy show you that 'ere bloomin' ditch at the back. They calls it a stream, but I dussn't say wot I thinks it is afore the nipper. All the dead cats and muck in the bloomin' crehation gits dumped in there. On 'ot days you wants a nosebag on, I ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... 'The dahned publishers are crawling to me. They've had their filthy lucre, and they know I can shift the stuff, and they're on their knees to me, begging me to take their muck by ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, their white walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks between the styes. Their lissom and statuesque inhabitants become softened and bent, and pad dejectedly through the muck as though they were ashamed to live, but had to go on with it. The palms which look so well in sunny pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle. They have not that equality with the storm which makes ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... with scant ceremony, loudly ordering from his path the loiterers at the inn door. They whose company he had quitted were silent for a moment; then said Sir Mortimer, slowly: "I remember now—there was a Thomas Baldry, master of the Speedwell. Well, it was a sorry business that day! If from that muck of blood ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... much. He would not do anything for money. He would do some things for money; he would sell his soul for money, for instance; and, as Mirabeau humorously said, he would be quite wise "to take money for muck." He would oppress humanity for money; but then it happens that humanity and the soul are not things that he believes in; they are not his ideals. But he has his own dim and delicate ideals; and he would not violate these for money. He would not drink out of the soup-tureen, for money. He would ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... profound secret and some time elapsed before the newspapers got wind of the coming Congressional inquiry. No one had believed the stories about Judge Rossmore but now that a quasi-official seal had been set on the current gossip, there was a howl of virtuous indignation from the journalistic muck rakers. What was the country coming to? they cried in double leaded type. After the embezzling by life insurance officers, the rascality of the railroads, the looting of city treasuries, the greed of the Trusts, the grafting of the legislators, ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... told you not to say that. The reason I'll do the thing she's going to ask of me—if it's what I think it is—is because this girl's a plucky little creature with a soul big enough to lift her out of the muck you probably helped her into. It's because she's got brains, talent, and a heart. It's because—well, it's because I feel like it, and ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... muck rakings, society's esteem for the capitalist has been unbounded. He is in general the only man with a national reputation. Society bestows upon him unstinted praise and the most generous rewards for his toil. His rewards are so extravagant that the game seems worthy ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... feel that she must not venture farther, she found herself upon a slight rise or swell from which she made out a group of cattle in the distance, and with this promise of success before her she put her horse to a gallop and set out for it, slapping him with the reins. Presently, the ring of black muck becoming plainly visible, she knew her quest was at an end; and her thirsty animal quickened his pace as if he ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... and set out for El Dorado by yourself. Whether that was your purpose I do not know; but, for doubting you, you can scarcely blame me. So, day by day, as I descended the shaft to the bed-rock, and piled up billets of wood, and kindled them, throwing out the muck, drifting with the streak, sending up nuggets to the surface, and dirt which often averaged ten dollars to the pan, I said to myself, 'Every shovelful you dig out, and every fire you light, and every billet you stack, is helping Spurling to betray ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... our task difficult to have to deal so muck with eccentricities and extremes. "How CAN religion on the whole be the most important of all human functions," you may ask, "if every several manifestation of it in turn have to be corrected and sobered down and ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... reached it without a ladder, for the logs were hewed and mortar filled the cracks even. Then he went to the west end, the willow faced him as he turned the corner. He examined the trunk carefully. There was no mistake about small particles of black swamp muck adhering to the sides of the tree. He reached the low branches and climbed the willow. There was earth on the large limb crossing Elnora's window. He stood on it, holding the branch as had been done the night before, and looked into ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... (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 a man as ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... power to turn their thoughts even for a minute from low objects. 'What do I care about being confessed before the angels, or about the Holy Spirit to teach me? What I want is my share of the paternal acres. A rabbi who will help me to these is the rabbi for me.' John Bunyan's 'man with the muck-rake' had his eyes so glued to the ground and the muck that he did not see the crown hanging above him. How many of us find the sermon time a good opportunity for thinking about investments ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... temporary command until she can get to Blois herself—and then! Why, then she will certainly take them in hand personally, or I don't know her as well as I ought to, after all these years of intimacy. That will be a sight to see—that fair spirit in her white armor, delivering her will to that muck-heap, that rag-pile, that abandoned ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... the Isle of Muck, did ye ever listen to such a strain? Now let us take a look at the works of the ancients. The first in point of order is the "Laidley Worm of Spindleston Heugh," touching which Mr Sheldon gives us the following information. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... 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 will have ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... 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 ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... so strong a measure was this temptation upon me, that often I have been ready to clap my hand under my chin, to hold my mouth from opening; and to that end also I have had thoughts at other times, to leap with my head downward, into some muck hill hole or other, to keep my mouth ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... they were still fearful savages. Messengers arrived from the neighbouring town to announce the death of their chief, Matiamvo. That individual had been addicted to running a-muck through his capital and beheading any one he met, till he had a large heap of human heads in front of his hut. Men were also slaughtered occasionally, whenever the chief wanted part of a body to perform ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 of our writers, his works are "not ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... 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 swim! Hither the clean wild ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... effect that the faculty would demand Frazer's resignation; to explain the reason why 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: "Well, by ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... they want money for?" he boomed. "They'll only spend it on all kinds of muck they don't want; what the missionaries leave ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... old hogs that were in the pen were hungry and fierce. Even a grown person would have been in danger from the beasts. The pen, too, was knee-deep in soft muck and was as dark as a dungeon. In his efforts to escape the hogs, the boy had wallowed round in the muck. The hole was out of his reach, and the sty was strongly planked up to the barn ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... 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 into ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... the poor is always givin' broken rubbish to the children," she exclaimed. "Not but what they mean it kindly, but it makes a heap of muck ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... Ile neuer lin, But I will thorough thicke and thinne, Vntill at length I bring her in, My dearest Lord nere doubt it: Thorough Brake, thorough Brier, Thorough Muck, thorough Mier, 310 Thorough Water, thorough Fier, And thus ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... him, by what kind of resemblance can I lead him on? For about what has he busied himself which resembles beauty, that I may be able to change him and say, Beauty is not in this, but in that? Would you have me to tell him, that beauty consists not in being daubed with muck, but that it lies in the rational part? Has he any desire of beauty? has he any form of it in his mind? Go and talk to a hog, and tell him not ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... have done your work, and I fling you away, as I fling away all my tools at my pleasure. There, in the green muck and slimy filth, you will tell ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... 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
... I haven't got down to the primitive diet yet," he sighed, as he sat back. "The tinned goods on the Rattler, now I could make a hearty meal off of them, but this muck——" He took a half-pound strip of broiled shark and flung it to the dog. "I suppose I'll come to it if you ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... the humble family attribute this visit?" I inquired, despising that tone of mockery into which I had fallen yet seeming unable to drag myself out of its muck-bottom depths. ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... to eight 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 our ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... to throw 'em to the lions, or bowstring 'em in the harems. And in the days of real chivalry they burned 'em at the stake or locked 'em up in convents or castles. But don't you worry, Jim, Charity has you for a champion and she's mighty lucky. Go on and fight the muckers and the muck-rakers, and don't let the reporters or the preachers scare you away from doing the ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... fumbled for a spare coin. She had a kindly, intelligent face, and spoke volubly in patois, having very little command of French. It was, indeed, necessary for me to converse by the medium of an interpreter. On approaching the village we were overtaken by a slight, handsome youth conducting a muck-wagon. This was her younger son, and his easy, well-bred greeting, and correct French, prepared me for the piece of intelligence to follow. The wearer of peasant's garb, carting manure, had passed his examination of Bachelor of Arts and Science, had, in fact, received ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... be woven into a golden net. He lifts his life to strike as miners lift their picks. He swings his body as harvesters their scythes. He will make himself an augur for boring, a chisel for drilling, a muck-rake for scratching, if only he may get gain. He will sweat and swelter and burn in the tropics until malaria has made his face as yellow as gold, if thereby he can fill his purse, and for a like end he will shiver and ache in the arctics. He will deny his ear music, he will deny ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... anxious to run a muck Can't do better than join with Puck. They'll find him bon diable—spite of his phiz— And, in fact, his great ambition is, While playing old Puck in first-rate style, To be thought Robin ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... since, but they never pinched any marry-me-quick, not in Master Noll's time. But he's gone now, and I'm not as nimble as I used to be. Jesus help me, how he had used to fight! He used to put my heart in my mouth, coming in here all blood and muck to wash himself afore he went home. But take your things off and ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... out of the muck of Christian belief about him. If common men all might live lives of greater sacrifice than Jesus did, without any pretensions to the supernatural, it only means that we need a new embodiment for our ideals. If we find it in man—in God's creature—so much the better ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... Moslander William Moslander John Moss (2) Alexander Motley William Motley Elkinar Mothe Enoch Motion Benjamin Motte Francis Moucan Jean Moucan George Moulton John Moulton Richard Mount John Muanbet Hezekiah Muck Jacob Muckleroy Philip Muckleroy (2) Jacob Mullen Eleme Mullent Jean Muller Leonard Muller Robert Muller Abraham Mullet Jonathan Mullin Leonard Mullin Jonathan Mullin Robert Mullin William Mullin Edward Mulloy (2) Francis Mulloy ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... spheres. The cropped convict, released from prison, was followed everywhere by the jeers and branding of a society which gloated over his downfall and which forever reminded him of his infamy. But the men who waded on to wealth through the muck of base practices and by means of crimes a millionfold more insidious and dangerous than the offense of the convict, were not only honored as leading citizens, but they became the extolled and unquestioned dictators of that supreme trading society which ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... a protective coloring from the action of time and the elements; his shirt had faded from a bright buff to a nondescript shade which blended with what had once been light corduroy trousers; his heavy shoes, treated only the evening before to a coat of preservative grease, were now covered with muck; and, pulled over his eyes, a shapeless canvas hat completed the list of the ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... I'm no 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 ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... then?" he asked. "Red, yaller, muck-dirt colour?"—and he stared significantly at the Tailless Tyke, who was lying at his master's feet. The little man ceased rubbing his knees and eyed the boy. David shifted uneasily ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... in a small ravine," he said. "They had broken through thin ice in an overflow, and the sled had mired in muck. The cold wave set them tight; their legs were planted like posts, and I had to cut them out. Two were ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... 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 it remained, was it not thine own? Thou ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... the Lord 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 daughters ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... not the unscrupulous ogre that the muck-rakers picture. He does not order the judge to decide the hundred-thousand-dollar-contract case in favor of his hench man. He might like to have him do so but he does not ask. Neither does the judge lean over backwards ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... Master. And a quiet receptiveness, an openness of eye, a simple readiness to take in these gentle impressions is, I believe with all my heart, of the essence of true wisdom. We have all of us our work to do in the world; but we have our lesson to learn as well. The man with the muck-rake in the old parable, who raked together the straws and the dust of the street, was faithful enough if he was set to do that lowly work; but had he only cared to look up, had he only had a moment's leisure, he would have seen that the ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... tower, like a lily stem, or a long, lovely pale pink and white and green pistil of the lily of the cathedral. Florence, the flowery town. Firenze—Fiorenze—the flowery town: the red lilies. The Fiorentini, the flower-souled. Flowers with good roots in the mud and muck, as should be: and fearless blossoms in air, like the cathedral and the ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... an' reckons your throne'll wan day be as bright. He'll break you, an' bring you to your knees, an' that 'fore your gray hairs be turned, as mine, to white. Oh, Christ Jesus, look you at this blind sawl an' give en somethin' better to lay hold 'pon than his poor bally-muck o' religion what's nort ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... mustn't mind weather when the market's to be considered. Tell me now, sir—you've got time, haven't you, sir? Talkin' of the market, and I've been nearly dead, and not out o' the muck yet—does the people know what us chaps gets ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... christened, so let her stay, I says. So it was with the Cassandra, as brought us all safe home from Malabar, after England took the Viceroy of the Indies; so it was with the old Walrus, Flint's old ship, as I've seen a-muck with the red blood and ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trades, I never, either now, or long since, Have heard of such a peace of nonsense; That one who learning's joys hath felt, And at the Muse's altar knelt, Should leave a life of sacred leisure To taste the accumulating pleasure; And, metamorphosed to an alley duck, Grovel in loads of kindred muck. Oh! 't is beyond my comprehension! A courtier throwing up his pension,— A lawyer working without a fee,— A parson giving charity,— A truly pious methodist preacher,— Are not, egad, so out of nature. Had nature made thee half a fool, But given thee wit ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... 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 colt and kye. ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... you expect, after making such a muck of it?" said his brother, sulkily. "We all thought you were so clever. How could we know you were going to be—well, ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... sunshine. They could not travel very close to its bank, for here the ground was uncertain. Once Sam left the highway to get a better view of the stream, and, before Cujo noticed it, found himself up to his knees in a muck which stuck to him like ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... we herded from the blast Of whizz-bangs, but one found our door at last. Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles. And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumping And splashing in the flood, deluging muck— The sentry's body; then his rifle, handles Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck. We dredged him up, for killed, until he whined "O sir, my eyes—I'm blind—I'm blind, I'm blind!" Coaxing, I held ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... the house raised or appear higher owing to 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 growers, and our experience with them is much in their ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward
... gotten fettled up—for indeed, Miss, I'd no heart to sweeping an' fettling, an' washing pots; so I sat me down i' th' muck—who should come in but Maister Weston! I started siding stuff then, an' sweeping an' doing; and I expected he'd begin a-calling me for my idle ways, as Maister Hatfield would a' done; but I was mista'en: ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... that, fellows?" he exclaimed, in dismay when he had rammed the seven foot pole down until three fourths of its length had vanished in the unfathomable depths of soft muck. ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... down, breathing frostily in the chill air. "I shall muck it. I know I shall," whispered Stalky uneasily; and his discomfort was not lightened by a murmur from the rear rank that the old gentleman was General Collinson, a member of the College ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... whereof is to have no order at all, but to grind with the clack of some demagogue. Is he providing already for his golden thumb? Lift up your heads; away with ambition, that fulsome complexion of a statesman, tempered, like Sylla's, with blood and muck. 'And the Lord give to his senators wisdom; and make our faces to shine, that we may be a light to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide their feet in the way of peace.'—In the name of God, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... garden, Maud; I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the muck of the rose ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... 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 ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the intricate ropes, at the steel masts rising and carrying huge yards of steel, rising higher and higher, until steel masts and yards gave way to slender spars of wood, while ropes and stays turned into a delicate tracery of spider-thread against the sky. That such a wretched muck of men should be able to work this magnificent ship through all storm and darkness and peril of the sea was beyond all seeming. I remembered the two mates, the super-efficiency, mental and physical, of Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike—could ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... Naught Nothing set to work at his task; but, as fast as he cleared the muck, it just fell back again. So by breakfast-time he was in a terrible sweat; yet not one whit nearer the end of his job was he. Now the Magician's daughter, coming to bring him his breakfast, found him so distraught and distracted that he ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... our fate would be if we continued in those marked billets, so we moved out, bag and baggage, into a sunken road near by and spent the night there in the rain and muck, and were most uncomfortable. What puzzled us rather was that the Hun did not shell our old billets that night—that is, nothing out of the ordinary. 'But that's only his cunning,' we consoled ourselves; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... perhaps had done justice; and yet not Hawthorne either, for he was mildly minded, and it lay not in him to create for us that throb of the miser's pulse, his fretful energy of gusto, his vast arms of ambition clutching in he knows not what: insatiable, insane, a god with a muck-rake. Thus, at least, looking in the bosom of the miser, consideration detects the poet in the full tide of life, with more, indeed, of the poetic fire than usually goes to epics; and tracing that mean man about his cold hearth, and to and fro in his discomfortable ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she: "I will not have anybody here so frightful." "That I cannot," answered the youth, "for I am not very clean in the head." "Dost thou think then that I will have thee in the kitchen, if such be the case?" said she; "go to the master of the horse: thou art fittest to carry muck from the stables." When the master of the horse told him to take off his wig, he got the same answer, so he refused to have him. "Thou canst go to the gardener," said he, "thou art only fit to go and dig the ground." The gardener allowed ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... are formed, known under the general names of humus and humic acid, which may, in a slight degree, affect the growth of plants, but their practical importance is of too doubtful a character to justify us in considering them. The application of manures, containing organic matter, such as peat, muck, animal manure, etc., supplies the soil with carbon on the same principle, and the decomposing matters also generate[Q] carbonic acid gas while being decomposed. The agricultural value of carbon in the soil depends ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... letter he begs the Society to be cautious and offer no encouragement to any disposed "'to run the muck' (sic) (it is Sir George's expression) against the religious and political INSTITUTIONS of Spain"; but "the delicacy of the situation does not appear to have been thoroughly understood at the time even by the Committee at home." {224b} They saw the astonishing success ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... 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 ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... we go through all this muck and moil to help fix things nicer for her at home, and what's it all amount to? Seems like she's just gone ahead the way she'd 'a' gone anyhow; and now, I suppose, getting ready to up and leave us! Ain't that a puzzle to you? ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... amount to nothin'," said California John. "In the first place, it's only the 'nesters,' [A] the saloon crowd, who are after you for Austin's case; and the usual muck of old-timers and loafers who either think they own the country and ought to have a free hand in everything just as they're used to, or who are agin the Government on general principles. I don't believe the people at Durham are behind this. I bet ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... by the run of luck May shed the slime—they've done it, Times and again they've done it. That turn to aspiration out of muck Is quick if heart's begun it, If heart's desire's begun it. But 'ware revenge if greater craft it is That jockeyed him to recognize defeat, Or greater force that overmastered his— Efficiency more potent than deceit That ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... the other, with loud 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 disliking to see ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... 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 ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... exclaimed in a high-pitched nasal voice, "it ain't no use in talkin', ye kent put no tenderfoot t' boss the round-up. There's them all-fired Donoghue lot jest sent right in t' say, 'cause, I s'pose, they reckon as they're the high muck-i-muck o' this location, that that tarnation Sim Lory, thar head man, is to cap' the round-up. Why, he ain't cast a blamed foot on the prairie sence he's been hyar. An' I'll swear he don't know the horn o' his saddle from a monkey stick. Et ain't ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... ride a special thoroughbred, and no doubt a cheery dog at home; but, poor devil, he hadn't much chance of good cheer there! Miles and miles on his poor feet before breakfast; mud-poultices all the morning; and not the semblance of a drink all day, except some aerated muck called Gieshuebler. He was allowed to lap that up an hour after meals, when his tongue would be hanging out of his mouth. We went to the same weighing machine at cock-crow, and though he looked quite good-natured once when I caught him asleep in his chair, I have known him tear up ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... how I had treated her, and invent things that never took place. Even on a dot of a coral island there is gossip and slander and a Kanaka Mrs. Grundy, and Rosie was doing her best to ruin me, so that I was avoided, and the King and the other high muck-a-mucks went to Tyson's, the opposition trader, and tabooed my store till I didn't know which way ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... he gave me condensed essence of mixed farming, with excursions into sugar-beet (did you know they are making sugar in Alberta?), and he talked of farmyard muck, our dark mother of all things, with ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... voice. In the corner of the room, Nema looked up for a moment, and there was fear and worry in her eyes before she looked back to her weaving of endless knots. Sather Karf sighed in weariness. "If I knew what was happening to the sky, would I be dredging the muck of Duality for the likes of ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... growing State, the law is aided by quickly executed decrees of vigilance committees. Self-appointed popular leaders, crafty politicians, scheming preachers, aspiring editors, and ambitious demagogues crop up. They are the mushroom growth of the muck-heap ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... I just stepped back and picked at the roof for all I was worth. A big bunch of muck came down, covering up the face. Then, like a crazy man, I picked wherever the dirt seemed loose all the way down the drift. Great heaps of dirt caved in on me. I was stunned, nearly buried, but I did the trick. There were tons of dirt between ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... coming in, others going out; some tottering with drunkenness, others yawning from yesterday's carousing. In the midst of these was Gallius, bedaubed with essences, and crowned with flowers. The floor of their apartment was all in a muck of dirt, streaming with wine, and strewed all about with chaplets of faded flowers, and fish-bones." Who could have seen more ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... lientery[obs3]; garbage, carrion; excreta &c. 299; slough, peccant humor, pus, matter, suppuration, lienteria[obs3]; faeces, feces, excrement, ordure, dung, crap[vulgar], shit[vulgar]; sewage, sewerage; muck; coprolite; guano, manure, compost. dunghill, colluvies[obs3], mixen[obs3], midden, bog, laystall[obs3], sink, privy, jakes; toilet, john, head; cess[obs3], cesspool; sump, sough, cloaca, latrines, drain, sewer, common sewer; Cloacina; dust hole. sty, pigsty, lair, den, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... lead me back to the main band. The signs were few and barely sufficient to allow me to keep up the pursuit. It was not until I came to a spring, the overflow of which had made muck of the ground, that I was afforded an opportunity to inspect the two sets of tracks. One set was made by moccasins almost as small as those I had given to ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... hurry did they twain fare, The gent, and the son of the stout porter, Who fled like an arrow, nor turned a hair, Through all the mire and muck: "A ticket, a ticket, sir clerk, I pray: For by two of the clock must I needs away." "That may hardly be," the clerk did say, "For indeed—the ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... it was the last thing he ever did. He'd like to see any man stop him. He took the deadly fence as with the wings of a bird. But he found that the man was still on his back. He couldn't understand it. He grew worried. And then he struck the red-brown muck bordering the stream. The muck flew, but at every bound Pirate sank deeper, and the knees of his rider were beginning to tell. Warburton, full of rage, yet not unreasonable rage, quickly saw his chance. Once more he threw back his weight; this time to the left. Pirate's head ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... rainbow. It is in shape like a large parrot, with a white bill, and black legs and feet. The carrion crow is as big as a small turkey, which it perfectly resembles in shape and colour; but its flesh smells and tastes so strong of muck that it is not eatable. The pelican is almost as big as a swan, being mostly white with brown tips to the wings, having a long bill with a large cross joining the lower part of the bill, and hanging ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... mun put u'p wi'! What insults an' snubs they've to tak! What bowin an' scrapin's expected, If a chap's a black coit on his back. As if clooas made a chap ony better, Or riches improved a man's heart, As if muck in a carriage smell'd sweeter Nor th' same muck ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley
... 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 chance. ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... sweet'airt, an' this is the chap, an' if my eyes ain't stun blind, the werry chap out o' the cussed studeros as killed 'er, pore dear, an' as is a-skearin' me away from my beautiful 'um in Primrose Court; an' 'ere wur I a-talkin' to 'im all of a muck sweat, thinkin' he wur a ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... facts. There are, for instance, big facts and little facts,—clean facts and dirty facts. Imagination raises you and gives you a high and comprehensive view of them all; your mere reason keeps you down in some noisome corner, like the man with the muck-rake." ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... 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 dressing of manure and a covering of corn stalks, but, ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... 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 not what ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... but were not permitted to approach him. They were the undisputed property of the rival chieftain,—to whose tent they were taken; but not until they had "run a muck" among the women and children, very similar to that which Bill had to submit to himself. It terminated in a similar manner: that is, by their owner taking them under his protection,—not from any motives of humanity, ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... stop again until they had cantered up through the awakening bazaar, where unclean-looking merchants and their underlings rinsed out their teeth noisily above the gutters, and the pariah dogs had started nosing in among the muck for things unthinkable to eat. The sun had shortened up the shadows and begun to beat down through the gaps; the advance-guard of the shrivelling hot wind had raised foul dust eddies, and the city was ahum when she ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... that mare, although, as you say, Miss Catharine, she was never healthy, has the most wonderful pluck, as you know. I remember once I had two ton o' muck in the waggon, and we were stuck. Jack and Blossom couldn't stir it, and, after a bit, chucked up. I put in Maggie—you should have seen her! She moved it, a'most all herself, aye, as far as from here to the gate, and then of course the others ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... so heavily on the mud-acclimated natives of Venus for success. They were as much at home in the mud as they were in the dank, humid air above. They could distinguish one type of mud from another deep beneath the surface, and could carry a dredge-tube down to a lode of the blue-gray muck with the unfailing ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... Mary Zattiany stood for a few moments striking her hands together, her face distorted. A wave of nausea overwhelmed her. She felt as if there had been an earthquake in her own soul and its muck were riding the surface. She loathed herself and all women and all men. She knew that the violence of the revulsion must be temporary, but for the moment it was beyond her control. She went to the telephone and called up Clavering and told ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... way to the palace steps. Weird figures sprang up from the muck, and were shot back ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... exclaimed, tucking the bat under her arm and wiping her forehead with a loose end of her yellow bandana. "I'm feelin' like the lady in 'The Vicar of Wakefield'; by which I don't mean the one that stooped to folly, but the one that was all of a muck of sweat." ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... is unlike anything that can be seen elsewhere. One hears about the bowels of the earth; this surely is the end of one of them. They talk of the mouth of hell; this is the mouth with a severe fit of vomiting. The filthy muck is spewed from an unseen gullet at one side into a huge upright mouth with sounds of oozing, retching and belching. Then as quickly reswallowed with noises expressive of loathing on its own part, while noxious steam spreads disgusting, unpleasant odours all around. ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... little sharply. "Our men here are as big as you and I, every one of them. My God! you'll have to pay the price of being a high muck-a-muck, Marty! So, don't ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... tree and the farm. It consisted of three buildings, a house and two big barns, forming three sides of a square. The cottage had a low, thatched roof, dirty, whitewashed walls, and green shutters. In the middle of the square was a huge muck heap, covered with patches of melting snow. A pig was pushing its snout into it here and there and grunting from time to time. There was no other sign of life anywhere. ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... suttee; while for the poor, cremation would be better than burial, because so cheap {footnote [Four or five dollars is the minimum cost.]}—so cheap until the poor got to imitating the rich, which they would do by-and-bye. The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a muck of threadbare burial-witticisms; but, on the other hand, it would resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation-jokes that have had a rest ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... poor shaffles? You're as drunk as muck. Do you think I've taken your brass? You've got a wrong pig by the lug if you ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... also mother of slaves; You might have borne deeper slaves— Doughfaces, crawlers, lice of humanity— Terrific screamers of freedom, Who roar and bawl, and get hot i' the face, But were they not incapable of august crime, Would quench the hopes of ages for a drink— Muck-worms, creeping flat to the ground, A dollar dearer to them than Christ's blessing; All loves, all hopes, less than the thought of gain, In life walking in that as in a shroud; Men whom the throes of heroes, Great deeds at which the gods might stand appal'd, The shriek ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... regarded as a dangerous lunatic and immoral person; 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 of "Traviata"—the ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... he costs. Get him started. Put it up to him to start toward the foregoing programme, to be reached in (say) three years—two if possible. He must learn to grow these things absolutely better than they are now grown anywhere on earth. He must get the best seed. He must get muck out of the swamp, manure from somewhere, etc. etc. He must have the supreme flavour in each thing. Let him take room enough for each—plenty of room. He doesn't want much room for any one thing, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... typical of the thousands of soldiers at the front, for French soldiers suffer that the children may never have to wade through this blood and muck. The foul creature that has bathed the world in blood must be slain forever. With the full consent of the intellect, of the heart and the conscience, these glorious French boys have given themselves to God, to ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... troublesome. The soil grew wetter and more wet until at last the men were working ankle deep in water. The further the mine went the wetter it became. The men worked on, taking their turn at the narrow face, shovelling out the wet muck and dragging it back to the shaft and up and out and away by the communication trench. They squeezed aside in silence when the Subaltern pushed in to inspect the working, and waited with side winks to one ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... Son 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 ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... all a-fire. An' it'll take great thumpin' jumps sometimes, an' run along the tops of the trees, carrying its partner with it, an' then droppin' him jest as a fish hawk'll drop a pickerel to kill it before eatin'. An' its food, of all the muck in the whole Bush is—moss!" And he laughed a short, unnatural laugh. "It's a moss-eater, is the Wendigo," he added, looking up excitedly into the faces of his companions. "Moss-eater," he repeated, with a string of the most outlandish oaths he ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... Our spoils he kicked at; And look'd upon things precious, as they were The common muck ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the like of you (he cuts a stick and throws it away), or wed with a wife (cuts a stick); and I do be thinking it should be a hard thing for the Almighty God to be looking on the world, bad days, and on men the like of yourself walking around on it, and they slipping each way in the muck. ...
— The Well of the Saints • J. M. Synge
... it 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 characteristically vigorous ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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 ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... school-houses, the largest one 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 there it is thoroughly washed and an embalming fluid injected ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... same letter he begs the Society to be cautious and offer no encouragement to any disposed "'to run the muck' (sic) (it is Sir George's expression) against the religious and political INSTITUTIONS of Spain"; but "the delicacy of the situation does not appear to have been thoroughly understood at the time even by the Committee at home." {224b} They saw ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... will find that Miss Marsdeo's taste differs very widely from yours," said De Forrest; "that is, if you give us to understand that you would seek your themes in a barn-yard, and set your easel upon a muck-heap. Though your pictures might not rank high they ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... 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 |
