"Pit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remained here she might think too long. And if he followed and insisted upon seeing her, the result might be more fatal still. He knew nothing of those personalities she may have concealed from him. For all he knew she might have depths in her nature as black as the bottomless pit. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... land is very prolific, the soil consisting of pulverized lava and volcanic dust, whose extreme fertility is due to a triple proportion of phosphates and nitrogen. On the slope of Mauna Loa is the crater of Kilauea, and in its centre the "pit," called Haleamaumau, the most awe-inspiring and in other ways the most remarkable volcano in the world. Landing at Hilo, by train and stage we went to see it. My visit was made at night when the illumination is greatest. Traversing the ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... ideas that he's likely to attempt nearly anything," said Hugh. "If he could find a good place where a runner would have to keep to the road I even believe he'd try to dig a deep pit, and cover the same over, just as the wild-animal catchers do in Africa, when they go out after big game for ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... my landlady's library. It consisted of Derham's "Physico- and Astro-Theology," "The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin," by one Taylor, D.D., "The Ready Reckoner or Tradesman's Sure Guide," and "The Path to the Pit delineated, with Twelve Engravings on Copper-plate." For distraction I fell to pacing the room, and rehearsing those remembered tags of Latin verse concerning which M. de Culemberg had long ago assured me, "My son, we know not when, but some day they ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... And of all lands of the whole world thou hast chosen thee one pit: and of all the flowers ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... seconds, yet how much he had seen in them. Truly his want of faith had been reproved—truly he also had been "warned of God in a dream,"—truly "his ears had been opened and his instruction sealed." His soul had been "kept back from the pit," and his life from "perishing by the sword;" and the way of the wicked had been made clear to him "in a dream, in a vision of the night when deep ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... docility in his youth. If the tragedy of Aspar also disappeared in the flames, it was not only in consequence of the criticism of a friend; for the author went so far as to call forth the noisy judgment of the pit. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... esteems confederates, And with true love embraces all, Prompt and efficient aid bestowing, and Expecting it, in all the pains And perils of the common war. And to resent with arms all injuries, Or snares and pit-falls for a neighbor lay, Absurd he deems, as it would be, upon The field, surrounded by the enemy, The foe forgetting, bitter war With one's own friends to wage, And in the hottest of the fight, With cruel and misguided sword, One's fellow soldiers put to flight. When truths like these ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... moments, to the fact that he was due to play left tackle on the Brimfield Football Team against Claflin School in a few days, and when he did he invariably experienced an appalling sick feeling at the pit of his stomach and became for the moment incapable of speech or action. When this occurred in class during, say, a faltering elucidation of the Iliad, it produced anything but a favourable impression on the instructor. Fortunately, while actually engaged in out-guessing Lee, of the second, ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... care who I deal with," said the boy, at bay. "I can't be took for seein' him, because there's no lor agin it. I was in the gravel pit ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... framework of a mortared Fiskiyyah ("cistern"), measuring five metres each way. The ruin lies a little south of west (241 deg. mag.) from the greater "Shigd;" and it is directly under the catacombed hill which bears the "Praying-place of Jethro." A tank in these regions always presupposes a water-pit, and there are lingering traditions that this is the "Well of Moses," so generally noticed by mediaval Arab geographers. It is the only one in the Wady Makna, not to mention a modern pit about an hour and ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... power from what I am in process of doing for Raoul. Ought he not to be preferred before all? Raoul de Frescas is a young man who has remained pure as an angel in the midst of our mire-pit; he is our conscience; moreover, he is my creation; I am at once his father, his mother, and I desire to be his guiding providence. I, who can never know happiness, still delight in making other people happy. I breathe ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... spurred by the immediate need of 'siller'! However, it's mine for what it's worth; and it's one of yours, the devil take it; and you know, as well as Flaubert, and as well as me, that it is NEVER DONE; in other words, it is a torment of the pit, usually neglected by the bards who (lucky beggars!) approached the Styx in measure. I speak bitterly at the moment, having just detected in myself the last fatal symptom, three blank verses in succession ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that are as deep as life itself, and that should come even to our little children in their romps and plays, the same as they learn to avoid the pit, or to fear a vicious dog, are the vital problems of mankind. These are questions essential to the preservation of life, and touching the progress of civilization; the natural economic problems that real statesmen should set before the people. Intelligent study and voting ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... wickedness on earth who was thrust down into Po, but who was really both inferior and posterior to Manua. This inferno, this Po, with many names, one of which remarkably enough was Ke-po-lua-ahi, the pit of fire, was not an entirely dark place. There was light of some kind and there was fire. The legends further tell us that when Kane, Ku, and Lono were creating the first man from the earth, Kanaloa was present, and in imitation of Kane, attempted ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... climber that when I first heard of hell from a servant girl who loved to tell its horrors and warn us that if we did anything wrong we would be cast into it, I always insisted that I could climb out of it. I imagined it was only a sooty pit with stone walls like those of the castle, and I felt sure there must be chinks and cracks in the masonry for fingers and toes. Anyhow the terrors of the horrible place seldom lasted long beyond the telling; for natural faith ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... do?" said his father. "The human devils would be no better, and the place would soon be re-occupied. The population of the pit must be kept up by immigration. There may be babies born in heaven, for any thing I know, but certain I am there can be none in the other place. This world of ours is the nursery of devils as well as ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... carnival of death; his artillery was massing to destroy the remnants of the charging divisions; those who deserted the crater, to scramble over the debris and run back, were shot down; then all that was left to the shuddering mass of blacks and whites in the pit was to shrink lower, evade the horrible mitraille, and wait for a charge of their friends to rescue them ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... workers, take up their tools and strike stroke for stroke with them. Every new situation and employment dazzles till we find out the trick of it. The boy longs to escape from a farm to college, from college to the city and practical life. Then he looks up from his desk, or from the pit in the theatre, to the gay world of fashion,—harder to conquer than even the world of thought. At last he makes his way upward into the sacred circle, and finds there a little original power and a great deal of routine. These fine parts are like those of players, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... seems to be well-rotted stable and cow-yard manure, mixed with vegetable matter, and when the tree is in bearing the outer covering of the nut itself is about one of the very best things to be thrown into the dung-pit. Dead animals buried not too near the roots, also blood, fish, and oil cakes are beneficial. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... fury of wild beasts, were the common topics of their poetry, as they were common occurrences in more remote periods of history. They were the strong ingredients thrown into the cauldron of tragedy, to make it "thick and slab." Man's life was (as it appears to me) more full of traps and pit-falls; of hair-breadth accidents by flood and field; more way-laid by sudden and startling evils; it trod on the brink of hope and fear; stumbled upon fate unawares; while the imagination, close behind it, caught at and clung to the shape of danger, or "snatched ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... through the bazaar for the other men who had returned, and when they were caught their punishment was more terrible still. Inconceivable tortures were inflicted on them and they were flung half-dead into a pit full of live scorpions and cobras. Even in these enlightened days there are dark corners in India, and in some Native States strange and terrible things still happen. And the tale of them rarely reaches the ear of the representatives ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... daughter was dead and is alive again; she was lost and is found. Myrtle Hazard, rescued from great peril of the waters, and cared for by good Samaritans, is now in her home. Thou, O Lord, who didst let the water-flood overflow her, didst not let the deep swallow her up, nor the pit shut its mouth upon her. Let us return our thanks to the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, who is our God and Father, and who ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is, and it ought to be well known to the closer student of nature, that the fire-weed makes its appearance in the "conditions" of the burnt soil, just as stramonium does in the conditions of the soil where a coal-pit has been recently burned; that is, not from seed, but from "vital units," or germs, everywhere present in the earth—those taking advantage of environing conditions, just as Bacteria or Torultz spring from the proper organic infusions. And the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... I did lately sit Playing for sport at cherry-pit: She threw; I cast; and, having thrown, I got the pit, and she ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... my bread first and live for beauty after. Everything is refused though, everything sent back or else dropped as it were into some bottomless pit or gulf. ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... if the choice were given me either to renounce my life of outward-seeming sanctity, and becoming as other men were, to feel again that inward peace which had been mine long years before; or else, while remaining holy in the eyes of the multitude, to feel myself sinking into a bottomless pit of wickedness from which I could never more hope to emerge. My mental tortures while this struggle was going on I can never forget: they are as much a real experience to me as if they had made up a part of my genuine waking life. And still I stood with closed hands in ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... a marl-pit over which mulberries arched, and there he stayed crouching with his eyes wide-open until evening. Here he sat like a king beneath the ogive of the branches; a shower of rain had adorned them with pale-blue ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... Pettybaw Sands, we daundered ower the muir. As we cam' through the scented birks, we saw a trottin' burnie wimplin' 'neath the white-blossomed slaes and hirplin' doon the hillside; an' while a herd-laddie lilted ower the fernie brae, a cushat crooed leesomely doon i' the dale. We pit aff oor shoon, sae blithe were we, kilted oor coats a little aboon the knee and paidilt i' the burn, gettin' gey an' weet the while. Then Sally pu'd the gowans wat wi' dew an' twined her bree wi' tasseled broom, while I had a wee crackie wi' Tibby Buchan, the flesher's dochter frae Auld Reekie. ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... vain,—nay, to whom the conceptions of the grandest master of instrumental music are incomprehensible; to whom Beethoven unlocks no portal in heaven; to whom Rossini has no mysteries on earth unsolved by the critics of the pit,—suddenly hears the human voice of the human singer, and at the sound of that voice the walls which enclosed him fall. The something far from and beyond the routine of his commonplace existence becomes known to him. He of himself, poor man, can make nothing of it. He ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and I got no rest day or night for her, till I found this "walking toad" under the turf. She dug a hole and put it there to charm me, gentlemen, that is the truth. I got the toad out and put it in a cloth, and took it upstairs and showed it to my mother, and "throwed" it into the pit in the garden. She went round this here "walking toad" after she had buried it, and I could not rest by day or sleep by night till I found it. The Bench: Do you go to church? Defendant: Sometimes I go to church, and sometimes to chapel, and sometimes I don't go nowhere. ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... unusual and unexpected. But in the short-story of action, on the other hand, the plot may be sufficient unto itself, and the characters may be the merest lay figures. The heroine of "The Lady or the Tiger," for example, is simply a woman—not any woman in particular; and the hero of "The Pit and the Pendulum" is simply a man—not any man in particular. The situation itself is sufficient to hold the reader's interest for the brief space of the story. Hence, although, in the short-story of character, the leading actor is likely ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... as I have before remarked, is a modest pit about a thousand feet deep and three thousand in circumference; that of Kilauea is somewhat deeper, and ten miles in circumference. But what are either of them compared to the vacant stomach of Haleakala? I will not offer any figures of my own, but give official ones—those of Commander Wilkes, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of sin; but, believe me, your faith is vain if you do not stand for, and labour and fight to enforce, God's claims to proclaim Christ's redeeming grace, and to deliver men from going down to the pit. ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... their plain diet had much to do with their ruggedness of nature. They had not as many good things to eat as we have, and they had better digestion. Now, all the evening some of our best men sit with an awful bad feeling at the pit of their stomach, and the food taken fails to assimilate, and in the agitated digestive organs the lamb and the cow lie down together and get up just as they have a mind to. [Laughter.] After dinner I sat down with my friend ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... went into my mouth. The impact almost knocked me over, but my teeth had closed on his thumb and when he jerked back he put me on my balance again. I clouted him on the jaw and knocked him down. He landed in the lime box. The school had not yet been plastered, and the quicklime was in an open pit. I started in after the bully, but stopped to save my pants from the lime. There was a hose near by, and I turned the water on Babe in the lime bath. The lime completely covered him. He was whipped and in fear of his life. Choking and weeping ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... his Confessions, he expresses in unmeasured terms his horror of the deed, filling seven chapters [Footnote: Confessions, chapters iv-x.] with his reflections and lamentations: "Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart, upon which thou hadst mercy when in the depths of this bottomless pit." "O corruption! O monster of life and depth of death! Is it possible that I liked to do what I might not, simply and for no other reason than because ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... camp-meeting times, for be it remembered that Cartwright called things by their right names. He gave forth no uncertain sound. His theology was that of the Fathers. We hear little in these modern days of "The fire that quencheth not" and of "total depravity" and of "the bottomless pit." Such expressions are unfitted for ears polite. Higher criticism, new thought, and all ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... are going into the bottomless pit of metaphysics, excuse me," said Lord Oldborough—"there I must leave you. I protest, sir, you are past ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... plays without chorus, had not the special dancing-stage (-orchestra-) with the altar in the middle, on which the Greek chorus performed its part, or, to speak more correctly, the space thus appropriated among the Greeks served with the Romans as a sort of pit; accordingly the choral dance at least, with its artistic alternations and intermixture of music and declamation, must have been omitted in Rome, and, even if the chorus was retained, it had but little ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... are to be pressed with the nails are as follows: the arm pit, the throat, the breasts, the lips, the jaghana, or middle parts of the body, and the thighs. But Suvarnanabha is of opinion that when the impetuosity of passion is excessive, then the places need ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... knew. He felt suddenly packed in ice, from his lips to the pit of his belly; he revolved slowly away, took a few steps and caught the edge of the panel. His whole body began to shake uncontrollably and his lips moved in a soundless whisper that seemed to say, "No, no ... don't you understand? ... we're ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... boxes he saw Count Gossau, in company with a comrade of his own, whom he had cashiered: these persons were among the foremost of his accusers. Inflamed with the desire of revenge, he entered the box, seized Count Gossau, and would have thrown him into the pit in the presence of the Sovereign herself. Gossau drew his sword, and tried to run him through, but the latter seizing it, wounded himself in the hand. Everybody ran to save Gossau, who was unable to defend himself. After this exploit, the colonel of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... hastened to help. Wondrous leather-roofed Floating-batteries, set afloat by French-Spanish Pacte de Famille, give gallant summons: to which, nevertheless, Gibraltar answers Plutonically, with mere torrents of redhot iron,—as if stone Calpe had become a throat of the Pit; and utters such a Doom's-blast of a No, as all men must credit. (Annual Register (Dodsley's), xxv. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... inmates of Pandemonium, than those of the counting-house, the college, or the chapel! If there be within the limits of any of our cities or towns, scenes which answer to this horrid picture, let 'it not be told in Gath, or published in the streets of Askelon,' lest the fiends of the pit should rejoice;—lest the ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... Matriena Pavlovna, leaning her head forward and smiling. By the intonation of her voice she seemed to say, "All are equal to-day," and wiping her mouth with a bandana handkerchief which she kept under her arm-pit, ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... whipped both of them, and I suppose their friends told them that they had whipped me. All I know is, they both run, and I was bloody from head to foot, from where I had been cut in the forehead and face by the canteens. This all happened one dark night in the month of July, 1864, in the rifle pit in front of Atlanta. When day broke the next morning, I went forward to where I had shot at the "boogaboo" of the night before, and right there I found a dead Yankee soldier, fully accoutered for any emergency, his eyes ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... recollections and desires, tormented by useless self-reproach, and physically intoxicated by the balmy atmosphere and the odor of the flowering shrubs at his feet. Arriving at the edge of a somewhat deep pit, he tried to leap across with a single bound, but, whether he made a false start, or that he was weakened and dizzy with the conflicting emotions with which he had been battling, he missed his footing and fell, twisting his ankle, on the side of the embankment. He rose with an effort and ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... is also mentioned by Spence, in a letter to his mother:-"In spite of the excellence," he says, "of the actors, the greatest part of the entertainment to me was the countenances of the people in the pit and boxes. When the devils were like to carry off the Damned Soul, every body was in the utmost consternation and when St. John spoke so obligingly to her, they were ready to cry out for joy. When the Virgin appeared on the stage, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... elsewhere, or have since found in previous publications. I can conscientiously declare, that the complete success of the REMORSE on the first night of its representation did not give me as great or as heart-felt a pleasure, as the observation that the pit and boxes were crowded with faces familiar to me, though of individuals whose names I did not know, and of whom I knew nothing, but that they had attended one or other of my courses of lectures. It is an excellent though perhaps somewhat vulgar proverb, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... viii. 2-xi. 18.—Seven angels receive trumpets, incense offered. With the sounding of each of the first four trumpets a chastisement is sent from above to rouse repentance (viii.). With the fifth, chastisement ascends from the pit; with the sixth, angels and terrific horsemen come from the Euphrates; but men repent not (ix.). Before the seventh trumpet sounds, an angel tells the seer that when it has sounded the mystery of God as declared to the prophets will be finished (x.). Two prophets resembling ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... whilst I eat.' He ate, and whilst he ate he thought of a scheme. He rose and said: I My girl, come, and I will show you a pit I ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... breadth it overlapped the path, its presence being skilfully concealed by branches of trees overlaid with broad leaves on which earth had been thrown and lightly pressed so as to give it the appearance of part of the beaten track. In the floor of the pit pointed stakes had been driven, but fortunately Laxdale had fallen between them and thus escaped being impaled. His sole companion was a goat that, left without food and water, was to act as a decoy to the lions. Evidently ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... that was ever created, and though you've got a new coat of paint onto you, and can set still all day and do nothing while I can wear the finest broadcloth and set still, too, it won't do for us to forget the pit from which we was dug, and I don't forget it neither, no more than I forgit favors shown when I was not fust cut. You, sir, rode on the 'Liza Ann with that crony of yours—Hastings was his name—and you paid me han'some, though I didn't ask nothin'; and ther's ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... the test of raising man out of the pit. And how does it propose to do it? Not by minimizing the danger and need. It says: "The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores." It demands as the first necessity a ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... bells of Heaven The wildest peal for years, If Parson lost his senses And people came to theirs, And he and they together Knelt down with angry prayers For tamed and shabby tigers And dancing dogs and bears, And wretched, blind pit ponies, And ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... leaden wings. At last the sickening word came that the planks yet to be removed before they could enter the main sewer were of seasoned oak—hard as bone, and three inches thick. Their feeble tools were now worn out or broken; they could no longer get air to work, or keep a light in the horrible pit, which was reeking with cold mud; in short, any attempt at further progress with the ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... his father struck me as an ideal blending of affectionate comradeship with old-fashioned respect.[E] True, this was in Philadelphia, "the City of Homes," and even there it may have been an exceptional case. I am not so illogical as to pit a single observation against (presumably) a wide induction; I merely offer for what it is worth one ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... scene, which I did soon after, I learned the cause of this change of tune. One of the dogs met me running back on the trail on three legs only, and woefully mangled. The moose was standing in a snow-pit, which had been trodden out by the animals while battling, and near his feet lay the other dog, mutilated in a most fearful manner, and evidently quite dead. The bull, in his rage, still continued to assail the dead body of the hound, rising and pouncing down upon ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... in spite of supplications, delaying to strike. What says Dante? "There was such a moan there as there would be if all the sick who, between July and September, are in the hospitals of Valdichiana, and of the Tuscan swamps, and of Sardinia, were in one pit together; and such a stench was issuing forth as is wont to issue ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... gala night. The opera-house of Milan was one blaze of light and colour. Royalty in field-marshal's uniform and diamonds, attended by decorated generals and radiant ladies of the court, occupied the great box opposite the stage. The tiers from pit to gallery were filled with brilliantly dressed women. From the third row, where we were fortunately placed, the curves of that most beautiful of theatres presented to my gaze a series of retreating and approaching lines, composed of noble faces, waving feathers, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... tossed on a stormy sea, chuck! chuck! from boulder to boulder, without intermittence. We found delicious spring water about noon and passed a most remarkable place later in the day. This must have been the pit of a volcano. A few steps aside from the road you might lean over the precipice and look straight down into a great, round crater, so deep that it made a person dizzy. At the bottom there was a ranch house, ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... which was an image of the Virgin, which he was required to kiss. In approaching it, he stepped upon the trap, and was precipitated into the depths below upon a wheel armed with knives, upon which he was torn in pieces. The story is, that this horrible pit was discovered in searching for a little dog which had fallen through the planking, when the wheel was found, with its knives rusty, the fragments of bones and garments still clinging to them. But ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... an' mosquitoes in the woods an' she's passed the age o' likin' to drop down anywhere, an' jump up any time, years ago. As for cookin' in the woods she says that part of Elijah's editorial is too much for every one. She says she never hear of roastin' a ox whole in a pit in her life; she says how is the ox to be got into the pit an' what's to cook him while he's in there an' when he's cooked how's he to be got out again to eat? She says she thinks Elijah has got ...
— Susan Clegg and a Man in the House • Anne Warner
... a number of Hindus were standing; some of them were his retainers and friends. I heard them say, as I passed through their midst, "Who will fall into the pit of the Christian Way!" And they laughed, and the Brahman laughed. "As the filth of the world, the offscouring of all ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... and cellars you no longer found squalor and dilapidation; poverty in plenty, but at all events an attempt at cleanliness everywhere, as far, that is to say, as a landlord's care could ensure it. The stair-cases had ceased to be rotten pit-falls; the ceilings showed traces of recent care; the walls no longer dripped with moisture or were foul with patches of filth. Not much change, it is true, in the appearance of the inhabitants; yet close inquiry would ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... thus looked out it was long before the time. A great murmur had attracted his attention. He saw the house crammed in every part. All the boxes were filled. In the pit was a vast congregation of gentlemen and ladies, the very ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... suspicion that the death of Mr. Farrell was more opportune than natural. You are the kind of man who is much impressed by his own cleverness, and when you met me in Devonshire it occurred to you to throw down a challenge, to pit your wits against mine. I suspected you then, for you overdid certain things, and a sinister intention had entered into your head. You confessed yourself charmed with Miss Lester, yet your whole attitude suggested that you ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... an assembly is, the greater quantity of carbonic acid is evolved by its component members. State, upon actual experience, the per centage of this gas in the atmosphere of the following places:—The Concerts d'Ete, the Swan in Hungerford Market, the pit of the Adelphi, Hunt's Billiard Rooms, and the Colosseum during the period ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... from its furnace, showing by the great wood fire the two nearly naked Krumen stokers, shining like polished bronze in their perspiration, as they throw in on to the fire the billets of red wood that look like freshly-cut chunks of flesh. The white engineer hovers round the mouth of the pit, shouting down directions and ever and anon plunging down the little iron ladder to carry them out himself. At intervals he stands on the rail with his head craned round the edge of the sun deck to listen to the captain, who is up on the little deck above, for there is no telegraph to the engines, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... us, the sheep of hell; lead us to Thy shining pasture ... still water; lead us from the great fire of the eternal pit, from the ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of south Tarawa atoll due to heavy migration mixed with traditional practices such as lagoon latrines and open-pit dumping; ground ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... depth of twelve feet without discovering the object of their search. In the evening, when Count Raymond had withdrawn to his post, and the weary assistants began to murmur, Bartholemy, in his shirt, and without his shoes, boldly descended into the pit; the darkness of the hour and of the place enabled him to secrete and deposit the head of a Saracen lance; and the first sound, the first gleam, of the steel was saluted with a devout rapture. The ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... sharpers! Grand Mogul of all the rogues under the sun!—great prototype of that first hellish ringleader who imbued a thousand legions of innocent angels with the flame of rebellion, and drew them down with him into the bottomless pit of damnation! The agonizing cries of bereaved mothers pursue thy footsteps! Thou drinkest blood like water! and thy murderous knife holds men cheaper ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... grown grey in the service of the nation, virtuous, intelligent, and with the unexampled experience of a whole life-time of government, would have acquired an extraordinary prestige? If, in his youth, he had been able to pit the Crown against the mighty Palmerston and to come off with equal honours from the contest, of what might he not have been capable in his old age? What Minister, however able, however popular, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... few, one may believe, who are fully conscious of the reasons why Shakespeare could fill the Elizabethan pit with the rough London apprentices and the Elizabethan boxes with superfine gallants and courtiers; why he has been a delight equally to the worldling, to whom always "the play's the thing," and to the sedate scholar, who has perchance never set foot in a theatre, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... morning, the man went out to hunt, and as soon as he was out of sight, his wives went up on top of the butte. There they dug a deep pit, and covered it over with light sticks, grass, and dirt, and placed ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... dances in character to the flute, which had long been usual, and which were performed sometimes on other occasions, e. g. for the entertainment of the guests during dinner, but more especially in the pit of the theatre during the intervals between the acts. It was not difficult to form out of these dances—in which the aid of speech had doubtless long since been occasionally employed— by means of the introduction ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... house, and now here comes a musicien from the backwoods and demands all of a sudden that I sing F!" This was the commentary of Fraeulein Varini, the prima donna whose outstanding bosom had long been a source of human merriment to pit, stall, and gallery. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... of emancipation. The boat which has been tethered to the weird, baleful shore is set free, and sails toward the glories of the morning. The man, long cramped in the dark, imprisoning pit, is brought out, and stretches his limbs in the sweet light and air of God's free world. Black servitude ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... the adjoining room, and deposited through that hole upon the shovel with which the man in front placed it in the oven. The bread, when baked, was conveyed to cool in a room the other side of the oven, by a similar aperture. Beneath the oven is an ash-pit. To the right is a large room which is conjectured to have been a stable. The jaw-bone above mentioned and some other fragments of a skeleton were found in it. There is a reservoir for water at the further end, which passes through the wall, and ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Caius Gracchus were murdered, and services were there performed in honor of their manes. Festus, an old Roman lexicographer who lived in the second or third century, tells us there was in the Comitium a stone covered pit which was ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... system the instrument for attacking another part; and it is also comic. What you appeal to and stand firmly rooted in is no more credible, no more authoritative, than what you challenge in its name. In vain will you pit the church against the pope; at once you will have to pit the Bible against the church, and then the New Testament against the Old, or the genuine Jesus against the New Testament, or God revealed ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... horses down to water before I went to the tree under which I had directed Mr. Browne to deposit a letter for me. A good deal of water still remained in the channel, but nevertheless a large pit had been dug in it as I had desired. I did not drink, nor did Mr. Stuart, the surface of the water was quite green, and the water itself was of a red colour, but I believe we were both thinking of any thing but ourselves ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... as we awake in the morning when we have slept out the night, so sure shall we then awake. What if our carcasses become as vile as those of the beasts that perish, what if our bones are digged up and scattered about the pit brink, and worms consume our flesh, yet we know that our Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the last on earth, and we shall see ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... call till every last one had climbed into the "pit" of the graceful sailing vessel, and like a sturdy strong crew they appeared; the scouts in their reliable khaki, and the captain and mate in their shining white duck, with the regulation yachting cap, jauntily but securely set on ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... have had a thousand roubles on her back, and all acquired at the expense of the overtaxed peasant, or, worse still, at that of the conscience of her neighbour. Yes, we all know why bribes are accepted, and why men become crooked in soul. It is all done to provide wives—yes, may the pit swallow them up!—with fal-lals. And for what purpose? That some woman may not have to reproach her husband with the fact that, say, the Postmaster's wife is wearing a better dress than she is—a dress which has cost a thousand roubles! 'Balls and gaiety, balls and gaiety' ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... leaving the library when a soft pit-pat, pit-pat at our heels caused me to turn. The quiet, disturbing footfalls were made by a beautiful blue Angora cat, which was accompanied by George, the pug, who had made his presence known at the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of flame the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the torture of that bed becomes ours for a moment. Through the dim purple air fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin, and in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of body into the semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner of false coin. He bids us listen to his misery; we stop, and with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day and night of the brooks ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... little bird bear in his bill a drop of water to quench the flame. So near the burning stream does he fly, that his dear little feathers are SCORCHED; and hence he is named Brou-rhuddyn (Breast-burnt). To serve little children, the robin dares approach the infernal pit. No good child will hurt the devoted benefactor of man. The robin returns from the land of fire, and therefore he feels the cold of winter far more than his brother birds. He shivers in the brumal blast; hungry, he chirps ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... his feet were set upon the road to Los Muertos, and that he was fleeing terror-stricken, gasping, all but insane with hysteria. Then the never-to-be-forgotten night that ensued, when he descended into the pit, horrified at what he supposed he had done, at one moment ridden with remorse, at another raging against his own feebleness, his lack of courage, his wretched, vacillating spirit. But morning had come, and with it the knowledge that he had failed, and the baser assurance ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... with chains or iron bands. Presently birds of prey, so numerous within the tropics and always waiting to devour, pounce upon the corpse and quickly tear the flesh from the bones, while the skeleton remains intact. This is afterward deposited in a pit dug within the same enclosure, and which remains open till completely filled up with bones; after which another is dug, and when the enclosure can conveniently contain no more pits a new one is selected and prepared. None ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... naughty jade on the boards stepped high, or blew a kiss to some dandy among the noted folk. For aught I could make out, they did not come to hear, but to be heard; the ladies chattering and ogling; the gallants stalking from box to box and pit to gallery, waving their scented handkerchiefs, striking a pose where the greater part of the audience could see the flash of beringed fingers, or taking a pinch of snuff with a snap of the lid to call attention to its gold-work ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... very averse from the course of forbidding him the house and thus insulting my wife by implication—since she obviously enjoyed his society—and descending to pit myself against the greasy cad in a struggle for a woman's favour, and that woman my own wife. Nor could I conscientiously take the line of, "If she desires to go to the Devil let her," for a man has as much responsibility for his wife as for his children, and it is equally his duty to guide and control ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... Satan, I conjure thee, Zezegot seluece soter, Unto thee my prayer I make, 115 Lucifer, listen to my prayer! By the mists of liquid fire That thy regions drear distil, By the vipers, snakes that fill All its wells, abysses dire, 120 By the pangs relentlessly Given by thee To the prisoners of thy pit, By the shrieks of those in it That unceasing echo still, 125 Beelzebub, I thee invite By the blindness of the Jews Who the wrong in malice choose And thereby thy heart delight rezeegut Linteser 130 zamzorep ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... the brake!" Experience said; "The stars, my boy, are overhead; The pit of Tophet's deep and wide." A sudden snarl of hate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... lie regarded as the tracks of air-breathing quadrupeds; and, after examining a specimen, containing four footprints, which he had brought above ground, and which not a little excited my curiosity, we visited the pit together. And there, in a side working about half a mile from the pit mouth, and about four hundred feet under the surface, I found the roof of the coal, which rose at a high angle, traversed by ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... to ask you something," he said. "If any one of you owned a sheep, and it fell into a pit on the Sabbath, wouldn't you lift it out? And don't you think that a man is worth more than a sheep? You say that it is against the Law to heal a man on the Sabbath. I say that it is always right to do good to somebody, on the Sabbath just the ...
— The King Nobody Wanted • Norman F. Langford
... would be curious to know what became of Gholam Kadir's jewel-laden horse after the rider fell into the pit. In Skinner's life, it is conjectured that he came into the hands of M. Lestonneaux. It is certain that this officer abruptly abandoned Sindhia's service at this very time. Perhaps the crown jewels of the Great Mughal are now in France. The Emperor (who composed poetry ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... theatre and dance to tell you of in this letter. To begin with, the theatres themselves are far better built than ours; everyone can see, and there is no pit, and the boxes are in graduated heights so that you have not to crane your neck,—but the decorations in every one we have yet been to are unspeakable. This one last night had grouped around the proscenium what looked exactly like a turkey's ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... his way through the debris of sticks, stones, dust and cast-off water-skins, and serenely disregarding the stare of the laborers, went up to the edge of the stone-pit and watched the work with interest. A constant stream of broken stone rattled down under the scaffold and long runlets of water fed an ever increasing pool in the depression before the cliff. A single slab of ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... mamateeks or wigwams, each intended to contain from six to eighteen or twenty people, are distinctly seen close together. Besides these, there are the remains of a number of summer wigwams. Every winter wigwam has close by it a small square-mouthed or oblong pit, dug into the earth, about four feet deep, to preserve their stores, &c. in. Some of these pits were lined with birch-rind. We discovered also in this village the remains of a vapour-bath. The method used by the Boeothicks to raise the ...
— Report of Mr. W. E. Cormack's journey in search of the Red Indians - in Newfoundland • W. E. Cormack
... would end the matter. Schiller, however, felt the need of a bolder contrast to his hero. The 'sublime criminal' required a colossal foil; and as equality with the sword was out of the question, the most obvious recourse was to pit natural depravity against natural greatness; scheming intellect ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... some celestial host marshalled and marching against the Powers of Darkness. To the left, under lowered eyelids of sable clouds, there ran a band of red fire that seemed as if it must belt the earth with its fury, a red fire that might have flamed from the mouth of the very pit. Lagardere was not over-imaginative, but the strangeness of the contrast, the fierce splendor of the warring colors, touched the player's heart beneath the soldier's hide. "The gold of heaven," he murmured, and saluted the sky to the right. "The ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... out of the pavilion hand in hand, and on through the sunshine they strolled, swinging hands gaily, reacting exuberantly from the week of deadening toil. They hung over the railing of the bear-pit, shivering at the huge and lonely denizen, and passed quickly on to ten minutes of laughter at the monkey cage. Crossing the grounds, they looked down into the little race track on the bed of a natural amphitheater where the early afternoon games were to take place. After that they explored ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... the guard wheeled, and the tiny party moved off. We discovered afterwards that they were marched three miles along the sandy road in the blazing sun to a point where they were roughly bidden to dig a huge pit. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... last leap in the dark, and she heard nothing now. A sudden thought seemed to strangle her, and she called no more. She turned her back upon the black silence of the pit and went up the lane towards Ploumar, stumbling along with sombre determination, as if she had started on a desperate journey that would last, perhaps, to the end of her life. A sullen and periodic clamour of waves rolling over reefs followed her far inland between the ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... of this animal. The whole town knew and kindly regarded Miss Betsy Barker's Alderney; therefore great was the sympathy and regret when, in an unguarded moment, the poor cow tumbled into a lime-pit. She moaned so loudly that she was soon heard and rescued; but meanwhile the poor beast had lost most of her hair, and came out looking naked, cold, and miserable, in a bare skin. Everybody pitied the animal, though a few could not restrain their smiles at ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... oh, my brother! think, we two are all to each other here. We have nought to lean upon save each other's love and Him. Dear Arthur, if you should—if one of us should be led into temptation, and should fall, and should go down into the pit of sin, what a blank would be the existence of the other! Oh! let us pray that our hearts may be bound together, and that no shadow may be allowed to fall upon or ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... destinies of the Republic. They were actually opened in the year 228 B.C., and it was with terror found that the Gauls would twice take possession of the soil of Rome. On the advice of the priests, there was dug within the city, in the middle of the cattle-market, a huge pit, in which two Gauls, a man and a woman, were entombed alive; for thus they took possession of the soil of Rome, the oracle was fulfilled, and the mishap averted. Thirteen years afterwards, on occasion of the disaster at Cann, the same atrocity was again committed, at the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... adorn this place with ashes made into flowers and branches, and round circles. Then they take divers strange shells, and pieces of Iron, and some sorts of Wood, and a bunch of betel Nuts, (which are reserved for such purposes) and lay all these in the very middle of the Pit, and a large stone upon them. Then the women, whose proper work it is, bring each their burthen of reaped Corn upon their heads, and go round in the Pit three times, and then fling it down. And after this without any more ado, bring in the ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... afternoon unusual activity was seen to prevail about the precincts of tranter Dewy's house. The flagstone floor was swept of dust, and a sprinkling of the finest yellow sand from the innermost stratum of the adjoining sand-pit lightly scattered thereupon. Then were produced large knives and forks, which had been shrouded in darkness and grease since the last occasion of the kind, and bearing upon their sides, "Shear-steel, warranted," ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... thinking a good deal of Mrs. McCarty, and Mrs. McCarty's daughters got to thinking a good deal of him. And Boatswain Bill, who lived at the house of the 'Nine Nations'-the house they said had a bottomless pit-and English used to fight a deal about the Miss McCartys, and Bill one night threw English over the high stoop, down upon the pavement, and broke his arms. They said it was a wonder it hadn't a broken his neck. Fighting Mary (Mary didn't go ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... now led me to a room where lived a man, his wife, and children, a sawyer out of work, whose eyes were so affected by the dust that falls into the pit, as to render him incapable of following his employment. His pride, as well as that of his wife, seemed to be piqued at being exhibited to view in the workhouse, and they took much pains to convince me that it was their misfortune, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... existed three years in this place. He became bald on the top of his head, as all Parisians do. Look down from your box at the Opera Comique, mademoiselle, and count the bald crowns of the fast young men in the pit. Ah—you tremble! They show where the arrows of love have struck ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... to see in the garden except papa's observatory, and a gravel pit with a cave where he keeps dynamite and things of that sort. However, it's pleasanter out of ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... of the season he went abroad, and was away for nearly two years. In Rogers's "Table Talk," it is recorded—"Before his going abroad, Garrick's attraction had much decreased; Sir W.W. Pepys said that the pit was often almost empty. But, on his return to England, people were mad about seeing him." His popularity did ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... pour over her soul; wildly she cast around her eyes, and then more piercing became her shrieks, as she found herself gradually descending into what seemed to be a pit or well—only that it was ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... pairt," suddenly interjected a humble little elder who had never been known to speak before. "It's in my conscience, an' I want to pit it oot. We a' ken fine we haena been ower regular at the prayer meetin'; but we'll try to dae better in the time to come. It's death-bed repentance, I ken, but ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... and while the parties on whom the cares of hospitality devolved were consulting with the farmer's wife about preparations for tea, any stray guest might search for wood-plants in the skirts of the copse on the hill behind, or talk with the children who were jumping in and out of an old saw-pit in the wood, or if contemplative, might watch the minnows in the brook, which was here running parallel ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... origin of the potato pit, as we now have it, in Ireland was the following advice given in Pue's Occurrences ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... time, too, a celebrated dramatist produced a piece in which the hero performed prodigies under the excitement of patriotism, and the labor of his pen was incontinently damned for his pains; both pit and boxes—the galleries dissenting—deciding that it was out of all nature to represent a monikin incurring danger in this unheard-of manner, without a motive. The unhappy wight altered the last scene, by causing his hero to be rewarded by a good, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... spot of many memories, I could not quit it again; while my wild woodland life lasted, here must I have my lair, and being here I could not leave that mournful skeleton above ground. With labour I excavated a pit to bury it, careful not to cut or injure a broad-leafed creeper that had begun to spread itself over the spot; and after refilling the hole I drew the long, trailing stems ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... some young boys of 15, some old men, bowed of back, with grey in their beards, hungry-looking, ragged, bearing the marks of their long fight in the pass. They shambled along, evidently without any idea as to what their fate was to be, till they came close to where this newly-dug pit lay open. There the command to halt was given, and they stood or sat, surrounded by their guards, for ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... eye is amazed and terrified, A hideous procession sordid and grimy Of men and boys, slaves of the coal-pit, Is seen on the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... like copper. Every sound rings as it were upon metal. There is a glow—a glow of outer darkness—a glow imagined by straining eyes. The city is a bubble with clamour and tumult rising thin and yellow in the lean streets like dust in a loam-pit. The city is walled as with a finger-ring. The sky is dumb with listeners. Far down, as the crow sees ears of wheat, I see that mote of a man, in his black clothes, now lit by flaming jets, now hid in thick darkness. Every street breeds creatures. They swarm gabbling, and walk ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... fell on us; cold, nor heat, nor hunger, nor thirst, nor fatigue affected us; neither our shoes nor our clothes wore out; but still we went on dancing. We trod the earth down to our knees, next to our middles, and at last were dancing in a pit. At the end of the year ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Birmingham of Mr. Murphy, already mentioned. Speaking in the midst of an irritated population of Catholics, the Rev. W. Cattle exclaimed:—"I say, then, away with the mass! It is from the bottomless pit; and in the bottomless pit shall all liars have their part, in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone." And again: "When all the praties were black in Ireland, why didn't the priests say the hocus-pocus over them, and ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... smelled from the outside. The rabbit naturally goes into the holes and in this trap there is nothing to awaken his suspicion. He smells the bait, squeezes along past the center of the tube, when it tilts down and the game is shot into the pit, the tube righting itself at once for another catch. The top and sides of the large box may be covered with leaves, snow or anything to hide it. A door placed in the top will enable the trapper to take out the animals. By placing a little hay or other food in the bottom ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... which Bunyan was very conscious—that his extrication from the fearful pit was the work of an almighty hand. The transition was very blissful; but just because his present views were so bright and assuring, he knew that flesh and blood had not revealed them. "Now I had an evidence, as I ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... on a broad, level plain, in the noon of day; all was clear to my eye, and glad to my heart. I was alone and went on my way rejoicing. Suddenly the earth opened under my feet, and I fell deep, fathom-deep;—deep, as if to that central pit, which our heathen sires called Niffelheim—the Home of Vapour—the hell of the dead who die without glory. Stunned by the fall, I lay long, locked as in a dream in the midst of a dream. When I opened my eyes, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... grand one. Belforest Park on the one side, the town almost as if in a pit below, with a bird's-eye prospect of the roofs, the gardens and the school-yard, the leaden-covered church, lying like a great grey beetle with outspread wings. Beyond were the ups- and-downs of a wooded, hilly country, with glimpses of blue river here ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... deliver as much refutation of an opponent as you will conjure up in your mind against your own speeches. Perhaps, also, this great amount advanced by you in testing your own position will prevent your opponents from ever finding in your delivered arguments much against which they can pit ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... once. Hundreds of figures were scurrying awkwardly around, clad in the inevitable space-suit. Several were working desperately at a huge concave glass reflector. Others were pointing a stone nozzle, extending out of a pit, directly upward. ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner
... contact with any portion of the head or body of a vigorous constitution for about twenty minutes, and observing the different impressions imparted by different localities. If the hand be held in contact with an individual suffering from some active form of disease, resting upon the forehead or the pit of the stomach, the morbid symptoms will be very perceptibly transferred to any one of an impressible constitution; but I would not recommend the experiment to any but those who are embarrassed by a constitutional scepticism, which hinders ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... a stretch, that his cheeks began to glow and his eyes to shine—for he wandered with Jesus in Galilee. Suddenly he would awake from his visions and find himself in his prison cell, and sadness overcame him, but it was no longer a falling into the pit of hell; he was strong enough to save himself on his island of the blessed. And so he wrote and wrote. He did not ask if it was the Saviour of the books. It was his Saviour as he lived in him, the only Saviour who could redeem him. And so there was accomplished in this poor ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... its poison, the bones of the unburied dead lay in the moat beyond the gates, and, on the other side of the river, desolate Khartoum crumbled over the streets and paths and gardens where Gordon had walked. The city was a pit of infamy, where struggled, or wallowed, or died to the bellowing of the Khalifa's drum and the hideous mirth of his Baggaras, the victims of Abdullah. But out in the desert—the Bayuda desert—between Omdurman and Old Dongola, there was only peace. Here and there was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... rise out of hell and show themselves in such ugly shape as damned wretches shall see them; and if, with that hideous howling that those hell-hounds should screech, they should lay hell open on every side round about our feet, so that as we stood we should look down into that pestilent pit and see the swarm of poor souls in the terrible torments there—we would wax so afraid of the sight that we should scantly remember that we ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... utterance. The narrow vault of the Sistine Chapel opens into immensity, and every one who looks upon it is lifted out of himself into new worlds. Shakespeare's plays were enjoyed by the apprentices in the pit and royalty in the boxes, and so all the way between. The man Shakespeare, of such and such birth and training, and of this or that experience in life, is entirely merged in his creations; he becomes the impersonal channel of expression of the profoundest, widest interpretation ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... she drew near he held out his hand, which she grasped eagerly, taking it for that of her lover; and, seizing his opportunity, the Prince passed a cord round her arms, and throwing off his invisibility cried to his spirits to drag her into the lowest pit. ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... funeral, the king's own regiment or body-guard surround many dwellings and villages, and seize the people indiscriminately as they issue from their doors in the early morning. These captives are brought to the pit's mouth. ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... thei would not that daie, ease nature of the belie burden. And when vpon other daies, nature forced theim to that easemente, thei caried with theim a litle spade of woode, wherewith in place most secreate, thei vsed to digge a litle pit, to laie their bealie in. And in the time of doyng, thei also vsed a very greate circumspection, that their clothes laie close to the grounde rounde aboute theim, for offending (saied thei) of the Maiestie of God. Vpon whiche respecte, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... it. His mind had produced a detailed picture of that rounded depression, at the bottom of which the strong-jaw lurked. But when he reached the crown of the bluff, nowhere did he sight the mounded earth of the pit's rim. He searched carefully for a good length, both north and south. No den—no trace of one. Yet his memory told him that there had ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... Lot; at whose representation the great pun was made;—I say the great pun, as we say the great ton of Heidelberg. As one of the performers was singing the line, 'L'amour a vaincu Loth,' (vingt culottes,) a voice from the pit cried out, 'Qu'il ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... had been the property of Blake, and it was now the dead of a long and sunless arctic night. Blake's cabin, built of ship timber and veneered with blocks of ice, was built in the face of a deep pit that sheltered it from wind and storm. To this cabin came the Nanatalmutes from the east, and the Kogmollocks from the west, bartering their furs and whalebone and seal-oil for the things Blake gave in exchange, and adding women to their wares whenever ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... by law the sportsmen of the period turned their attention to dog-fighting, and for this pastime the Bulldogs were specially trained. The chief centres in London where these exhibitions took place were the Westminster Pit, the Bear Garden at Bankside, and the Old Conduit Fields in Bayswater. In order to obtain greater quickness of movement many of the Bulldogs were crossed with a terrier, although some fanciers relied on the pure breed. It is recorded ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... follow that all change or omission is unlawful in placing Shakespeare's plays on the stage. Though in the pit or parquet we sit (more or less) at our ease, instead of standing as the groundlings did in old days, yet a tragedy five hours and a half long would be rather too much of a good thing for us. There must have been a real love of the drama in those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... turned into a secondary wife as one and all of your family would rely upon her to act contrary to reason and right! A whole household has been converted into secondary wives! But the sight fills you with such keen jealousy that you would like to also lay hold of me and throw me into the pit-fire! If any honours fall to my share, all of you outside will do everything disorderly and improper, and raise yourselves, in your own estimations, to the status of uncles (and aunts). But if I don't get any, and come to grief, you'll draw in your foul necks, and let me live ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... wouldn't. Oh, merry thunder! To think that a little single would have tied that game, and we couldn't get it! It actually makes me ill at the pit of my stomach!" ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... rhyme, of the most melancholy stupidity that ever was. Yet there was something very comical in the conditions of its performance, and in the possibility that public and manager were playing at cross- purposes. There we were in the pit, an assemblage of hard-working Yankees of decently moral lives and simple traditions, country-bred many of us and of plebeian stock and training, vulgar enough perhaps, but probably not depraved, and, excepting the first lady's friends, certainly not educated to the critical ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... aspires to the character of a keen sportsman, has what is termed a poste a feu. This is a pit or cave dug in the ground in the vicinity of a couple of pine-trees, and covered over with branches. In addition to the pine-trees, it is usual to have cimeaux, long spars of wood, of which two are supported horizontally on the branches of the trees, and a third planted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... any to wait for—the men, ducking low, dashed past him toward the pit, leaped down into it gouging their bayonets right and left. With the sentry's rifle still in his hands he tried to follow; but at the brink, being confronted by sounds of steel upon steel, oaths, ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... a furious drive against the Duke. There was a moment of suspense. The Duke did not give way. His arm shot out and the unfortunate Count turned completely round and fell. Charles de Morlay's sword had pierced beneath the right arm pit, entering the lung. The blood streamed from the wounded man's mouth. The Doctor and the seconds carried him into the room which Jeanette had prepared. The Duke, sorely moved, followed them. Albert saw him and held out a hand which the Duke pressed gently, ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... the walls of the Grey Room. I will justify the ways of God to man and, through the channel of potent prayer, exorcise this presence and bring peace to your afflicted house. For any living fellow-creature would I gladly pit my faith against evil; how much more, then, in a matter where my very own life's blood has been shed? You cannot deny me this. It ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... election of November 3. The State convention was called for November 5, 6, in order that the Eastern women might be present, as they were to leave on the 7th. A magnificent farewell meeting was held on the first evening in Metropolitan Temple, which was crowded from pit to dome. The Call declared, "It was more like the ratification of a victory than a rally after defeat;" and at the close of the convention said: "It furnished during its entire sessions an example of pluck and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... quarry that had been disused for years. On one side there was a smooth wall of rock, many feet deep. On the other the ground and rock were broken away, and it was quite easy to get into it. They found that by some means or other, one of their cows had fallen into this deep pit, over the steep side of the quarry. Of course the poor creature was dead, but the boys, out of curiosity, resolved to go down and look at her. They clambered down, found the cow, and, to their horror and amazement, discovered near-by the skeleton of a man. There was a heavy walking-stick by his side, ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... as the angler throws out his fly for the fish that is sure to rise. The King held his breath as the blue-penciled passage drew near. The voice quavered and broke; singer and orchestra stopped dead. The house roared. "Go on!" cried encouraging voices from gallery and pit. "Go on! Go on!" And the singer thus emboldened, and accompanied by one small piping flute, a ridiculous starveling of sound after all the blare that had preceded it, sang with a modest and deprecating ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... all the rehearsals he had never noticed how this opening dragged. Manders had never criticized it (one of the few things he hadn't tried to cut about); and it was dragging. In a moment people would be yawning and talking to one another; the pit would become noisy with its feet; already there was a rustle; if they would only look at the stage instead of trying to learn their programmes by heart! They should have done that before! And still the house was cold. . . . God in heaven! small ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna |
