"Rotten" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... studies, they would have merited, and under a king of such learning and such equity would have received in some sort, their reward. I look upon them as so many old cabinets of ivory and tortoise-shell, scratched, flawed, splintered, rotten, defective both within and without, hard to unlock, insecure to lock up ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... about society in Pera I have not meant to be personal or offensive in any way. My object has been to show up a rotten system whereby everybody suffers. I have some remote hope that things may change for the better, especially as one of the chief promoters of the ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... wise man too speaks, and acts, in Formulas; all men do so. And in general, the more completely cased with Formulas a man may be, the safer, happier is it for him. Thou who, in an All of rotten Formulas, seemest to stand nigh bare, having indignantly shaken off the superannuated rags and unsound callosities of Formulas,—consider how thou too art still clothed! This English Nationality, whatsoever from uncounted ages is genuine and a fact among thy native ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Arthur," and that my publishers, whenever I slunk in to ask how it was selling, looked at me with a sort of grave, paternal pity and said that it had not really "begun to move?" Anybody can write one of those rotten popular novels which appeal to the unthinking public, but it takes a man of intellect and refinement and taste and all that sort of thing to turn out something that will be approved of ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... and lots of evil. To a large extent I really believe it's the women's fault that the men are what they are. If they demanded a higher moral standard the men would come up to it; they encourage a man to go to the devil and then—and then when he's rotten with disease and ruins his wife and has children—what is it—'spotted toads'—then there's a great cry raised against the men, and women write books and all, when half the time the woman has only encouraged him to ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... poet among the beasts. When roots are rotten, and rivers weep. The bear is at play in the land of sleep. Though his head be heavy between his fists. The bear is ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... "He picked up a rotten leaf, held it to me, threw it down on the ground. I hardly looked at it. He had said to me: 'Man!' That word, thus said by him, seemed to me to mark the enormous change in me, to indicate that it was visible to the eyes of another, the heart of another. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... hillside, they piously crossed themselves, and leisurely resuming their head-gear, they looked at one another with questioning glances. Yet before any could voice the inquiry that was in the minds of all, a knock fell upon the rotten timbers ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... some flowers, as if in love, Unto the oak their arms incline; And tho' the tree may rotten prove, They still the closer around it twine: So has it been until this hour, And so in coming time 'twill be, Wherever young love may hang a flower, 'Twill think it aye ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... had loved her through it all,—this priceless, peerless man,—this man who was as true to the backbone as that other man had shown himself to be false; who was as sound as the other man had proved himself to be rotten. A smile came across her face as she sat looking at the fire, thinking of this. A man had loved her, whose love was worth possessing. She hardly remembered whether or no she had refused him or accepted him. She hardly ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... meat. They extended a rude but cordial welcome, and hospitably inquired if I was hungry; but as I had recently eaten a quantity of frozen salmon I declined further food. I had long ago learned to relish fish and meat which they call "topee," and which civilized people denominate "rotten". When frozen it does not taste any worse than some kinds of cheese smell, and is a strong and wholesome diet unless eaten in great quantities. It fortifies the system against cold, and, shortly after eating, causes a healthy glow of warmth to pervade the body, ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... damned me because I wouldn't get a job. And the work was already done, all done. And now, when I speak, you check the thought unuttered on your lips and hang on my lips and pay respectful attention to whatever I choose to say. I tell you your party is rotten and filled with grafters, and instead of flying into a rage you hum and haw and admit there is a great deal in what I say. And why? Because I'm famous; because I've a lot of money. Not because I'm Martin Eden, a pretty good fellow and not particularly a fool. I could tell ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... conventionalities of a rotten civilization," was the rasping reply. "Relapsed into the honest simplicity of primitive observances. Go ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... tryin' to bust it up, but it's a tough job. The best way to reform a reformer is to rob him. The minute he finds out he's been robbed he turns over a new leaf and begins to beller like a bull about how rotten the police are. Ninety nine times out of a hundred he quits his cussed interferin' with the law and becomes a decent, law-observin' citizen. Our scheme is to get busy as soon as we've been turned loose and while our so-called ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... discouragement for the authors to proceed; but let them remember it is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge. Besides, those whose teeth are too rotten to bite are best of all others qualified to revenge that defect with ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... "Not so rotten bad. But—when you're polite, you're a little too polite; when you're not ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... the Roebuck was falling to pieces, her wood rotten, her hull covered with barnacles. Eventually, using the pumps day and night, they arrived, on February 21st, 1701, at Ascension Island, where the old ship sank at her anchors. Getting ashore with their belongings, they waited on this desolate island until April ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... came to Harrigan. He rose without a word and ran out into the rain to a fallen tree which must have been blown down years before, for now the trunk and the splintered stump were rotten to the core. He had noticed it that day. There was only a rim of firm wood left of the wreck. The stump gave readily enough under his pull. He ripped away long strips of the casing, bark and wood, and carried it back to the shelter. He made a second ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... among us, that, when the Messiah shall come, the house of God, destined for the dispensation of His Word, shall be full of filth and impurity; and that the wisdom of the scribes shall be corrupt and rotten. Those who shall be afraid to sin, shall be rejected by the people, and treated ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... September 1522 when they reached the Spice Islands—the goal of all their hopes. Here they took on board some precious cloves and birds of Paradise, spent some pleasant months, and, laden with spices, resumed their journey. But the Trinidad was too overladen with cloves and too rotten to undertake so long a voyage till she had undergone repair, so the little Victoria alone sailed for Spain with sixty men aboard to carry home their great and wonderful news. Who shall describe the terrors ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... raging, and he was confirmed in his belief that England and her colonies would surely triumph. The French monarchy, to judge from all that he had heard, was now in the state of one of those old oriental monarchies, decayed and rotten, spreading corruption from a poisoned center to all parts of the body. However brave and tenacious the French people might be, and he knew that none were more so, he was sure they could not prevail over the strength of free ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sea of liberty, British merchants and Americans trading on British capitals, speculators and holders in the banks and public funds, a contrivance invented for the purposes of corruption, and for assimilating us in all things to the rotten as well as sound parts of the British model. It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in council, but who have ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... should be a cuckold, held his hand. Well: on went he for a search, and away went I for foul clothes. But mark the sequel, Master 95 Brook: I suffered the pangs of three several deaths; first, an intolerable fright, to be detected with a jealous rotten bell-wether; next, to be compassed, like a good bilbo, in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head; and then, to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with 100 stinking clothes that ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... his husky monotone in a querulous entreaty. "I need a little whiskey to keep me going. Tell her, won't you?—to let me have a little drink. My regular allowance was a pint a day, and I haven't had a drop for four weeks. Your Chicago whiskey is rotten bad, though, I tell you. I just stepped into a place to get a drink with Joe Campbell—his father owns a big pulp mill in Michigan—well—we had one or two drinks, and the first thing I knew there was shooting ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... flat, between very high banks, our principal creek ran, and to a quiet spot among the flax-bushes we directed our steps. By the fast-fading light the gentlemen set their lines in very primitive fashion. On the crumbling, rotten earth the New Zealand flax, the Phormium tenax, loves to grow, and to its long, ribbon-like leaves the eel-fishers fastened their lines securely, baiting each alternate hook with mutton and worms. ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... summoned, excited in Burke both indignation and contempt. And the leaders of the Constituent who came first on the stage, and hoped to make a revolution with rose-water, and hardly realized any more than Burke did how rotten was the structure which they had undertaken to build up, almost deserved his contempt, even if, as is certainly true, they did not deserve his indignation. It was only by revolutionary methods, which are in their essence and for a time as arbitrary as despotic methods, that the knot ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... (Instantaneous) Cheapside (Instantaneous) St. Paul's Cathedral The Bank of England (Instantaneous) Tower of London London Bridge (Instantaneous) Westminster Abbey Houses of Parliament Trafalgar Square Buckingham Palace Rotten Row ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... the stories weren't scientific. Well, if he can show me anywhere on your magazine where it says it is a scientific magazine, I'll certainly beg his most humble pardon on bended knee. He also crabbed about your artists. If he can do better, I advise you to hire him. He also says that the paper is rotten, and that after a few handlings goes to pieces. I still have all my magazines, and have lent them several times, and the paper is still there. On his fifth statement I agree with him: you should have an editorial. Also I would certainly like to have reprints, ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... had opportunities to watch the process, said that it was curious to see him bruise the grain between large stones, knead the rude flour with fair water, mould his simple cakes, and then bake them in a primitive oven formed by his own labour in a dry bank of the coppice, and heated by rotten wood shaken from the tops of the trees, (which he climbed like a squirrel,) and kindled by a flint and a piece of an old horse-shoe:—such was his unsophisticated cookery! Nuts and berries from the woods; fish ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... something of the character of a square, and just left room for the high road and Martin's Row to slip between its flank and the orchard that overtopped the river wall. Well! it is gone. I blame nobody. I suppose it was quite rotten, and that the rats would soon have thrown up their lease of it; and that it was taken down, in short, chiefly, as one of the players said of 'Old Drury,' to prevent the inconvenience of its coming down of itself. Still a peevish but harmless old fellow—who ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Nevers, Birague, De Retz, and Tavannes. Catherine alone ventured to interpose, and, in a tone of sternness well calculated to impress the mind of her weak son, she declared that there was now no turning back: "It is too late to retreat, even were it possible. We must cut off the rotten limb, hurt it ever so much; if you delay, you will lose the finest opportunity God ever gave man of getting rid of his enemies at a blow." And then, as if struck with compassion for the fate of her victims, she repeated in a low tone—as if talking to herself—the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... godless worldlings directed. There are many good men among the clergy of the Church of England; but they are slaves, my friends, nothing but slaves, dragged at the chariot wheels of the State; ruled by a caste of hard-headed lawyers; or binding themselves in the rotten robes of tradition. It is we only who can dare to say that we ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... grievously weakened, and his limbs not always trustworthy, he would never allow a cab to be summoned for him after dinner, always walking to his lodgings. But he had to give up by and by his daily canter in Rotten Row, and more reluctantly still his continental travel. Foreign railways were closed to him by the Salle d'Attente; he could not stand ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... divines, who blessed all his enterprises. He contributed largely, too, to the support of an influential Christian journal to aid in disseminating truth to Jew, Gentile, and heathen. The divines and the Christian journal were employed to persuade widows and weak men to purchase his rotten securities, as things too righteous to ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... that amongst a great flock of sheep some be rotten and faulty, which the good shepherd sendeth from the good sheep; so the great wether which is of late fallen, as you all know, so craftily, so scabedly, yea, so untruly juggled with the king, that all men must needs guess that he thought in himself, either the king had no wit ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... Parliament early, after the fashion of the day. He was twenty-one when, in 1809, a seat was offered him at Cashel in Ireland. The system of 'rotten boroughs' had many faults—our text-books of history do not spare it—but it may claim to have offered an easy way into Parliament for some men of brilliant talents. Peel's family connexions and his own training ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... scratchy work. One or another member of our party always went through; and precious uncomfortable going it was, I found, when I tried it in one above Egaja; ten or twelve feet of crashing creaking timber, and then flump on to a lot of rotten, wet debris, with more snakes and centipedes among it than you had any immediate use for, even though you were a collector; but there you had to stay, while Wiki, who was a most critical connoisseur, selected from the surrounding ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... tree bears rotten fruit; neither does a rotten tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor grapes picked from a bramble-bush. From the good stored in his heart the good man brings forth goodness, but the evil man from his evil store ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman
... "Oh, bother that rotten Infant!" exclaimed Dr. Dick. "I came near to putting my foot through its shining tummy this morning! Still it may serve its silly use, if it takes his mind off his book, until we can get him safely home. I suppose you know, sir, that Ronald ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... is this: everyone made good except myself. And everyone will be dragged down in the failure because of me. They've all built on a rotten foundation. They've all built on me. And you—you've built on me. But not one of you, not one, has built on what I really am, on the real me. Not one of you has allowed me to be myself, and ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... was a better navigator than he, and I was really captain myself. I lost her, too, but it's no reflection on my seamanship. We were drifting four days outside there in dead calms. Then the nor'wester caught us and drove us on the lee shore. We made sail and tried to clew off, when the rotten work of the Tahiti shipwrights became manifest. Our jib-boom and all our head- stays carried away. Our only chance was to turn and run through the passage between Florida and Ysabel. And when we were ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... Treatise in such precise order and method as manie other would have done, thinking it sufficient, truelie and plainelie to set forth such things as I minded to intreat of, rather than with vain affectation of eloquence to paint out a rotten sepulchre, a thing neither commendable in a writer, nor profitable to the reader. But howsoever it be done, I have had an especial eye unto the truth of things, and for the rest, I hope that this foule frizeled Treatise of mine will prove a spur to others better ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... her lay a somewhat larger pile of dust mixed with soft and punky splinters of rotten wood. Amid all this decay she saw some bits of rust, a corroded type-bar or two—even a few rubber key-caps, still recognizable, though with ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the slave is the tint of his skin, Though his heart may beat loyal and true underneath; While the soul of the tyrant is rotten within, And his white the mere cloak to the blackness ...
— The Anti-Slavery Harp • Various
... forth in a fury, "I'm not in the humor for this sort of thing. I think this dinner and this woman are rotten. See if you can find the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... speired; but for haudin' aff o' them efter the bargain's made—ye ken she's no even responsible for the bargain. An' gien ye expec' me to haud my tongue aboot them—faith, Maister Crathie, I wad as sune think o' sellin' a rotten boat to Blue Peter. Gien the man 'at has her to see tilt dinna ken to luik oot for a storm o' iron shune or lang teeth ony moment, his wife may be a widow that same market nicht: An' forbye, it's again' ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... how glad I was when they left, for I was in a cramped position, and as there had been rotten potatoes in that barrel, I was beginning ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... institution,' but we will not defend it; if you cannot keep your slaves in subjection, you must expect no aid from us." Let them only say this, and do nothing, and the whole fabric of slavery would instantly crumble and fall. The edifice is rotten, and is propped up only by the buttresses of the North. The South retains the slave, because the free States furnish ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... am. I am sick of the whole thing. I would reintroduce prize-fighting and bear-baiting and gladiatorial shows to brace the nation up a bit. We'll get jammed full of rotten vices ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... crawling through the fern after me, you broke a piece of rotten stick that was under you. ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... reach it, the great north barn was in flames. There was no way of summoning outside help, even if any one could have reached them in such a storm, and the wind was blowing the fire straight in the direction of the house; in less than an hour, most of the old and rotten outbuildings had burnt like tinder, and the rest had collapsed under the fury of the sweeping gale; but by eight o'clock the stricken Grays, almost too exhausted and overcome to speak, were beginning to realize that though all their ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... or have serrated edges, a sweep of which may tear the traveller's clothes, or lacerate his hands or face. Then there are at every turn and corner rough trunks of fallen trees, visible or concealed, often more or less rotten and treacherous, to be got over; and such things are frequently the only means of crossing ditches and ravines of black rotting vegetable mud. Moreover the paths are often very steep; and, indeed, it is this fact, and the presence of rough stones and roots, which ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... little fox makes a final spurt for a large red pine, leaps straight for the bare trunk, mounts like a squirrel and gains a rotten limb, panting with effort. As we approach he climbs still higher and lodges himself securely in the crotch of the tree, gazing furtively ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... and ore winter I bear sway, And Luna for my Regent I obey. As I with showers oft times refresh the earth, So oft in my excess I cause a dearth, And with abundant wet so cool the ground, By adding cold to cold no fruit proves found. The Farmer and the Grasier do complain Of rotten sheep, lean kine, and mildew'd grain. And with my wasting floods and roaring torrent, Their cattel hay and corn I sweep down current. Nay many times my Ocean breaks his bounds, And with astonishment the world confounds, And swallows Countryes up, ne'er seen again, And that an island makes ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... clothes—though of course I imagine it must be rotten, not having the right clothes. By the way, there are plenty for us both, you know. I did myself well in the shopping ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... foundation, and we cannot feel reassured. All between the highest and the lowest is moderately sound; the best of the middle-classes are decent, law-abiding, and steady; the young men are good fellows in a way; the girls and young women are charming and virtuous. But the extremities are rotten, and sentiment has rotted them both. Parliament has become a hissing and a scorn. No man of any party in all broad England could be found to deny this, and many would say more. The sentimentalist has said that loutishness shall not ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... he said gloomily, 'that is a question you are main happy to have time to dally with. I have wife and child, and kith and kin, and a plaguey basket of rotten apples ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... the barque "Tropic," loaded with guano, bound for Cork, in Ireland. This vessel was a very rotten old thing, and in getting round Cape Horn we all had a very hard time, and did not know how soon the vessel would sink with us; but we got round the Cape and into the South Atlantic, where we had better ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... full of youth, was thought around, A saint, and worthy of the legend found. The holy man a knotted cincture wore; But, 'neath his garb:—heart-rotten to the core. A chaplet from his twisted girdle hung, Of size extreme, and regularly strung, On t'other side was worn a little bell; The hypocrite in ALL, he acted well; And if a female near his cell appeared, He'd keep within as if the sex he feared, With downcast eyes and looks of woe complete, ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... those chests do not contain valuables, my name is not Murray Frobisher. Bring your stick, and let us see whether we can wrench off one of the locks. It should not be very difficult, for the wood looks so rotten as almost to ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... are down-pins, I admit," Reggie said dispassionately; "and the father and brother were rotten; but no one'll think of those things when they look ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... sandwiches or knitting or powder-puffs or tea; but those also are rotten hypotheses. I have too much faith in the good sense of my fellow-countrywomen to believe that they would cart a horrible thing like a cheap attache-case about simply in order to convey a sandwich or a powder-puff from one end of London to the other. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem to any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for—well, it 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and sweat—I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in there, I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... violent vomiting came on, which continued for thirty hours, or more. He was not able to walk for three days, and during that time I nursed him, finished jerking the meat, and built a raft of some partly rotten logs, which I found in the vicinity, on which we floated across the river, on the fourth day after our arrival here. I also looked to the welfare of the mule, and prepared some bags in which to carry our jerk. Manley, I am sure that you ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... paused and quickly glanced at her, for he realised his blunder the instant the slip had been made. Madame was all eager attention—what did she know of the marques of aeroplane engines!—"It was a day of rotten luck for me. I spotted nothing, and late in the afternoon my engine began to overheat and miss fire. I did my utmost to struggle towards Do——, Dunkirk, but the beastly thing gave out altogether, and down I dropped into the sea. I had an ordinary land plane without floats, and was obliged ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... told you, my son, I was already very old in those days. The sun had scarce heat enough to warm my benumbed limbs. I was no better than an old rotten tree, that has lost its crown of fresh leaves and singing birds. Each returning Autumn brought my end nearer; and one Winter's morning they found me stretched motionless by ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... luxuriant growth, and the place felt hot and steamy as we forced our way through, till, as I was going first and parting the waving canes right and left with my gun barrel, I stepped upon what seemed to be a big branch of a rotten tree that had fallen there, when suddenly I felt myself lifted up a few inches and jerked back, while at the same moment the canes and grass crashed and swayed, and something seemed to be in ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... have been hewn out of drift-wood, but were probably brought from the south, like the birch bark with which the bottom of the coffin was covered. As a "pesk," now fallen in pieces, lying round the skeleton, and various rotten rags showed, the dead body had been wrapped in the common Samoyed dress. In the grave were found besides the remains of an iron pot, an axe, knife, boring tool, bow, wooden arrow, some copper ornaments, &c. Rolled-up pieces of bark also lay in the coffin, which were doubtless intended to be used ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... to think. This was an eventuality entirely outside the calculations of McGrath. But the pachydermatous inertia of the citizens of Alleghenia had yet its vulnerable spot, where the weapon might enter. Vaguely these men had known that the state was rotten, but the fact had never been brought to their attention in a manner so poignantly suggestive before. Unwittingly McGrath had aroused the suspicion that it was not the purse of Peter Rathbawne alone which ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... to get a mouthful of bird's breath, but was swallowed alive. A carrion beetle (the ugly lover) crawled off to the sea shore, and found some fish scales that emitted light. The stag-beetle climbed a mountain, and in a rotten tree stump found some bits of glowing wood like fire, but the distance was so great that long before they reached the castle moat it was daylight, and the fire had gone out; so they threw their fish ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... "Say, it was rotten mean of me," admitted Mary easily. "I dunno what possessed me. That old codfish seemed to come in so blamed handy. But I was awful sorry—I cried last night after I went to bed about it, honest I did. You ask Una if I didn't. I wouldn't tell ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... set, Her own teeth would undo the knot, And let all go that she had got. Those teeth fair Lyce must not show, If she would bite: her lovers, though Like birds they stoop at seeming grapes, Are dis-abus'd, when first she gapes: The rotten bones discover'd there, Show ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... Swam upon the open ocean, Drifting like a fallen pine-tree, Like a rotten branch of fir-tree, During six days of the summer, And for six nights in succession, While the sea spread wide before him, And the sky ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... he said, "you've got things all wrong. Things are going to be very rotten for you ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... the drive and across Rotten Row, gaining confidence as he went. In a minute it was all delightful; his eyes were turned outward by all there was to see; and now his chief fear was lest some one or other of the several passers should stand in his path and ask what he ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... try a crop of artichokes. I had a very nice spot of land that I thought would suit me for this purpose. I prepared it as I would prepare land for Irish potatoes, knowing that artichokes were, like the Irish potato, a tuber. I took a four-horse wagon and hauled one and a half tons of rotten cotton seed, and of this I put a double handful every 18 inches apart in the drill; I then dropped the artichokes between the hills. I cultivated first as I would Irish potatoes. The plants grew luxuriantly and were all the way from 8 ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... you you are the rich Protestant family. Your uncles and your mother, hinny. Rotten with gold they are, and me just a poor old cailleach that gave you the ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... country to the north-east. No water-course, not the slightest channel produced by heavy rains, was visible to indicate the flow of waters. Occasionally we met with swampy ground, covered with reeds, and with some standing water of the last rains; the ground was so rotten, that the horses and bullocks sunk into it over the fetlocks. The principal timber trees here, are the bastard box, the flooded-gum, and the Moreton Bay ash; in the Myal scrub, Coxen's Acacia attains a very considerable size; we saw also ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... yet writhing under the sanguinary fumes of some horrid attack of nightmare. Stepping across the earth, which is but a broad executioner's block for pale, stooping humanity, he enters the larva world of blotted out men. The rotten chain of beings reaches down into this slaughter field of souls. Here the dead are pictured as eternally horripilating at death! "As annihilation, the white shapelessness of revolting terror, passes by each unsouled mask of a man, a tear gushes ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... of yarn in the dusty corners; a half-used broom; other heaps of yarn on the old toppling desk covered with dust; a raisin-box, with P. Teagarden done on the lid in bas-relief, half full of ends of cigars, a pack of cards, and a rotten apple. That was all, except an impalpable sense of dust and worn-outness pervading the whole. One thing more, odd enough there: a wire cage, hung on the wall, and in it a miserable pecking chicken, peering dolefully with suspicious eyes out at her, and then down at the mouldy bit ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... without a pilot these many years through rough water, rolls and shoots hither and thither because it is without ballast. Do not, then, allow her to be longer exposed to the tempest; for you see that she is waterlogged. And do not let her split upon a reef[5]; for her timbers are rotten and will not be able to hold out much longer. But since the gods have taken pity on this land and have set you up as her arbiter and chief; do not betray your country. Through you she has now revived a little: if you are faithful, she may live with ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... wouldn't do you any harm now to go and see her. I think it's horrid of you not to. It's such rotten humbug. Why, you used to say I was ten times more awful than poor ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... opportunity of pointing out that if anything at all is to be done with Kensington Gardens, why not make a real good Rotten Row there? That would he a blessing and a convenience. We're all so sick and tired of that squirrel-in-a-cage ride, round and round Hyde Park, and that half-and-half affair in St. James's Park. No, Sir; now's the time, and now's the hour. There's plenty of space for all equestrian wants, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... though the sky was so black and the air was so dark, and the stag went on and on till the young man didn't know a bit where he was. And they went through enormous woods where the air was full of whispers and a pale, dead light came out from the rotten trunks that were lying on the ground, and just as the man thought he had lost the stag, he would see it all white and shining in front of him, and he would run fast to catch it, but the stag always ran ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... to the eaves. The aperture of this horrible den of death would scarcely admit of the entrance of a common sized person. And into this noisome sepulchre living men, women, and children went down to die; to pillow upon the rotten straw, the grave clothes vacated by preceding victims and festering with their fever. Here they lay as closely to each other as if crowded side by side on the bottom of one grave. Six persons had been found in this fetid sepulchre ...
— A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and its Neighbourhood • Elihu Burritt
... Stubbs—Jonathan Stubbs," explained the stranger, as Wilson put down the empty mug. "Follered the sea for forty year. Rotten hard work—rotten bad grub—rotten poor pay. Same on land as on sea, I reckon. No good anywhere. Got a friend who's a longshoreman and says th' same 'bout his work. ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... over and made me tired, that fool. I did not meet such misfortune even on the battle-field. He does not even sleep;" and the devil began to swear. "I cannot follow him," he continued. "I will go now to the heaps and make everything rotten." ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... best sport I ever knew," he said, "and I am nothing but a rotten squealer! Forgive me, and I will try to be good. But, Bo! that did hurt!" The tears came to his eyes once more. "He was such a ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... plain. I dashed forward and saw the elephant raise its trunk in the air, and move on as if about to destroy its enemy, but the instant afterwards the trunk dropped, the huge animal staggered, and down it came with a crash on the shrubs and rotten wood beneath the trees. Charley started up scarcely three yards from where the creature fell. Numbers of monkeys and birds shrieking and screaming clambered chattering away amid the branches, or flew off across ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... crispa ascend thus high.] while mushrooms and other English fungi* [One of great size, growing in large clumps, is the English Agaricus comans, Fr., and I found it here at 12,500 feet, as also the beautiful genus Crucibulum, which is familiar to us in England, growing on rotten sticks, and resembling a diminutive bird's nest with eggs in it.] ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Only one nation is 'god-bearing,' that's the Russian people, and... and... and can you think me such a fool, Stavrogin," he yelled frantically all at once, "that I can't distinguish whether my words at this moment are the rotten old commonplaces that have been ground out in all the Slavophil mills in Moscow, or a perfectly new saying, the last word, the sole word of renewal and resurrection, and... and what do I care for your laughter at this minute! What do I care that you utterly, utterly fail to ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... I suppose you don't want to be friends with me any more. It was rotten of me, I know, for, of course—I saw—you seemed to be getting to care for me. I told Janet when we set up work together that I wasn't a bad woman. And I'm not. But I'm weak. You'd better not trust me. And besides—I fell into the mud—and I expect ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said, sadly pintin' to a barren lookin' spot sown thick with graves, "In this deadly climate the Drink Demon has little to do to assist his brother, Death. Our poor northern boys fall like rotten ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... the biscuit was in a state of decay, and that the airing and picking we had given it at New Zealand, had not been of that service we expected and intended; so that we were obliged to take it all on shore here, where it underwent another airing and cleaning, in which a good deal was found wholly rotten and unfit to be eaten. We could not well account for this decay in our bread, especially as it was packed in good casks, and stowed in a dry part of the hold. We judged it was owing to the ice we so frequently took in when to the southward, which made ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... much was saved if aught were missed! My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood, Drop water gently till the surface sink, And if ye find. . . Ah God, I know not, I! . . . Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, {40} And corded up in a tight olive-frail, Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli, Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape, Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast. . . Sons, all have I bequeathed you, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... slops were better, than under any of his predecessors; and yet that the charge to the public was less than it had been when the vessels were unseaworthy, when the sailors were riotous, when the food was alive with vermin, when the drink tasted like tanpickle, and when the clothes and hammocks were rotten. It may, however, be observed that these two representations are not inconsistent with each other; and there is strong reason to believe that both are, to a great extent, true. Orford was covetous and unprincipled; but he had great professional skill and knowledge, great ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... France, Turkey, and other places show. Especially sagacious were his observations on the Turks, made to his sister, married to Mr. John Burt, an Englishman settled at Holstein, in which he affirms that the kingdom is rotten, that Turkey had fallen under a ban, and that ban the Koran, which teaches so warped a doctrine that its laws and decrees must of necessity oppose all social progress. His views on Russia, as indicated ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... climbed on the cart, and peeping through a brick hole he could see that they had with some difficulty disengaged a very heavy stone. As we were turning our heads to watch the two lads fighting near our hiding-place, we heard the stone strike with a heavy thud upon the rotten ice below, and it was echoed by a groan ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the shelter of home, and ventured out into the great pitiless world on nothing better than Van Dam's word. It was like walking a rotten plank out into ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... all, believe me, I beseech you, My father is gone wild into his grave; For in his tomb lie my affections; And with his spirit sadly I survive, To mock the expectations of the world, To frustrate prophecies, and to raze out Rotten opinion, which hath writ me down After my seeming. Though my tide of blood Hath proudly flowed in vanity till now; Now doth it turn and ebb unto the sea, Where it shall mingle with the state of flood, And flow ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... operations in the provinces, the reported victories which turned out to be defeats, the adverse rumours concerning the condition of the French forces, the alleged scandal of the Camp of Conlie, where the more recent Breton levies were said to be dying off like rotten sheep, and many other matters besides. Every evening when I called on these friends the conversation was the same. The ladies, the grandmother, the daughter, and the granddaughter, sat there making garments for the soldiers ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... stairs each generation climbed are rotten at its death, so that no foot's weight can be borne upon them afterward. Man builds his own stairway greatnessward. In the Idyl of the King, entitled "Gareth and Lynette," is application of this thought of manhood above title ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... slumber in warriors' graves! No memorials have yet been erected To mark where these warriors lie. All alone, save by angels protected, They sleep 'neath the sea and the sky! But think not that they are forgotten By those who the carnage survive: When their headboards will all have grown rotten, And the night-winds have levelled their graves, Then hundreds of sisters and mothers, Whose freedom they perished to save, And fathers, and empty-sleeved brothers, Who surmounted the battle's red wave; Will crowd from their homes in the Southward, In ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... can be a hero in war and still be a coward at heart. He can at least meet the test of heroism amid the fury of armed combat, with some degree of success, when he would crumple up before this test, like a rotten lance against a shield, under every other condition. Indeed, we have only to strip away the trappings, the artificial characteristics of militarism, in order to see how the heroism produced by war, even at its highest and best, is of an inferior ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... Perhaps that is why they are absolutely blind to conventional ugliness. For truly nothing could be more hideous than Woodhouse, as the miners had built it and disposed it. And yet, the very cabbage-stumps and rotten fences of the gardens, the very back-yards were instinct with magic, molten as they seemed with the bubbling-up of the under-darkness, bubbling up of majolica weight and luminosity, quite ignorant of the ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... turnips and carrots; and the swine, pursuing such examples, have trod down all the young plants besides devouring whatever the others left of vegetables. Our potatoes, left, from our abrupt departure, in the ground, are all rotten or frostbitten, and utterly spoilt; and not a single thing has our whole ground produced us since we came home. A few dried carrots, which remain from the in-doors collection, are all we have to ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... condemn themselves to eat only a little food, and that of the most disgusting kind: the flesh of oxen that have died, half-rotten vegetables, and refuse of every kind, even mud and earth; they say that it is quite immaterial what ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... arrivals. The same questions were asked and answered each time. Then some minutes elapsed without any fresh comers, and Francis thought that the number was probably complete. He lay down on the sand, and with his dagger began to make a hole through the wood, which was old and rotten, and gave him no difficulty in ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... hated the owners; they hated the whole place, the whole neighborhood—even the whole city, with an all-inclusive hatred, bitter and fierce. Women and little children would fall to cursing about it; it was rotten, rotten as hell—everything was rotten. When Jurgis would ask them what they meant, they would begin to get suspicious, and content themselves with saying, "Never mind, you stay here and ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... celebration. Let us hope that it is not strictly a part of the old ceremony, but rather a minor manifestation of "Town and Gown" feeling, that the town boys jeer the choristers, and in return are pelted with rotten eggs. The origin of this special Oxford custom is said to be a requiem which was sung on the tower for the soul of Henry VII., founder of the College. In the villages girls used to carry round May-garlands. The party consisted of four children. Two girls in white dresses ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... beautiful luxurious rooms, and to go roving by hill-side and force, away to Easedale Tarn, to bask for hours on the grassy margin of the deep still water, or to row round and round the mountain lake in a rotten boat. It was here, or in some kindred spot, that Molly got through most of her reading—here that she read Shakespeare, Byron, and Shelley, and Wordsworth—dwelling lingeringly and lovingly upon ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... cage, stocks, and whipping-post were erected. They were placed in the most conspicuous part of the town, and there the culprit, in addition to his legal punishment, was also disciplined at the discretion of passers-by with rotten eggs and other equally potent encouragements to reform. These gratuitous inflictions, not mentioned in the statute, as well as the public exhibition of the prisoner were abolished in later times and in this ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... meant to be. You've given a new meaning to life, torn from its very roots a whole rotten philosophy. Oh, you don't know what I mean—except that nobility is in the mind, beauty in ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... political record, Uncle Milt, must respect you," said Phil seriously. "These newspapers that are so fond of handing out roasts seem to overlook the fact that you were the man mainly responsible for kicking out Rives and his crowd and cleaning up the whole rotten administration. It makes me mad. And some of them have got the nerve to ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... gold—in an old canvas bag, a little rotten and very brown and mouldy, but tied at the neck by a piece of stout and tarnished braid of gold. It had no name or card upon it nor letters on its side, and it lay for nearly thirty years high on a shelf, in an old chest, behind three tiers of tins of papers, in ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... can make 'em hear with the trumpet, now they be to leeward,' he said, and proceeded with two or three others to grope his way out upon the pier, which consisted simply of a row of rotten piles covered with rotten planking, no balustrade of any kind existing to keep the unwary from tumbling off. At the water level the piles were eaten away by the action of the sea to about the size of a man's ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... retreat; and if we had been so last year, instead of gallivanting to Ireland, this affair might not have befallen—if literary labour could have prevented it. But who could have suspected Constable's timbers to have been rotten from the beginning? ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... wi' a maggot in it," mused Billy: "three parts rotten, the rest sweet. An' all owing to fantastic inventions an' new ways of believin' in God wi'out church-gwaine, as parson said Sunday. Such things do certainly Play hell with human nature, in a manner o' speakin'. I reckon the uprising men ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Bellegarde several times what he thought of public affairs. M. de Bellegarde answered with suave concision that he thought as ill of them as possible, that they were going from bad to worse, and that the age was rotten to its core. This gave Newman, for the moment, an almost kindly feeling for the marquis; he pitied a man for whom the world was so cheerless a place, and the next time he saw M. de Bellegarde he attempted to call his attention to some of the brilliant features of the ...
— The American • Henry James
... ten feet in the highest place, and from thence descending, it struck exactly where the breast, head and bowels of its prey had lain, with a scream too horrible for description, when it tore to atoms the rotten wood, filling for several feet above it, the air with the leaves and light brush, the covering of the deception. But instantly the panther found herself cheated, and seemed to droop a little with disappointment, when however she resumed an erect posture, ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell
... recently torn by them. With a view of taking revenge on these animals for devouring their companions, the fatigue party sent to bury their remains, after digging a grave sufficiently capacious to contain all, and having deposited them in it, they covered the pit with slender sticks, bark and rotten wood, too weak to bear the weight of a wolf, and placed a piece of meat on the top and near the center of this covering, as a bait. In the morning seven wolves were found in the pit, and killed and the grave ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... we spent at a little estaminet across the way from our so-called billets. There was a pretty mademoiselle there who served the rotten French beer and vin blanc, and the Tommies tried their French on her. They might as well have talked Choctaw. I speak the language a little and tried to monopolize the lady, and did, which didn't increase my ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... disappear in a cloud of mouldy dust. He left his horse with the reins hanging over its head behind the house and entered by the back door. One step past the threshold brought him misadventure, for his foot drove straight through the rotten flooring and his leg disappeared ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... are careful to collect a sufficient quantity in autumn for winter use; but when through accident their stock fails, they have recourse to the soft down of the typha, or reed mace, the dust of rotten wood, or even feathers, although none of these articles are so cleanly, or so easily changed ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... were sharp as the claws of a wild beast. At last there was a flood in the river, and above the raft Finn perceived two immense pine trees afloat in the middle of the stream. Impelled by the force of the current, they cut through the raft, where the timber was rotten, and then grounded. ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... spied, as he passed, A starving tigress. Hunger in her orbs Glared with green flame; her dry tongue lolled a span Beyond the gasping jaws and shrivelled jowl; Her painted hide hung wrinkled on her ribs, As when between the rafters sinks a thatch Rotten with rains; and at the poor lean dugs Two cubs, whining with famine, tugged and sucked, Mumbling those milkless teats which rendered nought, While she, their gaunt dam, licked full motherly The clamorous twins, yielding her flank ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... to be a servant's bedroom, I found a rat-gnawed crust and two tins of pineapple. The place had been already searched and emptied. In the bar I afterwards found some biscuits and sandwiches that had been overlooked. The latter I could not eat, they were too rotten, but the former not only stayed my hunger, but filled my pockets. I lit no lamps, fearing some Martian might come beating that part of London for food in the night. Before I went to bed I had an interval of restlessness, and prowled from window to ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... track altogether, we began the sheer ascent of the mountain. Dense undergrowths and sharp rocks impeded our every step, and cut our feet cruelly, while, every now and then, a fall flat on the face was the result of misplaced confidence in a fallen tree trunk, which had become rotten from the ravages of ants or other insects. Falling any considerable height was, however, scarcely possible, as the binders and undergrowth, which tore our clothes and scratched our faces, legs, and arms, unmercifully, ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... the opposite party,' said the colonel; as conclusive a reply as could be: but he at once fell upon the rotten navy of a Liberal Government. How could a true sailor think of joining those Liberals! The question referred to the country, not to a section of it, Beauchamp protested with impending emphasis: Tories and Liberals were much the same in regard to the care of the navy. 'Nevil!' exclaimed Cecilia. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard, so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact in one of the spice islands of the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... really enjoyed—where men should for the first time stretch their limbs, and strain their faculties, and strive, and emulate, and endure, and encounter difficulties, and have friendships. What a commotion there would be! How would the younger sort, rebelling against the old rotten machine in which they had been incarcerated, form themselves into emigrating bands, and start forth to try upon some new soil their great experiment of a free life! How would they welcome toil in all its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... which we thirst to be familiar. To the animated and curious Frenchwoman what a cicerone was Ernest Maltravers! How eagerly she listened to accounts of a life more elegant than that of Paris!—of a civilisation which the world never can know again! So much the better;—for it was rotten at the core, though most brilliant in the complexion. Those cold names and unsubstantial shadows which Madame de Ventadour had been accustomed to yawn over in skeleton histories, took from the eloquence of Maltravers the breath of life—they glowed and moved—they feasted ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that come and gae, Just kent, and just forgotten; And the flowers that busk a bonnie brae, Gin anither year lie rotten. But the last look o' that lovely e'e, And the dying grip she gae to me, They're settled like eternitie— Oh, Mary! that I ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... so neither are we capable of doing it to ourselves while we remain fettered by any obstinate prejudice. And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... "Rotten poor evidence, even for a newspaper," commented Jimmie Dale. "Why not give him credit ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... recited the day's lesson to Baloo. The boy could climb almost as well as he could swim, and swim almost as well as he could run. So Baloo, the Teacher of the Law, taught him the Wood and Water Laws: how to tell a rotten branch from a sound one; how to speak politely to the wild bees when he came upon a hive of them fifty feet above ground; what to say to Mang the Bat when he disturbed him in the branches at midday; and how to warn the water-snakes in the pools before he splashed ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... said that the Studebaker was a rotten old car. Its steering-gear was pretty dicky, and the bad surface and continual hairpin bends of the road didn't improve it. Soon we came into snow lying fairly deep, frozen hard and rutted by the big transport-wagons. We bumped and bounced horribly, and were shaken ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... a mighty vapor, hiding the cooks and rolling into the narrow street, where it scarcely finds vent between the overhanging eaves of the houses. The sickening smell of the castor bean seems everywhere. Occasionally the sight and powerful odor of hard-boiled and rotten goose eggs, split open to show that they are either rotten or half hatched, attract the Chinese epicure. The oily cakes and crullers that the wandering baker is frying for a group of children, powerfully offend European olfactories, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... woman unto me and bore me away to be examined. She slung me at the mercy of a mistress who gave me a desk (with a chair clamped to the ground) paper, pen and examination papers. Could you answer the following: Who succeeded (a) Stephen, (b) John, (c) Edward III? I said to the old Pet, 'This is all rotten.' (By the way, I had been sent off to her when I had done.) And she replied, 'Oh, that's not at all a nice word for a young lady to use. We can't have that here.' She's rather ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham |
