"Cauldron" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this mountain lies a deep ravine and waterfall; and a precipice, where an arch of rock overhangs a basin, where, many hundred feet below, the water boils in a mad cauldron, and then plunges away, by leaps of forty, twenty, and twelve feet, with the intermediate runs necessary for such jumps, through a deep chasm in the rocks, to a narrow valley, the whole character of which, I suppose, may represent Swiss ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... the maiden, glancing round her with tremulous distaste at the stuffed crocodile, the black cat and the cauldron simmering on the hearth, "to see some ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... to have it out and glad to escape the consequence, leaving Gourlay a cauldron of wrath in the darkness. It was not merely the material loss that maddened him. But for the first time in his life he had taken a rebuff without a word or a blow in return. In his desire to conciliate he had let ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... takes me back to the time when I was a mechanic, engine-building near Aylesbury. We lived half a mile from the works, at an old inn, and we began at six o'clock. In winter time, I remember, we would snuggle into the big back kitchen, with its huge cauldron of pig-meat swinging over the open fire, and its barrels containing evil things like stoats and ferrets, to put on our boots; and when we opened the door, two feet of snow would fall in upon the floor. How well I remember ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... young Jew, dark faced and thin, was shouting from a wagon that all men and women must be free and own the factories and mills. A mob of small boys, clustered 'round a "camp fire" they had made on the street, were leaping wildly through the flames. It was a mammoth cauldron here, seething, bubbling over with a million foreign ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... had, with all my soul; but he sticks to his rascally undertaking like a crab to its shell; egad, there will be no dislodging him unless he's clapped into a cauldron of boiling water, as fishmongers ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... shrunk in the wetting two yards and a half about the belly. What are become of those two timber logs, that he used to wear for legs, that stood strutting like the two black posts before a door? I am afraid some bad body has been setting him over a fire in a great cauldron, and boiled him down half the quantity, for a recipe. This is no father Dominick, no huge overgrown abbey-lubber; this is but a diminutive sucking friar. As sure as a gun, now, father Dominick has been ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... things mundane have an end, even the most unpleasant—though it must be confessed their finality is generally lingering. Thus our desolate voyage through that seething cauldron, known to geographers and schoolboys as the Red Sea, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... the Indians had fled; this seemed also the opinion of the volunteers near me, who simultaneously left their hiding-place, and pushed forward to the scene. On arriving at the spot, I found the soldiers around a large Indian fire, over which was suspended a boiling cauldron, filled with venison, the Indians having been, no doubt, preparing a meal when disturbed by us; by the side, and not far from the fire, was a large trough, made out of a fallen tree, in which was a quantity of ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... when doors are closed and curtains drawn on a group of free spirits, the miracle happens, and Good Talk begins. 'Tis a sudden illumination—the glow, it may be of sanctified candles, or, more likely, the blaze around a cauldron of gossip. ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... sordid banality and ugly tragedy of their lot do not dawn on the people concerned. Greedy vanity in the more robust, lack of moral courage and firmness in the more sensitive, with a social organisation that aims at a surface dignity and a cheap showiness, are the ingredients of this devil's cauldron. The worst of it is that it has no fine elements at all. There is a nobility about real tragedy which evokes a quality of passionate and sincere emotion. There is something essentially exalted about a fierce resistance, a desperate failure. But this abject, listless dreariness, which can ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Besides bearing the cauldron of fish, Havelok had many things to do. He had to fill a huge tub in the kitchen with water, and to cut wood for the fire, and to do anything the cook told him. And, whatever happened, he was full of mirth, and would jest and play with the children who ran ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... house they went to the sea-side, followed by the black lap-dog aforesaid, and cast in the figures of clay representing the ship and the men; after which the sea raged, roared, and became red like the juice of madder in a dyer's cauldron. ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... stream turned, and had hollowed out its bed into a hole as big as a cauldron, they made an inclined plane and let the bottle slide down into the water head foremost, like a ship being launched. They could follow it as it curved under the water until it came up slantingly, and stood bobbing up and down on the water like a buoy, with its neck up. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... all returned from death. A brazen caldron was brought to Patrick as an offering from Daire. "Deo gratias," said Patrick. Daire asked his servants what Patrick said. They answered, "Gratzicum." "This is little reward for a good offering and a good caldron," said Daire. He ordered his cauldron to be brought to him. "Deo gratias," said Patrick. Daire asked what Patrick said when they were bringing the caldron from him. The servants answered: "It was the same thing he said when we were ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, nursing a baby, the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron which seemed ...
— Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. With a Proem by Austin Dobson • Lewis Carroll
... yawning gulf, whose depths no eye could fathom, as it was enveloped in perpetual twilight. North of this abode was a space or world known as Nifl-heim, the home of mist and darkness, in the centre of which bubbled the exhaustless spring Hvergelmir, the seething cauldron, whose waters supplied twelve great streams known as the Elivagar. As the water of these streams flowed swiftly away from its source and encountered the cold blasts from the yawning gulf, it soon hardened into huge blocks of ice, which ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... the Scotch Highlands, with their uncanny harmonies of silver mist and grey cloud and glint of water and bare rock and heather, and not see in the distance the Weird Sisters crooning over their horrible cauldron? In Germany the forests are magic-mad. Walking under the huge oaks of the Thuringian Forest or the Taunus, or in the pine woods of Hesse, one can see the flutter of airy garments in the chequered sunlight falling upon fern and moss; one can glimpse goblins and kobolds ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... has moved through the chancelleries of Europe. He has seen and heard what has been denied to all but very few. In the Balkans, that cauldron of racial passions which, overflowing, gave our enemies an ostensible cause for this war, he moved as though an invisible and yet keenly observant figure. He could claim the friendship of Venizelos and other Balkan statesmen. He has travelled as a monk throughout ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... positions. At the bottom appeared red and green flames, but above all was darkness. Out of the cloud came a ceaseless rain of metal, rifles, dirt, cartridges, and even human flesh. The whole world seemed to have been suddenly transformed into a roaring, flaming cauldron. ...
— Fighting in France • Ross Kay
... yards long; when they become ripe, which is known from their changing colour, they are gathered with great care, and laid by as long as they think proper: when they choose to animate the seed of these nuts, they throw them into a large cauldron of boiling water, which opens the shells in a few hours, and ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... stopped. The cheated wind was whistling around the corners of the old wooden buildings, and taking out its spite on any passers-by who must venture forth to work. The harbour, usually so peaceful and so sheltered, was lashed into a cauldron of boiling white foam, and the rocks were swept so clean that they at ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... had gone down and the sea had much subsided. For a considerable time no answer was returned to these signals. At length a light was seen, and presently a fire blazed up on a spot directly opposite the ship. Still it seemed impossible to carry a rope across the seething cauldron which intervened. Jacob volunteered to make the attempt. Harry, though unwilling to let him risk his life ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... people to the prophet: "Shall not black hills draw round in some forsaken land, to make a vale-wide cauldron wherein the molten rock shall seethe and roar, and where the crags of mountains shall be hurled upward to the surface and bubble and go down again, that there our enemies may ...
— The Gods of Pegana • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... hills and valleys, like Argos itself, or Lacedaemon, or the fair Vale of Tempe. But the lowlands were all drowned by floods, and the highlands blasted by fire, and the hills heaved like a babbling cauldron, before the wrath of King Poseidon, ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... day and night, with the exception of Sundays and some other holidays. I was early next morning at the mill. A current of cane juice was flowing from the mill in a long trunk to a vat in which it was clarified with lime; it was then made to pass successively from one seething cauldron to another, as it obtained a thicker consistence by boiling. The negroes, with huge ladles turning on pivots, swept it from cauldron to cauldron, and finally passed it into a trunk, which conveyed it to shallow tanks in another apartment, where it cooled ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... literally cooked wine, is made at the time of the vintage by the following recipe: Boil unfermented grape-juice in a well scoured cauldron [or porcelain-lined vessel] for a quarter of an hour, skimming thoroughly. Pour into earthen pans, and let it stand until the following day. Pour again into the cauldron, carefully, so as to leave the dregs, and boil until ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... immediately into a barrelful of water. When you have filled two, or three, or four, or five barrels with bark and water, allow them so to stand for eight days, until the waters imbibe all the sap of the bark. Afterwards put this water into a very clean pan, or into a cauldron, and fire being placed under it, boil it; from time to time, also, throw into the pan some of this bark, so that whatever sap may remain in it may be boiled out. When you have cooked it a little, throw it out, and again put in more; which done, boil down the remaining ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... "ghost town" which had never failed to interest him, but he gave no thought now to the hardy prospectors who had built it or to the vein of gold that had failed them. His searching eyes came back to the fiery pit, the Tonah Basin, a vast cauldron of sand and ash—great sweeps of yellow and gray and darker brown into which the sun was pouring its rays with ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... Kansas strife, the warring of sections, and the growing bitterness of free and slave State men make daily life a seething cauldron. Southern settlers are pouring into the interior. They shun the cities. In city and country, squatter wars, over lot and claim, excite the community. San Francisco is a hotbed of politicians and roughs ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... times when Mona was the grand seat of Druidical superstition, when adoration was paid to Dwy Fawr, and Dwy Fach, the sole survivors of the apocryphal Deluge; to Hu the Mighty and his plough; to Ceridwen and her cauldron; to Andras the Horrible; to Wyn ab Nudd, Lord of Unknown, and to Beli, Emperor of the Sun. I thought on the times when the Beal fire blazed on this height, on the neighbouring promontory, on the cope-stone of ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... soft fires in unextinguish'd urns, Cauldron'd in rock, innocuous Lava burns; On the bright lake YOUR gelid hands distil 160 In pearly mowers the parsimonious rill; And, as aloft the curling vapours rise Through the cleft roof, ambitious for the skies, In vaulted hills condense the tepid steams, And pour to ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... by a waggoner whom he hired for the purpose. After which he began to search the giant's cave to find his treasure. He passed through many windings and turnings until he came to a huge hall paved and roofed with freestone. At the upper end of this was an immense fireplace where hung an iron cauldron, the like of which, for size, Jack had never seen before. It was boiling and gave out a savoury steam; while beside it, on the right hand, stood a big massive table set out with huge platters and mugs. Here it was that the giants used to dine. Going a little further ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... season dragged its reeking length through the Simiti valley with fearful deliberation. Jose thought that he should never again see the sun. The lake steamed like a cauldron. Great clouds of heavy vapor rolled incessantly upward from the dripping jungle. The rain fell in cloud-bursts, and the narrow streets of the old town ran like streams in ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... special bath-houses of two or more rooms, found in the yard of almost every peasant family. The outer door leads to the entry, the next door to a hot undressing-room, and the inner door to a steaming inferno in which is a small masonry stove, a cauldron of hot water, a barrel of ice-water, a bench, several platforms of various altitudes, several beaten copper or brass basins, a dipper and a lot of aromatic twigs bound in small bunches. With these he flails the dead cuticle much ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... probably only one of many which circulated concerning the mischievous friar, he obtains admission into a convent for the purpose of debauching its inmates. Having received employment as under-cook, he soon finds means to throw his master into a cauldron of boiling water, and pretending that the cook's death resulted from an accident, he obtains the chief position in the kitchen himself. He then provides the convent with such delicious food that the monks give themselves up entirely to material enjoyment, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... End of Scripture History. John was on the Isle of Patmos as an exile because of his testimony for Jesus. He seems to have lived until the end of the first century and is said to have met death in a cauldron of boiling oil. The last of the apostles being now dead the canon of the scripture is closed and the power of miracles removed and Christianity left to win its own way by means of the efforts and the prayers of the disciples and the grace which God ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... tale that after George had been comforted by the angel who descended from heaven, his tormentors flung him into a cauldron of boiling lead, and when they believed they had subdued him by the force of his agonies, they brought him to a temple to assist in their worship, and the people ran in crowds to behold his humiliation, ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... allowed to bark. In the large and smoky hall a bright fire was burning on the stone floor. There was no chimney; so the smoke went up to the ceiling, and found a way out for itself. Soup was boiling in a large cauldron, and hares and rabbits were ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... grate, some of the smoke escaping up a rude chimney, but the greater part rolling out into the room, so that the air was thick with it, and a man coming from without could scarce catch his breath. On this fire a great cauldron bubbled and simmered, giving forth a rich and promising smell. Seated round it were a dozen or so folk, of all ages and conditions, who set up such a shout as Alleyne entered that he stood peering at them through the smoke, uncertain what ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... little eat they anything but flesh and the broth. And when they have eaten, they wipe their hands upon their skirts; for they use no napery ne towels, but if it be before great lords; but the common people hath none. And when they have eaten, they put their dishes unwashen into the pot or cauldron with remnant of the flesh and of the broth till they will eat again. And the rich men drink milk of mares or of camels or of asses or of other beasts. And they will be lightly drunken of milk and of another drink that is ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... knowledge of all the things of the world. The bush withered up afterwards, and it is to be seen on the roadside now between this and Rahasine." There is a poem of his about a bush, which I have never seen, and it may have come out of the cauldron of fable ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... course down this creek to the river we came suddenly upon a basin of boiling sulphur springs, exhibiting signs of activity and points of difference so wonderful as to fully absorb our curiosity. The largest of these, about twenty feet in diameter, is boiling like a cauldron, throwing water and fearful volumes of sulphurous vapor higher than our heads. Its color is a disagreeable greenish yellow. The central spring of the group, of dark leaden hue, is in the most violent agitation, its convulsive spasms frequently projecting large ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... advising them to keep calm, in order that they might retain the cold, keen coup d'oeil which in warfare generally decides the victory. Briefly, such was the plotting and intriguing that never had any witch's cauldron brimful of drugs and nameless abominations been set to boil on a more hellish fire than that of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... was his hate for the people who had dared to oppose his will that when dying he called before him his eldest son, and in the presence of his barons caused him to swear upon the saints that so soon as he should be dead his body should be boiled in a cauldron until the flesh should be separated from the bones, after which the flesh should be committed to the earth, but the bones preserved, and that, as often as the people of Scotland rebelled, the military array ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... turn, as the evening draws near, Drink 'round the great cauldron—a circle of cheer! And the dawn in amaze, revisiting that shore, On idle beds of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... followed by several others. The ship had struck and the masts had all gone together by the board. Shrieks and cries arose, but many of the voices were speedily silenced, as the sea, breaking over the ship, washed several men from the deck into the seething cauldron into which she had been driven. The captain, followed by Growler, sprang up the companion ladder, and we saw no more of them. The cries of the helpless slaves below, uniting in one fearful chorus, overwhelmed the voices of the ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... proceeded thither, and were graciously welcomed. Lady Errol pressed us to stay all night, and ordered the coach to carry us to see the great curiosity on the coast at Dunbui, which is a monstrous cauldron, called by the country people the Pot. Dr. Johnson insisted on taking a boat and sailing into the Pot, and we found caves of considerable depth on ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... had thus killed these two monsters, he went into their cave in search of their treasure. He passed through many turnings and windings, which led him to a room paved with freestone; at the end of it was a boiling cauldron, and on the right hand stood a large table, where the giants used to dine. He then came to a window that was secured with iron bars, through which he saw a number of wretched captives, who cried out when they saw Jack: "Alas! alas! young man, you are come to be one among ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... of the hissing bacon—ah!—as if he liked it; and when he poured the boiling water in the tea-pot, looked lovingly down into the depths of that snug cauldron, and suffered the fragrant steam to curl about his nose, and wreathe his head and face in a thick cloud. However, for all this, he neither ate nor drank, except at the very beginning, a mere morsel for form's sake, which he appeared ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... that old cattle-market; an example terrible indeed, the significance of which is not easily to be exhausted. For the poisoners of the soul there was the stake,[302] for the poisoners of the body, the boiling cauldron,—the two most fearful punishments for the most fearful of crimes. The stake at which the heretic suffered was an inherited institution descending through the usage of centuries; the poisoner's cauldron was the fresh expression of the judgment of the English nation on a novel ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... bubbling cauldron of France, where intrigues, foreign and domestic, conflicting ambitions, stratagems, and hopes, were whirling in never-ceasing tumult, was it strange if the plain Netherland envoys should ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... discharged all their precious liquid, the cauldron into which the metal has been poured is swung in mid-air by that unseen, effortless power which we know as hydraulic pressure, through the arc of a wide circle, until it reaches the point where the great ingot-moulds stand ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... agreed to have recourse to the judgment of Heaven, as a proof whether the testimony was true or false. The ordeal was to be by hot water. A great fire was lighted in the Church of St. Maurice, at St. Angers, and a cauldron of water placed on it, into which was plunged an old forester who had borne witness for the convent. Without appearing to suffer inconvenience from the heat, he repeated what he had formerly said and Geoffrey was obliged to abide by the result of ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... human soul, and of a future state of happiness or misery. They say that the soul of a dying person makes its escape through the nostrils, and is borne away by the wind, to heaven, if of a person who has led a good life, but if of an evil-doer, to a great cauldron, where it shall be exposed to fire until such time as Batara-guru shall judge it to have suffered punishment proportioned to its sins, and feeling compassion shall take it to himself in heaven: that finally the time shall come when the chains and bands of Naga-padoha shall be worn ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... of its administration. In the first, the ordeal by water, the accused had to take a heavy piece of iron from a boiling cauldron placed in the church—in the second, to carry a bar of heated iron nine feet. The hand or arm was bound in linen, the bandage sealed by the priest, and on the third day the limb was uncovered. If the burn or scald had healed the prisoner ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... the petals is indeed pure and lovely, and a little crystalline in texture; but that the form and setting of them is grotesque beyond all wonder; the two uppermost joined being like an old fashioned and enormous hood or bonnet, and the lower one projecting far out in the shape of a cup or cauldron, torn deep at the edges into ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... New York. The wonder of the steerage people pouring down their proper gangway is contrasted with the conventional at-home-ness of the first-class passengers above. Then we behold the seething human cauldron of the East Side, then the jolly little wedding-dance, then the life of the East Side, from the policeman to the peanut-man, and including the bar tender, for the crowd is ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... tumultuous sea, foaming and fretting in every direction, as if we were among breakers. We were in fact among breakers, though fortunately with no bottom near. No boat could have lived in such a cauldron as was produced by this meeting of the waters. They generally passed us in about three quarters of an hour, when everything became comparatively smooth again. No observation to-day for latitude, but by computation we are in latitude 5.25 N. and longitude (chronometer) ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... The "sounds heard in the mountain like the firing of a cannon," is a legend applied to two other neighbouring places. All the Bedawin still sacrifice at the tombs of their Santons: at the little white building which covers the reputed tomb of Aaron, sheep are slaughtered and boiled in a huge black cauldron. The "pile of large rounded boulders" bearing "cut Sinaitic inscriptions" (p. 423) are clearly Wusum: these tribal-marks, which the highly imaginative M. de Saulcy calls "planetary signs," are found throughout Midian. The name of the Wady is, I have said, not El-Ithem, but El-Yitm, a very ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... flame From Cridwen's cauldron came; Nine months was I in gloom In Sorceress Cridwen's womb; Though late a child—I'm now The Bard of splendid brow {75}; When roar'd the deluge dark, I with Noah ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... the tools thereon to the floor with a jingle which might have been heard far out on the loch. They were still clawing and cuffing each other in blind rage, when a hand, heavy and remorseless, was laid upon each. Sholto found himself being dabbled in the great tempering cauldron which stood by his father's forge. Laurence heard his own teeth rattle as he was shaken sideways till his joints waggled like those of a puppet at Keltonhill Fair. Then it was his turn to be doused in the water. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... leader, the brilliant, unscrupulous and ambitious Chapleau. He over-estimated his power. The whole strength of the government at Ottawa was at once concentrated in keeping the lid on that smouldering cauldron of stench and rottenness, the system of practical politics of that day. The Conservative chiefs tried to suppress Tarte and he refused to be suppressed—there was not a drop of coward's blood in his veins. Then they set to work to destroy him. He sought ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... Hennessey down the corridor, towering over him like Saint Bernards on the heels of a terrier. They turned into the dining room, a big square room centered with a rude table and chairs, one wall pierced by a fireplace in which a big cauldron steamed over smouldering coals. ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... were doomed to see the frail structure on which their lives depended go slowly to pieces before the mighty power of the remorseless sea. Bit by bit their foothold vanished from beneath them. One by one they were swept off into the seething cauldron of the storm. At last but one man remained, the cook of the ill-fated vessel, who floated about for three days on a piece of wreckage, until, half-starved and nearly crazed, he was picked up by a passing vessel, and told the tale of the wreck. So ended the ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... my child. But he fell free of the Zeppelin. He is not in that fire cauldron there. Didn't you see the end of ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... would have been compelled to remain at home. Turkey would have been overawed, and Constantinople would have fallen before the Russian fleet. We are to-day, and always must be, liable to a foreign war. We have a great boiling cauldron running over with excitement all along our southern and south-western borders. Central America, Cuba, the West-Indies, and South-America are far more foreign countries to us than Europe or the Mediterranean to England. Cuba will no doubt be at some day our most ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... surface of the tin was now cleared of slag, after which it was ladled into moulds and allowed to cool. This was the first process completed; but the tin was still full of impurities, and had to undergo another melting and stirring in a huge cauldron. This latter was a severe and protracted operation, which Vulcan performed with ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... they had dispersed all over the world. Their place was taken by a light railway bringing rails and sleepers. At first you were only aware of smoke in the distant west; in a few days' time you discovered a chimney, and presently found that that chimney was fixed to a large cauldron which rolled along without horses, dragging after it a dozen wagons full of wood and iron. Whenever it stopped men jumped out and laid down the wood, fastened the iron to it and drove off again. These were the proceedings ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... the great gods of Greece, gods believed in by Homer, worshipped by Sokrates, immortalized by Pheidias? Why should we listen to such horrors as that Tantalos killed his own son, boiled him, and placed him before the gods to eat? or that the gods collected his limbs, threw them into a cauldron, and thus restored Pelops to life, minus, however, his shoulder, which Demeter had eaten in a fit of absence, and which had therefore to be replaced by a shoulder made ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... shocked, till I reminded her I was only quoting Tony Lumpkin. The explanation being doubtfully accepted, D. expatiated on the delight of coming out of the gloom to find all the stir and movement and light in the great opening where there was 829 feet of water tumbling into a cauldron full twenty fathoms deep, blue sky overhead, foam everywhere, rainbows, and more falls below, and glittering wet rocks and waving foliage all round. A hard place to fish, I thought. And believe I will just fancy I see this place too; it ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... fore-ground. One woman plays upon the guitar while the other eats her dinner. The second volume has a fine illumination divided into four parts, with a handsome border—not quite perhaps so rich as the preceding. Among the subjects, there is a singular one of Lancelot du Lac helping a lady out of a cauldron in a state of nudity: two gentlemen and a lady are quietly looking on. The text appertaining to this subject runs thus: "Et quant elle voit lancelot si lui dist hoa sire cheualiers pour dieu ostes moy de ceste aure ou il a eaue qui toute mait Et lancelot ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... pitchforked into a vast melting-pot, where the cast-iron generalizations and traditions which most people consider their opinions grew flexible and fluid in the scorching heat of the furnace, assimilating so much of the other ingredients in the cauldron that they could never reassume their ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... trials,"[89] the apostles of freedom spoke with terrible vehemence and denunciation. Popular orators, too, were rushing here and there in the furor of a Presidential campaign, and as all these reforms were thrown into the governmental cauldron for discussion, the whole people seemed to be on the watch towers of politics and philanthropy. Women shared in the general unrest, and began to take many steps before unknown. Since 1840, they had generally attended political meetings, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... said Gosling, though thinking quite the reverse. And he walked back to bowl his next ball, conjuring up a beautiful vision in his mind. J. Douglas and Braund were fielding slip to him in the vision, while in the background Norris appeared, in a cauldron of boiling oil. ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... About five yards on the right I perceived Mr. Petulengro busily employed in erecting his tent; he held in his hand an iron bar, sharp at the bottom, with a kind of arm projecting from the top for the purpose of supporting a kettle or cauldron over the fire, and which is called in the Romanian language "Kekauviskoe saster." With the sharp end of this Mr. Petulengro was making holes in the earth at about twenty inches' distance from each other, into which he inserted certain long rods with a considerable bend towards the top, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the benefit of his absence, and we went home with thankful hearts that public sentiment had made a law too strong to allow avaricious and unprincipled men to cast our persecuted neighbors back into the seething cauldron of American slavery. ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... white, leaping, seething foam covered the spot where the terrible Bell Rock lay. Never for a moment did that boiling cauldron get time to show one spot of dark-coloured water. Billow after billow came careering on from the open sea in quick succession, breaking with indescribable force and fury just a few yards to windward ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... is so different from ordinary human baptism that it deserves a word of itself. A vast iron cauldron with half the fires of Avernus beneath it is partly filled with water that soon boils furiously. Into that is cast concentrated lye, lime, and sulphur, which is allowed to stew and fume until the witches' broth ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... Christ Osiris and Horus; the mask of the revelation of God drops from off it, and we see the true face, the ancient Egyptian religion, with a feature here and there moulded by the cognate ideas of other Eastern creeds, all of which flowed into Alexandria, and mingled in its seething cauldron of thought. ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... Children of Diarmid! Does not the valley of Glenorquhy, to this very hour, cry shame on the violence offered to a helpless infant whom her kinsmen were conveying to the court of the Sovereign? Were not her escort compelled to hide her beneath a cauldron, round which they fought till not one remained to tell the tale? and was not the girl brought to this fatal castle, and afterwards wedded to the brother of M'Callum More, and all for the sake of her broad ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... witches taking dead bodies out of their graves to make use of them in their enchantments, and Shakespeare, in his description of the witches' cauldron, shows that they threw into the seething pot many portions of human beings. The first witch in ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... lift her clean out of the water and keep her up for an instant with only a quiver running through her from end to end. And then she would begin her tumbling again as if dropped back into a boiling cauldron. Jukes tried hard to compose his mind and ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... reported to his neighbours the king's words, which they resolved literally to fulfil. Accordingly, the conspirators invited the unsuspecting Melville to a hunting party in the forest of Garvock; where, having a fire kindled, and a cauldron of water boiling on it, they rushed to the spot, stripped the sheriff naked, and threw him headlong into the boiling vessel: after which, on pretence of fulfilling the royal mandate, each swallowed a spoonful of the broth. After this cannibal feast, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... corresponded with a large montero-cap, that enveloped his head. The singularity of his features, and of the eyes, armed with spectacles, which were now cast on the subject of his studies, now directed towards his little cauldron, would have tempted Rembrandt to exhibit him on canvas, either in the character of an alchymist, or of a necromancer, engaged in some strange experiment, under the direction of one of the huge manuals which treat of the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... before the port of Ras-al-Jidid, the coast runs N. and S. with a small deviation to the N.W. and S.E. the distance being about three and a half leagues[295]. Ras-al-Jidid[296] is a small but very pleasant haven, 57 leagues beyond Swakem, and so exactly circular that it resembles a great cauldron. There are two points at its entrance bearing N. and S. and on the inside the eastern winds only can do harm. All the ground is very clean, having 18 fathoms at the mouth and 13 within; and half a league inland there is a well ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... woods, to the woods is the wizard gone; In his grotto the maiden sits alone. She gazes up with a weary smile At the rafter-hanging crocodile, The slowly swinging crocodile. Scorn has she of her master's gear, Cauldron, alembic, crystal sphere, Phial, philtre—"Fiddlededee For all such trumpery trash!" quo' she. "A soldier is the lad for me; Hey ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... stood in a corner at the back of the room, peering anxiously towards the cauldron of molten liquid, for well they knew that Kwan-yu's future rank and power depended on the success of this enterprise. Around the walls stood Kwan-yu's friends, and at the windows groups of excited servants strained their necks, ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... can tell you," said Willis, "is, that the steam is obtained by boiling water in a large cauldron, and that the power so obtained is ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... construction. It is necessary to rationalize this instinct of self-preservation and co-operation, in order to make it of effective service. Here lies the heart of our difficulty. War is the most intensely derationalizing process, and the long steeping of European civilization in the boiling cauldron will have twisted and blunted the very instruments of thought. As Professor Murray points out in a powerful essay, war rapidly undoes the slow secular process by which liberty and capacity for individual thought have grown up, and plunges the personal judgement ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... like a reed, his herculean frame trembled under the shock, in a way to render even his ability to resist seriously doubtful. But, the first blast expended, he sprang to the gangway, and leaped into the cauldron of the lake unhesitatingly, and yet in the possession of all his faculties. He was desperately bent on saving a life so dear to Adelheid, or on dying ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... deluging rain. The flowers so carefully planted by Fanny's repentant lover began to move and writhe in their bed. The winter-violets turned slowly upside down, and became a mere mat of mud. Soon the snowdrop and other bulbs danced in the boiling mass like ingredients in a cauldron. Plants of the tufted species were loosened, rose to the ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... suggestions. All that he had said had floated through my own mind before, without order, indeed, or shew of logic. From my own rebellious heart the same evil thoughts had risen, like pale apparitions hovering and lost in the fumes of a necromancer's cauldron. His was like the summing up of all this—a reflection of my own feelings and fancies—but reduced to an awful order and definiteness, and clothed with a sophistical form of argument. The effect of it was powerful. It revived and exaggerated these bad emotions—it methodised ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... a longing that made him sick, for "God's country" where all that is worst and best on earth still boils in the vast and seething cauldron of a continent in the making. There bubbles the elemental broth, dregs, scum, skimmings, residue, by-products, tailings, smoking corruption above the slowly forming and incorruptible matrix in its depths where lies imbedded, and ever growing, ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... more we learned from a friend who drew up beside us in a buggy, as I was drinking from a gleaming thread of water gliding down a mossed conduit of hollowed tree-trunks into an old cauldron sunk into the hillside, and long since turned in ferns and lichen. Colin was seated near by making a ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... use low wooden chairs or wicker stools to sit upon. The food, either bread, which is ordinarily of very thick cakes, but when guests are entertained of very thin broad cakes, like Indian chapatties, or meat boiled in a large iron cauldron, is served in large deep circular wooden vessels, hollowed from a trunk or thick branch of a tree, without any table, though tables were seen occasionally on which drinking vessels were set. The bread ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... Weland is quite different from the lays of the adventures of Thor, the rymskvia and the Hymiskvia, the songs of the Hammer and the Cauldron. These are chapters, episodes, in the history of Thor, not summaries of the whole matter, such as is the poem ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... and deep and black, but streaked with foam. At one side a gash in the rocky rim opened upon the sluicing current of the river, which rushed on, quivering and seething, to plunge with a roar into the terrific cauldron of the falls. Out of that thunderous cauldron, filled with huge tramplings and the shriek of tortured torrents, rose a white curtain of spray, which every now and then swayed upward and drenched the green birches which grew about the rim of the pot. For the break in the rim, which caught at ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... strictly speaking a soldier, but an officer's servant. I should have preferred to catch a combatant, who could have given me more precise information; but I was going to content myself with this capture for want of a better, when I saw at top of the slope two soldiers carrying a cauldron between them, on a pole. They were only a few paces off. It was impossible for us to re-embark without being seen. I therefore signed to my grenadiers to hide themselves again, and as soon as the two Austrians stooped to fill their vessel, powerful arms seized them from behind, ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... those days was punishable by death. Rachel, Leopold, and Eleazar are all thrown into prison. There Rachel relents, and retracts her accusation. Leopold is accordingly released, but the Jew and his daughter are condemned to be immersed in a cauldron of boiling oil. There is a rather meaningless underplot which results in a confession made by Eleazar on the scaffold, that Rachel is not a Jewess at all, but the daughter of a Cardinal who has taken a friendly interest in her fortunes throughout ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... conceptions of the other-world which we meet in Celtic legend are joyous; it is a land of youth and beauty. Cuchulainn, the Irish hero, for example, is brought in a boat to an exceedingly fair island round which there is a silver wall and a bronze palisade. In one Welsh legend the cauldron of the Head of Annwfn has around it a rim of pearls. One Irish story has a naive description of the glories of the Celtic Elysium in the words—'Admirable was that land: there are three trees there always bearing fruit, one pig always alive, and another ready cooked.' ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... and saw the gallows—the "Deadly Nevergreen" as it was called—the three posts with the beams connecting them—against the western sky. The ropes were in place all in one line; and a cart was there beneath them. A cauldron, too, sent up its smoke a little distance away beside the brook. All this space was kept clear again by guards; and there were some of the new grenadiers among them, in their piebald livery, with furred caps; and without the ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... rebounds, the brittle fauchion flies. Shut in himself, the war without he hears, Safe in the tempest of their rattling spears; The cumber'd strand their wasted volleys strow; His sport, the rage and labour of the foe. His pastimes like a cauldron boil the flood, And blacken ocean with the rising mud; The billows feel him, as he works his way; His hoary footsteps shine along the sea; The foam high-wrought, with white divides the green, And distant sailors point where ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... angry with Croesus. When Croesus boiled that lamb and tortoise together in the cauldron, he was ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... were to be dispatched forthwith to the Roman market. Though a fierce May sun blazed without, a huge fire roared in the middle of the hut: but this was for the sake of the ricotta, which was being made in another part of the capanna. Here stood a huge cauldron, full of boiling ewes' milk. In a warm state this curd is a delicious jelly and has often tempted me to enter a capanna in quest of it, to the amazement of the pecoraj, to whom it is vilior alga. Lord of the cauldron, ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... gynglen, jingling. habergeoun, hawberk. halwes, shrines (holies). heethe, heath, meadow. hem, them. here, their. heute, borrow. holpen, helped. holte, wood. i-falle, fallen. ilke, same. i-ronne, ran. juste, joust. kouthe, known. leede, cauldron. leste, pleasure. levere, rather. lipsede, lisped. luste, pleased. maistrye, mastery. maner, kind. mede, meadow. mete, meals, eating. motteleye, mixed colors. nightertale, night-time. noon, not one, not at ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... us no landmark or milestone. The fleck of cloud yonder, does it part it in two, or is it but a third of the way? The world is an immense cauldron, the ocean fills it, and we are merely on the rim—this narrow land is but a ribbon to the limitlessness yonder. The wind rushes out upon it with wild joy; springing from the edge of the earth, it leaps out over the ocean. ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... the back, saying it was a ne'er-do-weel trade he had ta'en up, and that he wasna blate to wile awa' her customers, crying after him, "I redde ye warn your madam that gin she sends you here again, I'll maybe let his Grace ken that her cauldron needs clouting." However, the graceless gilly but laughed at the vintner's wife, winking as he patted the side of his nose with his fore-finger, which testified that he held her vows of vengeance in very little reverence; and then he went on, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... interspersed. The following is sung by three Valkyries marching round the cauldron before Rota dips the fatal spear that she is ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... for thus it will be possible that the same furnace should serve both of them and their fittings. Three bronze cauldrons are to be set over the furnace, one for hot, another for tepid, and the third for cold water, placed in such positions that the amount of water which flows out of the hot water cauldron may be replaced from that for tepid water, and in the same way the cauldron for tepid water may be supplied from that for cold. The arrangement must allow the semi-cylinders for the bath basins to be heated from ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... at Paris would have certainly obtained for him the honours of expulsion at the hands of the municipal authorities. The entertainment of the day concluded with a discourse delivered out of a wind-sail by the chaplain attached to the person of the Pere Arctique, which was afterwards washed down by a cauldron full of grog, served out in bumpers to the several actors in this unwonted ceremonial. As the Prince had been good enough to invite us to dinner, instead of returning to the schooner I spent the intermediate ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... tool for his purpose in the Captain of the company to which Traverse Rocke belonged. This man, Captain Zuten, was a vulgar upstart thrown into his command by the turbulence of war, as the scum is cast up to the surface by the boiling of the cauldron. ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... you are riding up and get the first sniff of the putrid odour, you know at once that the Nepaulese market is being recruited by a fresh accession of very stale fish. If the taste is at all equal to the smell, the rankest witches broth ever brewed in reeking cauldron would probably be preferable. Over the frontier there seems to be few roads, merely bullock tracks. Most of the transporting of goods is done by bullocks, and intercommunication must be slow and costly. I believe that near Katmandoo, the capital, the roads and bridges are good, and kept in ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... splinters of quasi-historic evidence had run deep into his flesh. Despise him, if you like, but try to understand him. It was his very humaneness which brought him to this pass; recitals of old savagery had poisoned his blood, and the 'spirit of the age' churned his crude acquisitions into a witch's cauldron. Academic sweetness and light was a feeble antidote ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... no more Provokes the nod and simulated snore; No more the Lottery, no more the Fair, Lure the reluctant dollar from its lair, Nor Ladies' Lunches at a bit a bite Destroy the health yet spare the appetite, While thrifty sisters o'er the cauldron stoop To serve their God with zeal, their friends with soup, And all the brethren mendicate the earth With viewless placards: ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... adds one to the heap, first walking all round the cairn as if he were about to perform an incantation, then dropping the stone on to the top of the heap with the gesture of a magician adding an ingredient to a cauldron in full bubble. Goodchild sits down by the cairn as if it was his study-table at home; Idle, drenched and panting, stands up with his back to the wind, ascertains distinctly that this is the top at last, looks round with all the ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens |
