"Muck" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... night you brought the wallet. Still I did not understand. It was when I heard the lift door and knew you had gone forever that I understood. Loved you with all my heart, with all that poor old Stefani had fashioned out of muck and clay. If you held my head to your heart, if that is my blood there—Do you, can you ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... for the mounted men, and Harry and Dalton at last dismounted and led their horses. The division made slow progress and as they struggled on the battle deepened. Now and then as they toiled through the muck they saw long masses of blue infantry on a ridge, and with them the batteries of great guns which the gunners of the North knew so well ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... had some gratifying quality, because he repeated it. Then he stood up and repeated it again. "The fool I have been!" he cried; and now speech was coming to him. He tried this sentence with expletives. "Ass!" he went on, still warming. "Muck-headed moral ass! I ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... yards away. A soft glutinous muck, worse than the outer swamp, tugged at his ankles. Corrupt fungi-growth and giant spiked ferns reached far above him in the ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... to de wall, sar," cautioned my guide; "dere am a gutter in de middle ob de road, and if you steps into dat you go in ober your shoes in muck." ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... having taken so much trouble to get at the young man, was not going to be put off in this way. "Never mind your muck for a quarter of an hour," he said. "I have come here on purpose to find you, and ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... the driver for pleasure to find in rainy weather almost bottomless muck and mud on portions of the main travelled highway between New York and Buffalo, but that, for the present, is normal. The manufacturer may regret the condition and wish for better, but he cannot be heard to complain, and if the machine, with reasonably ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... things had been somewhat digested by Christiana and her company, the Interpreter takes them apart again, and has them first into a room where was a man that could look no way but downwards, with a muck-rake in his hand. There stood also one over His head with a celestial crown in His hand, and proffered him that crown for his muck-rake; but the man did neither look up, nor regard, but raked to himself the straws, the small sticks, and dust of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... barking and howling, and biting their shield-rims (like the ferocious "rook" in the narwhale ivory chessmen in the British Museum) till a kind of state was produced akin to that of the Malay when he has worked himself up to "run-a-muck." There seems to have been in the 10th century a number of such fellows about unemployed, who became nuisances to their neighbours by reason of their bullying and highhandedness. Stories are told in the Icelandic sagas of the way such persons were entrapped ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... make them slip a cog, in deference to some later modification of His original plan. It was just about then that I found him. He was floundering in a perfect mire, composed of the dust of conflict mingled with penitential tears. Really, he was knee-deep in the muck; and I put in a good share of my vacation in trying to haul him ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... in the eighties, before the dominance of business in American society had been questioned, efficiency, as the term was then understood, had a place among the elect; it was the intimate associate of business success. Then came the muck-raker, and with him came also anti-trust cases and insurance investigations. We turned our attention to labor outbreaks, to graft prosecutions, and to land steals. We talked about "malefactors of great wealth." We even became interested in Schedule K. And so, during the first decade of ...
— Higher Education and Business Standards • Willard Eugene Hotchkiss
... a drink. Arm in arm. Lenehan's yachting cap on the cadge beyond. Usual blarney. Wonder is that young Dedalus the moving spirit. Has a good pair of boots on him today. Last time I saw him he had his heels on view. Been walking in muck somewhere. Careless chap. What was he doing ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... for their faces;" not to speak of the characterization of a "Sacred Heart" too revolting to reproduce? Surely when, after having reviled M. Tissot almost personally, he describes his works as painted with "muck, wine-sauce, and mud," it is difficult not to answer with a tu quoque as far as this word-painting is concerned—difficult not to see here some morbid and "frightful appetite for the hideous" struggling with the healthy appetite ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... would do things up in shape somehow," grunted the Bishop's son approvingly. "This is the stuff. Conventionality be tabooed. They're going to the other extreme, and that's the way to do. If you don't want an altar and candles, and a high-mucky-muck at the organ, have a hay-wagon. Gee!—Let me get up here next to Ben Hur ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... the "muck-rake"[2] magazines was typical of the ten years at the opening of the twentieth century. These periodicals printed articles which portrayed a side of American life not commonly discussed in the newspapers. One of the earliest ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... a hurry did they twain fare, The gent, and the son of the stout porter, Who fled like an arrow, nor turned a hair, Through all the mire and muck: "A ticket, a ticket, sir clerk, I pray: For by two of the clock must I needs away." "That may hardly be," the clerk did say, "For indeed—the ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... o' heather honey, and the music o' the brae, As I watch the great harts feeding, nearer, nearer a' the day. Oh, to hark the eagle screaming, sweeping, ringing round the sky— That's a bonnier life than stumbling ower the muck to ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... purchasing, working, and maintaining such a stupendous machine; but no man was ever more sarcastic in his remarks upon this piece of mechanism than the naturalist, who next appealed to the patron's approbation for a curious disposition he had made touching the procreation of muck-flies, in which he had laid down a curious method of collecting, preserving, and hatching the eggs of these insects, even in the winter, by certain modifications of artificial heat. The nature of this discovery was no sooner communicated, than Peregrine, unable ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... of all kinds from every available source. Remember that anything which will rot will add to the value of your manure pile. Muck, lime, old plastering, sods, weeds (earth and all), street, stable and yard sweepings—all these and numerous others will increase your garden successes of ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... excellent," the R.A. smiled whimsically. "You have a real talent for caricature, Mr. Cummings, and you should exercise it. You really got Peters. Poor Peters, he's a fine fellow, you know; but this business of living in the muck and filth, c'est malheureux. Besides, Peters is an old man. It's a dirty bloody shame, that's what it is. A bloody shame that all of us here should be forced to live ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... denoting the practice of the Malays, when infuriated to madness with bang (a preparation from a species of hemp), of sallying into the streets, or decks, to murder any whom they may chance to meet, until they are either slain or fall from exhaustion.—To run a-muck. To run madly and attack all we meet (Pope, Dryden). As in the case of mad dogs, certain death awaited them, for if not killed in being taken, torture and ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... utmost rigour of the law? WINSER, the cabman, who gave his false evidence so gaily in the Thirkettle Case, has been had up, and sentenced. Having dealt with WINSER, it is only a short step from WINSER to SLOUGH—but perhaps such a slough of muck, that it wants the pluck of a Hercules in the Augaean stable to commence operations, and a deus ex-machina—that is, the Public Prosecutor from the Treasury—to see that the proceedings are not abortive. Oh, where, and Oh, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... and pictures the girl built up as she lay, half waking, half dreaming between her blankets. Pictures in which MacNair, misjudged, hated, fighting against fearful odds, came clean through the ruck and muck with which his enemies had endeavoured to smother him, and proved himself the man he might have been; fancies and pictures that dulled into a pain that was very like a heartache, as the vivid picture—the real picture—which she herself had ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... commented the earl, when I had finished my inspection. 'I am sure the old boy simply filled it up with this rubbish to give me the trouble of examining it. Higgins tells me that up to within a month before he died the room was reasonably clear of all this muck. Of course it had to be, or the place would have caught fire from the sparks of the forge. The old man made Higgins gather all the papers he could find anywhere about the place, ancient accounts, newspapers, and what not, even to the brown wrapping paper ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... I can't propose your health, friend, Or drink to the 'Thirteen's' luck. I must dine on—Eucalyptus, And Sulphur, or some such muck. I have no Salt to be spilling; My only knife is a spoon; And I have not the smallest notion If there ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... moment or two before he replied. "If I choose to run a-muck, there is no reason why you should follow me. I am old and you are young. I want nothing from politics as a profession, and you do. Moreover, you have a congenial subject where you are, and need not disturb yourself. For myself, I tell you, in confidence, ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... he. But sinners still laugh at his talk of the New Jerusalem-ha-ha, te-he! And biting their thumbs at the doughty Don-John— This parson of high degree— They think of the streets of a village they know, Where horses still sink to the knee, Contrasting its muck with the pavement of gold That's laid in the other citee. They think of the sign that still swings, uneffaced By winds from the salt, salt sea, Which tells where he trafficked in tipple, of yore— Don Dunkleton ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... Mounseers on sea, an' it won't be difficult for our lobsters to lick 'em on land. P'r'aps there'll be an exchange of prisoners, an' we may have a chance of another brush with them one o' these days. If the wust comes to the wust, we can try to break out o' jail and run a muck for our lives. Never ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... religion, and return again into the ways of sin, he would exclaim, "What! give up my blessed religion and return to thy swill-tub agean; I should be a great fooil to do that,—does th' want to mak' me like an owd saa (sow), that's been weshed, and then runs back into t' muck agean; nay, thaa's rolled me i' sin lang enough; I'm thankful to be aat o' thy mud-hoil, and by the help of God, thaa'll get me there no maar." Then perhaps, when in conversation with some unconverted neighbour ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... and command in the word like the "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." It detached the street-muck from the woman. It was not she; it was defilement she had picked up, when perhaps she could not help it. She could scrape her shoes at the door, and ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... venerable chieftain of a mountain clan. Judd, with his aquiline face, which was undoubtedly handsome in a dark, brooding way, beneath its uncombed shock of black hair which swept low over his forehead, sinewy with the strength, quickness and muck of the natural grace of a panther, was the ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... highest gifts are free; only the second-rate things can be bought with money. Did this sordid old man yearn for pure human love amid his millions? Did such a dream cast a momentary glamour over a life spent in raking among the muck-heaps? If so, it passed away, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... Mirabelle. "Let a dozen worms do a dozen turns! I never thought I'd see the day when a Devereux—almost the same thing as a Starkweather—'d figure in a disgrace such as yours. You've heaped muck on your uncle's parlour-carpet. But some day you'll see the writing ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... don't think it would much matter if it did; it is that turned already with the sight of these blackamoors and their filthy, thieving ways. They are only fit for muck, they are; and they smell ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... My Liege Ile neuer lin, But I will thorough thicke and thinne, Vntill at length I bring her in, My dearest Lord nere doubt it: Thorough Brake, thorough Brier, Thorough Muck, thorough Mier, 310 Thorough Water, thorough Fier, And thus goes ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... chosen was the last chapter of the Epistle of James. The deep, even voice of Nathaniel North sounded through that terrible denunciation of unholy riches with a gravity of conviction far more impressive than the anger of the modern muck-raker. The hearts of the children, remembering their conversation, were disturbed and vaguely troubled. Then came the gentler words about patience and pity and truthfulness and the healing of the sick. At the end each member of the house-hold was to read a sentence ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... inaccurate expression, and we slander him very much. He would not do anything for money. He would do some things for money; he would sell his soul for money, for instance; and, as Mirabeau humorously said, he would be quite wise "to take money for muck." He would oppress humanity for money; but then it happens that humanity and the soul are not things that he believes in; they are not his ideals. But he has his own dim and delicate ideals; and he would not violate these for money. He would not drink out of the soup-tureen, for money. He would ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... SLINGSBY discovered the first one, now close on three cent'ries ago, Wot a lush of mixed mineral muck these 'ere 'Arrygate Springs 'ave let flow! Well, ere's bully for Brimstone, my bloater, and 'ooray for 'Arrygate air! Wich 'as done me most good I don't know, and I'm scorched if I very ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... arter the poor is always givin' broken rubbish to the children," she exclaimed. "Not but what they mean it kindly, but it makes a heap of muck to clear up." ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... Prefects' lickings aren't meant for that sort of thing. They're supposed to be for kids who steal buns at the shop or muck about generally. Not for a chap who curses a fellow who runs him out. I tell you what, there's just a chance Firby-Smith won't press the thing. He hadn't had time to get over it when he saw me. By now he'll have simmered down a bit. Look ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... still the carpenter plies the creaking saw and the stunning hammer, still the plumber plumbs and the bellhanger rattles, still the cisterns overflow and the unfinished drains send forth odorous fumes, still the rains descend and all around the house is a muddle of muck and mire, and still there is so much to do that we look forward to some far distant futurity, when all that we are now suffering will be over, and we may look back upon it as upon some strange yet not ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... "Well, it's a muck of a world," he declared cheerfully, taking off his coarse harvest hat and running his hand through his clustering fair hair. In the mellow light the almost brutal strength of his jaw was softened, and his sunburned face paled to the beauty of some ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... is very soon made into a ball without manual aid. It is then lifted out by means of a suspended fork and carried to a Winslow squeezer, where the ball is reduced to a roll twelve inches in diameter. Thence it is taken to a furnace for a wash heat, and finally to the muck train. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... Adam Warner grows a Miser, and behaves Shamefully III A Strange Visitor—All Ages of the World breed World- Betters IV Lord Hastings V Master Adam Warner and King Henry the Sixth VI How, on leaving King Log, Foolish Wisdom runs a-muck on King Stork VII My Lady Duchess's Opinion of the Utility of Master Warner's Invention, and her esteem for its Explosion VIII The Old Woman talks of Sorrows, the Young Woman dreams of Love; the Courtier flies from ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are whisked here, there, every where, in attempts to strike the hog; one man giving a strong blow, strikes another one who was stooping down to arrange his garters, where he dislikes to be struck, and instantly the one struck runs a muck, hitting wildly left and right. Two or three men charge on one another and brooms fly in splinters all round. One champion got a head-blow and had his wind knocked out by another blow simultaneously; round they go, and at it they go, beating ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of grass, sir," was the growling objection; and still worse was the suggestion, which gradually rose into a command, that the "muck-heap" should be removed to the said home-field, and never allowed to accumulate in such close ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... suck Blood or muck! The disease of the state is a plethory, Who so fit to reduce ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... again!" she shouted out to me, where I stood shifting muck in the yard. "He's offered himself again, Rupert! What's the ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... domestic servants both declared that they could not do so; and the elder one, who had been many years in the family, was born and bred in London, and detested the country and everything connected with it, gave her opinion in the most decided manner, that there was quite enough "muck" in the house already, without making more work with butter-making, which she said confidently, would only be fit for the pig when it was made. Here was a pretty state of things! What were we to do? must we give up all hope of eating our own butter, and regard the ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... mighty glad you mention dat,' says Brer Tarrypin, sezee. 'Mr. Mud-Turkle is setch clos't kin ter me dat I calls 'im Unk Muck, en I lay ef you sen' dar atter dat sane you won't fine Unk Muck so ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... should yield about one hundred and fifty bushels of berries to the acre, under skilful cultivation - a most profitable industry, since the cranberry costs less to cultivate, gather, and market than the strawberry or any of the small perishable fruits. Planted in muck and sand in the garden, the vines yield surprisingly good results. The Cape Cod Bell is the best known market berry. One of the interesting sights to the city loiterer about the New England coast in early autumn is the berry picking that is conducted on an immense scale. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... yet that mare, although, as you say, Miss Catharine, she was never healthy, has the most wonderful pluck, as you know. I remember once I had two ton o' muck in the waggon, and we were stuck. Jack and Blossom couldn't stir it, and, after a bit, chucked up. I put in Maggie—you should have seen her! She moved it, a'most all herself, aye, as far as from here to the gate, and then of course the others took it up. ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... he traveled at a foxtrot which thoughts of Fallon and Shayne and Harrigan would not let him abandon; but he had to run her down when he caught sight of her, for she fled like a wild thing before him. Floundering in a cedar swamp, soaked to the knees, little blue be-furred suit heavy with black muck, he came up with her. She was kneeling, shaking with terror, face hidden by her loosened hair, when he bent over her and raised her to ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... the stream was turned off, and men took from the cleats quantities of mingled muck and gravel, which they proceeded to ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... that when I show to such men, so "respectable" and so impure, a landscape of magnificent prospects whose vistas are adorned with every charm of nature and art, they point their unclean noses at a little heap of muck here and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... contour couch, the young girl strained against the padded steel grips and screamed. Again she writhed and screamed as she felt the hideous touch of the monster snatching at her. She struggled frenziedly through the muck of the swamp but the thing with the blood eyes scrabbled faster on its rotten limbs. The thing seized her in its obscene embrace. Raw terror tore another scream from her throat. Behind her on the projector a needle slammed into the red zone. Beyond the hundreds of long rows of ...
— The Premiere • Richard Sabia
... have named it the root of all Evil, the begetter of hate and bloodshed, the sure cause of the soul's damnation. It has been called "trash," "muck," "dunghill excrement," by grave authors. The love of it is denounced in all Sacred Writings; we find it reprehended on Chaldean bricks, and in the earliest papyri. Buddha, Confucius, Christ, set their faces against it; ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... it understood that the chateau was first occupied by General von Muck and his staff. The names crayoned on the doors of my bedrooms in big red letters bear testimony—as well as some soiled under-linen and a glassentuch marked v. K.—and numerous papers stamped with the Imperial ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... his, I'll lend him a safety-pin from my shirtwaist," drawled Rupert, lounging up, hooking his own mask. "I ain't muck-raking, but he broke his rear axle at Indianapolis, last month, and ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... digressed to mention, because this Malay (partly from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, partly from the anxiety I connected with his image for some days) fastened afterwards upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse than himself, that ran "a-muck" {18} at me, and led me into a world of troubles. But to quit this episode, and to return to my intercalary year of happiness. I have said already, that on a subject so important to us all as happiness, we should listen with pleasure to any man's ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... the bottom heading and blast it down upon the timber staging, thus maintaining a passage below for the traffic from the heading and break-ups farther down the line. Starting with the condition indicated by Plate XIII, the face was drilled, the columns were then taken down and the muck pile was shoveled through holes in the staging into muck cars below. The face was then blasted down upon the staging, the drill columns were set up on the muck pile, and the operation was repeated. This method ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace, Francis Mason and S. H. Woodard
... money for?" he boomed. "They'll only spend it on all kinds of muck they don't want; what the missionaries leave ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... stimulating their nervous energies by the use of some intoxicating drug, which rendered them capable of feats of extraordinary strength and daring. The Berserker gang must have been something very like the Malay custom of running a muck. Their moments of excitement were followed by periods of great exhaustion.] named Halli and Leikner, whom the Jarl had retained about his person,—fancying that two champions of such great strength and prowess would much ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... She drawled the word wearily. "Oh for a bit more money! Then we could give stew to the cat's-meat man and bread to old Thompson's chickens. And then we could have nice things to eat. Nice birds and pastry ... and trifle, and ices, and wine.... Not all this muck!" ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... like himself a Northerner by birth, and Mr. Mason, a thick-skulled, ruffle-shirted Virginian. It was not in him or in Mr. Pierce, with their antecedents and associations, to be uncompromising Federalists. There was no clear law to go on. Moderate men were in a muck of doubt just what to do. With Horace Greeley Mr. Buchanan was ready to say "Let the erring sisters go." This indeed was the extent of Mr. Pierce's pacifism during the ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... say, out shall not he 190 The heart of Hamlet's mystery pluck? Or, where most unclean beasts are rife, Some Junius—am I right?—shall tuck His sleeve, and forth with flaying-knife! Some Chatterton shall have the luck Of calling Rowley into life! Some one shall somehow run a muck With this old world for want of strife Sound asleep. Contrive, contrive To rouse us, Waring! Who's alive? 200 Our men scarce seem in earnest now. Distinguished names!—but 'tis, somehow, As if they played at being names Still more distinguished, like the games Of children. Turn our sport to earnest ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmers door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... litter and muck of a decaying world, Lo! even so I saw a new life arise. O sound of waters, jubilant, pouring, pouring—O hidden song in the hollows! Secret of the Earth, swelling, sobbing to divulge itself! Slowly, building, lifting itself ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... never been worldly-wise enough to become an avowed cynic on the question. He probably knows as well as anybody that to clean up Montreal is in the same category as making Europe safe for the League of Nations; a much harder city to regenerate than even Philadelphia. Muck-raking has no effect, when two-thirds of the population read French papers which never use the rake, and when the boss of three-fourths of the rest is himself often a target for the yellows. Mr. Ames should long ago in this connection have propounded a thesis, Hugh Graham, What ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... it all do you or anybody else? You're stirring up muck, and you're getting the only thing you ever get by that kind of activity, a bad smell." He paused for his effect; then delivered himself of a characteristically vigorous ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... much," protests Rupert. "You see, I lived in a little town in southern Illinois. Father ran a general store. I had to help in it—sold shingle nails, molasses, mower teeth, overalls. How I hated that! But there was the creek and the muck pond. I had an old boat. I played smuggler and pirate. I used to love to read pirate books. I wanted to ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... should generally have a heavier and richer soil, and rather more room. A soil which produces cabbages with large and rather soft heads is likely to be good for cauliflowers; that is, it contains more vegetable matter than the right amount for producing hard heads of cabbage. Muck will answer for cauliflowers if it is not too wet or too dry; it should like any other soil be treated to a good coat of barn-yard manure—horse manure being preferable on such land, as it promotes fermentation. Small quantities of lime may also ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier
... a brush drain endures much longer than in sandy land, which is dry a part of the year, because the brush decays in dry land, but will prove nearly imperishable in land constantly wet. In a peat or muck swamp, we should expect that such drains, if carefully constructed, might last twenty years, but that in a sandy loam they would be quite ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... of the refuse-heap, things that human society once needed and then rejected. He collects them again, and now the poor can buy them. And he buys the soldiers' bread too, when they want to go on the spree, and throws it on his muck-heap; he calls it fodder for horses, but the poor buy it of him and eat it. The refuse-heap is the poor man's larder —that is, when the pigs have taken what they want. The Amager farmers fatten their swine there, and the sanitary commission ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... too intense, and the habit of a continually increasing dose had made him proof against the poison; it would not even lull him, but seemed to stretch and rack his nerves, exciting him to deeds of bloody daring. Should he rush out, like a Malay running a muck, with a carving-knife in each hand, and kill right and left:—vengeance! vengeance! on Jonathan Floyd, and John Vincent? No, no; for some of them at last would overcome him, think him mad, and, O terror!—his doom for life, without the means of death, would be solitary confinement. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... steps outside, a horse in the shafts of a dung-cart was gnawing at a bunch of oleanders. The wheels, in grazing the flower borders, had bruised the box trees, broken a rhododendron, knocked down the dahlias; and clods of black muck, like molehills, embossed the green sward. Gouy was vigorously ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... him with the most famous of the Dutch masters, and he rises into glory; coarseness and vulgarity in them had no point out of which could come instruction. If they picture the issues of their own minds, they must have been gross and sensual; they ransacked the muck of life, and the grovelling in character, for themes that one should see only by compulsion. But Hogarth's subjects were never without a lesson, and, inasmuch as he resorted for them to the open volume of humanity, like those of the most ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... open formation, with their guns ready. I set apart with my eye the one I opinionated to be the boss muck-raker ...
— Options • O. Henry
... Puck, "My liege, I'll never lin[9], But I will thorough thick and thin, Until at length I bring her in; My dearest lord, ne'er doubt it. Thorough brake, thorough briar, Thorough muck, thorough mire, Thorough water, thorough fire; And thus goes Puck ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... persisted. Somehow, the romance of the land and the quest entered into their blood, the spell of it gripped hold of them and would not let them go. Man after man of them, after the most terrible privation and suffering, shook the muck of the country from his moccasins and departed for good. But the following spring always found him drifting down the Yukon on the ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... out. I'd rather you would come again. I don't think you will bring that street-muck ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... to cool down. As soon as the muck-rakers wear out their rakes, and the great American public finds some other kind of hysterics to keep it worked up to a proper temperature, I shall mosey back and resume business at the old stand. But why tell you the story of my life? Play fair now, and tell me a lot about ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... have him then?" he asked. "Red, yaller, muck-dirt colour?"—and he stared significantly at the Tailless Tyke, who was lying at his master's feet. The little man ceased rubbing his knees and eyed the boy. David shifted uneasily ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... of very little account in this life, and he received the penalty due to his sin in the life hereafter. For in the spirit land the ghost of such a poor-spirited wretch was sentenced to what the Fijians regarded as the most degrading of all punishments, to beat a heap of muck ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... day the great prize may be drawn. And then, "Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?" The Beachcomber may be perverted into—well, the next best on the list. Yet they say in pitiful tones, those who rake among the muck of the streets, "What a dull life! What a hopeless existence! He is out of it all!" Yes, with a gladsome mind, and all its sounds, if not forgotten, at least muffled by music, soft as dawn, profound as the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... as the truck sloshed and slewed through the muck that was hardly recognizable now as a road. For an hour Sam fought the wheel to hold the car approximately in the middle of the brownish ooze that led them through the night. The three men sat in the cab. Behind them, a litter and first-aid equipment had been rigged ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... voice. In the corner of the room, Nema looked up for a moment, and there was fear and worry in her eyes before she looked back to her weaving of endless knots. Sather Karf sighed in weariness. "If I knew what was happening to the sky, would I be dredging the muck of Duality for the likes of ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... work. This produces disgust and repugnance in the new-comers, who cannot yet bear to be ordered about, least of all to be maltreated by negroes like themselves, while, on the contrary, they submit willingly and with affection to the orders of a white." This Manual, which reads like a treatise on muck or the breeding of cattle, proceeds to say, that, if the planter would preserve his negroes' usefulness, he must be careful to keep ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... Another inhabitant said that he had two boys fighting. "One on 'em is in France, wherever that might be, and Jimmy's in that hare old Dardelles." He couldn't rightly say when the elder had gone out, "but it might be a yare ago come muck-spreadin'." ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... third of the minute islands to look back. He saw the lash of blaster fire on the top of the cliff, Tau on his knees on the first of their chain of steppingstones, and a graz sprawled head and forequarters in the sucking muck where it had dived past the two defenders above. Needler and blaster fired together again, and then Jellico swung over the cliff rim. Tau waved vigorously and Dane took off for the next islet, just making it ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... had ascended half the length of the rapids we encountered the usual troubles that overtake the tracker—those of clearing our lines of trees and bushes, slipping into the muck of small inlets, stumbling over stones, cutting the lines upon sharp rocks, or having them caught by gnarled roots of driftwood. As we approached the last lap of white water the canoes passed through a rocky basin ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... trouble, a relic of the dementia of childbirth. At all events Maria did not remember; the idea of the gold plate had passed entirely out of her mind, and it was now Zerkow who labored under its hallucination. It was now Zerkow, the raker of the city's muck heap, the searcher after gold, that saw that wonderful service in the eye of his perverted mind. It was he who could now describe it in a language almost eloquent. Maria had been content merely to remember it; but Zerkow's avarice goaded him to a belief that it was still in existence, hid somewhere, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... Noyes heard how she became an instrument in the hands of the man who hated him mortally, and owed her debut and her terrible awakening to what he considered the only sporting answer to that insult. While he listened he pondered, awestruck, upon the fact that out of all this muck and blackness, the degradation of hate by the lodger, the refinement of hate by himself, had flowered that rarest of all human creatures—one that could make the whole ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... plumb to blazes, Eb Flanders! Go on! Git outer here! You a kunsterble! You aint fit to ketch muck-worms! Arrestin' boys for burglary, when the worst land-shark in the country is runnin' a bunco-game right under yer face an' eyes! Go over an' arrest them fellers,—arrest that ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... it'll take great thumpin' jumps sometimes, an' run along the tops of the trees, carrying its partner with it, an' then droppin' him jest as a fish hawk'll drop a pickerel to kill it before eatin'. An' its food, of all the muck in the whole Bush is—moss!" And he laughed a short, unnatural laugh. "It's a moss-eater, is the Wendigo," he added, looking up excitedly into the faces of his companions. "Moss-eater," he repeated, with a string of the most outlandish oaths he ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... love you, come down yere to-morrer, and you'll git to know wot stinks is. Let Teddy show you that 'ere bloomin' ditch at the back. They calls it a stream, but I dussn't say wot I thinks it is afore the nipper. All the dead cats and muck in the bloomin' crehation gits dumped in there. On 'ot days you wants a nosebag on, I tell you, ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... of a Catholic-moiderin' bastard! Come down and I'll moider yuh! Pullin' dat whistle on me, huh? I'll show yuh! I'll crash yer skull in! I'll drive yer teet' down yer troat! I'll slam yer nose trou de back of yer head! I'll cut yer guts out for a nickel, yuh lousey boob, yuh dirty, crummy, muck-eatin' son of a— ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... matter what he costs. Get him started. Put it up to him to start toward the foregoing programme, to be reached in (say) three years—two if possible. He must learn to grow these things absolutely better than they are now grown anywhere on earth. He must get the best seed. He must get muck out of the swamp, manure from somewhere, etc. etc. He must have the supreme flavour in each thing. Let him take room enough for each—plenty of room. He doesn't want much room for any one thing, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... his jaded body and brain into new activities. Every thought is a thread to be woven into a golden net. He lifts his life to strike as miners lift their picks. He swings his body as harvesters their scythes. He will make himself an augur for boring, a chisel for drilling, a muck-rake for scratching, if only he may get gain. He will sweat and swelter and burn in the tropics until malaria has made his face as yellow as gold, if thereby he can fill his purse, and for a like end he will shiver and ache in the arctics. He will deny his ear music, he will deny his mind culture, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... that he found his wires down, and he was compelled to plunge knee deep into the black swamp-muck to restring them, he became so ill from fear and nervousness that he scarcely could control his shaking hand to do the work. With every step, he felt that he would miss secure footing and be swallowed in that clinging sea ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... they ate out of Pablo's hand and submitted to be stroked and caressed; and before they were a fortnight in the stable. Alice and Edith could go up to them without danger. They were soon broken in; for the yard being full of muck, Pablo took them into it and mounted them. They plunged and kicked at first, and tried all they could to get rid of him, but they sank so deep into the muck that they were soon tired out; and after a month they were all ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... names of humus and humic acid, which may, in a slight degree, affect the growth of plants, but their practical importance is of too doubtful a character to justify us in considering them. The application of manures, containing organic matter, such as peat, muck, animal manure, etc., supplies the soil with carbon on the same principle, and the decomposing matters also generate[Q] carbonic acid gas while being decomposed. The agricultural value of carbon in the soil depends (as we have stated), not ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... just going to tell him, when somebody banged me over the head from behind.... I fell on my face, and a mountain seemed to fall on top of me. 'Shall I knife him, my lord?' comes a voice like a girl's. Then—'Get off, you dung! or I'll make muck o you!'—'I ony thought, my lord—'—'Think, swine! you think!' And smack—smack goes his sword! The mountain got off. The lord was kneeling by ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... becomes a devil all at once, and no man becomes an angel all at once. Trust yourself to Christ, and He will lift you to Himself; turn your back upon Him, as some of you are doing, and you will settle down, down, down in the muck and the mire of your own sensuality and selfishness, until at last the foul ooze spreads over your head, and you are lost in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... where planks have been laid over the tops of desks, on which the remains are placed. A corpse is dug from the bank. It is covered with mud. It is taken to the anteroom of the school, where it is placed under a hydrant and the muck and slime washed off. With the slash of a knife the clothes are ripped open and an attendant searches the pockets for valuables or papers that would lead to identification. Four men lift the corpse on a rude table, and there it is thoroughly washed and an embalming ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... same time, that he was penniless unless they consented to allow him a moderate sum in name of percentage, in consideration of twenty years of danger, poverty, and [exile], all of which evils he might have escaped by surrendering their right to the money. Will it be believed that a muck-worm was base enough to refuse his consent to this deduction, alleging he had promised to his father, on his death-bed, never to compromise this debt. The wretch, however, was overpowered by the execrations ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... stupid generalization, and go oozing along contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches, mounting, perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction into a muck-puddle; and all the while the little brook that you patronize when you are full-fed, and snub when you are hungry, and look down upon always,—the little brook is singing its own melody through grove and orchard and sweet wild-wood,—singing with the birds and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... standing around with a kind of "How-do-you-know?" and "Did-it-happen-to-you?" air every time a man says something he knows by—well—by seeing it—perfectly plain seeing it. One doesn't need to stand up to one's neck in experience, in a perfect muck of experience, in order to know things, in order to know they are there. People who are experienced within an inch of their lives, submerged in experience, until all you can see of them is a tired look, are always calling out to the man who sees a thing as he is going by—sees it, I mean, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... it makes our task difficult to have to deal so muck with eccentricities and extremes. "How CAN religion on the whole be the most important of all human functions," you may ask, "if every several manifestation of it in turn have to be corrected and sobered down ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... in an instant, for they had wanted only a leader. Above the roar of the flames Bert could hear the thud as the horses landed in the soft muck of the cow-yard, ten feet below. Then came a shout as the men ...
— The Young Firemen of Lakeville - or, Herbert Dare's Pluck • Frank V. Webster
... the eagul And the dipper-dapper-duck And the Jew-fish And the blue-fish And the turtle in the muck; And the squir'l And the girl And the flippy floppy bat Are differ-ent As gent from gent. So ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... soil grew wetter and more wet until at last the men were working ankle deep in water. The further the mine went the wetter it became. The men worked on, taking their turn at the narrow face, shovelling out the wet muck and dragging it back to the shaft and up and out and away by the communication trench. They squeezed aside in silence when the Subaltern pushed in to inspect the working, and waited with side winks to one another to see what he would do to overcome the water difficulty. 'Pumps' would ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... elated by good or depressed by bad fortune, but capable of excesses when roused. Under the influence of religious excitement, losses at gambling, jealousy or other domestic troubles they are liable to amok or run-a-muck, an expression which appears to have passed into the English language." With strangers, the Brunai Malay is doubtless taciturn, but I have heard Brunai ladies among themselves, while enjoying their betel-nut, rival any old English gossips over their cup of tea, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... but were not permitted to approach him. They were the undisputed property of the rival chieftain,—to whose tent they were taken; but not until they had "run a muck" among the women and children, very similar to that which Bill had to submit to himself. It terminated in a similar manner: that is, by their owner taking them under his protection,—not from any motives of humanity, but simply to save his property from receiving damage at the hands ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... the basket of provisions to her side; the air grows thick with the smell and smoke of kitchens. It again becomes clear to our Lane that the real and normal consist solely of herself, her houses, and their muck-heaps. ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... you determine to manure the whole site, this is your way: digge a trench halfe a yard deepe, all along the lower (if there be a lower) side of your Orchard plot, casting vp all the earth on the inner side, and fill the same with good short, hot, & tender muck, and make such another Trench, and fill the same as the first, and so the third, and so through out your ground. And by this meanes your plot shall be fertile for your life. But be sure you set your trees, neither ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson
... of a $50,000 salary and the opportunity of rebuilding the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which had sadly deteriorated since the days of Dr. Karl Muck, lured ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... won't be difficult for our lobsters to lick 'em on land. P'r'aps there'll be an exchange of prisoners, an' we may have a chance of another brush with them one o' these days. If the wust comes to the wust, we can try to break out o' jail and run a muck for our lives. Never say ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... that was in corn, plow it deeply in October, and if he detects traces of the white grub, cross-plow it again just as the ground is beginning to freeze. Early in the spring he can cover the surface with some fertilizer—there is nothing better than a rotted compost of muck and barn-yard manure—at the proportion of forty or fifty tons to the acre. Plow and cross-plow again, and in each instance let the first team be followed by a subsoil or lifting plow, which stirs and loosens the substratum ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... muck-rakers, I found that I was popular with the British ruling classes; they found my books useful in their campaigns against democracy, and they were surprised and disconcerted when they found I did not agree with their interpretation of my writings. I had told of ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... morass, slough, quagmire, bog, fen, marish. Associated Words: paludine, paludinous, paludism, paludose, palustrine, draco, muck, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... and spoke volubly in patois, having very little command of French. It was, indeed, necessary for me to converse by the medium of an interpreter. On approaching the village we were overtaken by a slight, handsome youth conducting a muck-wagon. This was her younger son, and his easy, well-bred greeting, and correct French, prepared me for the piece of intelligence to follow. The wearer of peasant's garb, carting manure, had passed his examination of Bachelor of Arts and ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the side of the hill behind the Bar, and on the latter also, glance spots of azure and crimson, in the forms of blue and red shirted miners bending steadily over pickax and shovel, reminding one involuntarily of the muck-gatherer in The Pilgrim's Progress. But no; that is an unjust association of ideas, for many of these men are toiling thus wearily for laughing-lipped children, calm-browed wives, or saintly mothers, gathering around the household hearth in some far-away country. Even among ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... her shiftless husband at the inn was one of Mrs Durbeyfield's still extant enjoyments in the muck and muddle of rearing children. To discover him at Rolliver's, to sit there for an hour or two by his side and dismiss all thought and care of the children during the interval, made her happy. A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came over life then. Troubles ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... pleasant till 'tis past: The mischief is that 'twill not last. Oh I have been to Ludlow fair And left my necktie God knows where, And carried half-way home, or near, Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer: Then the world seemed none so bad, And I myself a sterling lad; And down in lovely muck I've lain, Happy till I woke again. Then I saw the morning sky: Heigho, the tale was all a lie; The world, it was the old world yet, I was I, my things were wet, And nothing now remained to do ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... as Eleanor looked over the dragon with its wide strong jaw and plausible eyes and big gripping hand she very much doubted whether the conception had ever dawned on the big dome head that the other fellow had any rights. The man was not the baby-eating monster of the muck-rakers. Neither was he a gentleman—he had had a narrow escape from that—the next generation of him would probably be one. He gave the impression of a passion for only one thing—getting. If people or things or laws ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... the turbid mass, turning it round and round. As he lifted it up, the drops which trickled from it hardened into earth of their own accord; and thus dry land was formed. As Izanagi was cleansing his spear the lumps of muck and mud which had adhered to it flew off into space, and were changed into stars ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis |
