"Ditch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and proper, but——" Her steely calm broke. She burst out in a screaming, hysterical voice: "You've just got to, Emma Hulett! You've just got to! If you don't I won't never go back to 'Niram's house! I'll lie in the ditch by the roadside till the poor-master comes to get me—and I'll tell everybody that it's because my own twin sister, with a house and a farm and money in the bank, turned me out to starve—" A fearful spasm cut ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... most helpless and enslaved females of the dark race and the most recklessly dominant males of the white. "He enters a world in which there was no place prepared for him." His father was about as sensible of his parental obligations towards him as a toad towards its spawn in the next ditch. To him he "was a broken wineglass from last night's feast." "Often without a family, always without a nation or race, without education or moral training, and despised by the society in which he was born," is it any wonder ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... not quite vanished from Scotland before I was sent thither, but remained to help me get ready for the kingdom of heaven: those dykes must still be dear to my brothers who have gone up before me. Some of the fields had only a small ditch between them and the road, and some of them had no kind of fence at all. It was a dreary road even in summer, though not therefore without its loveable features—amongst which the dykes; and wherever there is anything to love, there is ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... they would be in danger from the Gauls if they were unable to defend themselves. Caesar undertook that they should have no hurt, but he insisted that their arms must be given up. They affected obedience. They flung their swords and lances over the walls till the ditch was filled with them. They opened their gates; the Romans occupied them, but were forbidden to enter, that there might be no plundering. It seems that there was a desperate faction among the Aduatuci who had been for fighting to extremity. A third part of the arms had been secretly reserved, ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... the country, and which scarce any body that comes to London omits seeing). The tower, which stands by the Thames, is a large strong building, surrounded with a high wall, about a mile in compass, and a broad ditch supplied with water out of the River Thames. Round the outward wall are guns planted, which on extraordinary occasions are fired. At the entrance, the first thing we saw was a collection of wild beasts, viz. lions, panthers, tygers [sic], &c. also eagles and vultures: These are of no sort ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... those who still think, however, in terms of the days of sailing-ships. They advise us to pull our warships and our planes and our merchant ships into our own home waters and concentrate solely on last ditch defense. But let me illustrate what would happen if we followed ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... and strong enough to create frogs in one way in every ditch at this moment, is he not wise and strong enough to create frogs by some other way, if he should choose, whether in Egypt of old, or now, here, this ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... nodded Chadron. "That feller's opened a ditch from the river up there on my land ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... difficult to comply with an editorial request such as this: "The story I send you is as dull as ditch-water; do please read it over and illustrate it with ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... v. tr., to cast away, to fall down; daro langi si asidaro laona kilu, shall they not both fall into the ditch? ...
— Grammar and Vocabulary of the Lau Language • Walter G. Ivens
... came to the fore. As soon as they had wandered about they could see that the stockade of gnarled trees which framed in Casterbridge was itself an avenue, standing on a low green bank or escarpment, with a ditch yet visible without. Within the avenue and bank was a wall more or less discontinuous, and within the wall were packed ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... defensive wall, guarded by the Tower, and crowned by the cathedral. The city proper lay on the north of the Thames, and the wall made a semicircle of some two miles, from the Tower on the east to the Fleet ditch and Blackfriars on the west. Seven gates pierced the wall to the north, and the roads passing through them into the fields were lined with houses. Westward along the river were great palaces, behind which the building was practically continuous along the muddy road that ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... hair lightly sprinkled with gray. The second that he looked into that woman's eyes taught him her character, absolutely, as finally as if he had grown up with her. One could trust her to the last ditch, ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam
... close within his arm, resting his red head against the dark one below it. "I don't seem to feel particularly tired, now," he observed. "Curious, isn't it? Fatigue, as I've often noticed, is more mental than physical—with most of us. Your ditch-digger is tired in his back and arms, but the ordinary person is merely tired because his mind tells ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... the force of Peterborough, and should have been able to defend the city against an army vastly exceeding their own numbers. Ten bastions and some old towers protected the town toward the north and east; between the city and the sea was a long rampart with an unfinished ditch and covered way; while to the west, standing on a lofty elevation, the castle of Montjuich overlooked and guarded the ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... mean. I certainly do not go blindly over hedge and ditch after the opinions of John Calvin. I am not ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... and marriage. You had better be the emperor of one loving and tender heart, and she the empress of yours, than to be king of the world. The man who has really won the love of one good woman in this world, I do not care if he dies in the ditch a beggar, his life has been ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... finding it save in street gangs and at labor that was mostly done by Greeks and Italians fresh from Europe. A man had to begin at the bottom, he realized, but he did not desire to begin at the bottom of a ditch. He did not seek for such small clerical jobs as he knew himself able to fill. He did not mean to sit on a high stool and ruin his eyes over interminable rows of figures. That much at least the North had done for ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... retreated as far as the ditch, from which each took a concealed musket; the result was that our seven travelers were outnumbered in weapons. Aramis received a ball which passed through his shoulder, and Mousqueton another ball which lodged in the fleshy part which prolongs the lower portion of the loins. Therefore ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... is a square fortress, having four bastions connected by curtains, surrounded by a ditch. The walls are about twenty-four feet high, and built also of coral rock. Besides the houses, &c. mentioned in the text and near to what is called the Iron Magazine, is the grass plot where criminals are executed: It is a square space, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... beast of burden, the ass, signifies the people that lets itself be bridled and ridden, and goes as it is led, like the ass, who was forced and beaten cruelly when he went out of the way into the ditch, and must neither give place before the angel in the way so long as it could help, nor turn aside, and so must fall down. For in the same way have these seducers also urged on the people, until these last have become sensible that it is a thing not to be endured, and that they ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... there faithfully, as a friend that waited his return. He is stronger now, but no less delicate; he loves not Nature less, but the world more. He has learned to love his fellow-men. Knut Pedersen, vagabond, wanders about the country with his tramp-companions, Grindhusen, the painter who can ditch and delve at a pinch, or Falkenberg, farm-labourer in harvest-time, and piano-tuner where pianos are. Here is brave comradeship, the sharing of adventures, the ready wit of jovial vagrants. The book is a harmless picaresque, a geste of innocent rogue-errantry; its place is with Lavengro ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... softly as a shadow; and in his wildest dash, what a sure judgment he has for the lie of the ground, how unerringly—and at a moment when a mistake is death—he selects his cover! How learned, too, he is in his knowledge of the countryside! There is not a dry ditch, or a water-course, or an old drain, or a hole in a bank for miles around that is not mysteriously set down in the map he carries in his graceful, clever head; and one need hardly say that all the suitable hiding-places in and ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... nourished a fancied slight would have been laughed at by his fellows. She had a town-bred girl's curiosity and interest in camp life, which she declared was like a "perpetual picnic," and her slim, graceful figure halting beside a ditch where the men were working seemed to them as grateful as the new spring sunshine. The whole camp became tidier; a coat was considered de rigueur at "Prossy's mother" evenings; there was less horseplay in the trails, and less shouting. "It's all very well to talk about 'old mothers,'" said the ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... regularly waited on him (though I make bold to say that he trusted in me rather than in them), gave him the permission which he had taken. He had caused a mantlet to be built for him which was brought up to the edge of the ditch with which the town was surrounded. In this he sat, with a cross-bow in hand, and shot not a few of the enemy, being skilful beyond the common in the use of this weapon. But towns are not taken by the shooting of bolts, howsoever well aimed ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... American history, we have been engaged in change—in a perpetual peaceful revolution—a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions—without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... little girl's shrieks grew louder she began to think something serious was the matter, and the two ladies started away in the direction of the sound. Poor Rikli was indeed in a wretched plight. She was standing in a ditch, covered quite to her neck in the muddy water, and holding up her arms above her head, in an effort to protect it from the many little green frogs that were sporting about her. Aunty reached her first, and, taking the little ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... Prince of Orange had rewarded their insurrectionary election of him to the Stadtholdership by redeeming them from the despair to which the French invasion and the English fleet had reduced them, although since his famous "I will die in the last ditch," Holland no longer strove to commit suicide by opening its own sluices, yet the unloosed floods of popular passion were only partially abated. A stone that grazed his cheek and plumped against the little hand-bag that held his all of luggage, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... having a uniform dip, or inclination. Oftener, however, in hilly regions especially, they are quite irregular—the impervious stratum frequently having depressions of greater or less extent, and holding water, like a bowl. Not unfrequently, as we cut a ditch upon a declivity, we find that the dip of the strata below has no correspondence with the visible surface of the field, but that the different strata lie nearly level, or are much broken, while the surface has a ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... end of the valley was another, called the Valley of the Shadow of Death. On the right hand of this valley was a very deep ditch; it was the ditch into which the blind have led the blind in all ages, and have there miserably perished. And on the left hand was a dangerous quagmire, into which, if even a good man falls, he finds no bottom for his foot to stand on. The pathway here was exceeding narrow and very dark, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the Hawaiians can not well live without horses. Some of the people live on the shore and make salt, which you see stored up in pandanus bags under the shelter of lava bubbles. When I was there a number were engaged in digging a ditch in which to lay an iron pipe, intended to convey fresh water to the denser part ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... Brigliador, and John Ingram himself," cried Arthur. "Oh, my uncle! my uncle!" And, in one moment, he had bounded across the ditch, which fenced in their exercising ground, and had rushed to meet Ingram. "Oh, John!" exclaimed he, breathlessly, "have they done it? Oh, tell me of Uncle ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in appearance. The palace is a handsome building of Italian architecture, surrounding three sides of a square. It is built of hewn stone, and over the centre entrance is placed a large gilt crown. Not far from the modern palace is the ancient Chateau, surrounded by a deep ditch, and flanked by gloomy bastions, formerly the requisites to a prince's residence, but incompatible with the luxury sought for in a ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... advisable to save myself all unnecessary fatigue. I was of course accompanied by a servant to bring back the horses when they were of no further use. By leaving the lane and making our way across the fields over hedge and ditch, we contrived to ride about half a mile. The horses then became useless, as the drifts were so deep against the hedges and gates, that the poor animals became imbedded in them, and were unable to find any firm footing to leap from. The servant therefore ...
— A Night in the Snow - or, A Struggle for Life • Rev. E. Donald Carr
... his sword, and cursing horribly in his Hindustan jargon. Behind him came troops of matchlock-men, who picked off every one of our men who showed their noses above the ramparts: and a great host of blackamoors with scaling-ladders, bundles to fill the ditch, fascines, gabions, culverins, demilunes, counterscarps, and all the ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... playing-cards, which he had stuck on thorns from time to time, each inscribed with a blasphemous comment on the discomforts of such travel. After an apparently interminable interval we crossed an irrigating ditch, where the horses were glad to water, and so came to one of those green flowering lush California villages so startlingly in contrast to ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... was distinctly of a different nationality and race. This, with a certain neatness of dress and artificial suavity of address, had gained him the nickname of "the Count" and "Frenchy," although he was really of Flemish extraction. He was the Union Ditch Company's agent on the Bar, by virtue of his knowledge ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... slight or so unevenly distributed that agriculture cannot be carried on except by means of irrigation. This irrigation consists of taking water out of the streams and conducting it by means of ditches which have a very gentle slope over the land which it is proposed to irrigate. From the original ditch, smaller ditches are taken out, running nearly parallel with each other, and from these laterals other ditches, still smaller, and the seepage from all these moistens a considerable area on which crops may be grown. This, very roughly, is irrigation, a subject of incalculable ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... be joined the remark of Leonard Swett, that "any man who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man would wake up with his back in the ditch." ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... him to put up his hands, at the same time snatching away Colquhoun's revolver. Sergeant Shoebotham, Corporal Stewart and Constable Browning ran after Dunn, firing as they went, he returning the fire as he ran. After some twenty shots had been exchanged Dunn fell into a ditch and threw up his hands, saying, 'I am shot.' The men ceased firing and took two revolvers from Dunn. On taking him out of the ditch it was found he had been shot in the calf of the leg, the bullet going ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... irrepressibly: he laughed till he reached the Temple Gate; and when in Fleet Street went almost into convulsions of hilarity. Holding on by one of the posts in the street, he sent forth such peals of laughter that they seemed in the silence of the night to resound from Temple Bar to Fleet Ditch. ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... to make him smoke. I tried to make him talk about his travels. Nothing would do: he just kept nodding off." "What did he say? Did he say anything?" "But little." "Anything? Mary, confess He said he'd come to ditch the meadow for me." "Warren!" "But did he? I just want to know." "Of course he did. What would you have him say? Surely you wouldn't grudge the poor old man Some humble way to save his self-respect. He added, if you really care to know, He meant to clear the upper pasture, too. That sounds like ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... at the mountains on my left—the lower ridge of the Kapanja Sirt—and saw how the water-course went up and up and in and out, and I thought if I kept low and crawled round in this ditch I should come out at last close behind the firing-line, and then I could get in touch with the trenches. I could hear the machine-gun of the M—'s ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... decided gesture of her foot every stone that lay in her way. There were many in that rocky path, but Becky left it smoother as she climbed, and paused now and then to send some especially sharp or large one spinning into the grassy ditch ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... regarded Philip's exactions as intolerable, and rebelled. Against them marched the royal army of iron-clad knights; and the desperate citizens, meeting these with no better defence than stout leather jerkins, led them into a trap. At the battle of Courtrai the knights charged into an unsuspected ditch, and as they fell the burghers with huge clubs beat out such brains as they could find within the helmets. It was subtlety against stupidity, the merchant's shrewdness asserting itself along new lines. King Philip had to create ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... lane were heard, or neigh of a colt from the four-cross roads, people at dinner would start up and cry, "The French, the French have landed!" while the men in the fields would get nearer the hedge to peep through it, and then run away down the ditch. ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... chuckling answer. "Nothing but good, old-fashioned sarsaparilla soda pop with the pop left out. It's as flat as ditch water. Where'd ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... had better stop and talk over the matter of drainage. There are three kinds of drains, namely: the open drain, the blind drain, and the tile drain. Each one has worked out of the other. The simplest sort and the one man first used is the open ditch. A piece of land was covered with water. A ditch was dug through the land at the place or places where water was standing. Usually a little stone is thrown into the bottom to help drain ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... were felled, and log-huts wore erected, the interstices of which were filled up with earth, moss, and a rude kind of mortar, in order to render them warm and comfortable. Around them, for defence, two redoubts were erected and an intrenchment, drawn with a ditch six feet wide and three or four feet deep. His left was covered by the Schuylkill, and his rear, for the most part, by an abrupt precipice; but his right was somewhat accessible, and the centre of his front was weak, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... is used with reference to the progress of work on a wall or ditch from one end of it ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... upon one another, and the great ditches which run on the plains and elsewhere so many miles, were (not unlikely) their boundaries, and withall served for defence against the incursion of their enemies, as the Picts' Wall, Offa's Ditch, and that in China; to compare small things to great. Their religion is at large described by Csesar; their priests were the Druids. Some of their temples I pretend to have restored; as Anbury, Stonehenge, ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... thoroughly rational; in other words, a combination of knave and fool. Bob, in consequence of his accomplishments, was always a great favorite in the village. Upon some odd occasions he was a ready and willing drudge at everything, and as strong as a ditch. Give him only a good fog-meal—which was merely a trifle, just what would serve three men or so—give him, we say, a fog-meal of this kind, about five times a day, with a liberal promise of more, and never was there a Scotch Brownie who could get through so much work. He knew no fatigue; frost ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... occurred there. It was one of the very strangest places in the whole world, for there, in the middle of that great desolate waste, were herded together seven or eight thousand men—warriors, you understand, men of experience and courage. Around there were a double wall and a ditch, and warders and soldiers; but, my faith! you could not coop men like that up like rabbits in a hutch! They would escape by twos and tens and twenties, and then the cannon would boom, and the search parties run, and we, who were left behind, would laugh ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the town they have cleared ten acres, (the garden) and planted corn and rice, which is growing nicely. They have set out mulberry, peach, and apple trees, which are doing well; in the middle of the garden, which is enclosed with a fence and ditch, they have built a corn-house, a cabin in which to live, and a stable." Another cabin, the first erected in the garden, had been burned in January, at which time Mrs. Waschke was living in it, though she was away when it caught fire, and returned ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... neighbours," said Bailie Craigdallie; "and this feud cannot be patched up as the former was: citizen's blood must not flow unavenged down our kennels, as if it were ditch water, or we shall soon see the broad Tay crimsoned with it. But this blow was never meant for the poor man on whom it has unhappily fallen. Every one knew what Oliver Proudfute was, how wide he would speak, and how little he would do. He has Henry Smith's buff ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... a strong one. Fronting us to the north we had a large and rapid river; on the south we were Banked by a ditch forty feet broad and ten feet deep, which isolated the building from a fine open ground, without my bush, tree, or cover; the two wings were formed by small brick towers twenty feet high, with loop-holes, and a door ten feet from the ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... a beautiful surprise for Peter's mother, that sketch, which was a larger copy of the one on the fly-leaf of his geography. There was the gray worm-fence, a bit of brown ditch, an elder in flower, a tall purple thistle, and on it the Red Admiral. Peter wished to make his mother personally acquainted with the Red Admiral, so he printed on the back of ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... showing the Author's Route Sir Wilfred Laurier Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat Belt The Canadian Women's Press Club A section of Edmonton The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan Irrigation ditch, Calgary, Alberta A Waldorf-Astoria on the prairie's edge Athabasca Landing Necessity knows no law at Athabasca The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co. A "sturgeon-head" on the Athabasca ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... kitchen-garden a raised causeway led into the Bawtry road, between an old drain of the Tome River and a narrower ditch running down to the parsonage duck-pond. The ditch as a rule was dry, or almost dry, being fed through a sluice in the embankment from time to time when the waters of the duck-pond ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lady nodded her head in assent. "Nurse, I once saw a robin's nest when I was in England; it was in the side of a mossy ditch, with primroses growing close beside it; it was made of green moss, and lined with white wool and hair; it was a pretty nest, with nice eggs in it, much better than ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... told him that he had a farm hand, but, he added, "he won't go, because he has the ague." "Oh, well," Mr. Veil replied, "that's no matter, I know how to cure him; I'll tell him how to cure himself." So they sent for me, and Veil told me how to get rid of the ague. He said, "you dig a ditch in the ground a foot deep, and strip off your clothing and bury yourself, leaving only your head uncovered, and sleep all night in the Mother Earth." I did it. I found the earth perfectly dry and warm. I had not much more ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... with a blast of powder by some enemy. Unable to bear the disappointment, Don Juan blew out his brains in the office belonging to his mine. A month afterward, Don Eugenic Mendoza y Jara, the bishop of Cuzco, sent a couple of Indians for the body, with instructions to throw it into a ditch: the men attached a rope to the feet and dragged it to a ravine, where dogs and vultures disposed of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... at the side of a ditch, which had been newly cut through a meadow at the end of our plantation, I caught sight of a small black object protruding from the side of the cutting, which turned out to be a fragment of Indian pottery made of coarse ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... would do in ten years. And him you think To put in place of Michael Angelo, In building the Basilica of St. Peter! The ass that thinks himself a stag discovers His error when he comes to leap the ditch. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... pleasantly, yet profanely, told me that he was General Walker (the poor fellow was killed the 22nd of July, at Atlanta), and that I had better get further. He passed on and waked others. Just then, General Cleburne and staff rode by me, and I heard one of his staff remark, "General, here is a ditch, or gully, that will make a natural breastwork." All I heard General Cleburne say was, "Er, eh, eh!" I saw General Lucius E. Polk's brigade form on the crest of ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... of the rooms under some mattresses, five men were found, and under a bridge crossing an irrigating ditch another was discovered. All these were immediately shot by the orders of Santa Ana, and so hastily and excitedly was it all done that a Mexican was killed with them by accident. The wife of Lieutenant Dickinson, a negro servant of Travis, and a few Mexican women were the only human ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... our Maryland woods. At Christmas-tide, when we came to the eastern shore, we would gallop together through miles of country, the farmers and servants tipping and staring after her as she laid her silver-handled whip upon her pony. She knew not the meaning of fear, and would take a fence or a ditch that a man might pause at. And so I fell into the habit of leading her the easy way round, for dread ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... presents," says Mr. G. T. Clark, "in a remarkable degree the features of a well-known class of earthworks found both in England and in Normandy. This kind of fortification by mound, bank and ditch was in use in the ninth, tenth, and even in the eleventh centuries, before masonry was general. {13} The mound was crowned with a strong circular house of timber, such as in the Bayeaux tapestry the soldiers are attempting to ...
— The Hawarden Visitors' Hand-Book - Revised Edition, 1890 • William Henry Gladstone
... times. The same street frequently changes its name in each division, and this part of the Calle de Tacuba is occasionally called the "Plazuela del Sopilote," "San Fernando," and the "Puente de Alvarado," which is the more classic of the three, as celebrating the valour of a hero; while a ditch, crossed by a small bridge near this, still retains the name of "el Salto de Alvarado," in memory of the famous leap given by the valiant Spaniard, Pedro de Alvarado, on the memorable night called the "noche triste," of the 1st of July, 1520, when the Spaniards were forced to retreat from ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... the ladder," said Bart, pointing to a little ditch through which ran a small stream of water. "No one would ever think ...
— Frank Roscoe's Secret • Allen Chapman
... killed the old witch. As the huntsmen came up they crowded round him, and praised him; and then they fastened the witch's body to a horse by ropes, and dragged her to the bottom of the valley, where they buried her in a ditch. That night, when the miser heard of her death, he dropped ...
— Welsh Fairy-Tales And Other Stories • Edited by P. H. Emerson
... to see except the transmission room and the upper conning tower—the twin holy of holies in a commissioned ship—and slipped away, escaping the Captain by a bare two minutes. Which was lucky, as he would probably have had us thrown into the "ditch." ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... excitement of the moment he could hardly have told how he got out of that car; but it did not seem ten seconds before he was standing beside the engineer and conductor of the train, looking at the battered engine, as it lay upon its side in a deep ditch. The baggage-car, just behind it, was broken all to pieces, but the passenger-cars did not seem to have suffered very much; and nobody was badly hurt, as the engineer and fireman had ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... light compared with that which the Nationalists would have on hands. I am aware that, at the time when we were all talking at concert pitch on the Irish Question, a good deal was said about dying in the last ditch by men who at the threat of any real trouble would be found more discreetly perched upon the first fence. But those who know the temper and fighting qualities of the working-men opponents of Home Rule ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... arrived at the lowest drain of that vast basin of clay absorbing many rivers, so that they lose themselves as in the ocean. Here the final outlet or channel of the waters of the Macquarie, was but a muddy ditch one might step across, which the magnificent flood we had seen in the same river above the marshes was not at all likely to reach. That flood had gone to fill thousands of lagoons, without which supply, those vast regions had been unfit for animal existence. Here we discover ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... say, and he had gone off a little way to get some dry wood to make a fire to boil the kettle over, and then he hadn't seemed to be able to recollect which was his way back; and had wandered and wandered off in quite the wrong direction; and at last he had got drowsy and fallen asleep in a dry ditch with his wooden leg on the lower rail of a fence; and then a local policeman who didn't know him had taken charge of him and trotted him off to Winklechurch, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... nourish cockatrices in their own bosoms; they choose to themselves those paths which have written upon them in large characters, These are the ways of death and damnation. They are offended with them that endeavour to pull them out of their ditch, and choose rather to lie and die there than to go to God by Christ that they may be saved from wrath through him; yea, so mad are they, that they count the most sober, the most godly, the most holy man, the mad one; the more earnest for life, the more mad; the more in the Spirit, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... face glided past the carriage at the level of the wheels as we drove slowly by. The imbecile face was red, and the bullet head with close-cropped hair seemed to lie alone, its chin in the dust. The body was lost in the bushes growing thick along the bottom of the deep ditch. ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... pulled a sour face. "We are ditch-water dull. Festivals are celebrated quietly in the home; there is small religious fervor; courtships are consummated by family contract. I fear you will find little sensational ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... not tempt me. I'm too old to acquire such habits, and if Gerald lets his car get beyond a fair rate of speed during our journey home, I shall leap out into the ditch. Then just think how badly ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... good at a five-barred gate, and would make but a very bad hand at a double ditch. If you are inclined to remain among the tame people, she will ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... got behind a log, and by pushing, rolled it ahead of him until at last it fell with a splash in the water of a ditch or canal which led from near that grove of trees to the pond. Paddy followed into the water and began to push it ahead of ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... honour to hand the lady of the house to her own well-appointed table. Indignation, vexation, disbelief of the whole matter spoiled his dinner effectually. Mrs Grove's exquisite soup might have been ditch-water for all he knew to the contrary. The motherly concern so freely expressed, looked to him dreadfully like something not so praiseworthy. How she could look her dear Fanny in the face, and talk, so softly on indifferent subjects, ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... help the Trojans, verily then I too would desire that even instantly this might be, that the Achaians should perish here nameless far from Argos: but and if they turn again, and we flee back from among the ships, and rush into the delved ditch, then methinks that not even one from among us to bear the tidings will win back to the city before the force of the Achaians when they rally. But come as I declare, let us all obey. Let our squires hold the horses by the dyke, while we being harnessed ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... and hot, the Union lines reach the strong defences of Peachtree Creek. Here Confederate Gilmer's engineering skill has prepared ditch and fraise, abattis and chevaux-de-frise, with yawning graves for ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... for this purpose. This done, they appointed Mr. Hansen their agent to make the projected improvements; and they, it may be supposed, worked a little more steadily and lived a little more frugally in San Francisco. He employed Spaniards and Indians as laborers; and what he did was to dig a ditch seven miles long to lead water out of the Santa Anna River, with four hundred and fifty miles of subsidiary ditches and twenty-five miles of feeders to lead the water over every twenty-acre lot. This done, he planted on every farm eight acres of grapes and ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... of the book. Nothing, for example, can be more admirable than the different manifestations of meanness which take place among the travellers of the stage-coach, in the oft-quoted chapter where Joseph, having been robbed of everything, lies naked and bleeding in the ditch. There is Miss Grave-airs, who protests against the indecency of his entering the vehicle, but like a certain lady in the Rake's Progress, holds the sticks of her fan before her face while he does so, and who is afterwards ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... way, saw the carcase lying on the road, and pulled it on one side; but the Bodhisattva, seeing it there, took it by the tail, and tossed it over seven fences and ditches, when the force of its fall made a great ditch. I suspect that the characters in the column have been disarranged, and that we should read {.} {.} {.} {.}, {.} {.}, {.} {.}. Buddha, that is Siddhartha, was at this time only ten ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... us, before all things, push on with the war! It is by our victories that slavery will be in the beginning most thoroughly attacked. If the South, as it professes, means to fight to the last ditch, and to the black flag, all discussion of emancipation is needless; for in the track of our armies the contraband assumes freedom without further formula. But we are by no means convinced that such will ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... small in comparison with the wonderland that lies beyond the rubber plantations between Hana and the Honomanu Gulch. Two days were required to cover this marvellous stretch, which lies on the windward side of Haleakala. The people who dwell there call it the "ditch country," an unprepossessing name, but it has no other. Nobody else ever comes there. Nobody else knows anything about it. With the exception of a handful of men, whom business has brought there, nobody has heard of the ditch country of Maui. Now a ditch ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... side of this double pavilion grows a quick-set hedge, from which the brambles straggle like stray locks of hair. Here and there a tree shoots boldly up; flowers bloom on the slopes of the wayside ditch, bathing their feet in its green and sluggish water. The hedge at both ends meets and joins two strips of woodland, and the double meadow thus inclosed is doubtless the result ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... with different trees planted about it, amongst which were several of those called etoa, very large. These, as they resemble the cypress, had a fine effect in such a place. There was, also, a row of low palms near one of the houses, and behind it a ditch, in which lay a great number ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... sunk when we entered Cassala. It is a walled town, surrounded by a ditch and flanking towers, and containing about 8,000 inhabitants, exclusive of troops. The houses and walls were of unburnt brick, smeared with clay and cow-dung. As we rode through the dusty streets, I sent off Mahomet with ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... II.), 1389, Adam Shakespere, who is described as son and heir of Adam of Oldediche, held lands within the manor of Baddesley Clinton by military service, and probably had only just then obtained them. Oldediche, or Woldich, now commonly called Old Ditch Lane, lies within the parish of Temple Balsall, not far ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... ditch as surely as they did in the war," he said to Darcy, rubbing his hands in great glee. "I tell you, old chap, it was a lucky thought of starting just as we did. You see, we shall come up with the good times; for I do honestly believe the ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... as had arisen, viz., the capture of the fort by our troops. I therefore went with the colonel up to the fort to listen for the mining operations, and got the men who claimed to have heard the subterranean noises, down in the bottom of the ditch of the fort, which was ten feet deep, and at the angles formed a fairly good listening gallery, but nothing unusual could be heard. I therefore made arrangements to sink a line of pits in the bottom of the ditch, something like ordinary wells; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... our horses which had come a journey, put a pair of his horses and one of his postillions to our coach: the postillion had, it seems, amused himself at a club in Castle Pollard while we were at the ball, and he had amused himself so much that he did not know the ditch from the road: he was ambitious of passing Mr. Dease's carriage—passed it: attempted to pass Mr. Tuite's, ran the wheels on a drift of snow which overhung the ditch, and laid the coach fairly down on its side in ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... recognized the metallic bars to which he clung. He was in the cage under the ball of St. Paul's. The dome rose but a little way above the general contour of the city, into the still twilight, and sloped away, shining greasily under a few distant lights, into a circumambient ditch of darkness. ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... wind rushed up the high road as though it would tear Peter off his feet and fling him into the sea, but he walked sturdily, no cap on his head and the wind streaming through his hair. Some way along the road he found a child crying in a ditch. He loved children, and, picking the small boy up, he found that he had been sent for beer to the Cap and Feathers, at the turn of the road, and been blown by the wind into the ditch and was almost dead with terror. At first at the sight of Peter the child had ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... mile or so from the gate we came to an inner enclosure, that answered to the South African cattle kraal, surrounded by a dry ditch and a timber palisade outside of which was planted a green fence of some shrub with long white thorns. Here we passed through more gates, to find ourselves in an oval space, perhaps five acres in extent. Evidently this served as a market ground, but all around ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... hares and rabbits from their hiding-places. Gaily went they forth, these merry sportsmen and their helpers; light was their step across the green meadows and up the sandy hill-sides; loud was their laughter when one of them, trying to jump through a broken hedge, fell into the neighbouring ditch; great was their mirth when another's gun went off and lamed a squirrel in an adjoining tree; and joyous was the shout with which they scared a frightened rabbit from its ...
— The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg - Second Edition • Unknown
... was foolish two seconds after the words had left his lips. But a temper which has been allowed to leap hedges, unchecked throughout life, is in peril of forming a habit of taking them even at such times as a leap may land its owner in a ditch. This last was what her interested eyes were obviously saying. It suited him best at the moment to ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... countermarching for months, and had a jaded, dejected appearance, not pleasant to look upon, and very far removed indeed from the buoyant and hopeful air with which they entered upon the campaign. At one point, during the retreat of the day before, it had been necessary to leap the horses over a difficult ditch. Many of them fell into it, and the riders were overtaken by the enemy's horse before they could be extricated. Among these was Hobart, sergeant major, who was taken to Libby prison, where he remained until the next year, when he ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... Past hedges, gates, and trees; past cottages, and barns, and people going home from work. Yo-ho! Past donkey chaises drawn aside into the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses whipped up at a bound upon the little watercourse and held by struggling carters close to 5 the five-barred gate until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the road. Yo-ho! By churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... dream, so far as this valley reached, there was on the right hand a very deep ditch; that ditch is it, into which the blind have led the blind in all ages, and have both there miserably perished. Again, behold, on the left hand there was a very dangerous quag, into which, if even a good man falls, he finds no bottom for his foot to ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... confusion he held up his white hand in the scorching sunrays and commented jovially: "Talk about Eastern heat—this is a hundred and five Fahrenheit at the very least! A-a-ah!" He drew in a deep breath of the dry pure air. "This is something like! When you get your land under ditch, you'll have a paradise." ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... suddenly and stunningly succeeded by a conviction of the truth. The whole story of the past night sprang into his mind with every detail, as by an exercise of the direct and speedy sense of sight, and he arose from the ditch and, with rueful courage, went ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... behind, mounting the hills and then striking the turnpike—every rod of which he could have found in the dark—his thoughts, like road-swallows, skimmed each mile he covered. Here was where he had stopped with Kate when her stirrup broke; near the branches of that oak close to the ditch marking the triangle of cross-roads he had saved his own and Spitfire's neck by a clear jump that had been the talk of the neighborhood for days. On the crest of this hill—the one he was then ascending—his father always tightened up the brakes on his ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Salvat had suddenly escaped from the detectives by bounding into the Bois de Boulogne, it had occurred to him to slip round to the Dauphine gate and there descend into the deep ditch* of the city ramparts. He remembered days of enforced idleness which he had spent there, in nooks where, for his own part, he had never met a living soul. Nowhere, indeed, could one find more secret places of retreat, hedged round by thicker bushes, or concealed from view by loftier ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... these ideas, the squire had them all on horseback at an early age, and made them ride, slap-dash, about the country, without flinching at hedge or ditch, or stone wall, to the imminent danger of ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... of water in a ditch The frogs stand only with their muzzles out, So that they hide their ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... years, as if our inheritance were the crown of some archaic king. I myself feel that strongly. If it came to the point, though I have said that I am too old to fight for distressed Virtue, I should very likely die in the last ditch for every inch of land and every worthless object I ever owned. When Vetch talks about taxing property more heavily I am utterly and openly against him because it is my instinct to be. I refuse to ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... Thames, when he sallied out to see it, had been too good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had ever seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a marked accent and accosting some passer-by with the question, "Say! But is this little wet ditch ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Provisions from Tolu, and the River Sina, as to prevent any Attempts being made this Way. The next place of Defence was Castillo Grande, which is about eight Miles up the Harbour. This Castle is a regular Square with four Bastions, strong and well built, and defended to the Land by a wet Ditch and Glacis proper, and one Face towards the Sea has a Raveline, and a double Line of Guns. This Castle can mount sixty one Guns, though there was but fifty seven in it. Opposite to this was a Horse-shoe Battery ...
— An Account of the expedition to Carthagena, with explanatory notes and observations • Sir Charles Knowles
... afterward on the same spot—stood on a slight conical rise some distance back from the little stream that watered the ranch. From his windows Jim Laramie could look on gently falling ground in all directions. Toward the creek lay an alfalfa field which, with a crude irrigating ditch and water from the creek, he had brought to a prosperous stand. Below the alfalfa stood the barn and ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... inhabitants took refuge in the palace, in the fort, with the Ursulines, or with the Jesuits; redoubts were raised, loop-holes bored and patrols established. At Ville-Marie no fewer precautions were taken; the governor surrounded a mill which he had erected in 1658, by a palisade, a ditch, and four bastions well entrenched. It stood on a height of the St. Louis Hill, and, called at first the Mill on the Hill, it became later the citadel of Montreal. Anxiety still prevailed everywhere, but God, who knows how to raise up, in the very moment of ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... a long bicycle ride into the country, taking my shame and rage with me. On a certain Saturday, bestriding my faithful bike, I went for a spin along the dusty high-road which runs past the camp. After going at high speed, I dismounted, seated myself under a tree in the shade, by the side of a ditch, and was falling asleep. It was summer, the sun was pouring down. A cyclist stopped in front of me with a punctured tyre. He asked me to lend him the wherewithal to repair it; and whilst the solution was drying ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... one's body, one's beauty, little by little; one is feared like a beast of prey, scorned like a pariah, surrounded by people who always take more than they give; and one fine day one dies like a dog in a ditch, after having ruined others and ruined ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... his travels to-night," he said, in a low tone. "Easy served with a bed, that lad be; six foot o' dry peat or heath, or a nook in a dry ditch. That lad hasn't slept once in a house this twenty year, and ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... ready here hard by in the brew-house; and when I suddenly call you, come forth, and, without any pause or staggering, take this basket on your shoulders: 10 that done, trudge with it in all haste, and carry it among the whitsters in Datchet-mead, and there empty it in the muddy ditch ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... out of him, but he's had a bad attack of pneumonia, and it's an old enemy of his, as it always is to a man of his physique. He's a good worker, but lacks judgment to make his work count. Doesn't really seem to have much to work for. But he's a friend to the last ditch. Just hear the rain!" ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... clump, crawled through a gap into it, and walked through it. One pheasant scuttled out of it, down the hedgerow to the wood below. The occurrence pleased him. He crawled out of the clump on the farther side, and proceeded to lay a train of raisins down the ditch of the hedge to the wood. He did not lay it right down to the wood lest some inquisitive gamekeeper might espy it. Then he returned with fine, red Indian caution to Erebus. They rode ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... Msalala, came selling from Sakuma on the north—a jocular man, always a favourite with the ladies. He offered a hoe as a token of friendship, but I bought it, as we are, I hope, soon going off, and it clears the tent floor and ditch ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... breathing-room for their gasping population. Besides, air, water, light, and cleanliness are modern innovations. The nose seems to have acquired its sensitiveness within a hundred years,—the lungs their objection to foul air, and the palate its disgust at ditch-water like the Thames, within a more recent period. Honestly dirty, and robustly indifferent to what mortally offends our squeamish senses, our happy ancestors fattened on carbonic acid gas, and took the exhalations of graveyards and gutters with a placidity of stomach ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... and destruction of their castles. These castles were not as yet the vast and elaborate structures which arose in after days. A single strong square tower, or even a defence of wood on a steep mound surrounded by a ditch, was enough to make its owner dangerous. The possession of these strongholds made every baron able at once to defy his prince and to make himself a scourge to his neighbours. Every season of anarchy is marked by the building of castles; ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... the village her father had to get out and pluck a flower for her, which he could not see and which she pointed out to him growing on the edge of the ditch. ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... splendid!" he exclaimed; "you're fine! You could put life into a dead man. You're the kind of girl that are the making of men. By Jove, you'd back a man up, wouldn't you? You'd stand by him till the last ditch. Of course," he went on after a pause—"of course I ought to go to New York. But, Blix, suppose I went—well, then what? It isn't as though I had any income of my own, or rich aunt. Suppose I didn't find something to do—and the chances are that I wouldn't for three or four months—what ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... ready here hard-by in the Brew-house, & when I sodainly call you, come forth, and (without any pause, or staggering) take this basket on your shoulders: y done, trudge with it in all hast, and carry it among the Whitsters in Dotchet Mead, and there empty it in the muddie ditch, close ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... thinking of the unspeakable ruin of the souls of men through the wickedness culminating in the "Pope's confessors," that the Son of God said:—"If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch." To every woman, with very few exceptions, coming out from the feet of her confessor, the children of light may say:—"I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, but thou art dead!" ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... now got into order; the north and south sides were protected by a bank 4 feet 6 inches high on the inside, having a ditch 10 feet wide and 6 feet deep on the outside. The west side, facing the bay, had a 4 foot bank crowned by a palisade, with no ditch; and the east side, on the bank of the river, was protected by a double row of water casks. The armament ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... the ground the smaller may be the troughs, but on ground where the slopes are great, more expense will be necessary in stilting the flumes to maintain the level, and the harder it will be to find a large section that can be brought under the ditch. ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings |
