"Hard put" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his staff of ten officers were quartered in Judge Hubbell's house. Mrs. Hubbell was hard put to furnish them with meals, but they treated her with perfect respect, and every night, not knowing how long they might stay, they left on the table the price of their ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... of the empire builder tightened as his eyes gleamed over the soft luxury of his daughter's boudoir. James would have been hard put to it to conceive any contrast greater than the one between this modern berserk and the pampered daughter of his wealth. A Hun or a Vandal gazing down with barbaric scorn on some decadent paramour of captured Rome was the most analogous simile Farnum's ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... context. We talked only concrete things because we thought only concrete things. Also, we depended largely on pantomime. The simplest abstraction was practically beyond our thinking; and when one did happen to think one, he was hard put to communicate it to his fellows. There were no sounds for it. He was pressing beyond the limits of his vocabulary. If he invented sounds for it, his fellows did not understand the sounds. Then it was that he fell back on pantomime, illustrating the thought wherever possible and at ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... done the things you want. If I have, and you feel good about it, I'd be thankful if you'd report the way we're workin' this camp. And if you've a spare moment to talk other things, you might say that the boys of my camp are mighty hard put to get the stuff, and they're as tough a gang of jacks as ever heard tell of the dog's life of ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... already set in fine, watchful wrinkles. She rarely spoke, except in the obvious commonplaces of courtesy, and our days were wonderfully still. The Professor taught me Persian, in a desultory way, and chess most rigorously, for he was hard put to it for an opponent even partly worthy of his prodigious skill. He was a member of all the most select societies of learning in the world, an Egyptologist of such standing that his pronouncements in that field were practically final, a man called before kings to determine the worth of their national ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... theorists, I am hard put for an answer. I look round me, and watch my interlocutor preparing to make bread. There is a mammoth pan on the bench beside me containing a coast-line of flour with a lake of water in the middle. Cook is opening ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... and took in the less than imposing figure of Josip Pekic. Josip felt an urge to nibble at his fingernails, and repressed it. He had recently broken himself of the smoking habit and was hard put to find occupation for his ...
— Expediter • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... meadow and Lydia laughed up at him mischievously, "I've always thought I overpaid for those school books. They were fearfully used up. Oh, the speeches have begun," and Billy was hard put to it to keep close to her as she rushed toward the ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... too tall,' replied the individual addressed. 'For a short man one would be hard put to it ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... him the sweetest smiles from time to time. They are evidently good friends; and she loses her strange startled look when she speaks to him. I suspect she has been quite aware of the squire's wish that she should return to France; and has been hard put to it to decide whether to leave her child or not. The idea that she would have to make some such decision came upon her when she was completely shattered by grief and illness, and she has not had any one to consult ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... said he, pulling up the blind. "Look at this—a sheet from a note-book, with 'For God's sake come at once—P. T.,' scrawled upon it in pencil. Our friend, the doctor, was hard put to it when he wrote this. Come along, my dear fellow, for it's ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... captive in the train of the smiling and voluble Senhora Pondillo, and it immersed Hozier in a tangle of fearsome words which turned out to be the stock in trade of a clothier. The mere male of Maceio decks himself with gay plumage. Philip was hard put to it before he secured some garments which did not irresistibly recall the heroes of certain musical comedies popular ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... whence arise the nerves to give feeling and movement to the parts below, was crushed, broken, and torn by the force of the bullet. Also he lost understanding and reason, and in a few days he died. The surgeons of Paris were hard put to it for many days to treat all the wounded. I think, mon petit maistre, you saw some of them. I beseech the great God of victories, that we be never more employed in such ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... taught him, and it's MULTIPLICATION—which you may see him execute upside down, because he can't do it the natural way. The one seen by self and Henrietta by the Green Park railings can just smear into existence the two ends of a rainbow, with his cuff and a rubber—if very hard put upon making a show—but he could no more come the arch of the rainbow, to save his life, than he could come the moonlight, fish, volcano, shipwreck, mutton, hermit, or any ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... shook his reins and bustled the great sorrel under him. The animal's response was a lengthening of stride which left his companions hard put to it to ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... error into which I had tricked him. Slowly, says the proverb, one journeys far and safely. Slowly, then, did I consider! The escort was, no doubt, on its way back to Rome, and if I could but rid myself of that cumbrous litter, Ser Ramiro would find himself mightily hard put to it to again pick up the trail. I remembered a ravine a little way behind, and I rode my mule back to that as fast as it would travel with the litter and the other mule attached to it. Arrived there, I unharnessed the beasts on the very edge of that shallow precipice. Then exerting all ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... utterance as unworthy. At the end of half an hour his mind was still working fruitlessly. He knew that the longer he waited the more brilliant he would have to be, and he told himself that even Bernard Shaw or one of those clever writing fellows would have been hard put to ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... good idea," agreed the young camera operator. "Those International people must be pretty hard put to it ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... infernally proud and self-satisfied. It wouldn't be charity. It would be justice. Now, see here, I've argued this thing with you for three months or more and I'm getting tired of your everlasting serenity. I know you are hard put to find enough money to clothe and feed these kids, besides buying what your wife may need. You are beginning to look shabby and you certainly are thinner and greyer. What you ought to do, Bingle, is to turn those kids over to ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... filtering paper or napkin and mix it with the clarified gelatine; also let the juice of 2 oranges and 1 lemon run through filtering paper and add it to the jelly; then make a trial to see if firm enough; place jelly form in cracked ice, pour a few spoonfuls of jelly into the form and when hard put in a layer of pineapple; cover them with jelly and when firm put in another layer of pineapple; continue until all is used up; then cover the form, put some ice on top of form and let it remain till jelly is firm; serve with or without ...
— Desserts and Salads • Gesine Lemcke
... by shoals, surrounded by breakers, surrounded by quicksands; at cross purposes; not out of the wood. reduced to straits; hard pressed, sorely pressed; run hard; pinched, put to it, straitened; hard up, hard put to it, hard set; put to one's shifts; puzzled, at a loss, &c (uncertain) 475; at the end of one's tether, at the end of one's rope, at one's wit's end, at a nonplus, at a standstill; graveled, nonplused, nonplussed, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... gaze. Down in its depths the red jelly-fish went sailing past, and from there, too, came the terrified flying-fish, which went winging away out to the beam, glittering in the bright sun. The rumbling of the ship's engines filled the air with a sleepy monotone; and Mac was hard put to keep awake. From his cool perch he looked down on snowy awnings stretching fore and aft, though here and there through openings he caught glimpses of mens' bare bodies as they lay sleeping on deck, and of horses' heads ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... floor, he had a perfect right to do so. However, he humored her in this as in other matters, and smoked by stealth, like a guilty creature, in the barn, or about the gardens. That was practicable in summer, but in winter the Captain was hard put to it. When he couldn't stand it longer, he retreated to his bedroom and barricaded the door. Such was the position of affairs at the time ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... he was branded with the name of the Wicked. Nor did he even refrain from wrongdoing to foreigners, but, after foully harrying his own land, went on to assault Saxony. The Saxon general Syfrid, when his men were hard put to it in the battle, entreated peace. Toste declared that he should have what he asked, but only if he would promise to become his ally in a war against Hadding. Syfrid demurred, dreading to fulfill the condition, but by sharp ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... then ice tops and sides with different tinted icings, pale green flavored with pistachio, pale pink with rose, yellow with orange, white with almond. Little domino cakes are also pretty. Ice the cakes on top and sides with white icing, then when hard put on a second layer of chocolate, using Walter Baker & Co.'s Unsweetened Chocolate and made as for layer cake, dipping the brush in the melted chocolate to make ...
— Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes and Home Made Candy Recipes • Miss Parloa
... head in his hands, like any humblest mortal hard put to it. It has been brought home to him sharply enough that the thing is not to be done, on the accomplishment of which he had so fondly built. It is not that an angry wife has interfered; it is that her argument has been sound, and that for the sake of his world a god ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... hear the noise of feet or strange voices in that chamber, have a care to lie as squat [quiet] and close as ever you can. So may you safely hover [lie concealed]; for the cleverest soldier of them all shall be hard put to it to find you here, ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... and his crew, whom we took on board. Very glad I was to have them, as they were of the greatest assistance during the gale, though I fear Captain Hake must have been hard put ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... as the bandits had departed, news was sent by telegraph, notifying the surrounding country of the robbery. Sheriffs, policemen and detectives rallied in such numbers that the robbers were hard put to it to escape alive. A state reward of $1,000 for each was published, and all lower Minnesota organized itself into a determined man hunt. The gang undertook to get over the Iowa line, and they managed to keep away ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... night long. I used to have a way of getting up to take my turn, and sending her off to sleep. It isn't a man's business, some folks say. I don't know anything about that; maybe, if I'd been broiling my brain in book learning all day till come night, and I was hard put to it to get my sleep anyhow, like the parson there, it wouldn't; but all I know is, what if I had been breaking my back in the potato-patch since morning? so she'd broken her's over the oven; and what if I did need nine hours' sound sleep? I could chop ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... the little Doctor was hard put to it to keep his hands off the great political issue of the year, bound up as it was in the tenets of his own politics, which he held only less uncompromisingly than those of the Shorter Catechism. It was, unfortunately for him, a gradual and peaceful progress of opinion, marked by ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... haven't much to do at home, or are hard put for company, to travel six miles in the snow to show off their prinkin' to a lot of idle louts shiny with bear's grease and scented up with doctor's stuff," added the girl, shrugging her shoulders, with a touch of her father's ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... grace, of the word, and of the soul's condition, doth he now lay before it, and haunt it with; whereby he dejecteth, casteth down, daunteth, distresseth, and almost driveth it quite into despair! Now, by the reason of these things, faith (and all the grace that is in the soul) is hard put to it to come at the promise, and by the promise of Christ; as it is said, when the tempest and great danger of shipwreck lay upon the vessel in which Paul was, they had "much work to come by the boat;" Acts xxvii. ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... then," said the skipper; "only don't get within shot. I don't want to have to turn amateur doctor again on your behalf. I am clever enough at cuts and bruises, and I dare say if I were hard put to it I could manage to mend a broken leg or arm, but I wouldn't undertake to be hunting you all over to find where a rifle-bullet had gone. Accidents are my line, not wounds received in war; and, ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... of hostilities between the states. Living at home with this Virginia doctor of divinity, was a married daughter, whose husband was an officer in the confederate army. They were people of the old school, cultured, refined, and hospitable, though hard put to it to show any substantial evidences of their innate hospitality, on account of their impoverished condition, which they seemed to feel keenly, but were too proud to mention, except when driven to it by sheer necessity. The federal ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... to Mrs. Sniff, and is a regular insignificant cove. He looks arter the sawdust department in a back room, and is sometimes when we are very hard put to it let in behind the counter with a corkscrew; but never when it can be helped, his demeanour towards the public being disgusting servile. How Mrs. Sniff ever come so far to lower herself as to marry him, ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... save us!" said another battered, begrimed fellow. "If he'd a-rolled agen the stove we couldn't done nothin'. We was hard put to it to ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... conflict. Anything, so that a burning lust for hurt should be satisfied. He cared nothing at all for himself. No bodily suffering could compare with the anguish of mind he had passed through, was still passing through. And so he rode headlong till the youth accompanying him was hard put to it to ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... another look through the glass. Burton's face was livid and ghastly, and it was plain that he was hard put to it for breath. With feeble, faltering strokes he was coming to the surface. Hill was following him as relentlessly as ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... of the palace. I am sorry we did. There was no Sleeping Beauty in any chamber that we saw; nor any fairies, good or malevolent. There was a shabby set of clean old rooms, which looked as if they had belonged to a prince hard put to it for money, and whose tin crown jewels would not fetch more than King Stephen's pantaloons. A fugitive prince, a brave prince struggling with the storms of fate, a prince in exile may be poor; but a prince looking out of his own palace windows with a dressing-gown out at elbows, ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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, and Christian was hard put to it to get through safely. And right by the wayside, in the midst of the valley, was the mouth of hell, and out of it came flame and smoke in great abundance, with sparks and hideous noises. But when the hosts of hell came at him, as he ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... said that certain orders of beings are able to improvise or to interchange organs, just as need calls. Thus a polyp, if hard put to it, may shift what little brain and stomach happen to be in his possession. You may say that he carries his heart in his hand. He can take his stomach, and dump it down in brain-case or thorax, just as he fancies,—can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... interesting. But they are in somewhat other than the usual sense quite "simple, sensuous, and passionate." The misplaced ingenuity which, neglecting the unum necessarium, will busy itself about all sorts of unnecessary things, has accordingly been rather hard put to it with them, and to find any pasture at all has had to browse on questions of dialect, and date, and personal allusion, even more jejune and even more ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... don't mean that," cried Corrie, with a feeling of self-reproach. "I don't mean to say that you're ignorant in a general way, you know, but only about what men are likely to do, d'ye see, when they're hard put to it, you understand. Our feelings are so different ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... which abode for centuries among the Egyptians, as Israel did—among a people who elaborately fed the kas of the departed—might pick up a trace of a custom, the giving of food for the dead, still persevered in by St. Monica till St. Ambrose admonished her. But Mr. Huxley is hard put to it for evidence of ancestor-worship or ghost-worship in Israel when he looks for indications of these rites in 'the singular weight attached to the veneration of parents in the Fourth Commandment.'[3] The Fourth Commandment, of course, is a slip of the pen. He adds: 'The ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... of income. There is no provision in the will for Mr. John Smith. Smith would have to go to work. I don't think he'd like that. By the way, I wonder: do you suppose John Smith could earn—his salt, if he was hard put to it? Very plainly, then, something has got to be done about getting John Smith to fade away, and Stanley G. Fulton ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... now the explosive growth of the Washington metropolis and the other centers of industry and people. But still the Basin in general is not like Long Island, swarmed upon by daily and weekly waves of millions, hard put to save even traces of the natural magnificence it once had. It is not like much of Southern California, packaged and delivered over whole to automobiles instead of to human beings. It is nine million acres or so of still mainly rural and agricultural, Eastern, temperate, ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... it charity! If I was hard put, don't you s'pose I'd go to the next man if he offered me what I offer you? The ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... very distantly. "A-birding on a Broncho" suggested an equally alliterative title for this chapter—"Birding on a Bike"; but I will leave it to others, for those who go a-birding are now very many and are hard put to find fresh titles to their books. For several reasons it will suit me better to borrow from Cobbett and name ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... strange to read in the life of the Lord Keeper Guilford, that his lordship's court enemies, "hard put to it to find, or invent, something tending to the diminution of his character," took advantage of his going to see a rhinoceros, to circulate a foolish story of him, which much annoyed him. It was in the reign of James ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... for a moment as I passed. They were distressed that I had not spoken sooner, as they would at once have sent their doctor. I did not tell them my reason, which was, that my mother would not see a French doctor. I was hard put to it, as they said they would send their physician that very evening. When I came home, I told my mother that I had met Herr Heina with a German priest, who had heard a great deal about me and was anxious to hear me play, and that they were both to call on me ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... husband to Mrs. Sniff, and is a regular insignificant cove. He looks arter the sawdust department in a back room, and is sometimes, when we are very hard put to it, let behind the counter with a corkscrew; but never when it can be helped, his demeanor towards the public being disgusting servile. How Mrs. Sniff ever come so far to lower herself as to marry him, I don't know; but ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... was so remarkable. One would have said that he was conscious of having committed the murder himself. In all my experience I never saw a man so hard put to it to tell a plain and ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... him, and being thereto not a little plied by Ruberto himself, she bethought her at last of the following expedient: to wit, her room fronting the street, and Arriguccio, as she had often observed, being very hard put to it to get him to sleep, but thereafter sleeping very soundly, she resolved to arrange with Ruberto that he should come to the front door about midnight, whereupon she would get her down, and open the door, and stay some ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... seen the other boats come alongside, and the reinforcements they brought. All along the side of the dahabieh the Arabs were clambering up like so many ants, and though the advantage was still with Naoum, the outcome looked doubtful. The crew were hard put to it. ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... attending to his own sensations. The steam was pouring out of the pipe inside the box, and it was growing wetter, thicker, and hotter. The pleasant warmth and tickling changed to a burning sensation. Ken found himself bathed in a heavy sweat. Then he began to smart in different places, and he was hard put to it to keep rubbing them. The steam grew hotter; his body was afire; his breath labored in great heaves. Ken felt that he must cry out. He heard exclamations, then yells, from some of the other ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... is not particularly easy for one to climb up out of the working-class—especially if he is handicapped by the possession of ideals and illusions. I lived on a ranch in California, and was hard put to find the ladder whereby to climb. I early inquired the rate of interest on invested money, and worried my child's brain into an understanding of the virtues and excellences of that remarkable invention of man, compound interest. Further, I ascertained the current ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... spending billions in taxes in experimental research. For a project to achieve reality now, it must have benefits, visible benefit, for the majority of mankind. It must have a raison d'etre that had nothing of a military flavor. And occasionally Nails had been hard put to explain why, to people who did not understand; to explain his feeling that men must expand or die; that from a crowded planet there could be only one frontier, and that an expansion ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... Philip. The three strangers were all interested in his personality and the fact that he had no previous work to his credit. It was unusual, almost dramatic, and for a time both Elizabeth and he himself found themselves hard put to it to escape the constant wave of good-natured but ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dreadful discovery that I had now made, I was silent and helpless. Of the guilty persons concerned in the concealment of the birth, and in the desertion of the infant, my nobly-born, highly-bred, irreproachable aunt now stood revealed before me as one! An older woman than I might have been hard put to it to preserve her presence of mind, in such a position as mine. Instinct, not reason, served me in my sore need. Instinct, not reason, kept me passively and stupidly silent when I got back to the house. "We will talk about it to-morrow," was all I could say to Michael, when he gently lifted ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... which testify to a genuine power of observation. But don't talk to me about the windows. Is it common sense, I ask you, to leave up windows which shut out all the daylight, and even confuse the eyes by throwing patches of colour, to which I should be hard put to it to give a name, on a floor in which there are not two slabs on the same level? And yet they refuse to renew the floor for me because, if you please, those are the tombstones of the Abbots of Combray and the Lords of Guermantes, the old Counts, you know, of Brabant, direct ancestors ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... hostile tribes, suffer the most casualties. A large portion of the nests of April and May are destroyed; their enemies have been many months without eggs and their appetites are keen for them. It is a time, too, when other food is scarce, and the crows and squirrels are hard put. But the second nests of June, and still more the nests of July and August, are seldom molested. It is rarely that the nest of the goldfinch or the cedar-bird ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... were not meant for strife, nor tongues for swords, He that sees clear is gentlest of his words, And that's not truth that hath the heart to kill." There are usually pleasant enough things that one CAN say - though one may be hard put to it; and if the truth must be told, it may often be sugarcoated. President Hadley, when a young man, was receiving instructions for a delicate negotiation. "If the issue is forced upon us," he interrupted, "there is, I think, nothing to do but to tell the truth." "Even ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... the ground floor. We had a number of folding beds for emergency, and we had no rules as to overcrowding. In the morning the authorities would clear out as many patients as we wished. Sometimes we were hard put to it to find room for them all, but we always managed somehow, and we never refused admission to a single patient on the score of want of room. The authorities soon discovered the capacity of the hospital for dealing with really serious cases, and as a result our beds were crowded ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... upon the front seat, but even so we were hard put to it to keep warm. The prospect of a hot lunch at Pistol was pleasant indeed. Jonah was driving, and the Rolls slid through the country like a great grey bird, sailing and swooping and swerving so gracefully that ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... 5000 to the Duke of Gloucester. A deputation from the City attended at the same time, to tender their loyalty to the King, and to make an offering of 10,000. It was little wonder that the King, who a few weeks before was hard put to it to borrow a few pistoles, and was deep in debt for the maintenance of his household, should receive such messengers with overflowing welcome. The citizens of London were sent home rejoicing in the honour of knighthood—in abeyance for twenty years, and now conferred ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... and were for trusting to their fists alone. I contrived to give one of them a smart tap on the crown before they came to close quarters; but ere I could recover myself they were upon me, the staff was wrenched from my grasp, and I was as hard put to it as a stag bayed by hounds. I made what play I could with my fists, and got home at least one blow for two; but the odds were too heavy against me, and when at length a fellow as big as myself slipped ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... those besetting General Steele. He, too, struggled on unaided, nay, more, he was handicapped at every turn. Scarcely had he taken command at Fort Smith when he was apprised of the fact that the chief armorer there had been ordered to remove all the tools to Arkadelphia.[736] Steele was hard put to it to obtain any supplies at all.[737] Many that he did get the promise of were diverted from their course,[738] just as were General Pike's. This was true even in the case of shoes.[739] He tried to fit his regiments out one by one with the things the men required in readiness ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... think o' that? Why? Because I got my trade here. An' think o' me! Damme, if ar a one o' you had my brain-labor t' do, you'd soon find out what harsh labor was like. What with bad debts an' roguery an' failed seasons an' creditors t' St. John's I'm hard put to it t' keep my seven senses. An' small thanks I gets—me that keeps this harbor alive, in famine an' plenty. 'Tis the business I haves that keeps you. You make trouble for my business, ecod, an' you'll come t' ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... know, Dick," she remarked, "that I shall be hard put to it to live up to you? You ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... suavitates illius vitae—shared the amusements of his host, and only bothered about his pupils when he had nothing better to do. He must have been as little of a grammarian as possible—he hadn't the time. With the tyrannical friendship of rich people, who are hard put to it to find occupation, Romanianus doubtless monopolized him from morning till night. They hunted together, or dined, or read poetry, or discussed in the evergreen alleys of the garden or "the philosopher's corner." And naturally, the recent convert to Manicheeism did his best to indoctrinate ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring. The birds have gone. The teeming life that goes on down in the long grass is exterminated. The prairie-dog keeps his hole. The rabbits run shivering from one frozen garden patch to another and are hard put to it to find frost-bitten cabbage-stalks. At night the coyotes roam the wintry waste, howling for food. The variegated fields are all one color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky are the same leaden gray. The hedgerows and trees are scarcely perceptible ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... of his skin was a color to match in with the rest of him. It was not pale, nor was it pasty. People with a taste for comparisons were hard put to it to describe just what it was the hue of his face did remind them of, until one day a man brought in from the woods the abandoned nest of a brood of black hornets, still clinging to the pendent twig from which the insect artificers had swung it. Darkies ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... hands, Captain Clipperton took measures for recovering them, but ineffectually. At last, a fortnight after their desertion, and only the day before the ship was to leave the island, two of them were caught by the goat-hunters and brought aboard. They confessed that they had been hard put to it for the first five days, being forced to subsist entirely on the cabbage-trees, which are here in great plenty; but having accidentally found some fire, left by the goat-hunters, it served them in good stead, as it enabled ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... is a work shall make us strong 'gainst all attacks," and he pointed to the growing barricade. "But what of our noble Friar Martin? But for him, Beltane, but for him and his ancient company we had been hard put to it, lad. Ha, 'neath that white gown is saint and friar, and, what is better—a man! Now God be praised, yonder cometh the dawn at last! Though forsooth this hath been a sorry wedding-night for thee, dear lad—and ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... T. Lucretius a second time. A disturbance arising among the Sabines, between the advisers of war and of peace, transferred from thence some additional strength to the Romans. For Attus Clausus, afterwards called at Rome Appius Claudius, when he himself, being an adviser of peace, was hard put to it by those who abetted the war, and was not a match for the faction, fled from Regillum to Rome, accompanied by a great number of clients. The rights of citizenship and land on the other side of ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... cloth and the napkins folded away in the drawer, and the white-topped table ready for evening use. Bel Bree had not been brought up in a New England farm-house, and seen her capable stepmother "whew round," to be hard put to it, now, over half a dozen cups and tumblers more ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... wondering contempt. As for the little French girls, he was at any time uninterested in girls; and these spindle-shanked precocities walked on two-inch heels, and tried to fascinate him with the graces of mature coquettes. His careful politeness was hard put to it to conceal his distaste for their conversation. Possibly he was hankering after a healthier life; but at any rate he, who was generally so full of energy, had mooned listlessly about the gardens all the morning, ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... some armless sleeve on the body of a dead man, the rattle of a loose strand of barbed wire, the movement of a sorely wounded soldier lying out in the open, might draw the German fire. And if the moving picture boys were caught in that they would be hard put ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton
... bear the notion of her," rejoined Tom stoutly. "I'd be hard put-to to do wi' onybody at arter our Betty. Hoo's wick an' 'earty, an' I dunnot want nobry; but if I did have to pick a second missus, it shouldn't be ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... unblushingly at Max as he boasted of the way in which he had aided the Belgian troops, and the latter was hard put to it to keep back the torrent of wrathful words that rose to his lips. But other and more pressing matters claimed attention just now, and, choking down his indignation, he ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... of course, to be rich—in the eyes of the European peasant all Americans are rich—and she was poor and hard put to it to earn her living; but here was a chance for her to show in her own way a sense of what she, as a Frenchwoman, felt for America. Somehow, the more you see of the French, the less you care for ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... men will not hear that voice. They say in their hearts, "The Lord is far away above the skies; He does not care for us: we must help ourselves, each man to what he can get off this earth; nay, even, when we are hard put to it for a living, we must break God's laws to keep ourselves alive, and so steal from God's table the very good things which He ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... has rather overestimated my capacity," he continued. "They import a shipload of stuff from abroad every month, and send an auditor here to check over my empties. I've been hard put to it to get away with all the stuff. I've had to fall back on your old plan of using wine to irrigate the garden. It's had rather a dissipating effect on the birds and insects, though. Really, you ought to spend an evening here some time. The birds sing all night long: they have to sleep it ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... the rain came down in buckets, drenching them to the skin; see what sort of enthusiasm would show up when perhaps their supply of food gave out, and they were hard put to get enough to appease their savage appetites; given a week away from the loved ones at home, and how many of these bold spirits would still be able to declare with all their hearts that the life in the open was ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... your ladyship knew all, you would pity me; for never poor creature was so hard put to it. But I ought to forget it all ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... her last breath. Mrs. Collingridge was the forerunner of such spirits as Kate Lee. She raised up and trained a band of brave women fighters; these women were used with remarkable success in the growing Mission. William Booth was hard put to find sufficient evangelists for the rapidly increasing stations about London and in the Provinces. God had signally blessed the Women's Band as visitors and exhorters, and William Booth saw in them qualities that caused him to believe that, given opportuity, ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... crashed down over the first rough step. Venters warmed to greater admiration of the sorrel; and, giving him a loose bridle, he stepped down foot by foot. Oftentimes the stones and shale started by Wrangle buried Venters to his knees; again he was hard put to it to dodge a rolling boulder, there were times when he could not see Wrangle for dust, and once he and the horse rode a sliding shelf of yellow, weathered cliff. It was a trail on which there could be no stops, and, therefore, if perilous, ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... for she should be hard put to it to commit mortal sin, when mewed for eight years in one chamber. Howbeit, if so be, what then? Is not Father Jordan a priest? One priest is full as ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... off; faint, if it be faint, though close to you. Why should you suppose that Nature always means you to know exactly how far one thing is from another? She certainly intends you always to enjoy her coloring, but she does not wish you always to measure her space. You would be hard put to it, every time you painted the sun setting, if you had to express his 95,000,000 miles of distance ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... build an addition to their house, declaring that such an addition would make the old mansion ever so much more valuable, and as to the cost, he would arrange that so that they would never feel the payment of it. But this suggestion met with no encouragement, and poor Burke was so hard put to it for something to occupy his mind that one day he asked Mrs. Cliff if she had entirely given up her idea of employing some of her fortune for the benefit of the native Peruvians, stating that if she wanted an agent to go down there and to attend to that sort ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... abundance of rattlesnakes, were nearly the only living things we saw. The Indians were mainly fishers of the Shoshone - or Great Snake River - tribe, feeding mostly on salmon, which they speared with marvellous dexterity; and Root-diggers, who live upon wild roots. When hard put to it, however, in winter, the latter miserable creatures certainly, if not the former, devoured their own children. There was no map of the country. It was entirely unexplored; in fact, Bancroft the American historian, in his description of the Indian tribes, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... They were, indeed, hard put to it to carry on the Government at all, and they only succeeded in passing their Education Bill ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... not very large," said he; "I have two horses and two dogs, a Parsee servant, and a Cape baboon. I should like to take the latter with us as well as my servant. My servant, because he is a good cook; and my monkey, because, if we are hard put to it, she will show us what we may eat and what we may not; there is no taster like a monkey. Besides, she is young and full of tricks, and I like something ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... some time may be of assistance to the naturalist who shall write the life history of this noble species. But unless that naturalist has already been in the field and has there gathered much material, he is likely to be hard put to it when the time comes for his story to be written, since then there may be no mountain sheep to observe or to write of. The sheep is not likely to be so happy in its biographer as was the buffalo, for Dr. Allen's monograph on the American bison is a classic ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... to have thanked you sooner for the annual cask of cider, which has given us even more than the customary pleasure. This has been an autumn when I have been hard put to it to keep up with my own thoughts, and I've written no letters at all. Like everyone else I am thinking constantly of this new peace that has marvellously come upon us. I trust we may have statesmen who will be able to turn it to the benefit of humanity. I wish there could be an international ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... salt into a large kettle or pot of boiling water. When the water boils very hard put in the lobster, having first brushed it, and tied the claws together with a bit of twine. Keep it boiling from half an hour to an hour in proportion to its size. If boiled too long the meat will be hard and stringy. When it is done, take it ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... Christian community nothing further is known. But if we take into account the hideous immoralities of Corinth, we shall deem it probable that the port, with its shifting maritime population, was, like most seaports, a soil in which goodness was hard put to it to grow, and a church had much against which to struggle. To be a Christian at Cenchrea can have been no light task. Travellers in Egypt are told that Port Said is the wickedest place on the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... main fruit of his sovereignty. I omit the madnesses of Caligula's delights, and the execrable sordidness of those of Tiberius. Would one think that Augustus himself, the highest and most fortunate of mankind, a person endowed too with many excellent parts of nature, should be so hard put to it sometimes for want of recreations, as to be found playing at nuts and bounding-stones with little Syrian and Moorish boys, whose company he took delight in, for ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... governed herself with much difficulty, began now the necessary preparations; for as to Susan, she was utterly rejected, and with such disdain, that the poor wench was as hard put to it to restrain her hands from violence as her mistress had been to hold her tongue. This indeed Susan did not entirely; for, though she literally kept it within her teeth, yet there it muttered many "marry-come-ups, as ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... marked the way the two horses had come, and it led off to the left, toward where the monuments were thickest, and where the great sections of wall stood, broken and battlemented. Lucy was hard put to it to hold Sage King, but the horses behind plodded along. The black horse struck Lucy as being an ugly, but a faithful and wonderful animal. He understood everything. Presently she tied the bridle she was leading him by to the end of her own lasso, and ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... the thing done and the motive goes for nothing. I have read somewhere, but cannot remember where, that in some country district there was once a great scarcity of food, during which the poor suffered acutely; many indeed actually died of starvation, and all were hard put to it. In one village, however, there was a poor widow with a family of young children, who, though she had small visible means of subsistence, still looked well-fed and comfortable, as also did all her little ones. "How," everyone asked, ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... enemy lost Junction Post to a spirited attack by the Gloucesters, the line that he had been holding for three weeks was broken, and his retreat became fast and general. After relieving the Gloucesters our companies were hard put to it to advance rapidly enough to keep touch. At last we stood upon the Aubers Ridge itself. Lille was almost in view; but at this point the Division was relieved by the 59th and sent southwards to join our armies before Cambrai, where the final issue between British and German arms was ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... the squadron to which Hal, Chester and Alexis were attached was soon in the midst of the foe. Not unused to such encounters, the lads nevertheless found themselves hard put to keep their seats and ward off the blows of ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... around us.—And Helen—what could become of her, were I to leave her the subject of new insult and atrocity?—or how could she bear to be removed from these scenes, where the remembrance of her wrongs is aye sweetened by the recollection of her revenge?—I was once so hard put at by my Great enemy, as I may well ca' him, that I was forced e'en to gie way to the tide, and removed myself and my people and family from our dwellings in our native land, and to withdraw for a time into MacCallum More's country—and Helen made a Lament on ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... sent you word," said he, as he kissed her with more than usual tenderness of manner. "It was wrong in me. But I've been very hard put to it to take up my notes, and didn't succeed until near the closing of bank hours. I loaned Ellis some money, which he was to return to me to-day; but his failing to do so put me to a ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... later either Gregory or Peter might have been observed coming down the staircase with a missive from Hamlet. Juliet had detected his gift for verse, and insisted, rather capriciously, on having all his replies in that shape. Hamlet humored her, though he was often hard put to it; for the Muse is a coy immortal, and will not always come when she is wanted. Sometimes he was forced to fall back upon previous efforts, as when he translated these lines into very ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a very early age, had to learn things less pleasant than drawing. That tiny house in Riverton represented all that was left of the once-great Champneys holdings, and the little widow was hard put to it to keep even that. Before he was seven Peter knew all those pitiful subterfuges wherewith genteel poverty tries to save its face; he had to watch his mother, who wasn't robust, fight that bitter ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... original Juppiter-Liber there had grown the independent god Liber; and now this Liber lost his individuality by identification with Dionysos. Finally comes Kore, Demeter's daughter. Here the Romans were hard put to it to find a goddess who represented any similar content, and after all this was no light task because Kore has little meaning unless she is taken also as Persephone, Pluto's bride—a process which required a mythological knowledge ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... got Mr. CHARLES HAWTREY back again and that is what really matters. As a philanderer protesting innocence in the face of damnatory facts we know him well enough; but here we have him innocent and ingenuous as an angel, yet hard put to it to convince anyone but himself of his guilelessness. A millionaire (dollars) with a wife of economic disposition, who declines to spend his money for him, he feels drawn to a course of knight-errantry and rides ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... before long, hard put to it in argument, and very delicately and discreetly convicted of arrogance or worse. They were entering the woods of the park when ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hurriedly aft, while one heavy sea after another swept over him. Once the Fram buried her bows and shipped a sea over the forecastle. There was one fellow clinging to the anchor-davits over the frothing water. It was poor Juell again. We were hard put to it to secure our goods and chattels. We had to throw all our good paraffin casks overboard, and one prime timber balk after another went the same way, while I stood and watched them sadly as they floated off. The rest of the deck cargo was shifted aft on to the half-deck. I am afraid the shares ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... "since you seem to have been so hard put to it, as single men, what's to be done with the married man who ruins an innocent body?—What punishment, Lady Towers, shall we find out for such an one; and what reparation to the injured?" This was said with a particular view to the earl, on a late scandalous ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... this," says Mr. Bucket, who feels in a manner furbished up in his French by the blow of the morning. "Must have cost a sight of money. Rum articles to cut away from, these; she must have been hard put to it!" ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... John Bunyan was as hard put to it to get the right name for this head of the gentry of Mansoul as Paul was to get the right name for sin in the seventh of the Romans. In that profoundest and intensest of all his profound and intense passages, the apostle has occasion to seek about for some expression, some epithet, some ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... was hard put to it. The grey infantrymen were good marksmen, and their line was long, drawn across the road and the up and down of the fields. Here and there, now and again, a trooper went down to the dust, and the riderless horse, galloping to the rear, brought small comfort to Kenly's retreating ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... unnaturally to their countrymen, and so very grossly to themselves, that they could not come to any conclusion without consulting the two Englishmen and the rest; but, however, they would go to them and discourse about it, and they should know in half-an-hour. It may be guessed that they were very hard put to it; for, as they were to wait this half-hour for an answer, they begged they would send them out some bread in the meantime, which they did, sending at the same time a large piece of goat's flesh and a boiled parrot, which they ate ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... huskily, her rapt face and intent manner, her utterly lovely ivory body, glittering everywhere with the shining powder which she used, the subtle penetrative scent of her—I was hard put to concentrate upon ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... Square. Miss Forbes came to the telephone. She said you had gone to the Home Office. By some feminine necromancy, too, she divined the link which binds you with the death of Mrs. Lester. She was distressed on your account, and I was hard put to it to extricate myself from the risk of saying something which I ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... past Fritz's first line; past his second line; at his third line; and his fourth line he is wildly digging now—places for his M.G.'s wire, etc. But he's very, very hard put to it. We have almost all the high ground. Our guns are at it day and night. Trench warfare no longer exists. A few hastily dug holes, a few short lines of trench, mostly battered to pieces, and that's all. It's almost open fighting. Even the infantry ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... with white down, and the developing feathers on their wings were turning black. They squalled unremittingly, which squalling I decided was not so much on my account as because of a swarm of black flies that attacked them when the mothers flew away. I was hard put to it myself to keep these flies, large as pennies and as flat, from eating me alive. They slipped up my sleeves and trousers and their bite made ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... instant. But I am safe. No one but shepherds ever come to the lake and even they don't come any more for the dragon has eaten up so many of them that the lake has got a bad name. Indeed, nowadays even the Tsar himself is hard put to it to find a shepherd. Oh, I tell you, old woman, your ...
— The Laughing Prince - Jugoslav Folk and Fairy Tales • Parker Fillmore
... travelling south from Lyons must have been poor booty by the time that they had passed Vienne; and merchants travelling north from Avignon, similarly, must have been well fleeced by the time that they were come to the Pont-Saint-Esprit. Indeed, the lords in the middle of the run doubtless were hard put to it at times to make any sort of a living at all. Nor could the little local stealing that went on have helped them much—since, their respective castles being not more than five miles asunder, each of them in ordinary ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... Toby, 'in the general line. Also a—a little money on account of rent. A very little, sir. It oughtn't to be owing, I know, but we have been hard put to it, indeed!' ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... queer sentiments in regard to the mulatto, and every time I found him behind my chair I was hard put to repress a shudder. In this fashion the strange evening passed; and to the accompaniment of distant, muttering thunder, we two guests retired to our chambers in Cragmire Tower. Smith had contrived ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... be enough material on land or sea to supply the demand for ready-made garments. As it is, I'm afraid the poor devils will have to go naked themselves until a new crop springs up. I saw one of Pootoo's wives patching his best suit of breech clothes to-day, so he must be hard put ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... singing of the "Gypsy Trail," Paula emerged from her seclusion, and Graham found himself hard put, in the tower room, to keep resolutely to his work when all the morning he could hear snatches of song and opera from her wing, or laughter and scolding of dogs from the great patio, or the continuous pulse for hours of the piano from ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... an' built a cabin. I come down that day Gene sent his horse Majesty to you. Never saw Gene so broken-hearted. Well, after he sloped for the border Bonita an' I were hard put to it to keep alive. But we got along, an' I think it was then she began to care a little for me. Because I was decent. I killed cougars an' went down to Rodeo to get bounties for the skins, an' bought ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... that the accounts of the visits of Mary Magdalene, and subsequently of Peter and John to the tomb, which are given in the fourth Gospel, are from a Johannean source, if we were asked our reasons for this belief, we should be very hard put to it to give them. Nevertheless ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... had been cautioned on how to receive him; but things went badly at first, and the man began again insisting that they were mismated. (He "had the other girl still considerably on his conscience and heart.") Tangles continually arose which the society's visitor was hard put to it to straighten out. Once the wife found a letter from the girl; but finally, after the charity organization society in the city where he had left the girl reported that she was doing well and not breaking her heart about him, the man decided to "cut out" the correspondence. ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... herself making better speed than the majority of her fellows, who were heavily laden and had to rest their packs every few hundred yards. Yet she found herself hard put to keep the pace of a bunch of Scandinavians ahead of her. They were huge strapping blond-haired giants, each striding along with a hundred pounds on his back, and all harnessed to a go-cart which carried fully six hundred more. Their faces were as laughing suns, and ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... upright—much in the attitude of a watchful terrier on guard. In spite of herself she was nervous. Her eyes flashed continually from one window to the other. She noted the exact position of the communication cord. What it was that she feared, she would have been hard put to it to say. But in her own mind she was far from feeling the confidence displayed in her words. Not that she disbelieved in Tommy, but occasionally she was shaken with doubts as to whether anyone so simple and honest as he was could ever be a match for the fiendish ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... me I kin see long, thin streaks. O Lawr, boys, Rodden must ha' been hard put, when he drapped the block into the hole. It's shet up tight. Hev ye got the chisel ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... cool-headed men were hard put to check the fury of the mob. Men and women, bent on vengeance, made the night hideous with their curses, howls and shrieks. In their senseless fury they prepared to kill. They had heard the stories about Manuel Crust and his disciples. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon |
